Little League players cheered on by parents and coaches. Toddlers splashing in fountains. Elementary schoolers climbing playground structures. Dogs leading their owners to favorite sniff spots. All are modern-day images of neighborhood life at Strawberry Hill’s beloved Glacken Field and Playground.
A little over a century ago, this recreational area was established formally by the city of Cambridge. It was carved out of the Fresh Pond Reservation, an area strictly managed by the local Water Board. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Water Board’s primary mission was to keep people away from the Fresh Pond water supply to prevent its contamination. The board, with the support of the Good Government reformers and the academic elite class, advocated in favor of a quiet, aesthetic buffer around the city’s water supply and saw a structured athletic field, with its noise, crowds and physical construction, as an “intrusion” into Frederick Law Olmsted’s master-planned landscape.
On the other side of this issue were local ward politicians and the residents of Strawberry Hill, many of whom were working-class Irish and Italian immigrants. They pointed out the irony of having a beautiful reservation in their backyard that their children weren’t allowed to use for sports and recreation. After much heated debate, the ultimate creation of Fresh Pond Field and Playground (now Glacken Field and Playground) in 1924 was a win for local ward politicians and their constituents. Though its creation wasn’t a scandal in the modern sense, the area sat at the center of a long-standing political tug-of-war in Cambridge regarding land use, neighborhood equity and public health.
Before children could run and play on this land, the city had to create the ground beneath their feet. The area where Glacken Field sits was historically a low-lying marsh and part of the “Great Marsh” system. Considered a nuisance area, it was a breeding ground for mosquitoes and a site where illegal dumping often occurred. The city used excavated dirt and fill from other municipal projects, including the water purification plant, to level the field. Historically, the use of industrial ash and urban debris as fill was common in Cambridge. This practice led to considerable headaches later, including during a 2019-2021 field renovations when soil contamination from the original 1920s development had to be addressed at high cost to taxpayers.
More than 20 years after its creation, the field was renamed for Frances Xavier Glacken, who died in the line of duty during World War II. “Duchie,” as many of the locals called him, graduated from the Cambridge Latin School in 1937. A strong student, all-scholastic athlete and student government leader, Duchie went on to Holy Cross to study math and play football. After marrying and moving to California in 1941, he answered the call for pilots and joined the Army Air Forces in 1942. The plane he co-piloted, Z Square 7, was shot down over Tokyo Bay in 1945. In November 1948, the young congressman John F. Kennedy led a ceremony to name the field in honor of the neighborhood’s native son.
The naming of Glacken Field was in keeping with the values of local ward politicians of the time. These politicians steered toward names that honored local heroes or neighborhood figures, while the Good Government reformers favored names that were geographic (e.g., Fresh Pond Parkway or Reservoir Hill). By naming the field after Dutchie Glacken, the neighborhood effectively “claimed” the land, communicating to city planners and the Water Board that this corner of the reservation belonged to the people of Strawberry Hill, not the city’s master plan.
Interestingly, the multimillion-dollar 2019 renovation of Glacken Field and Playground reignited some of the political turmoil. The long-ago conflict between preserving natural landscapes and dedicating land to public recreation morphed into debates over natural grass versus artificial turf. In the end, natural surfaces prevailed, and many upgrades were added: two West Cambridge Little League fields, a universal design playground accessible to all children, a walking path and improved drainage systems to mitigate the area’s sinking soil and marshlike tendencies. The area termed Glacken Slope, created from concrete blocks and wildflower and native plantings, serves as a nod to local environmentalists while providing neighborhood children with a modern, natural play space.
Atop this small strip of land, iterated and reiterated, lie dirt, fill and a story far bigger than one might imagine. Evidence in the power of neighborhood advocacy, political will, thoughtful innovation and compromise, the century-old Glacken Field and Playground continues to be a central source of community for Strawberry Hill and West Cambridge.
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