Historical Commission 08/10/26

AI-generated summary. Written by gemini-3-flash-preview from the transcript below, which is the record. It may be incomplete or wrong; it does not report votes. Every item links to the moment it began.

The Commission approved several demolition applications and scheduled significance hearings for the following month. Members also reviewed an archaeological survey for Brooks Estate and received updates on the restoration of Cross Street Cemetery.

0:17 15 Maple Park Avenue — Approved the demolition application for the Hedgner Center, which will proceed directly to a public hearing based on a prior determination of significance.
2:18 Mystic Avenue Applications — Approved demolition applications for 67, 71, 73, and 81 Mystic Avenue, with determinations of significance for each property scheduled for the next meeting.
4:07 Spring Street, Surry Street, and Circuit Road — Approved demolition applications for 146 Spring Street, 73 Surry Street, and 78 Circuit Road after confirming the applications were complete.
8:40 Zoning and High School Updates — Received updates regarding a delay in the Boston Avenue zoning text and the ongoing search for historical records for the Medford High School Section 106 review.
13:41 Surveys and Cemetery Restoration — Reviewed an archaeological survey of the Brooks Estate identifying sensitive areas and monitored progress on the Cross Street Cemetery restoration, including gravestone cleaning and radar bidding.
32:38 Meeting Minutes — Approved the meeting minutes and discussed the necessity of holding multiple meetings in October to accommodate a backlog of seven significance hearings.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Call the meeting to order at 702 PM. We have a robust number of items on the agenda tonight, so we'll start by taking the various applications for review, starting with 15 Maple Park Avenue, the Hedgner Center. The City of Medford has applied for the demolition of the Hedgner building. Commissioners, I sent around a list of links for the applications, and I believe the application is complete. We'll take a motion to accept the application.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Second. Any discussion or questions? Hearing none, we'll go around for a roll call vote. Jen? Yes. And Luke? Yes. And Doug? Yes. And Sarah? Yes, excuse me. 4-0 for yes, the application is approved. The 15 Maple Park Ave has a determination of significance that we previously completed, so the project will go right to a public hearing. Jen, you and I will work on getting the legal language out to the applicant, and then they can post it. I'm not sure who the applicant, who's taking over that project. Dennis, that was Laurel. Is she still the person that I should reach out to, or should I reach out to Alicia?

[CAS00002523_SPEAKER_00]: I, that's a good question. I, I would just, any, cause I think any emails she included like this, both her and Alicia, I would just reply to both of them and let Laurel sort of make that call right now. Cause I know she was trying to shepherd this to at least some completion until we get a new CBGB person.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Okay, great. Two here. Okay, great. With that cleared, we have applications for several properties on Mystic Ave. Commissioners, the four property or the three property or the four property addresses are all related. So I would like to condense these down into a single motion to accept that would include 67, 71, 73 and 81 Mystic Avenue. All the information has been uploaded. It's all the same applicant. So I'm willing to take a motion to approve all of those applications.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: So those will make a determination of significance. John Clemson's been hired to do MHC form B's on those properties. He's in process of working on them, so he'll get them to us for next month.

[Jennifer Keenan]: And Ryan just want to clarify that when we actually do the significance, we will do them individually, correct? Yeah, yeah.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Great. Next up, 78 Circuit Road. Commissioners, I did receive the application, but Jen, I didn't have a chance yet to upload it. Can you upload it?

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: 146 Spring Street. Commissioners, I sent around the application and it's perceived complete.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: So I'll take a motion to approve the application when you have a second.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: You could, yeah, because usually it's motion, debate, then final motion, vote. So you could be persuaded to change your vote if we were having a raving debate, but this is such an easy issue. OK, great. 4-0 approved. So again, we'll do a determination of significance next month. 73 Surry Street. Same thing commissioners. I'll take a motion.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Great, and then 78 Circuit Road. Yeah, 78 Circuit Road. I'll make a motion to approve.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Second, thank you. Any discussion? Do you need a second to take a look at it to make sure it's complete?

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: All right, hearing no other comments, roll call. Doug?

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: OK, great. No, zero. OK, that one too will have a determination of significance next month. That's it for all of those.

