There is no evidence that a UFO-related Area 51 exists but in Needham there is a somewhat mysterious Parcel 74.
The woodland property between Greendale Avenue and Route 128 encompasses more than 2.6 million square feet or 61.5 acres, roughly eight times the size of DeFazio Field and 10 acres larger than all the greens and fairways that the town leases to the Needham Golf Club. Yet it has never been developed or even used as a park, though there are some trails that run along its spine.
“It’s one of very few pieces of open space that the town has,” Select Board member Marianne Cooley said. “Parcel 74 gets considered every single time we do a study for a building. Back when I was on School Committee, we looked at it every time we tried to site a school.
“We looked at it when we did the senior center and when we did the community building at Rosemary. We looked at putting a portion of DPW there. We just keep looking at it and it doesn’t go anywhere largely because the location is not ideal.”
Parcel 74 is not centrally located and it’s on the highway. It’s also long but not especially wide. Cooley said it is not under consideration for the new Pollard Middle School and an effort to locate DPW there to free up space on Dedham Avenue was quashed at Town Meeting in 2016.
Like DeFazio, Parcel 74 is Park and Recreation land that is protected by state law. For the town to use it for other purposes, it would require a two-thirds vote of Town Meeting and an OK from the state Legislature.
At the 2016 Town Meeting a warrant item sought to transfer the northerly 11.7 acres of Parcel 74 from the Park and Recreation Commission to the Select Board — the first step toward considering the land for other purposes. Chris Gerstel, a Town Meeting member and a Park and Rec Commissioner both then and now, said that the Park and Recreation Commission unanimously supported the transfer.
Several residents from Needham Heights opposed the transfer, citing the loss of the buffer between the highway and the neighborhood. The late Ford Peckham, then a Town Meeting member from Precinct E, asked for assurances that the DPW building not be moved to this location. The warrant authorizing the transfer failed on a vote of 49-143.
Carys Lustig, director of Needham DPW, said that Parcel 74 may come into consideration again depending on where Pollard is cited.
“When we did the reboot of the feasibility study a couple of years ago, initially they did look at Parcel 74,” she said. “From a physical standpoint it would support all of our operations and it has fewer constraints than our present site in terms of wetlands.”
“What’s happening with Pollard may affect our ability to operate at the current site. In that case we’d have to look at that location again. It’s really contingent on how Pollard moves forward.”
Needham History Center & Museum Director Gloria Greis said that this section of Needham was mostly undeveloped until the highway was constructed. It was pasture and forest that was leased as Water Lands for Newton’s municipal water supply.
The construction of the highway severed it from the land that became Cutler Park in 1962. More than 60 years later, after neighborhoods sprouted on one side and the highway expanded on the other, the 61.5 acres of Parcel 74 remain undeveloped, quietly — if not mysteriously — providing a green buffer between Needham homes and the highway.
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