Agassiz Road reopens in Back Bay

Agassiz Road, that’s “ah-gah-see” for the people in the back, is back in action in Boston after three years. 

The difficult-to-pronounce and yet deceptively short road was closed due to the Muddy River Restoration Project, a large engineering and historic park restoration project, according to the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR). 

“The project addressed long-standing concerns about flood risk, ecosystem degradation, and historic preservation along the historic 3.5-mile urban waterway. Over the next year, DCR will be conducting a feasibility study on the use and design of Agassiz Road. The findings will serve as a foundation for recommendations for the future use of the road,” read part of the statement from the DCR. 

The work for the Muddy River Restoration Project included dredging 90,000 cubic yards of sediment from the river. There has also been the removal of invasive species and habitat restoration.

This is being done to prevent massive flooding and improve the general conditions at Olmstead Park, which runs along the river itself, according to the project’s website. 

Where did the name of this newly reopened road come from? One man interviewed by WCVB guessed at the pronunciation of the road as being based on Louis Agassiz, a biologist from Switzerland who made his way to America and eventually became a professor at Harvard. 

He is credited with starting the school’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. However, he is also known as the man who commissioned early photos of an African enslaved man and his daughter, named Renty Taylor and Delia Taylor, in order to make his argument about white supremacy, according to art history scholars, including the University of Chicago Press. 

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