SWAMPSCOTT — Angela Ippolito grew up in Swampscott, but moved to Boston as an adult. When she moved back, she began to notice little changes around town to some of its more historic and memorable features.
“I started looking around and thinking ‘you know, I can’t believe this hasn’t been saved,’ and ‘that’s not preserved,'” she said. “Just thinking that it’s such a pristine little place that I always loved as a kid.”
Ippolito’s husband, Joe, suggested she see what she could do about her concerns, and in 2000, she joined the town’s Historical Commission, despite never having an interest in government before.
Twenty-one years later, Ippolito is the chair of Swampscott’s Planning Board and has held several community positions in town and around the North Shore.
“There’s still lots more to do,” she said. “There’s no shortage of things to get myself involved in.”
After graduating college, Ippolito began a career in the art world, selling the work of artists to galleries around the world. Eventually, she and her husband opened their own gallery on Boston’s Newbury Street. Later, she entered the more commercial side of the business, working with independent artists to create posters and marketing materials for museums and other organizations, and then worked in marketing for a few different companies.
She took a few years off after her son, Michael, was born, and the family moved back to Swampscott, which is when she began getting involved in local government.
Ippolito said that when she first joined the Historical Commission the group was in the middle of preparing for the town’s 150th anniversary, and she was able to write an article to enter into the paperback book that the commission published, “Swampscott, Massachusetts: Celebrating 150 Years, 1852-2002.”
Over the next few years, she helped the commission write grants, start its ongoing archive project and — most notably — achieve a spot on the National Register of Historic Places for the Olmsted neighborhood, which had been designed in 1888 by noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.
Ippolito said she had the opportunity to visit the Olmsted archives in Brookline during the process for the designation.
“I had a wonderful time doing that, because I was able to speak with some of the most renowned experts on Frederick Law Olmsted in the country,” she said. “They pulled all of the original drawings from Swampscott’s Olmsted subdivision and I was able to photograph them.”
While she enjoyed her work with the commission, Ippolito started to feel that she wasn’t doing everything she wanted to do.
“Over the years, I realized a lot of the issues we had with preservation and land use were really related to flaws, omissions and improper zoning,” she said. “Our zoning bylaws were just really not ideal for development, and I became much more interested in land use and preservation.”
On her own, she began attending seminars about the topic and joined the Essex National Heritage Commission, which falls under the National Parks Service and works to highlight the cultural, commercial and historical attractions along the Essex Coastal Scenic Byway.
Then, in 2009, Ippolito was elected to Swampscott’s Planning Board.
“I started paying attention to what zoning could do,” she said. “Changing any kind of a bylaw that affects personal property and the desires of the town to expand and develop, especially in a coastal community, is a huge challenge and takes a lot of time and a lot of public input.”
Ippolito considers one of her biggest accomplishments during her time on the board so far as her roles in creating Swampscott’s Master Plan — in collaboration with the board, other town officials and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council — as well as the Open Space and Recreation Plan, for which she was the committee chair.
“It informs all the land use and zoning we want to see happen,” she said of the Master Plan. “Because it happened through the state process, which was a very public process, it’s something that really belongs to the whole town.”
The plan was the first one the town had created since the 1970s, and the previous plan had sat on a shelf collecting dust, Ippolito said, so she was thrilled when the Town Meeting approved funding for its creation. However, she said, the funding had to be requested three years in a row before that happened.
Big issues that Ippolito said have come up again and again over the years have been sustainability, coastal resiliency and affordable housing. While the town has been able to make certain changes, like upgrades to its beaches, she looks forward to doing even more. One project she hopes to see in the future is the preservation of the train depot, one of the only original depots in the area still standing, and the creation of more transit-oriented development in the area around it.
Meanwhile, Ippolito stays busy. She is a longtime Town Meeting member and serves on the Hadley School Reuse Advisory Committee. In addition to her government work and working from home with her husband, she teaches yoga on Eisman’s Beach every Monday and Wednesday from 6 to 7 p.m. during the summer through the Recreation Department. The classes are attended by residents of all ages.
“It makes me so grateful that we live in this spectacular place,” she said. “I can walk down the street and I’m at the ocean. So many of us take this for granted.”
According to Ippolito, spending time with community members through yoga, and all of her other activities, are the best reward for the work that she does.
“There’s so many new people getting involved in different efforts,” she said. “I would say that’s the thing that has kept me interested: always having another goal for the town and really being able to enjoy, on a volunteer level, the collaboration with other people, other communities, other boards and then all the people I meet.”
