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The city of Pittsfield has restored a neglected park pond and created an ecological and recreational attraction. (Photos courtesy Jim McGrath)
A quarter century in the making, a pond restoration project has brought new life to a somewhat neglected section of a Pittsfield park, completing a mission that was both professional and personal for city officials.
On Nov. 2, Pittsfield held a ribbon cutting ceremony for the newly revamped pond in the 275-acre Springside Park. The project involved the repair of a dam, the removal of sediment and invasive vegetation, the addition of native plantings, and the construction of a boardwalk across the pond and accessible pathways leading to the water. Envisioned since about 1999, the project cost roughly $625,000 and was funded through the American Rescue Plan Act.
“It’s not only an ecological restoration, but it’s a park asset improvement,” said James McGrath, Pittsfield’s park, open space, and natural resource program manager. “It’s part of neighborhood revitalization. It’s handicapped accessibility. It’s historic preservation, and at the end of the day, it sort of checked all those boxes, and really became a perfect park project.”
During the last century, residents gathered at Springside Park Pond to swim, skate in the winter, and fish. Mayor Peter Marchetti remembers cooling off in the pond and catching frogs and tadpoles there in his youth.
“It was sort of a happy homecoming for me,” Marchetti said, “to be able to go back into the neighborhood and complete something that was done, and done well.”
Over the decades, the pond’s leaky dam had fallen into disrepair, and pond maintenance lagged. Erosion from other park recreational activities and invasive weeds caused sediment to accumulate, and left the park with a pond short on water.
When McGrath arrived in 2002, one of the documents sitting on his desk was a pond feasibility study conducted a few years earlier. He said he quickly understood the importance of the pond and park to residents.
“It really seemed like a project that I knew we wanted to undertake,” said McGrath, who lives near the pond. “It just took a little time to get there.”
The city ran into funding obstacles, with numerous unsuccessful grant applications, McGrath said. Because of the failed dam, the anticipated removal of a concrete wading pool within the pond, and the amount of sediment removal required, he said, the city faced complex engineering issues and a complicated permitting process to satisfy environmental regulations.
Pittsfield caught a break several years back, when it was able to use about $25,000 in Community Development Block Grant funds for engineering design and a feasibility assessment to understand the anticipated project’s complexities, McGrath said. But it was the arrival of federal pandemic recovery funds that truly made the project a reality.
The original pond covered about 3 acres, McGrath said, but the high cost of sediment removal left Pittsfield with enough funding to restore only about a third of the pond area.
Ultimately, Pittsfield removed about 1,200 cubic yards of non-hazardous sediment from the pond and deposited it in an old fire suppression cistern once reserved for the old General Electric plant nearby, McGrath said, “sort of taking care of one piece of infrastructure that’s no longer needed with a new use.”
To replace the invasive vegetation, the project planted new native plants, shrubs, and paper birch and sycamore trees nearby. The city has also installed four bird boxes in the pond area.
City officials said they are also developing a maintenance plan, with a focus on caring appropriately for the native plantings and pond health, and monitoring for invasive weeds.