To understand a neighborhood’s health disparities, you first need look at its history

I’ve often worked under the assumption that the best reporting should be forward-looking and offer solutions, rather than simply look at preexisting problems. I still hold that to be true, but working on my Center for Health Journalism National Fellowship project taught me something else: In order to accurately report on how a marginalized community might move forward from decades of health disparities, a reporter must first understand the history behind those disparities.

My project proposal began with a Facebook post from a local environmental group. It said that there used to be an Olmsted Park in the area where Boston’s Logan Airport now stands and that the green space had been destroyed to make room for the development. It was poorly shared and poorly liked, and at first, I wasn’t sure it was true. I’d never heard of the park, named Wood Island. None of my colleagues had either, even those who had lived in the Boston area for decades.

After verifying the post’s accuracy (it was somewhat hard — there isn’t a Wikipedia entry for the park), I knew there might be a story. East Boston, an immigrant community separated by water from most of the city, used to be home to a massive, beautiful park, designed by America’s most lauded landscape architect, and government officials had taken that away. When I put that surprising piece of history alongside the health disparities that I knew existed in the neighborhood based on my experience living and reporting in Boston, I knew there was a story.

When I first arrived in Los Angeles for the fellowship, I thought that the importance of the story lay in the contemporary health issues in the neighborhood, namely asthma, obesity and other disparities. But after meeting with my advisor, Kavitha Cardoza, I knew I needed to rethink my approach.

Why did so few people know the story of Wood Island Park?

That question lingered in my mind. “I want you to get in touch with nursing homes, archives, community groups and find anyone you can who remembers this park,” Kavitha told me. “I want you to find every document you can related to its destruction and why it was destroyed.” (I’m paraphrasing here.) I wanted to report on what’s happening now and what happens next, the health disparities facing the neighborhood and how the community can move forward. But Kavitha knew that the spark of the story rested in the people at the center of it, the people who had lost the park that was at the heart of their neighborhood.

Before my fellowship with the Center, I had never taken on a months-long reporting project. So the task of seeking out people I didn’t know existed, spending hours listening to archival tape and digging through troves of documents … it was daunting. But Kavitha helped guide me through the process. And once I found the community members who had lived the history I was reporting on, they helped guide me through a story that they felt had never been told correctly before — a story they were eager to share despite the pain at the center of it. One key source, Fran Riley, became my guide through the neighborhood’s history, literally spending hours driving through East Boston with me, sharing her memories and frustration with how things have mostly changed for the worse.

As I learned more about the history of Logan Airport’s expansion and Wood Island Park’s destruction, it became clear that so few people knew the story because it happened in a neighborhood state officials felt they could push around with little consequence — a notion that I came to realize was at the center of the health disparities being felt in East Boston today. 

But I found that, even with a deeper understanding of the community I was reporting on, connecting the current health issues of the neighborhood to its history wasn’t easy. After all, there weren’t any studies on how destroying a green space and expanding an airport affected health outcomes in a community. It’s one of those things that seems obvious but is hard to scientifically pinpoint.

Finding the right health expert for the story became key. I had spoken to doctors and other experts in the neighborhood, but their expertise was on the patients they saw and the community they served, not the connection between history and local health disparities. With the help of my advisor, Kavitha, I came to realize that one of the speakers at our Fellowship gathering could be helpful in connecting the dots: Dr. Tony Iton, who had pioneered the notion that a person’s ZIP code is more important than their genetic code when it comes to health outcomes.

When I called Dr. Iton, the story came together — not just the connection between now and then, but the forward-looking nature of the story that I knew was essential to any productive piece of health reporting. 

“The obvious manifestations of going from an Olmsted Park to a polluting, noisy airport on the health of the community and population is as straightforward as you could imagine,” Iton told me. “Undoing the health harm … is going to require a comprehensive, long-term strategy that is highly resourced. And the decisions about how to proceed have to be in the hands of the community that is impacted. And that’s something that our society has never done well.”

While there wasn’t a study on the topic, Iron’s expertise allowed me to illustrate the historical roots of the health disparities in East Boston with authority. And his discussion of how to undo those disparities helped me hone in on one of the key elements of the story: how the community has and continues to fight back.

Throughout my story, I focused on how Eastie became a hub of activism in the aftermath of the park’s destruction. And I devoted a portion of my story to a neighborhood health program that is working to undo the harms of the airport’s destruction and the park’s absence.

This all allowed me to produce a piece of reporting that rooted itself in history while proposing solutions for the future. It helped me understand that in order to look forward, you sometimes do need to look back.