[Jennifer Keenan]: So next month, we will have seven significant votes and a public hearing. Yikes. Pack your cooler. It's going to be an evening.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: If we wanted to, so we have to Um, we have to have the Maple Park hearing 14. We have to post that 14 days out. Uh, but we could have a separate meeting for all of the demo delay stuff. If you wanted to have a hearing on a different night for those meetings, either, you know, the week before or, you know, the weekend, you know, a couple of days after it's up to the commissioners, just something to keep in mind. We can circle back to that at the end of the meeting.

Um, Taking seats. We had an application from Marissa Zampino who was interested in joining the commission. I invited her to the tonight's meeting. If she happens to be here, I don't see her name on the information.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: It is early and we did have a lot of applications. They may have perceived that that would have taken longer than 10 minutes that it actually took us, so. OK, any new business before I move on to old business? All right, here we go. Zoning update from Community Development Board. That's Doug.

[Doug Carr]: Yes, a couple things. We're meeting tomorrow night. Apparently the final tech zoning for Boston Ave is not ready yet, so we will not be debating or approving that tomorrow night like we originally hoped. So that's going to be September 2nd. We're hopefully going to have the final at least week in advance and then we'll be able hopefully to approve it that night and send it on to the City Council by the September 15th as we hope we would.

Jen and I were talking earlier this week about uh you know there's a couple things we need to do. We need to fix some language both in Medford Square and Boston Ave zoning to make sure it's uh consistent with our own processes. We have some um draft text that this this uh commission has put together a few meetings ago but it hasn't I haven't seen that version of it but there's a longer debate and Jen I don't know if you want to get into it now or do we want to do this at a separate meeting to try to determine if we're going to change our processes or get ahead of it. I think it would take a good amount of time to have that debate. I don't know if we want to do it tonight. What are your thoughts?

[Jennifer Keenan]: Yeah, my thought was that me, you, Ryan and Danielle should kind of hammer out a process and then I thought we could bring it to the commission. Okay. Once we have kind of an outline and then we could discuss it as a group.

[Doug Carr]: I think that makes sense. Yeah, because we definitely need to have Danielle a part of the conversation. So I'll be talking to her tomorrow anyway. It's actually Wednesday night's meeting, but I will bring that up and we'll schedule that. But given the next meeting, it's probably going to be the meeting after before we actually take it up, I imagine.

[Doug Carr]: So that's the update on zoning. Um, we're not sure what's next. It's probably tough, but we're going to have a meeting with the city council and the mayor's staff to go over a schedule for the next 12 months, uh, for zoning that has not happened yet. So we will figure out, uh, as soon as I know what the template is for the rest of the year, we can, we can, um, I can alert you guys, you can kind of plan accordingly. We're going to try to take.

A little more time than we did in Boston Ave. Boston Ave felt very rushed. We wanted to take a good four to five months per section of the city, whatever the next section is, whether it's Tufts, West Medford, whatever it is.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Are you planning on coming back to Glenwood? Um, I think it would seem to, it would seem to make sense to do that because it's a lesser, you guys did a lot, but you're going to make changes, I think was the plan. So it might be wise to do that while you can also do it on Boston Ave. So you can, not Boston Ave, Tufts. So you can be working on something new and something to revise at the same time as sort of, you know,

[Doug Carr]: Yeah, I think the staff, you know, getting just a one is a heavy lift for the staff, because they have so many more meetings in between our meetings, and we have a lot of meetings. So I'll bring it up to them, but I'm not sure the setting of the next area of Medford is kind of a collective decision. But I can ask them.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: OK. Well, that's a good update. Things are moving right along. Medford High School section 106 review. Just so you know, we hired Claire Dempsey to do an MHC area form for that complex. I've asked for various information from various sources. I only put the request in last week, but I'm hoping that there will be some movement. We're looking for department records and school committee records and the city council records that talk about the construction of the building. We do have a complete set of construction plans to, so we know the architect, we know the builder, we know and have copy of the original layouts and elevations.

