The Golden Thread Runs Through Places East Boston Already Uses

Debra Cave chairs the East Boston Museum and Historical Society. When she walked through the new steel arch near Airport MBTA Station this fall, she thought of Mary Ellen Welch. She told GBH News that before the greenway named for Welch, "We had this horrible, ugly black-tarred area from one end of East Boston to the other." Welch, Cave said, "advocated and worked with others until we had this beautiful Greenway."

That arch is one of five in the Threshold Series. The series is the first piece of the Golden Thread, a cultural trail from Project Starboard, a nonprofit based in East Boston. None of the arches sits in a plaza built for visitors. They stand at the top of a staircase, beside a ferry landing, by an old shipyard and along a former rail line. The trail is laid over routes the neighborhood already uses, so walking it means seeing familiar ground through a new frame.

Four arches are standing, at four everyday places

Each Threshold is a walk-through steel arch with multilingual stories you open by scanning a QR code. In late October, GBH reported that four of the five were in place and open to scan:

1. Arrival, at the top of the Golden Stairs near the shipyard on Marginal Street
2. Crossing, at Lewis Mall Wharf by the East Boston ferry
3. Making, by the Atlantic Works dry docks
4. Neighbors, which GBH found temporarily near Airport MBTA Station

The site hosts are Massport, the City of Boston and the East Boston Community Development Corporation. Tim Zeitler of Zephyr Architects, an East Boston resident, described the design to the East Boston Times-Free Press as "restrained in form, yet rich in light and texture." Founder David Lank put the idea more plainly in the same paper: "We are building a civic institution out of the neighborhood itself."

Arrival: the arch at the top of the 58 steps

There are 58 concrete steps in the Golden Stairs, and GBH notes that local runners treat them as a challenge. A hundred years ago, thousands of immigrants climbed those same steps from the piers below on their first day in the United States. The Arrival arch stands in the small park at the top of the climb.

The Arrival story on thread.boston follows those arrivals through the years of immigration quotas and the uncertainty they brought, then the old immigration station, and then what the stairs still mean as a gateway. The station was built along the piers in 1919 as a detention facility and was demolished in 2011. State Representative Adrian Madaro, who helped secure $10,000 in state funding for the project, put the loss this way to GBH: "On Ellis Island, they celebrate that with a beautiful museum. Here, they demolished our immigration station." The arch puts that history back at the top of a staircase that gets daily use for workouts.

Crossing and Making: the waterfront's two working histories

The Crossing arch stands where people still cross the harbor. The Crossing story begins with an 1868 proposal for a passage under the water. From there it moves to the 1904 subway tunnel, the construction of the Callahan Tunnel, the Ted Williams Tunnel and ferry service. GBH describes the 1904 tunnel as the first undersea subway tunnel of its kind in the country. It carried streetcars from downtown to Maverick Square in seven minutes, and the Blue Line still runs through it.

The newest chapter of that story has a deadline. On October 28 the MBTA extended East Boston ferry service, weekdays and weekends, through December 31, 2026. No ferry route runs on Thanksgiving Day, November 26. If you want to see the arch at Lewis Mall Wharf while boats are still leaving from beside it, go before the end of the year.

Making stands by the Atlantic Works dry docks. The Making story centers on Donald McKay and his clipper ship Glory of the Seas, then follows the site through later years of vessel repair to the marine fabrication done there today. GBH adds that the Flying Cloud also came from these piers. That clipper set the world sailing record between New York and San Francisco. Glory of the Seas, launched in 1869, was the last of McKay's clipper ships built in East Boston. Like the Golden Stairs, this site still has a working life, and the arch tells the long version of that story.

Neighbors: an arch about a greenway, close to the greenway

Of the five, Neighbors is the story closest to living memory. The Neighbors story opens in 1925, when the corridor was "one of East Boston's great working rail yards." It then traces how the rail yard became a greenway through Mary Ellen Welch's organizing and advocacy. The project's own page puts it in nine words:

This was a railroad. Neighbors made it a greenway

GBH found the arch near Airport MBTA Station in late October, in a spot it called temporary. Inside the arch, an image of Welch appears under the year 1969. On thread.boston, the arch's listed home is Bremen Street Park, as part of the Greenway corridor. Cave told GBH that this is her favorite arch, because it highlights the activism around the start of Logan Airport. "When your neighbor is an airport, you need to be active," she said.

Bremen Street Park has another new reason to visit. On October 27, Massport celebrated the reopening of its renovated playground there. A new play structure and swings replace equipment from 2007, and Massport describes the new equipment as accessible to children of different ages and abilities. The greenway that Welch fought for is getting new investment just as an arch arrives to tell how it came to exist.

Adaptation: the missing arch is the one about the future

The fifth arch, Adaptation, is planned for Central Square. Its page on thread.boston says "Coming soon!" According to GBH, it will highlight a future flood path, and Lank hopes to include the Indigenous history of the Wampanoag and other tribes who considered the land their home. "We thought it might be an opportunity to weave the tale of adaptation starting from the Indigenous peoples of the Boston Harbor Islands — then bring it all the way to the future, which is coastal resilience," he told the outlet.

The other four arches look back at arrival, transit, shipbuilding and organizing. The last one looks ahead, and it is going into the square at the center of the neighborhood. Starboard's longer-term plans include a harbor museum and innovation center that would combine port heritage, coastal resilience research and public learning in East Boston. The Golden Thread is the project's first public step toward it. Historian Daniel Berger-Jones of the Boston History Company is partnering with Lank on tours along part of the trail. Starboard has said it will develop more walking tours and programs with community partners.

A late-November loop, with what else is going on nearby

The four standing arches make an easy afternoon walk, and several neighborhood events are coming up nearby.

Other dates to know between now and mid-December:

• East Boston Farmers Market, indoors. The market moved on November 4 to 282 Meridian Street, the old library. Through winter and spring it runs as a smaller market on the first and third Wednesday of each month, so after the November 18 market, the next dates are December 2 and December 16. The Farmer Dave's CSA moved there too, and HIP benefits still apply, according to Caught in Eastie.
• East Boston Chamber of Commerce Marketplace. Thursday, November 19, from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the Martin Pino Community Center, 86 Boardman Street. Admission is free, per the EastBoston.com listing.
• Eastie's Elves toy drive. From November 20 to December 10, the Madaro Family Community Fund has collection boxes across East Boston, Revere and Winthrop. A celebration follows on December 11, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., at the Hyatt Regency Boston Harbor, and admission is one new, unwrapped children's toy, according to EastBoston.com.

If you start at the Golden Stairs and end near Airport station, the walk covers four of the five arches and four chapters of East Boston history. Each stop has a QR story waiting inside the steel, and the Central Square site is still waiting for its arch.

East Boston is home base for Urban Circle Realty, and we follow projects like the Golden Thread because they shape how the neighborhood sees itself. If you want to talk about where these arches stand, or anything else about owning, leasing or investing in Eastie, connect with Sherean and the Urban Circle team.