For five weeks this summer Chelsea closed Broadway for soccer. The city set aside $125,000 in January for World Cup events, the Traffic and Parking Commission approved a plan in April that allowed Broadway to close up to four times between June 10 and July 19 with open-container zones from Friday to Sunday, and Eastern Minerals donated a 16-by-9-foot mobile LED screen for the games. The result was Fiesta Futbol in Chelsea Square, and by the city’s own accounting it came in under budget with $40,438.51 left over.
The plan
The commission’s Option 1, in the April 27 packet, closed Broadway with open alcohol sales Friday through Sunday, and closed Second Street and Winnisimmet Street around the clock for the tournament’s five weeks, with partial permanent closures on Winnisimmet on a rolling basis. The commission amended it to a maximum of four Broadway closures. Twenty parking spaces on two streets were removed for the duration. The request came from Karl Allen in the Department of Housing and Community Development, which ran the events.
Eastern Minerals, the salt company that owns the Marginal Street waterfront, gave the screen. U.S. Soccer donated 1,200 size-4 balls for the city’s youth programs, which the council accepted in June. The city’s application for the All-America City award, which it won in Denver in June, cited the World Cup programming as an example of community trust-building.
What it cost and what is left
The September 21 agenda carried the accounting: $40,438.51 of the $125,000 unspent, which the administration proposed to move to other uses. We reported the transfer in the agenda preview. The remaining $84,561.49 covered staging, security, the police details for the closures, and the programming itself. The city has not published attendance figures or a breakdown of the spending by event.
What Chelsea got
Chelsea is the most Latin American city in New England and the World Cup was in Boston, or near enough, with matches at Gillette Stadium. Closing the main street for the games was the obvious thing to do and the city did it. The quieter result is the precedent: a city that has never closed Broadway for anything but a parade closed it four times in five weeks with beer sales, the businesses did not revolt, and the Traffic and Parking Commission has a template. Chelsea Day used it on September 12. The question for next summer is whether the city does it again without a World Cup to justify it, and whether the $125,000 was the right size. No event-by-event accounting has been published.