So, you know, we have some information, but it would be great to have an expanded version of that. So we're trying to track down that information It's just a matter of getting a hold of it. And if there is no information to be had, then so be it. We tried to find as much as we could. So that's going forward. We'll, of course, send that to the consultants when we complete it so that they have a copy of it.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: That's it for that. Properties under demo delay. I haven't heard anything since we delayed.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Not yet. Not yet. No, I haven't had a chance to. I've just been too busy.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: I don't really have an update for them either. Brooks Estate Archaeological Survey. So I have that in hand. Doug, I did send it to you and Carly. The upshot of the report is that based on their recommendations and estimates, about 35% of the landscape is potentially high and medium archaeologically sensitive. There are areas that have been highly disturbed throughout the site, but that's a good chunk of land. And there were some recommendations that came out of it, like, for example, potentially doing some testing and doing some proving of the ground in and around point of rocks. Peter Charden Brooks, the third house, just to sort of confirm that there is some remains of a building there and that the city just didn't wholesale clear the site, which I believe they imploded the building. So I suspect there's probably a lot of construction debris there, but it'd be great to look at that in the future. The reports there, it will sort of influence, you know, whatever the, you know, it's there for them built to use as, you know, potential look into your future projects. It's there for the cemetery department to look at when they look at their seven acre project. So, um,

[Doug Carr]: Yeah, I skimmed the report. It's about, what, 45, 50 pages, Ryan? I found some things in there that were surprising to me. I can take these offline with you. I thought there was, they were talking about the Hamlet building as if it was veterans housing.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Yeah, they called it the veterans housing building, and I picked up on that. There's a few changes, like somebody wrote, that the building was acquired in 1924, which is not, they're getting confused with Thomas Brooks Park. You're right, the Hamlet is the Hamlet, it's not, it's the caretaker's quarters, it's not the veterans housing.

[Doug Carr]: I found some other factual things that I questioned, and I thought the original point of rocks was a Native American site pre-contact from what I remember hearing decades ago. And that's not even mentioned, but I think we can take that offline. There's obviously a lot of fine tuning on that report that needs to happen, but it's a good report. It's an excellent start for sure.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Yeah. There's some proving, you know, there's scientifically they base it off of topography and slope and, you know, all the geographic factors, but then there's the actual truthing of the site. And that is one of them is to, they recommend going up and digging at the point of rock site. And it wouldn't surprise me because it's such a high elevation that it is a potentially a pre-contact site.

[Doug Carr]: Is a LIDAR type exercise possible for Pointer Rocks? Because that building was so big, if there's a lot of stuff in that ground, wouldn't we do an aerial scan to see if we can find out, rather than trying just the two test pits?

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Well, LiDAR will show you the depression of where it is, and we walked the site, and it's very hard to see, because it was the middle of summer, we didn't trust ourselves to walk in the tall grass. But if in the fall, when it gets a little bit clearer, I mean, we can walk up there and see what we can see. There should be the remains, you know, the house was huge, so the house should be there.

adjacent carriage house should be right down the bottom of the hill. And I don't think, based on what they were constructed out of, that they were physically carted off, especially in the 1940s, where the city demolished the building to save money because it was in such, quote unquote, bad condition.

[Doug Carr]: All right, well, I think there's a lot of work to be done there. It's a great start, though.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Yeah, so yeah, I can look up and I'll send out some LIDAR information because you can access the publicly the LIDAR. And, you know, it's great for sort of overview level, but I don't know what it's going to show. So we'll see.

[Doug Carr]: I thought hidden structures under the ground was what it was supposed to show.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: No, well, LiDAR shows topography at a very high detailed level through trees and terrain. So it'll show you stone walls and things that aren't necessarily visible. It'll show you they've found forts. They had a young boy who was using LiDAR who found a whole lost civilization of archaeological resources down in the jungle in Brazil. So it's really useful. Okay, so that's all I got for that. So it's out there. It's, you know, it's available for the commissioners if they want to read through it.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Anybody else want a copy of it? It's only 10 megs, so if you really want to read through it. It's just very, it's just very technical.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Yeah, just read the summary and then you can skip through to the sort of the overview of how they got to the recommendations. And that's probably the bulk of it.

[Doug Carr]: And the prime author was a former member of this commission, right?

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Right. Right, yeah, she's a geoarchaeologist too. So this is her, that's her field of expertise. And she's one of only a handful in the country. So, you know, that really plays into looking at what the soil compositions are and stone compositions are and how that plays into known archaeological sites. And it's pretty proven. They basically said that they use the same technique over and over across the country. And, you know, most times stuff comes out of the ground as, you know, In the areas that they think are highly sensitive.

Great CPA project, so Thomas Brooks Park is we completed the tree work. I haven't really done anything else. I. I'm going to push SWCA, who just did the archaeological survey, to complete the work on the artifacts. I believe they're mostly done, and then I will retrieve the artifacts from PAL and put them together, and they will be deposited in the library. And maybe we'll put them on display for a little while. Might be fun for October for Archaeology Month.

