Woonasquatucket Adventure Park

Thanks to a $500K community recreation grant from the Department of Environmental Management, the Lincoln Lace & Braid site in the Hartford neighborhood of Providence will be transformed from a field next to a bike path into a destination for cyclocross enthusiasts and other outdoor activities. Construction is in progress, so keep your eyes open for the next great park on the Woony in 2019 – the Woony Adventure Park!

What We Will Have

• 8.8 acre city-owned park in the Hartford neighborhood
• Cyclocross & Pump Tracks
• Parkour & Bike Skills Areas
• River overlook
• Rough-hewn black locust picnic tables & benches
• Signature Greenway signage
• Native Plantings
• Neighborhood park entry at Barbara Street with shaded picnic areas & playgrounds

How We Got Here

• The Woony Adventure Park shares a lot of history with Merino Park. Both sites are located near the old Lincoln Lace & Braid Company.

• The site was formerly a sheep farm, a factory yard, a swimming and skating pond, a soccer field and abandoned park, a landfill dump, and a road-salt storage area.

• The main structure of the remaining Lincoln Lace & Braid Company mill complex burned in 1994 and was razed in 1997.

• Due to the level of contamination on the site, RI DEM declared the property a ‘Brownfields’ site and the EPA awarded an EPA Region 1 grant to conduct an environmental assessment. In 1998, WRWC worked closely with the Providence Parks department and Hartford neighborhood to clean up the Brownfields site.

• The WRWC continued to work closely with the EPA and Trust for Public Land to clean up the Lincoln Lace & Braid site, completing work to cap the old landfill site in 2006.

• Remedial activities in 2007 included clearing and grubbing brush, the construction of a landfill cap which includes a geotextile fabric and clean fill, and plantings of a variety of upland, wetland, an transition plant species. The cap is intended to prevent exposure and migration of petroleum hydrocarbons, VOCs and several metals.

• Remediation since that time includes removal of the building debris, petroleum, and petroleum-contaminated soil from the site. Between October 2010-May 2011, additional soil was removed and seven cover systems engineered caps were installed.

• WRWC is now creating a “Climate Smart Park” with design and infrastructure that captures potential overflow from the Woonasquatucket River during flooding events and mitigating the “heat island” effect of the area due to the lack of trees.