Economics, Demographics, and Societal Considerations: Alewife Brook

Tail End of the Alewife Brook, October 2022.

For this final blog post of the semester, I figured I would bring it back home and take the opportunity to engage closely with my own community here in North Cambridge. Having relocated to the Boston area for the sole purpose of undergraduate study, not to mention at the height of COVID restrictions during the Fall of 2020, my knowledge of the city and Cambridge specifically was limited essentially to just the Yard, and maybe the CVS on JFK St.— but this is unequivocally no longer the case. As an off-campus student living in Alewife, I’ve developed a much closer connection to the immediate community and space around me in North Cambridge, and despite sharing local policies and only being around 2 miles away from the heart of Harvard Square, the social environment and even actual environment here feel like they are at a world’s distance away from the rest of Cambridge (particularly Harvard Square and the residential area around Longfellow Park, down Brattle Street). 

Fresh Pond Reservation, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The area north of Fresh Pond is named “Alewife” after a fish (closely related to the herring) that is found in some inland lakes and in the waters of the North American Atlantic. The alewife is an anadromous fish, meaning it migrates up rivers from the sea to breed in fresh water— alewife migrate from Fresh Pond in huge quantities using the nearby brook, hence the name “Alewife Brook”. Despite the significance of the brook’s ecological identity in the naming of the area around it, the Alewife Brook is actually one of the most severely polluted bodies of water in the Boston metro area, especially when you take into consideration the enormous volume of untreated vapor and chemical overflow that ends up in the relatively small brook. I live about a 6 minute walk away from the Alewife Brook, it can be accessed just north of the Alewife MBTA T-Stop, and it is difficult to articulate the state of the brook to those that have not had the opportunity to smell it for themselves. In 2021 alone, the area’s inexcusably dated sewage system dumped over 50 million gallons of untreated sewage waste into the Alewife Brook. It is interesting to consider the juxtaposition of this sewage-vapor ridden brook and the Alewife Reservation that sits next to it, a 115-acre open space containing natural wetlands, marshes, and agricultural fields (not in use). Although the Alewife Brook has been going through this environmental violation for decades, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority has recently promised to include Climate Change projections in their development of new sewer infrastructure across the area. This is a positive step forward— a direct response to the hazardous reality of the Alewife Brook’s raw sewage situation— but it is imperative to step back from this larger-scale environmental issue and attempt to analyze how the social demographics and financial development of the Alewife area in the last couple of years have impacted Cambridge’s approach (or lack-thereof) to the Alewife Brook. 

View of Rindge Towers (Fresh Pond Apartments), as seen from a thoroughly-polluted & fenced-off Jerry's Pond.

Within the last decade or so, dozens of high-end housing developments have sprouted all along the area that surrounds the Alewife T-Stop station. Although these apartment developments are less than a quarter of a mile from Rindge Towers (now called Fresh Pond Apartments), an affordable housing development completed in 1970, they are severely over-priced and as a result completely inaccessible to local community members that can’t afford a minimum $2,000/month rent payment on their own. Now that these high-end developments have entered the scene however, it is clear how the economic and social scene in North Cambridge is willing to cater to the newer, more “financially flexible” demographic of the area— the arrival of both a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe’s all but cements this perspective. The long-awaited addressing of the Alewife Brook’s sewage system problem comes as a result of the city of Cambridge’s tendency to ignore the gravity of living situations that affect those who don’t fit the image of a sophisticated Cambridge. In the end however, as an ultimate takeaway from my comments on the state of the Alewife Brook and the social and economic demographic changes in the area, I believe that Cambridge as a community has grown (and continues to grow) in a positive direction; hopefully, it is a direction that will keep itself accessible and maintain its current dedication to addressing the concerns of all different communities across the city.