Madison Park

In June last year, Aparna Lakshmi, a teacher at the O’Bryant School, suggested in a Banner op-ed that the city consider a new building for the school on Parcel P3, a publicly-owned seven-and-a-half acre site that abuts the Madison Park campus.

“It has been a long journey to achieve this goal, but I saw it coming as early as last year,” said second-year head coach William Harvey, encapsulating his Madison Park Lady Cardinal volleyball team’s triumph over Snowden High School in the recent Boston City Championship game. 

Up until the late 1960s, the area of Lower Roxbury around Madison Park was a vibrant neighborhood where luminaries such as jazz drummer Roy Haynes, former state Rep. and minister Michael Haynes, Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan and former Boston Police Superintendent William Billy Celester came of age. But a plan that was hatched in 1962 would soon wipe the neighborhood from the city’s map.