You might have noticed our temporary pilot wayfinding signs along the Mary Ellen Welch Greenway. In August we deployed five wayfinding signs. The locations are at Marginal Street, Gove Street, Airport Station, the East Boston Public Library, and Constitution Beach.

The purpose of this project is to guide and encourage people to discover what the Greenway can offer, from connecting the harbor to the beach to playgrounds, and everything in between.
The Friends of the Mary Ellen Welch Greenway Council has been very excited to install wayfinding signs for the past few years. We are really lucky to have great partners in the City of Boston Parks and Recreation Department, the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), and Massport who supported this project.

It was really important to us to make the signs as accessible as possible to different audiences. The color choice seeks to provide the highest contrast possible for people with low vision impairments or color deficiencies. Because of the budget limitation we couldn’t include braille text but that might come on the final design.

Testing makes projects better. We encountered a few challenges:
1- The stability of the temporary frames.
2- Typos on the Arabic text translation.
3- The durability of the signs at Gove St, the Library and Constitution Beach.

Thankfully the two first bumps were able to be fixed with added weight on the bases and with the help of an Arabic speaking neighbor, Qusai Akoud. Special thanks to Qusai and to everyone that has helped us so far!

Feedback & Next Steps

We have received great feedback already. Feel free to send your comments our way via email at: eastiegreenway@gmail.com

We will leave the signs up until the cold temperatures come and then seek to make this project permanent.

The Friends of the Mary Ellen Welch Greenway is a grant recipient of the Barr Foundation. Thanks to those funds we can make projects like this possible.