That's all I got for that. We will need to do something with the has to do that. For Cross Street Cemetery, I sent around some pictures of the ongoing restoration. So Daedalus Restoration is the consultant that we chose. They have power washed the perimeter wall. It looks great, looks almost brand new. There are a lot of cracks and some boulders missing. There's no way to replace them. So we will put the rest of that work off. But the fact that the biological material, the lichen and the the mosses off of there is really helpful to preserving that wall for a time. The stones, he's working on the stones. He's got the first two rows almost complete, third row under some level of conservation. What really stands out if you walk by the cemetery are all the marble stones that they've cleaned. It's beautiful. They've gone from this nice, this grayish color to a nice, beautiful sort of optic white color, which is great. And some of them you can actually read once more because they don't have any sort of moss or lichen on them when they're not dirty.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Yeah, yes. It's really a striking difference and it really is going to make us push to try to get the rest of the stones cleaned because that's, you know, what will be left are just the ones that need a light cleaning. So that's going. The gate is in his possession. He's cleaned the original one that's staying and he's in the process of just confirming my field measurements to make sure that when they remake the other leaf that it is as I've drawn it, it's pretty close. So, and it just really depends on, they probably need to just field measure how long the pins need to go into the adjacent granite posts so that they can,

so that they can hang it, but should be pretty close. So that's it. So he's invoiced for at least a part of the work, and I'm going to process that with Teresa tomorrow, and they should continue on working on it. As part of the CrossStreet project, we went out to bid for the ground-penetrating radar We put out an RFP for GPR services at both the relocated Cross Street Cemetery and the original site off of Clippership Drive. We had four bidders for three different firms, I believe, there this morning. It's a mandatory meeting, so they're pre-qualified now to bid.

There were a lot of great questions. What it will give us the answer to is two things. It'll tell us how many people are buried in the open area in front of the old, the relocated Cross Street Cemetery, to see if that is available to receive additional burials if we find people at the old site. And the other one will define how many grave shafts the archaeologists have to investigate as part of the relocation project, basically. It was sort of an open-ended, we based it off of maybe it's this many, I'd like to know more concretely to better get a solid bid and determine a scope of work. So this is just sort of getting us that answer. It's taken us a little bit longer than we want. We wanted to be in the ground this year, but it's probably looking like we'll be in the ground for spring of 27.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Correct, and I'd rather, you know, this is an opportunity. It's not, you know, it's not proven, like, GPR is not guaranteed, but it certainly will give you a lot more information without actually even opening anything up, which is a huge help. So that's in process. Hopefully we'll have a consultant and within the next month get our answer so that we can then go back out to bid with the archaeological stuff and the excavation stuff and go from there.

Survey projects for Hastings Heights. We received some additional product from the contract extension. MHC gave us more money to spend, and we got product, so we spent it. And now we're just waiting for feedback. I've sent them comments. So the project's moving along. It's going to wrap up relatively soon. What is next? Brooks Estate. However, I am having difficulty getting an answer out of the state. They may not have received their federal funding for this year, and as a result, that project would be put on hold. So I'm trying to get them to answer me so that I know that we can spend our match, because there's always work we can be doing.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Well, I'm kind of hoping that They should have their answer soon, but their fiscal year, I believe they have until September to get a decision. The feds have until September.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Oh, yeah, then, um, so we may not have an answer and it may not be available until October one, but that seems very late to me. So, and I prefer not to, you know, I'll certainly hold tight, but like, cause this project was supposed to start in May and here we are in August. So, um, you know, and I'd like to not, you know, waste our, the city's match that's $14,000 worth of survey. So. So I'll circle back and let you know, you know, before, you know, before the end of next month.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Well, it's a part of our normal budget, so it'll just, it'll sit there. So we, that's why usually when that happens, I, I will create a smaller project and we'll get it out the door.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: And the only last thing I have is the approval of meeting minutes, but does anybody else have any old business that I did not get on the agenda? Okay, Peter sent around meeting minutes. Were there any questions, comments, changes? If not, okay.

[Jennifer Keenan]: Before we do meeting minutes, do we want to toss around breaking up, or do we want to bust through seven significance hearings at the next meeting?

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: So from what I understand from preliminary information from John is that all of the Mystic Gap buildings all have a common past. It's all the same subdivision. So then, you know, it's just a matter of When most of them had houses on them that were then torn down and then replaced with the commercial buildings in the 30s. So the question will really be like, you know, how quickly we think those will go. I, I honestly think that this most of that stuff will go pretty quickly. It's pretty cut dry.

