Cambridge (Mass.). Recreation Division

Cambridge Park Commission (also known as the Cambridge Park Dept.) was established in 1892, with a Board of Park Commissioners. It was formed to construct and maintain city parks. Around 1905, recreation activities were added to the responsibilities of the Park Commission. It hired landscape architect Charles Eliot and his firm Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot to improve existing parks and plan new ones in poorer neighborhoods. The city acquired Donnelly Field in East Cambridge, Rindge Field in North Cambridge, and the entire Cambridge frontage of the Charles River, and in 1894 took eight hundred acres of mud flat and degraded salt marsh by eminent domain, and by 1914 created a park along the city's shoreline. In 1910, the city began construction of playgrounds and operating recreation programs, and these functions expanded after the park was transferred to the Metropolitan District Commission in 1921. In 1947 the Park Commission was abolished as a separate department; its maintenance activities were transferred to the Dept. of Public Works, and a new Recreation Commission (also known as Recreation Dept.) was formed; in 1980 the Recreation Commission became the Recreation Division of the new Human Services Dept.