Bartlett mall restoration project
Bartlet Mall was Newburyport's town common, now hundreds of years old.
- The Frog Pond formed during the Ice Age and its shape is essentially unchanged, but water no longer flows in or out. The bed is contaminated.
- In 2014, a City-funded study identified heavy metals, cyanobacteria, and total phosphorous in the pond sediment, which feed harmful algal blooms.
- Dredging and disposing of pond sediment would be exorbitantly expensive and do environmental harm of its own.
- In 2017, the City tried a low-cost, reverse-osmosis system, but this failed due to the sheer volume of total phosphorous in the pond.