Edition: U.S. / Global

Spectacle Island Journal; Stinking Heap in Boston Harbor Is Well on Its Way to Revival

Published: June 27, 1999

An island just cannot get any more down and out than Spectacle Island did.

Think of the exact opposite of St. Tropez, or the anti-St. Lucia. Imagine a hideous, stinking, toxin-leaking dump right in the middle of Boston Harbor, which itself used to be compared to a toilet, what with sewage and all. A 100-acre hellhole just three miles out from Boston that no one was allowed to land on, and who in the world would want to, anyway?

For some in this sorry life, though, there is redemption. For people, for islands, even for whole harbors, given a great deal of work and the right historical juncture.

When a gaggle of officials and advocates boated over to check on Spectacle Island's progress today -- and invited the first reporter to land there since the island's transformation, they said -- they surveyed a newly terraformed world still in the making, but already easy to imagine as a park inviting enough to attract tourists as planned, in 2002.

Spiraling dirt roads led up a grassy, man-molded hill that offered a 360-degree view of the harbor, once considered the dirtiest in the country and now, after a court-ordered clean-up costing billions of dollars, redeemed enough that many parts are swimmable and dolphins deign to visit. To one side lay Boston's lopsided skyline, the two great skyscrapers and financial district cluster of smaller ones, and to the other, the scattering of other harbor islands long so little-used that many Bostonians do not even know they exist.

The public pier was partly finished, the man-made beach was already washed with seaweed and spotted with jellyfish, and here and there, roses and daisies bloomed, kept alive in these dry weeks by water barged over from the mainland.

It gets better. This week, the United States Department of Transportation announced a $1 million grant to make Spectacle Island a futuristic land of zero-emission power. It will be powered by solar energy collectors, and offer visitors rides in electric cars and on an electric boat and electric bicycles, becoming a kind of demo for a post-fossil-fuel world, and a model for other national parks.

''There used to be 200 years of trash piled here,'' said Sheila Lynch, chairwoman of the Spectacle Island Park Advisory Committee and director of the consortium overseeing the zero-emission grant, as she trod a new road past saplings and rose bushes. ''To see it, in 12 years, go from a very bad landfill to a zero-emission park is like seeing a phoenix rising from the ashes.''

Now, here is the serendipitous twist that turned Spectacle Island's tale from woe to winning: none of this could have happened without the $12 billion highway project known hereabouts as The Big Dig.

That big digging involves sinking the city's Central Artery underground, along with adding a third tunnel to Logan Airport. All that tunneling produced a lot of dirt, much of it contaminated. Without a place to put all that dirty dirt, the project could not have gone forward. Meanwhile, the dumps on Spectacle Island needed to be capped so they would stop leaking into the harbor.

To make a long story short -- a story of more than a decade of legal battles, politics, permitting, public pressure and assorted city-state-Federal struggles -- Spectacle Island ended up getting about a third of the Big Dig dirt, more than 3 million cubic yards of it. In return, the Big Dig builders were obligated to provide ''mitigation'' services, from containing the old waste to building a visitors' center, trails, beach and mussel habitat area.

All that piled and compacted dirt made the island grow about 60 feet upward to become the tallest point in the harbor. When it is done, planners say, Spectacle Island, which is co-owned by the city and the state, will become a gateway point for the new national park formed of the harbor's 30 islands and peninsulas, which include colorfully named spots like Hangman Island, Bumpkin Island, Button Island and World's End.

Plans are afoot to develop, gingerly, several of the islands, and to vastly increase public access to them, turning them into what one official described as a sort of poor-man's Nantucket, where city folk could take quick public ferries out to enjoy seaside views, wind-surfing, nature education and the like. Currently, only about 100,000 visitors a year ferry out to the islands.

So change awaits several of the islands, but surely none will embody as dramatic a turnaround, as telling a history, as Spectacle, which was so named because its original form, two mounds connected by a sandbar, resembled a pair of spectacles.

Long a summer gathering point for the Massachusetts Indian tribe for which the state is named, it was used as pastureland in colonial times; as a quarantine hospital site in the 18th century; then as a resort spot that, by the mid-19th century, had gained such ill repute for its gambling and dancing that the authorities closed it down.

A Boston businessman then installed a horse-rendering plant on the island, and for years it absorbed thousands of Boston's equine corpses. For much of the 20th century it was simply a dump, and produced so much methane that in 1960, underground fires broke out and smoldered there for years.

In the 1970's, the Defense Department, which had owned the strategically located islands at the mouth of the harbor, sold them off, and most became part of a state park. But there was no money to fix up Spectacle until the Big Dig came along.

Now, though still owned by the city and state, it is effectively the ward of the kind of complex, interlocking, impeccably inclusive public-private partnership typical of many 1990's projects. On the boat over to the island were Federal transportation and park officials; state environmental and park officials; New England Aquarium, Boston Edison and University of Massachusetts project managers; environmentalists; members of advisory committees for Spectacle Island and for the whole island park, and others.

It was crowded on deck. But cheery.

The fate of Spectacle Island, said Brian MacDonald of the New England Aquarium, ''is like the greatest story you can tell about recovery.''

Photo: A view from the top of a hill on the cleaned-up Spectacle Island looking south over the island and beyond it, to Boston Harbor. A visitors' center will be built where the temporary structures are now on the old dump. (Jared Leeds for The New York Times) Map of Boston showing the location of Spectacle Island: Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor, that is undergoing a cleanup.