The City of Revere will pay the former owners of the Wonderland Greyhound Park site an additional $16.5 million to settle a long-running dispute over how much the city owed for the land it seized to build a new high school. The deal cancels a jury trial in Suffolk Superior Court that had been set to begin that same week under Judge Anthony Campo, with as many as 18 witnesses expected to testify.
According to The Boston Globe, the settlement combines with the city's original $29.5 million pro tanto payment from 2022 to bring the total land acquisition cost to $46 million. The newspaper's report also notes the settlement includes roughly $500,000 to resolve unpaid parking fees, since the roughly 34-acre site had been used as a parking lot before construction began. Then-mayor Brian Arrigo signed the original order to seize the Wonderland parcel in the fall of 2022, and the site's former owner, CBW Lending — which included businessman Joe O'Donnell and Vornado Realty Trust — sued the city in February 2023, arguing the payment badly undervalued the property.
A Site With a Complicated Past
Wonderland Greyhound Park opened on June 12, 1935, and ran for 75 years before permanently closing on August 19, 2010, following a 2008 statewide ballot question that banned commercial dog racing, according to background compiled on the track's history. After O'Donnell and Vornado lost out to Wynn's Everett proposal in the competition for a Greater Boston resort casino license, the pair later marketed the Wonderland site, per the Globe's reporting. CBW later proposed redeveloping the property before the city moved to seize it instead. O'Donnell was among the site's former owners, the Globe reported.
In arguing the city's original $29.5 million payment was far too low, CBW pointed to comparable regional deals, including Amazon's $355 million purchase of the former Necco factory site, according to Advocate Newspapers. At the time of its lawsuit filing, CBW argued the Wonderland site could have been worth as much as four times what the city paid, the Globe reported. Peter Flynn, an attorney involved in the case, said the looming trial helped push both sides toward a deal that ultimately valued the property at $46 million, and that CBW would have preferred a larger settlement but recognized the public purpose behind the high school project.
Council Reversed Course Before Settling on the Site
Revere's path to building on the Wonderland parcel was not straightforward even before the valuation fight reached court. The city council briefly rejected the Wonderland location in February 2023 after initially executing the eminent domain taking in November 2022, with some members voicing concern over pulling prime commercial land off the tax rolls, Advocate Newspapers reported at the time. The council reversed itself and re-approved Wonderland in January 2024 by a 10-1 vote.
As pre-trial proceedings intensified last year, the city expanded its legal team by bringing on law firm Foley Hoag to work alongside outside municipal land counsel John S. Leonard, according to the Revere Journal. The case followed the city's eminent-domain taking and CBW's lawsuit seeking additional compensation in Superior Court — the exact path that led to this week's settlement.
A Separate Legal Fight Still Looms Over CBW
The Wonderland land dispute is resolved, but CBW Lending's legal troubles are not entirely behind it. In July, the Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled in favor of second-mortgage noteholder E. Mark Noonan in Noonan v. CBW Lending, finding that CBW had defaulted on a $3.9 million note's capital event clause by taking on additional property financing without notifying Noonan, according to court records reviewed by FindLaw Caselaw. Noonan has claimed CBW owes him money tied to the property, per the Globe's reporting.
Construction Presses Ahead at the Blue Line Site
Work on the new Revere High School has continued throughout the litigation. City and state leaders broke ground at the Wonderland parcel — located across the street from the MBTA Blue Line's Wonderland Station — on August 14, 2025, according to the City of Revere. The project targets student move-in by 2028 or early 2029, and the 422,600-square-foot facility is designed for 2,450 students and is being designed as Net-Zero Ready and Fossil Fuel Free, with geothermal wells proposed for installation beneath the athletic field closest to the building, per the Revere Journal.
The Massachusetts School Building Authority approved a $233,889,807 grant to help offset the roughly $493 million municipal bond the city council authorized in 2024 for the project, easing the burden on local taxpayers. The Revere Journal also reported that final construction bidding came in $14.8 million below preliminary estimates in June, reducing hard construction costs to $935 per square foot, with the savings shifted into hard-cost contingency reserves.
Taken together, the settlement closes the book on a valuation fight that had shadowed Revere's largest capital project even as bulldozers worked the site. What remains is a campus rising on ground that spent 75 years as a dog track, then sat vacant for over a decade before becoming the center of one of the city's biggest legal and financial undertakings.
