Woodard & Curran has a longstanding relationship with the city of Quincy, Massachusetts and its redevelopment of public spaces. Our Community Development and Land Use team oversaw the planning, permitting, design, and construction oversight of significant infrastructure improvements, which resulted in improvements for the area neighborhood and sports and recreation facilities for the Atlantic Middle School and North Quincy High School.
The project began with an evaluation of four publicly owned properties within walking distance of the high school that could be transformed into a competition-level synthetic turf athletic field. The team completed a master plan and conceptual layout for each site for the city to assess.
After the city’s review, they chose to redevelop Creedon Field, an existing soccer field across from the high school actively in use by sports teams and possessing complicated subsurface conditions that required more extensive improvements. This first required rehabilitation of another field at Atlantic Middle School to improve drainage and playing surface conditions for the athletes to utilize while Creedon field was under construction. This work included field investigations, evaluation of the existing soils, a detailed construction sequence, drainage improvements, site plan, details, and associated specifications to enable the city’s parks staff to conduct the work at a significant cost savings.
Concurrently, Woodard & Curran’s team began planning, investigating, permitting, and designing the work to be done at the flood prone Creedon Field. As part of this project, the city acquired nine homes on Hunt Street that were demolished to make way for a more definitive high school campus space, allowing for more parking and compensatory storage within the floodplain. A surcharge program was also developed due to the highly compressible soils and implemented sequentially to import materials needed for the new field and parking areas.
In addition to the multi-purpose synthetic turf field, the project added lighting, a grandstand, scoreboard, sound system, concession stand, restroom, and storage structure. A total of 140 parking spots were added, in addition to a bus pull-off and major infrastructure improvements including the resurfacing of Hunt Street. The final project addressed significant and complex environmental, hydraulic, hydrologic, and geotechnical challenges and wrapped up in December 2017.
