Chelsea Celebrates Grand Opening of Bear Park: New Green, "Cool" Space

Chelsea residents now have a new place to cool off and connect with nature with the grand opening of Bear Park on Saturday, April 18. The city’s newest park, located at 212 Congress Street, is designed to combat the urban heat island effect and provide much-needed green space.

Bear Park is part of Chelsea’s initiative to create "cool parks" that offer relief from extreme heat and address environmental and public health concerns. The park features a splash pad for children, shade structures, picnic tables, and a play structure for children ages five and older. A drinking water fountain and a rain barrel for collecting stormwater are also on-site, providing a sustainable resource for community members to use for non-drinking purposes like watering gardens.

“The opening of Bear Park—built on a formerly vacant, contaminated lot—represents the culmination of years of community advocacy and collaboration with GreenRoots to transform the site into a vibrant space featuring a splash pad, shade structures, and sustainable stormwater collection,” said Ben Cares, Director of Housing & Community Development for the City of Chelsea. “These investments directly respond to the heat island effect that puts Chelsea's most vulnerable residents at risk, while providing free, accessible spaces for recreation and connection that improve both the physical and psychological health of the community.”

The park is named in honor of James P. "Bear" Burke, a former employee of the Chelsea Department of Public Works. Its development transformed a formerly vacant, contaminated, and partially paved lot into a vibrant community green space through a partnership between the City of Chelsea and the environmental justice organization GreenRoots.

“For GreenRoots, community engagement isn't just a focus group or a survey, but the meaningful and continued building of relationships between people, and the landscape around them,” said Jazmin Castellon, Climate Justice Organizer at GreenRoots. “We aim to co-create, alongside community members, the healthy and thriving neighborhoods that they want to live in.”

Bear Park is also a key component of the Cool Block project, a collaboration between the City, GreenRoots, and the Boston University School of Public Health. This initiative aims to reduce the urban heat island effect in Chelsea's most vulnerable neighborhoods through street tree planting, brighter pavement surfaces, and white roofs. Researchers are monitoring air temperatures to measure the impact of these interventions.

The project received support from the Boston Society of Landscape Architects (BSLA) for its community visioning process and was made possible in part by a significant donation from an anonymous foundation. Chelsea has invested millions in open space over the past five years, with Kayem Park slated for future renovations.