Chinatown and Leather District residents, volleyball players, skate boarders and park enthusiasts gathered in October at the Reggie Wong Memorial Park in Boston’s Chinatown to celebrate what they hope will be a turning point in a long struggle to protect and gain community control of this urban playground and encourage the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) to make good on its commitment to lease it to the community for $1 a year.
At the event, Lydia Lowe, Chinatown Community Land Trust director, announced that MassDOT had verbally committed to moving forward with leasing the park to the community group for $1 a year and planned to take responsibility for soil mitigation and park repaving. The Friends of Reggie Wong Park will be meeting with MassDOT in November. Leather District Neighborhood Association Chairman Chris Betke said that after years of advocacy and negotiations, the community is ready to take the next step, calling for a group photograph and leading a chant of “Sign the lease!”
Lowe described that Boston has an average of 7.59 acres of open space per thousand residents, but 3500 residents need to share that same amount of space in this part of the city, where enjoying the outdoors means taking a walk to the Boston Common. Chinatown is also Boston’s hottest neighborhood, with one of the lowest levels of tree canopy and permeable surfaces. She recounted that activists and area volleyball players first came together when MassDOT revived plans to market its Kneeland Street parcels to developers and that selling land to the highest bidders could threaten the future of the park. With the support of the Chinatown Community Land Trust, the community formed the Friends of Reggie Wong Park to protect the park’s future and implement some needed renovations.
Reggie Wong Park is the neighborhood’s only public recreational open space. For decades, it has been the home of Chinese Nine Man Volleyball in the region, a unique Chinese American sport brought over from the Taishan province of China by the early Chinese immigrant laborers and kept alive by both new immigrants and the American-born, generation after generation.
In 2019, Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack made a commitment to lease the land to the community for $1 a year. The project changed hands, and negotiations went on hold over the past year when MassDOT discovered the presence of contaminated soil, but officials confirmed that the community lease and the remediation project are now ready to move forward.
At the celebration, City Councilor Ed Flynn congratulated the Friends of Reggie Wong Park and the Chinatown Community Land Trust for their persistent advocacy. Rep. Aaron Michelwitz shared that state plans for spending of federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds include $250,000 for renovations and improvements to Reggie Wong Park. He noted that late community leader Reggie Wong acted as a bridge that brought people together, and that his namesake park was continuing to play the role of bringing together diverse sectors of the community.
Kathryn Friedman of the Leather District Neighborhood Association described short term improvement plans for the park. Plans include repaving and realigning the courts, adding play equipment for younger children, and installing more attractive new fencing with a design that honors the late community leader Reggie Wong.
Russell Eng, president of the Friends of Reggie Wong Park and late Reggie Wong’s nephew said, “We played here before there even was a park. And when we got the park, Reggie called it Pagoda Park to mark it for Chinatown.” It was named the Reggie Wong Memorial Park in 2012.
