Physical Description:
Tower Street Urban Wild is a small urban woodlot standing at the center of what was originally meant to be Tower Street, a public right of way running between Orient Street to the north and Gladstone Street to the south. The street currently runs forty feet in from Orient Street to end at a low masonry block wall. Behind this wall a wooded slope drops gradually to a paved parking lot below.
Though a few larger elms and cherries grow on this woodlot, it is primarily populated by weedy species including black locust, Norway maple, and white mulberry. Garlic mustard, multiflora rose, dame’s rocket, and Japanese knotweed choke the littered woodlot floor. Patches of common reed, Phragmites australis grow at the base of the slope adjacent to the parking lot.
The Don Orione Shrine complex standing to the east of the staircase includes a portion of the Tower Street Urban Wild. This portion, a lawn partially overgrown by Japanese knotweed, lies behind the Shrine’s formal steel picket fence.
Tower Street has a southern aspect affording views of Logan Airport, Wood Island Bay Marsh, and South Boston.
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