For decades, the 18-acre stretch of waterfront where Chelsea Creek meets Mill Creek sat fenced off and abandoned — the former home of the Forbes Lithograph Manufacturing Company, an industrial relic dating to the 1880s. Today it's the site of the most ambitious green-space project in the city's recent history: a planned public park, nature preserve, and mixed-income housing, led by Mass Audubon in partnership with Chelsea-based GreenRoots and The Neighborhood Developers. But whether that vision survives now rests with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

The site's path to this point was rocky. Developer Jianfeng "Ken" He, an Australia-based businessman, bought the property through Yihe Forbes LLC for $11.6 million in 2014 and spent several million dollars developing a plan — 585 residential units and a small amount of commercial space — that Chelsea's Zoning Board of Appeals approved in 2019, scaled back from a more intense proposal first introduced in 2015. Then COVID hit. He has said the project's primary funding source — a hotel business in China — dried up. By August 2024, the Chelsea Board of Health had determined the property was "unfit for human habitation" and a risk of accident to the public. The following month, Yihe's lender, Shanghai Commercial Bank, petitioned for receivership. In November 2024, a nine-alarm fire burned through part of the site, forcing the temporary closure of an adjacent commuter rail line. The City of Chelsea went to Suffolk Superior Court, which approved the appointment of a receiver, L. Alexandra Hogan, to secure the property and find a buyer.

Hogan sold the site to Mass Audubon for $8.36 million, a deal that closed in March 2026. For the city, the sale meant recovering real money: City Manager Fidel Maltez told the city council in an April 2026 letter that the sale allows Chelsea to recoup more than $1 million in delinquent property taxes and municipal liens, plus reimbursement for costs the city put toward the receivership.

But He isn't done fighting it. His attorneys argue Hogan breached her fiduciary duty by selling the property for far less than its $20 million assessed value, while ignoring potential bidders who were reportedly willing to pay $13 million to $20 million. "Chelsea, Hogan, and Mass Audubon essentially say that our client is a bad actor that neglected its property and that it should be punished for its bad behavior by losing most or all of its equity," attorney Dana Curhan told the Globe after the Supreme Judicial Court heard the case on September 9. "There is a requirement that the interests of the property owner be considered — in fact, we contend that it is a primary consideration." Another member of He's legal team, John Ruggieri-Lam, said Hogan had promised to cooperate with the developer on any sale: "Instead, we went down a railroaded sale that was thrust upon us without prior notice when the receiver knew we had other buyers." He himself told the Globe he hadn't expected the receiver to sell the property at all: "I didn't expect them to sell it. We were selling the property at that time."

Hogan's attorney, Talia K. Williams, pushed back in a court brief, writing that any fiduciary duty Hogan held "extend[s] to the court itself and the receivership estate as a whole" — not directly to Yihe as the landowner. Mass Audubon, which intervened in the case, told the court that Hogan's sale was the fastest and most reliable way to eliminate the site's ongoing public safety risks, and argued the transaction shouldn't be unwound. The SJC is now weighing whether He's rights as a property owner were violated — a decision that will determine whether the sale stands or gets reconsidered.

None of that has slowed Mass Audubon's plans so far. Since taking ownership in March, the organization has spent $700,000 securing the site and beginning preliminary cleanup, and has raised $27 million of the roughly $70 million the full project is expected to cost, according to Mass Audubon chief executive David O'Neill. The vision — what Mass Audubon calls the future Chelsea Creek Sanctuary — includes restored wetlands, a living shoreline for climate resilience, a nature center and outdoor classroom, and up to 225 units of mixed-income housing built by The Neighborhood Developers on a 2.5-acre portion of the site. GreenRoots, the Chelsea-based environmental justice nonprofit whose executive director Roseann Bongiovanni grew up near the property, has pushed for the project for years. "Our residents deserve to access this historically important site in a way that is welcoming and beneficial for all," Bongiovanni said when the sale was first approved. O'Neill said he's confident the organization can raise the rest of the money through private donations, state and city grants, and proceeds from the land sale to The Neighborhood Developers, and is targeting an Earth Day opening in April 2029. "We are off and running," he said.

Whether that timeline holds is no longer entirely up to Mass Audubon. It's now in the hands of the Supreme Judicial Court.