The Lynn waterfront was a dump. Literally. But what if it became a park?

LYNN — “Somebody a long time ago made a big mistake,” Fred Hogan said as he stood on the shoreline here and looked out across the Atlantic Ocean. Depending on where you look, you can see Nahant, some of the Harbor Islands, and, in the distance, the Boston skyline.

The mistake is behind him. Or it was. And as the Lynn city councilor turned around to look at the brand-new Lynn Harbor Park , he kind of shook his head.

“If you knew what this used to look like …”

It was a dump. Quite literally, a festering landfill blanketed by swarming seagulls that was so massive it took more than a million tons of soil to cover up. And it was just one of the eyesores on the Lynn waterfront, which had become a dumping ground for all sorts of ugly industry, effectively shutting the community off from it