A new park has opened in Boston to honor a Black trans woman who was killed nearby.

The Rita Hester Community Green serves as a “living tribute” to the park’s namesake, announced landscape architecture firm Copley Wolff. A statement from the firm said the park celebrates Hester’s “legacy of strength, identity, and community” and features “a dog park, flexible event lawn, quiet corners, and playful natural buffers.”

Related

Rita Hester’s life mattered
In the pantheon of slain civil rights activists, Rita Hester, an African-American transgender woman, is among them.

The park is located in Allston Yards, where Hester lived when, in 1998, she was stabbed to death in her apartment. She was 34 years old, and the killer has never been found.

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Hester’s death inspired the creation of the International Transgender Day of Remembrance. A plaque at the park reportedly reads, “After Rita’s life was tragically taken in an act of violence, her legacy inspired the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Observed worldwide every November 20, the day honors the lives lost to anti-transgender violence and reaffirms a global commitment to kindness and equality.”

“She just happened to be a star for Transgender Day of Remembrance for a whole lot of other people,” Hester’s sister, Eartha Hester, told Advocate, “and I think that’s really beautiful. Her death was not in vain, she started something that will last forever… Rita’s name is known worldwide.”

She also said she believes the murder is unsolved because the Boston police did not devote enough resources to it at the time. She suspects Rita’s intersectional marginalized identities played a role in their lack of care for the case. “

“They didn’t gather evidence that they were supposed to because they didn’t really care,” she said. “We have a man in a dress, whatever. They just didn’t care. They didn’t have empathy.”

Copley Wolff describes the park as “a joyful, inclusive space made for connection and year-round fun.” The firm designed it in collaboration with the city’s urban planning department. The neighborhood also has a mural devoted to Hester that was installed in 2022.

Earlier this year, the Boston City Council voted 12-1 in favor of a resolution declaring the capital city a sanctuary for LGBTQ+ people, meaning it will not enact anti-LGBTQ+ policies or comply with federal demands to do so.

The resolution codifies LGBTQ+ protection at the local level and denounces policies that will undermine access to essential gender-affirming healthcare, reproductive services, and HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. 

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