[Jennifer Keenan]: And then do we, I mean, we have no way to predict what sort of kind of community feedback and discussion that will happen for the Hegner Center, you know, in terms of that. I mean, I just don't want to sit here and predict like.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Yeah, I mean, the Hegner Center needs to, you know, they'll have to put up a sign, obviously. So, and, you know, we'll encourage people to write in ahead of time, but, you know, we don't know. You know, and it may not be, you know, I think people might be interested in the project that's going there, but they may not necessarily be interested in the building that's currently there, right? So I'm making sure we would stay focused on the comments related and surrounding to the building itself.

[Jennifer Keenan]: Well, one thing we could do is just do nothing else that night. Like we do these cases and we table any other business, unless we're taking new applications that come in. and we just have no other old business or any other new business, like a section 106 or something?

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Yeah, I mean, I can table everything else. I mean, there's really no need for normal updates.

[Jennifer Keenan]: Right, because then that would... We'll be brain fried. Right, but then at least it's like we're only focusing on these things to move them down the road for the applicants. And then from there, if we end up with seven, got seven public hearings in October, that's another discussion. But it might just make sense to, because we could always pull another meeting to do regular business if we had to with fewer people, right? Like if we don't have a quorum. I mean, or if we have some conflicts on dates. Right, right. And also, are we going to have a funky schedule in October? Because always the holiday screws us up. And I don't remember what we put on our calendar at the beginning of the year.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Yes, because if we meet When is the holiday? Is there a holiday in October?

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: We definitely split it up. Sorry, it would be the 12th.

[Jennifer Keenan]: Yeah, it's the 12th, so we have to meet before the 14th for a public hearing.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Right, so we would, the meeting would be held on September 14th for significance, and then the public hearing would be on the 5th for all of those.

[Jennifer Keenan]: Yeah, or another night that week if we just because Luke and Sarah, just to give you context, October is always funky because the second Monday of the month is always Indigenous Peoples Day. And so if we have cases, we have to meet within 30 days. So sometimes we end up meeting early so that we can stay within the timeline. And then sometimes we'll actually do a second meeting the week after Columbus Day if we have if we take an application and we have to have significance or we have new applications or whatever. So it always just ends up being a little funky in October. The other option is we meet on Columbus Day, but... No, no, no.

[Jennifer Keenan]: I mean, the city's technically closed that day, so... Right. Yeah. No, we can't.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Well, me and Doug don't get the day off, so it doesn't matter.

[Jennifer Keenan]: I mean, I work too, so it's like a regular day for me. But I know some of the applicants and whatnot could be away for the weekend.

[Jennifer Keenan]: Yeah. OK, so Ryan, why don't we just table any other business on September 14? Sure. And then that night, if we have a backlog of stuff and we need to pull a meeting together to catch up on things, we can do a separate meeting for those that can attend. And then knowing that October, we could end up having two meetings anyway just for meeting schedules and deadlines.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Yeah, I think we should just assume that we'll have two meetings in October.

[Jennifer Keenan]: Well, I think it'll depend a lot on how much carries over from September. Right. OK, does that work for everybody? I mean, it's like I think it might be the best option, at least we can decide tonight. OK.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: OK, roll call, Jen. Yes, Sarah, yes, Luke, yes. Oh my goodness, thanks. Doug Doug, yes. OK, or zero approved.

[Jennifer Keenan]: So Ryan, just for the Hagner Center, for their legal notice, they've got to get it in ASAP because the meeting's going to be early. No, I'm sorry. I just made that up. I'm a month ahead.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: You're a month ahead. Forget what I said. If you want to do the legal language tonight, just send it out to them.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Nope. Nope. Just not. Our newspaper is the newspaper, and they're going to have to do it. It's their project. We don't pay for it.

[Jennifer Keenan]: No, I know. I just didn't know if we had an online option now.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Nope. Nope. No, because ours say newspaper. So an online newspaper is more of a blog. It's not a newspaper.

[Jennifer Keenan]: So moved and a 2nd. 2nd, considering how much we had on our agenda, that was pretty quick meeting.

[Vice Chair Ryan Hayward]: Yep. I was, I was like, oh, we got to get out of here by 740. okay roll call Doug.