2 weddings and a funeral

QUINCY -- Julie Pinkham didn't think it would be strange to bring her wedding party to a sewage treatment plant on Nut Island.

Her husband proposed outside the red-brick building, on a grassy knoll surrounded by violet wildflowers. And it was just a short walk from her home in Houghs Neck.

So on her wedding day, Pinkham made her way uphill in a white gown and heels to Nut Island, a small peninsula that juts into Quincy Bay like the tip of a boot.

Guests took pictures as a pink sunset colored the Boston skyline and millions of gallons of waste water flowed in a maze of pipes below ground.

''I guess, yes, it's a little odd to go there," Pinkham acknowledged months after her fall wedding. ''On the other hand, it's absolutely gorgeous, a little slice of gold. There wasn't any place I could have rented that was more beautiful."

Thanks to organized neighborhood resistance over the past 30 years, the sprawling sewage plant that once spewed raw waste into Quincy Bay is now a favorite spot for sunset gazers, rollerbladers, and mothers pushing baby carriages. Their persistence, marked by periodic shouting matches with plant officials, helped transform Nut Island into a place where sewage and neighbors can peacefully, if not fondly, coexist.

Not too long ago, Pinkham would have been ridiculed by her Houghs Neck neighbors, known as Neckers, if they got wind of her wedding plans. For decades, a permanent plume of sewage snaked into the bay, and noxious fumes roused Neckers from their sleep.

Inviting company over for a barbecue was a risk few were willing to take. A wedding was unfathomable.

''We're not baking cookies here," was the brash response that plant workers gave to frustrated residents.

When word spread through the close-knit community in the 1970s that the state was considering an expansion of the Nut Island plant, Neckers assembled a group called the Nut Island Citizens Advisory Committee and retained a lawyer.

''Nobody could tell me that you can't fight city hall," said Lois A. Murphy, 73, a second-generation Necker who now mows the lawn for $7.50 an hour at the treatment plant. ''We knew what was right, and I wanted to prove that if you work with the bureaucracies and the goal you have is for the better of the community, then you can win. And we did."

A lawsuit filed by the City of Quincy did not hurt either. In 1982, William Golden, then Quincy's city solicitor, sued the state after he stepped in raw sewage while jogging along Wollaston Beach near Nut Island.

During the trial, Jack Walsh, a Necker, brought into court a blob of waste he retrieved from the beach. Walsh, the hard-nosed chairman of the citizens group for the past 30 years, said the blob contained clumps of hair, cooking fats, and other refuse.

That lawsuit served as a catalyst for the $4 billion cleanup of Boston Harbor and the creation of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.

But the work was far from over, at least for the neighbors.

At late night meetings, Neckers haggled with the MWRA over nearly every detail of the construction and design of the new plant, which would remove debris from the sewage from as far away as Framingham, before sending it in a cross-harbor tunnel to Deer Island for another round of treatment.

''They were very persistent; there's no doubt about that," said Michele Gillen, spokeswoman for the authority.

The old plant was dismantled, and the new one, which opened in 1998 at a cost of $63 million, was built largely underground with state-of-the-art odor controls. Neckers were successful in persuading the MWRA to hide the aboveground section of the plant with a hill and to build a pier, initially used by construction barges, where it could not be seen from their homes but would offer the public views of the Boston skyline.

Tense meetings over a rusty stack that emitted gases lasted for months. The MWRA agreed to cover the stack with green metal, but withdrew a previous agreement to build a float off the pier for pleasure boats to dock.

''I'd lose sleep over this sometimes," said Walsh, whose wife signed him up for the citizens committee while he was away on business. ''But I felt obligated to continue. You kind of grow with it and feel like you need to finish it."

Some Neckers say they may have done too good a job. Since the MWRA opened the new plant, they say, newcomers have been snatching up houses, and property values have soared, causing property taxes to jump as much as 260 percent for some neighbors.

A few years back, an Asian family held a funeral at the pier for a relative who always fished at Nut Island. They arrived early on a weekday morning and scattered his ashes on Quincy Bay.

Dick Donovan, a Necker who does landscaping work at the plant, talked with the family.

''That's where he wanted to go," Donovan said. ''We've had two weddings and a funeral here. The only thing we haven't had here yet is a birth. At least none that we know of."

Jenn Abelson can be reached at abelson@globe.com.