State inventory shows only 41% of Swampscott open space protected

← All news · August 10, 2026

MassGIS maps 319.8 acres of open space in Swampscott. Only 41 percent is protected in perpetuity. The largest block is a private golf course with no protection, the town beaches are logged 'limited,' and the state shows three conservation restrictions, none on Archer Street.

MassGIS, the state’s mapping office, maps 319.8 acres across 75 polygons in Swampscott’s open-space inventory. Only 131.2 of those acres, 41 percent, are marked protected in perpetuity. Another 44 percent carry no protection at all, and 14 percent are logged “limited,” the softest category the state records.

The gap matters tonight. The Open Space and Recreation Plan Committee meets at 7 p.m. with Goal 43, Archer Street, listed as item 15 on its agenda. Town Meeting bought the two Archer Street parcels in 2022 with warrant language committing them “to open space and conservation purposes only, to be evidenced by a conservation restriction.” On the floor, then-Select Board member Peter Spellios, now off the board and serving as a Precinct 3 Town Meeting member, said: “with your approval tonight, we will be placing a conservation restriction on this property, which, again, forever protects it for open space and conservation purposes.”

Four years on, the state has no record of it. Archer does not appear in the open-space inventory, and the Commonwealth’s registry shows exactly three Swampscott conservation restrictions. There is no fourth.

“Open space” on a town map describes how land is used. It does not prove how land is protected.

No Archer restriction in state records

A conservation restriction is a recorded instrument that binds land forever. It is the strongest routine protection a town can put on open space.

The Commonwealth’s registry shows three in Swampscott: One Salem Street (11 acres, held by One Salem Corporation, deed book 7044, page 110), Atlantic Avenue (0.47 acres, the Clifton Improvement Association, 12355/108), and Blythswood (4.67 acres, 30624/542). They are numbered 291_CR_1, 291_CR_2, and 291_CR_3. There is no 291_CR_4. None of the three is on Archer Street.

That is not proof the Archer restriction was never recorded. The definitive check is in the Essex South Registry of Deeds, at Book 41288, Page 257 and Book 41394, Page 542, and no one in the public record has yet made it. But the state’s own map, so far, shows nothing.

Protection requires a recorded instrument

Yesterday this paper laid out the legal rule: in Massachusetts, a Town Meeting vote does not protect land. A recorded instrument does. The Supreme Judicial Court has said so plainly, and the town’s own 2022 purchases turn on it.

In Selectmen of Hanson v. Lindsay (2005), a town meeting voted unanimously to accept a parcel “for conservation purposes,” but no instrument was ever recorded. Years later the land was auctioned for back taxes. When the town sued to void the sale, it lost: the vote “alone, had no legal effect.”

In Mahajan v. Department of Environmental Protection (2013), the SJC, citing Muir v. Leominster, held that thirty years of actual use as a playground did not, by itself, convert unrestricted land into protected land. Use is not status. A deed or a recorded conservation restriction perfects the protection, which is why the state map shows so much Swampscott land as “limited” or “none.”

Tedesco is the largest unprotected block

The single biggest piece of mapped open space in Swampscott is Tedesco Country Club, 140.5 acres across six polygons, private, protection “None,” not Article 97 land. That is 44 percent of the town’s entire open-space inventory. The state’s comment field on the parcels reads: “Private equity golf course.”

Tedesco is private land. The club owes the public nothing, and the town cannot restrict it. Nearly half of what Swampscott’s green map shows is land the town does not own: a golf course whose owners could, in principle, do with it what any private owner may.

A seventh Tedesco-owned polygon, a 3.16-acre softball field, is logged separately, its protection “Unknown.” It is separate from the town’s 7.7-acre Little League fields, which are municipal and “limited.”

The town beaches are limited

All four town beaches, Fishermans (1.09 acres), Eisemans (0.51), Sandy (0.45), and Whales (0.38), are logged “limited” protection, with Article 97 status “unknown.” Combined, they are 2.43 acres.

“Unknown” is not “unprotected.” It means the state has no Article 97 flag on record for them. But it is less secure than a resident might assume for a public beach.

Whales Beach shows how far the map can drift from the deed. MassGIS lists the town as the fee owner of all four beaches. Yet as this paper reported August 7, the Daley v. Swampscott decision (1981) confirmed registered title to the Whales Beach shoreland in the abutting owners, Joseph and Gladys Della Porta of 165 Puritan Road, with the town and public holding a court-confirmed easement to use the sand seaward of the retaining wall. The town manages the beach, and the public has a right to walk it, but the ownership line on the state’s map is softer than it looks.

The committee is already working on deeds

The Open Space and Recreation Plan Committee has already reached the same basic point the state inventory shows.

In April, minutes record, member Paula Claridge looked into whether Article 97 protects the town’s open-space land. Vice Chair Tonia Bandrowicz, who also chairs the Conservation Commission, told the committee it did not, and that “the deeds would be needed.” By June, Claridge and Community and Economic Development Director Marzie Galazka were working through the town’s open-space property data to decide which deeds should carry Article 97 language, the “magic words” in the minutes’ phrase, attributed to Bandrowicz.

That work reaches only what the town owns. The 44 percent with no protection is Tedesco’s private land, beyond the town’s power to restrict. The fixable municipal gap is the roughly 45 acres logged “limited”: the cemetery, the school and Little League fields, the playgrounds, and the four beaches, every one of them town-owned. Archer Street is item 15 tonight, led by Brian Longin, Shauna Vera, and Galazka.

State records may lag

Two cautions apply. Most of these records, 62 of the 75 polygons, trace to the town’s own 2013 Open Space and Recreation Plan, so municipal attributes may lag, and conservation restrictions arrive on a separate state track. The absence of a parcel is evidence, not proof. The Hawthorne, bought in 2022, is absent too. So is Archer.

At least one owner field is plainly stale: Upper Jackson Park (6.28 acres) still lists “Aggregate Industries,” the ancestor of the quarry operator (Aggregate → Holcim → Amrize) the committee is separately chasing for land near Fosters Pond, with the present owner unresolved.

For residents, the useful question is not only whether land is called open space. It is which record protects it: a planning map, a deed, a recorded conservation restriction, an Article 97 designation, or a court-confirmed easement.

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