In February, Chelsea wrote to the owner of the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun and offered the team a home for its practice facility on the Chelsea waterfront. All eleven councillors signed a resolution backing the pitch. As far as the public record shows, nobody wrote back.
The letter
The letter, dated February 10, went to Stephen Pagliuca, the Celtics co-owner whom the city’s letter identifies as the owner of the Sun, and who, the City Manager wrote, “is moving the WNBA franchise to Boston.” “We believe that Chelsea would be a wonderful home for a practice facility for the team,” the City Manager told the council in transmitting it. The letter points to privately owned industrial parcels at 150 to 200 Marginal Street, on the creek, a few minutes from downtown Boston and Logan, with land enough for a practice gym and offices. It was co-signed by Councillor Leo Robinson and by a representative of Colwen Hotels and the Chamber of Commerce. The council followed on March 2 with Resolution 26R06, signed by all eleven members, inviting the team to Chelsea.
The idea
It is not a foolish idea. WNBA teams have been building dedicated practice facilities as the league’s money has grown, and the facilities go where land is cheap and the drive to the arena is short. Chelsea is ten minutes from TD Garden by the Tobin Bridge, the Marginal Street parcels are the largest flat industrial land near Boston that is not already spoken for, and the city has been trying for a decade to turn that waterfront into something other than salt piles, tank farms and a produce market. A professional team’s training complex would be the anchor tenant the West Chelsea overlay and the economic development office are looking for, and the pitch cost nothing but a letter.
The silence
Seven months later there is no reply in any council packet, no follow-up letter from the City Manager, and no public statement from the team about where it will practice. The Sun’s move to Boston is itself still a plan rather than a schedule. The council’s resolution and the letter are the kind of gesture a city makes to show it is open for business, and Chelsea has made several this year: the All-America City trip, the business attraction campaign, the economic development officer. What it has not yet done is land one. Whether the team or Pagliuca’s office ever responded is not recorded anywhere in the public file.