It’s said that in the early colonial days, European settlers would sit and eat cheese and cakes along a brook that ran through what is now Newton. And that’s how that brook got its name.

“Who knows if that’s entirely true?” Charles River Watershed Association staffer Alfredo Con said in his presentation on Cheesecake Brook improvements Wednesday evening.

Today, Cheesecake Brook serves as far more than a rest stop for hungry hunters. It’s become part of the city’s infrastructure, helping with stormwater and climate change mitigation.

“It’s an urban stream, one that’s been heavily manipulated and channelized, and there was a restoration plan created for that through the state grant that we partnered with the city to accomplish in 2024,” Con said.

Left to right: Charles River Watershed Association intern Jonah Lieberman, City Councilor Sean Roche, CWRA Executive Director Emily Norton, City Councilor Cyrus Dahmubed and City Councilor Martha Bixby cut a ceremonial ribbon at the Cheesecake Brook near Albemarle Field on Wednesday, June 17, 2026. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Once upon a time, for example, the city and state decided it was smart to put cement slopes from the streets directly into the Cheesecake Brook. That was not smart, and it caused a lot of pollution.

In addition to man-made pollutants, the biggest contaminator of waterways is found in leaves. Leaves need phosphorus to build their cells. When leaves fall and die, they’re meant to decompose in place (this is partly how forest floors are created). But as the cavity has seen more and more development of buildings and roadways, and permeable ground space has decreased, leaves tend to fall and get swept away and end up in the waterways.

Phosphorus is also a key ingredient in fertilizer.

Eric Highers, a design engineer with the Newton Division of Public Works, said the state is requiring Newton to remove thousands of pounds of phosphorus from its groundwater by 2030. So far, the city has removed a pound.

Today, those slopes are replaced with rock formations that filter the water as well as turret systems that collect, filter and regulate the flow of water from the roadways into the brook.

Highers later demonstrated how that new roadside waterway infrastructure works.

“And this is all sediment and stuff that comes from the road,” Highers said, pointing to a thick soup of brownish-gray sludge. “It’s a variety of tree debris, trash, pollen–that’s all the yellow stuff.”

The water leaves behind that unpleasant collection as it passes through a screen before it moves forward into a system of rocks and wood that slow the flow as it disperses into the ground next to the brook.

“And this is all stuff that’s being prevented from just dumping straight into Cheesecake Brook. This is what decomposes and releases phosphorus and causes impacts to water quality.”

Ahron Lerman, Newton’s director of parks and open space, talks about tree plantings along the Cheesecake Brook alongside Eric Highers of the DPW on Wednesday, June 17, 2026. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Working in collaboration with the turrets and other installments are trees and plants, all native and all aimed at fostering ecosystems and managing groundwater.

You can check out these improvements yourself at the broom along Albemarle Field. The black plastic will eventually be removed from the edges of the brook once the new plantings have taken root and the new solid ground takes form.

In early 2025, the city began work on a massive stormwater filtration system underneath Albemarle Field along Cheesecake Brook.

The project is installing an infiltration basin under the new athletic field to manage water collected from a large area off-site. With the new system, water in the Craft Street drainage line will be diverted to an underground filtration basin and then filtered and treated before the water returns to the drainage line and empties into Cheesecake Brook.