Walk the boardwalk at Market Landing Park this week and you'll feel it before you see it. A board flexes underfoot near the fish pier. A patch of new screws, still bright against weathered gray wood, marks a spot where the city sent a crew out for emergency repairs. Keep walking toward Oldies Marketplace and the decking gets rougher, older, the kind of surface where you watch your feet instead of the river.
That patchwork is not neglect. It is a holding pattern. For more than a year, Newburyport has been deciding exactly how to fix the Peter J. Matthews Memorial Boardwalk, and in March the City Council finally voted on an answer. If you assumed "rehabilitation" means the whole thing gets torn out and replaced, you assumed wrong. What's coming is narrower, cheaper, and more interesting than a clean slate.
What $1.8 Million Actually Buys
On March 2, 2026, the City Council approved roughly $1.8 million to fix the boardwalk, funded through a $1.49 million grant from the Commonwealth's Seaport Economic Council, $285,000 in Community Preservation Act money, and $50,000 from the Newburyport Waterfront Trust. That funding stack matters less than what it was chosen over.
The city's marine engineering consultant, GEI, laid out two paths. Replace the entire boardwalk with composite decking for about $2.9 million. Or take a hybrid approach for about $1.8 million: pull up boards on the final third of the boardwalk toward Oldies Marketplace and on the first third at the other end, evaluate which of those boards can be reused, and reserve new composite decking for the worst-hit sections in the middle.
The council chose the hybrid. Ward 1 Councilor Sharif Zeid, who walked the council through the plan, described the problem in blunt terms:
"a lot of boards that are raised, a lot of public safety hazards and so forth."
That framing tells you what this project is and is not. It is a targeted fix for the sections doing the most damage to ankles and strollers. It is not a full modernization of the structure into a single new material end to end. When the work wraps, you will be walking on a boardwalk that mixes reused hardwood at the ends with new composite in the middle, not a uniform surface.
Why the City Is Waiting Until Fall
If the funding was approved in March, why hasn't a crew shown up yet? Because the timeline was built around the boardwalk's other job: hosting Newburyport's summer.
The plan is to bid the project out in summer 2026, mobilize a contractor in the fall after boating season wraps, and do the physical work through the off-season, meaning late fall, winter, and early spring of 2027. The goal is a finished boardwalk by summer 2027.
That sequencing is not incidental. It means this year's Yankee Homecoming, the nine-day festival that ran from July 25 through August 2 and filled the boardwalk lawn with waterfront concerts, morning workout classes hosted near Sea Level Oyster Bar, and the Brewfest kickoff, happened on the same patched-up boardwalk residents have been walking all year. The city is choosing to absorb one more full season of wear rather than disrupt the festival, and it is choosing to do the disruptive work during the months when foot traffic on the boardwalk drops off anyway.
As of April 2026, the design phase was reported to be about 35 percent complete, according to the mayor's chief of staff at a City Council meeting. That is the most recent public benchmark on record. The practical read: expect the bid process and contractor selection to consume most of the summer, with visible work beginning once the boats clear out.
What the Short-Term Fixes Have Already Told You
Before the council vote, the city was already buying time. A contractor, BTT Marine Construction, pre-drilled and installed roughly 200 new coated screws along the boardwalk to fasten down loose boards, a stopgap the city described plainly as temporary. In some spots, standard pressure-treated pine wasn't holding up to the span, so the crew secured oak hardwood boards instead, a small but telling detail. It suggests the eventual material choice for the reused sections may lean toward hardwood where it has already proven it can take the load, rather than composite everywhere.
An earlier structural assessment found something worth knowing if you've wondered whether the whole waterfront is at risk: about 90 percent of the boardwalk's subsurface stringers and supports were found to be in satisfactory shape. The problem is almost entirely the decking itself, not the frame underneath it. Consultants estimated that roughly 60 percent of the boardwalk needs new decking, which lines up with the hybrid plan the council eventually approved.
Part of a Longer Waterfront Story
The boardwalk fix is not happening in isolation. It's the last piece of a waterfront modernization that's been unfolding in stages for years. The Central Waterfront Bulkhead Rehabilitation Project, which reinforced the seawall the boardwalk sits behind, wrapped in the summer of 2024. The Market Landing Park Expansion, which turned old parking lots on the east and west sides of the park into green space and added a shared-use path connecting to the Clipper City Rail Trail, opened with a ribbon-cutting attended by Mayor Sean Reardon and U.S. Representative Seth Moulton.
Mayor Reardon has been direct about why the boardwalk matters enough to fund in a year when city budgets are stretched thin. As he put it when the Seaport Economic Council grant came through:
"Our boardwalk is central to our waterfront economy, tourism, and quality of life."
That's not a line reserved for visitors. The boardwalk was originally built in the late 1970s and extended in 2002, and the Newburyport Waterfront Trust maintains it as an 1,100-foot public walkway with six access points running from the heart of downtown along the Merrimack. It's where people walk dogs on a Tuesday morning and where thousands gather for Yankee Homecoming's fireworks in late July. The bulkhead, the park, and now the decking are three separate capital projects aimed at keeping one stretch of riverfront functional for another generation.
What This Means for Anyone Walking It This Year
If you use the boardwalk regularly, here's the practical shape of the next twelve months. Expect it to look and feel roughly the same through the rest of this year's boating season, patched but passable. Expect a contractor to show up sometime this fall. Expect work to run through the winter, which means less foot traffic overlap but also less daylight to watch it happen. And expect a finished product by next summer that looks a little different depending on where you're standing: original wood, evaluated and reused, near both ends, and new composite decking through the stretch that's been the worst of it for years.
None of this changes what the boardwalk means to the people who live near it. It's still the place where Yankee Homecoming's Waterfront Morning Workouts happen on the lawn, still the route for an evening walk with a view of the Merrimack, still the reason a lot of people chose to live within walking distance of downtown in the first place. The city just spent a year figuring out how to keep it that way without spending more than it had to.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a town's capital projects because you're thinking about staying in Newburyport for the long haul, or wondering what a home near this stretch of waterfront is actually worth once projects like this are accounted for, that's exactly the kind of local detail Kathleen Murphy Group pays attention to on behalf of clients. Contact us when you're ready to talk about what's next.
