Walk the boardwalk at Market Landing Park on an August evening and you'll find it the way it's always been: warped boards catching the last light, a couple of teenagers fishing off the rail, the deck outside Michael's Harborside filling up with people who came for the view as much as the lobster roll. It feels permanent. It isn't. Sometime this fall, once the boats stop needing the harbor the way they need it in July, the city is going to start tearing sections of that boardwalk apart.
The rehabilitation of the Peter J. Matthews Memorial Boardwalk, the roughly 1,200-foot span that's carried foot traffic along the Merrimack since the late 1970s and got a re-decking in 2002, has been in the works for over a year. The funding is locked. The design is well underway. What hasn't gotten much attention outside city council minutes is a detail that matters more to residents than to anyone reading a press release: the project's entire schedule was built around protecting the boating season, not the walking season.
The Repair Nobody Timed for You
According to the city's own project page, the plan calls for mobilizing a contractor in the fall of 2026, after the boating season ends, so the heaviest work can happen during the off-season: late fall, winter, and early spring of 2027. The goal is a boardwalk ready to reopen by summer 2027, in time for the marinas, the harbor cruises, and the outdoor decks that depend on foot traffic in July and August.
That makes sense if you're protecting the businesses that live and die by three months of tourist revenue. It makes less sense if you're one of the people who actually uses the boardwalk between November and April, when the rail trail loop is one of the only flat, plowed, well-lit places in town to walk a dog after dinner or get a run in before the sun sets at 4:30. The boating economy gets spared. The walking season absorbs the disruption.
This isn't a criticism of the decision. Protecting the summer economy is a defensible call for a city where the waterfront carries real weight in tourism and tax revenue. It's just not the version of the story that shows up when people search for "Newburyport boardwalk closed." The people who'll actually feel it are the ones out there in January, not July.
What $1.8 Million Actually Buys
The financing came together over several months and three separate votes. Here's how it breaks down:
- $1,492,500 from the Commonwealth's Seaport Economic Council, awarded in January 2026 as part of a broader FY26 round that funded waterfront infrastructure in 23 coastal communities
- $285,000 in Community Preservation Act funds, approved by the City Council in March 2026 to satisfy the roughly 20 percent local match the state grant required
- $50,000 from the Newburyport Waterfront Trust, approved separately in January 2026
That's about $1.8 million total. During the council discussion, Ward 1 Councilor Sharif Zeid laid out why the city didn't go further and rebuild the whole structure in composite material, which engineers had priced at closer to $2.9 million. The hybrid approach the city chose instead salvages what's still sound and replaces what isn't, at roughly 60 percent of the cost of a full teardown.
"The boardwalk of course runs across the river and goes by the new waterfront park and beyond," Zeid said. "This project is to improve the condition of it, which unfortunately has had a lot of boards that are raised, a lot of public safety hazards and so forth."
That's not an exaggeration. Before the funding was secured, the city's contractor had already gone out and installed roughly 200 new screws just to hold down loose boards as a stopgap, the kind of patch job that buys time but doesn't solve anything structural.
Forty Percent Stays, Sixty Percent Doesn't
The material decision is still being worked out, and it's a more interesting question than it sounds. Marine engineering consultant GEI, Inc. has been evaluating three options: tropical hardwood, composite plastic lumber, and pressure-treated pine, weighing each against cost, durability, appearance, availability, and ecological impact. Roughly 60 percent of the existing decking needs to come out entirely. The other 40 percent is sound enough to keep, which is part of why the city passed on the full composite rebuild. As Newburyport's Senior Project Manager Geordie Vining put it during a public presentation on the project, every material option comes with real tradeoffs, and there's no obvious right answer for what the boardwalk should be made of for the next couple of decades.
As of an April 2026 city council update, the design phase was roughly 35 percent complete, with a spring 2027 completion still being discussed at that point. The city's more recent project page pushes that target to summer 2027, which tracks with the decision to sequence construction around, rather than during, the peak boating months.
The Detour Has a Precedent
If you've lived here long enough, you've already seen how the city handles a closure like this. When the rail trail and shoreline revetment project ran through the winter of 2020 into 2021, the city fenced off a stretch of the shoreline corridor for roughly six months and rerouted trail users along Water Street until the work was finished. Nothing in the current boardwalk project documentation spells out exactly how pedestrian access will be managed once construction starts, but that earlier detour is the closest thing to a template the city has used before, and it's a reasonable bet that some version of it comes back this winter.
There's also a built-in alternate loop that doesn't depend on the boardwalk at all. From the harbor end of the rail trail, the Gillis Bridge Connector, a short paved path crossing under Route 1, links over to Cashman Park on the north side of the Merrimack, with its own boat ramp, playground, and courts. From there it connects into Salisbury's Old Eastern Marsh Trail, giving you a legitimate loop that trades boardwalk views for marsh views without ever touching the construction zone.
Plan Around It, Not Through It
None of this means the waterfront goes dark for the winter. Market Landing Park itself, the green space the boardwalk runs alongside, isn't part of the construction scope. The Custom House Maritime Museum and the Firehouse Center for the Arts both sit just off the water and stay open through the off-season. Michael's Harborside keeps its indoor dining and fireside seating going through the colder months even after the outdoor decks close down, and Sea Level Oyster Bar is a short walk up Merrimac Street if the harborfront itself is torn up.
What changes is the automatic, thoughtless version of the walk, the one where you step out the door, head down to the water, and let the boardwalk carry you along without thinking about it. For a season, that walk needs a plan. Worth checking the city's project update page before the first cold snap, since the exact phasing and any formal detour signage will likely get posted there once the contractor is actually on site.
The boardwalk will come back better than it's been in years, with new decking, improved substructure, and a design meant to help it withstand coastal flooding and storm impacts along this stretch of the Merrimack. It's just not coming back this winter. If you're one of the people who treats that walk as part of your daily life rather than a summer amenity, it's worth knowing now, not in November when the fencing goes up and you're left guessing.
If you're weighing a move to the waterfront or thinking about what a property near Market Landing Park is really worth once you factor in projects like this one, Alissa Christie has been tracking Newburyport's waterfront in detail for years and is glad to talk through what it means for your specific address.
