For 500 feet along Lake Avenue, there stands a big fence. Just beyond it are 33 acres of cool, blue water – Crystal Lake – but the fence and construction materials seem to imply “no entry.”
What’s going on here?
The City is creating a new park that is intended to improve Levingston Cove by capturing stormwater, reducing erosion, enhancing wildlife habitat, and ensuring pedestrian accessibility at the fishing area.
Eight truckloads of concrete have been poured to create 200 feet of new walkways, erosion-proof walls, and a framework for the wooden pier. The 150 feet of new railings, along the freshly paved walkways, will bring the area into ADA compliance and make it accessible for everyone for the first time.
The prominent fishing deck – which extends 10 feet out over the lake’s surface – was likewise built to accommodate all people including those who use wheelchairs.
Next to the deck, a new field of boulders has created some controversy.
According to Srdjan Nedeljkovic, Secretary of the Newton Highlands Neighborhood Area Council and Treasurer of the Crystal Lake Conservancy, these boulders were not in the project plans.
“The set of plans that was presented in 2021 more or less went forward in 2023 in the final design, with one exception — the area of stone that was presented as being flat,” Nedeljkovic said. Indeed, although the blueprints detailed in the Parks and Recreation Department Fact Sheet show the stones arranged in an almost step ladder-like pattern, the rocks currently on the ground “look like big giant boulders that were placed more or less haphazardly there.”
Nedeljkovic noted that the stones, far from improving the navigability situation, have made the area “completely inaccessible” and “unsafe.” During the Newton Highlands Area Council meeting in May, several Area Councilors expressed concerns with the seeming deterrent created by the rocks, with Area Councilor Barbara Darnell also remarking on the lack of safety in the current shoreline situation.
When a motion was made by the Area Council to write a letter to the City’s Parks, Recreation & Culture Department regarding removal of the stones, all but Area Council President Jeremy Freudberg were in favor, but he too expressed concerns. “If you look at the 2021 plans, it shows flat rocks. There’s even reference to it being some kind of stairs, and that’s just not what’s been built,” he said.
The project included input from many parties – the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, the City Council, the Conservation Commission, the Crystal Lake Conservancy and Friends of Crystal Lake. “The plans were a compromise,” Freudberg emphasized, “and we shouldn’t deviate from the compromise.”
In a letter in response to a discussion by Newton Highlands residents regarding Levingston Cove, Director of Parks and Open Space Luis Demorizi had said that, regarding the boulders, the intent of the design was erosion control, not necessarily easy access to the water, and the project ended up using rocks found on-site because the dimensional stone shown in the plan cost too much.
“It would be financially infeasible and unsustainable to source dimensional stone, when there were plenty of stones on site that could work for this purpose,” Demorizi noted. To provide a schematic update of this change before it happened, he said would have been “impractical and inefficient.”
Accessibility in the grove area was not a design intention, Demorizi said, but at the pier, universal access has been a key priority, along with protecting the environment.
He said in an email to Fig City News, “the pathways within the park provide guests with dedicated routes, reducing the amount of trampling of the delicate, environmentally beneficial planting areas. We have removed a significant number of invasives and replaced them with more appropriate, native plant species. These plants will all be protected to ensure they are properly established without being trampled.”
Parks, Recreation & Culture Commissioner Nicole Banks said, “The stones along the shoreline are intended to fortify the shoreline to prevent erosion. The stones are about the same height as a step in a stairway, with a few stones having a greater vertical difference to provide some areas for seating. People are free to walk or sit on them.”
Progress on the project has been delayed. The forecasted completion date was mid-June of this year, and then mid-July, but any onlookers at the scene see the same construction fence.
The Department of Parks, Recreation & Culture, which is overseeing the project, had provided regular updates of construction progress through early June, but not in July. On August 10, a day after Fig City News’s first article, Demorizi issued an August update, which explained that much of the site is near completion – including “the new fishing platform, the upper pass-through walkway, [and] slope stabilization” – but supply chain issues for the railings are causing delays on the whole.
The lack of updates regarding changes early on may have caused the significant delays later. As Highlands Area Councilor and architect Robert Fizek put it, the Parks Department “didn’t talk to anybody during COVID, and then all of a sudden showed up with 60% or 70% complete construction documents.” Those documents are the ones currently being used for the project, but they were not complete when work started.
Fizek continued, “I confirmed this with one of the foremen on the job. He said, ‘Well, that’s pretty correct. It’s been holding us up because we’re waiting for the engineer designers to fill in the gaps in the documentation.’”
After initial discussions in 2017, the first preliminary project plans were developed in 2018-2019 and presented to the City during one of the regular meetings regarding Levingston Cove, but the meetings ended soon after due to Covid restrictions. According to Nedeljkovic, “there wasn’t another meeting until 2021.” At that time, the Parks, Recreation & Culture Department held a community meeting to update residents. In his letter to Newton Highlands residents, Demorizi has noted that City staff are on site at least daily and have been consistently monitoring progress.
Despite concerns about boulders and delays, some abutters are very pleased with the project.
Sonya Kurzweil lives near Crystal Lake. She’s a member of the Friends of Crystal Lake – the group that helped develop the 2018-2019 plans. She says that the development has brought some bad but also a lot of good.
“We are very happy that the walking paths are restored and very much appreciate the conservation measures implemented,” she said. “We hope the Cove will be officially designed as an ecological restoration for passive recreation featuring universal accessibility.”
“The teams have been doing a good job,” she added.
Andrey Sarkanich is a junior at Newton North High School and a Fig City News summer intern.
Ed. Note: Our reporter revised this article, originally published on August 8, to include new information available after the original version was published and to respond to concerns received from two readers that the original appeared to express the reporter’s opinions, which was not intended.
