Spectacle Island
Capped former landfill turned harbor park, with drumlin hills, five miles of trails and a lifeguarded swimming beach.
Location
About this audio guide
Spectacle Island's guide traces its four decades as Boston's harbor dump, starting around 1921, when trash swallowed the island's glacial hills so completely that a bulldozer driver once felt his machine sink into the pile beneath him. It follows the methane fires that smoldered underground through the 1960s, and the 1992 sealing effort that capped the whole mess in clay trucked over from the Big Dig. Climb the north drumlin, the island's high point, to get above it all.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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