The Alewife area at the northeastern edge of Belmont is a remnant of the Great Swamp that once stretched from Fresh Pond to Spy Pond. It included large parts of what is now Belmont's Winn Brook neighborhood. This "primitive, beautiful wilderness," wrote William Brewster in 1906, once contained "reeds, bulrushes, wild rice and muskrats ... beautifully diversified by wooded or bushy swamps alternating with open grassy marshes." Up until the mid-nineteenth century, the water was good to drink, with no pollution.

But according to An Alewife Area Ecology Guide, by the Belmont naturalist Stewart Sanders, the quality of the landscape quickly declined in the late 1800s. Lagoons were filled in, water was diverted, and fish migrations slowed. Garbage dumping turned the now-stagnant water into a breeding ground for mosquitoes carrying malaria.

The Metropolitan Parks Commission, ancestor of the Metropolitan District Commission, bought a portion of the land in the early 1900s. It drained the stagnant pools and restored some of the water flow, improving the swamp's ecological health. But development at Alewife didn't stop. Route 2 was built in the 1930s and widened in the 1960s. Fresh Pond Shopping Center was built in 1962. The Red Line extension was completed in 1984. In the 1990s, Cambridge allowed the construction of office towers south of the MDC reservation along Cambridge Park Drive.

Now O'Neill Properties wants to put 250,000 square feet of office or laboratory space on thirteen acres of Belmont land north of the MDC reservation; the Martignetti family and others have plans to develop the adjoining land in Cambridge; and the Mugar family would like to put 300,000 square feet of office space on an eighteen-acre parcel in East Arlington, directly across Route 2 from the O'Neill property. Citizens in all three communities are fighting the developments, but they face uphill battles.

- Sue Bass