Piers Park  Piers Park is located on the southwest side of East Boston, overlooking Boston Harbor and downtown Boston. Designed by Pressley Associates Landscape Architects of Boston, the 6.5-acre park was conceived to reclaim a condemned industrial pier for recreational use, allowing residents and visitors direct access to the waterfront. The park is slated for expansion in two further stages of development, phase II and phase III, which are proposed to increase the park's land area to 11+-acres. Phase II is in process (as of 2020). Phase III currently has no public date for ground-breaking. East Boston has shared an uneasy relationship with the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) since the first iteration of Boston's Logan Airport opened at then Jeffries Field in 1923. The relationship has been actively litigious since the 1960s, when the agency took control of a parcel of land at the northwest side of the expanding airfield, a parcel that included Frederick Law Olmsted's 46-acre Wood Island Park. Designed by Olmsted and opened in 1898, Wood Island Park was a mature, 46 acre park with an extensive slice of harbor waterfront, accessed by a tall parkway avenue of elm trees. The park was a recreational area for a neighborhood with, "fewer park and recreation facilities than other neighborhood in the city." The decision was made for it to be "taken" in 1969 to make way for expansion of Runway 15R/33L at Logan. Outside of the park's main gateway on Neptune Road parkway, abutting residents, formerly, with the convenient park access, owners on the "most prestigious street in East Boston," found themselves bought out of their homes and forced to relocate. Public opposition came to a head following the morning of April 23rd, when Massport Head, Edward J. King sent an unannounced crew to start work. "It was like a military operation." a witness recalled. "They came in with 36 men with chainsaws and massacred 36 trees in five minutes." In the days that followed, residents lay down in the streets to block bulldozers and supply trucks from reaching the construction zone. "In one day Wood Island Park was graded to the level of the existing runway.". In 1966, under direction from then Governor John Volpe, MassPort had made a commitment to replace the recreational facilities that would be lost to the sacrifice of the Olmsted park. By 1975, Massport had again expanded the airport, consuming the Bird Island tidal area, and the promised park had yet to be produced.