Who parks on the median in front of Boston City Hall on Cambridge Street and why?
Municipal police officers explained this. Apparently the Big Apple Circus tent took up space on City Hall Plaza, where police officers used to park. They had to find somewhere else to park, so they pulled their private cars up onto the median, sometimes sticking out into traffic. With the circus gone, construction fences on the plaza still keep police officers from parking on the plaza.
This brings up other questions that have no answers. City Hall Plaza is not supposed to be a parking lot, so why are police officers parking there in the first place? Second, why do police officers need parking spaces? Don’t they take the T to work like the rest of us? When the construction stops at the JFK building next door, will it become the parking lot it was before the fence went up there also?
It’s always suspicious when someone in Boston gets a free parking space. Legislators get free spaces. Fire fighters sometimes get free spaces. Somehow you don’t trust people as much if they park for free. If you’ve been reading Brian McGrory’s Boston Globe columns about Liberty Mutual, I imagine you suspect those executives have free parking spaces too, although I don’t know that for a fact. It’s just interesting to think about who parks for free in space-challenged Boston and whether it benefits us as a whole.
Should we talk more about whether Boston is or is not a World Class City?
I made up my mind that it is okay that Boston is not World Class, but many of you think I’m crazy. One person agreed with me. He said, “Boston may not be a World Class City but it sure is one of the World’s Classiest Cities.” This man is from Bermuda and went to school in England, so he must know a lot of cities.
However, that wasn’t the tone of most of my correspondents. One woman said she had trouble breathing after reading the first five paragraphs. Another person said I should have included Cambridge as part of Boston, because MIT, Harvard, and the accompanying companies and think tanks would have immediately put Boston into the World Class Category. Several readers pointed out to me that Boston was re-evaluated by the same Atlantic Cities web site I had offered as evidence that Boston lacked enough juice to make it World Class. Most recently, theatlanticcities.com ranked Boston as fourth in America among the world’s “most powerful global cities,” putting it ahead of LA and a bunch of other cities that most people would say headed toward World Class.
So maybe I’ll rethink World Class.
What if Boston had not buried the Central Artery?
For sure we wouldn’t be World Class.
Last week there was a party at sunset on the 30-something floor on one of the downtown office buildings. Spread beneath was Boston Harbor, the Charles and Mystic rivers, all the neighborhoods, low hills to the south and higher hills farther north. The air was dry and clear, making it possible to see those higher hills. The Greenway actually looked green, not like the median it sometimes seems to be at street level. Tree leaves were full but still fresh.
Those gathered on that upper floor talked with one another, but more than that, they looked out. At that height, no one could see the trash and the broken asphalt that still degrades too many streets and sidewalks. But the blue sky, the green of the grass and trees, the red brick, the granite wharfs and the white sails, all highlighted by the warm light — this is a truly beautiful city.
There is still work to be done, of course. Some of the roofs of lower buildings could become greener. The East Boston waterfront looks abandoned but it could be as busy and attractive as the waterfront in the North End. And the trash and the broken streets need fixing.
Nevertheless, we could have looked for hours. The old elevated roadway was like a streak of oil in the ocean, a length of slime on a forest floor, a trail of tears in a sunny landscape. Cities should be treated as works of art, as tributes to humanity’s success. Erecting the elevated highway now seems like a failure of vision, a lack of professionalism, an act of profound stupidity.
It was a bold act to bury the mistake.
What if we hadn’t done it?
Why does everybody with money have a hard-on for “developing” East Boston? Don’t you people have enough?
You’ve already turned the waterfront from the North End to Fort Point into an aging elite retirement paradise, and you’ve condo-ized swaths of Charlestown and South Boston out of the price range of families who have lived there for generations.
Lest we forget the West End that got razed generations ago and the South End that became elite within the last 25 years. Beacon Hill and the Back Bay were never meant for anybody but Brahmins and now the University-Medical complex is gobbling up Fenway, Kenmore, Mission Hill, Allston and parts of Roxbury.
You even have your mitts on JP, as evidenced by the replacement of the Hi-Lo supermarket that was both economically and culturally important to the Hyde Sq./Jackson Sq. community with another damned Whole Foods.
East Boston is one of the last urban parts of this city that actually gives poor, low-income and working class people a life not completely plagued by inadequate public transit, insufficient access to healthy food and gang violence. It maintains a lively mixed character of life-long residents, off-the-boat immigrants and varieties of people in between because it has been largely allowed to evolve organically, without the meddling hands of large-scale developers and urban planners.
I know you people must think that quite a pity, but not everything is about you. We like our Eastie the way it is and the way you’ve treated the rest of the city has us with nowhere else to go if you come and price us out of our homes. Please leave us the hell alone.
Thank you.
City Hall Plaza should be an open space not a parking lot. In additon to police parking, the DPW trucks are parked on the side of the building. A plaza is meant for people not for cars.