Tag Archives: Greenway

Giving thanks

You will probably be sitting around a table soon telling friends and family what you are thankful for.

We think about the big things—those friends and family members, the good food, good health, a satisfying job. We can easily forget other enjoyments, amenities and endeavors that enrich our lives.

I’m here to remind you of such enrichments.

For example, give thanks for the new 311. Punch that into your phone, and City Hall answers. You can report a missed trash bag, a street light that is out or a dangerous pothole. 311 is not 911, which is for emergencies. 311, though, keeps all those little city pieces functioning.

Now that I’ve mentioned it, let’s thank the trash pickup. It works. The trucks are clean considering what they handle. They come when they say they will. The guys are pretty neat in the pickup. What they leave behind is mostly the fault of lazy residents who deposit their trash the night before, leaving 12 dark hours for the rats to chew through the bags and strew the contents all over the sidewalk.

This is the time of year to be thankful for winterberry, that native New England holly flashing its bunched, small, neon-red fruits in the region’s marshes right now. Birds gobble up the drupes by mid-December when these shrubs become indistinguishable from the other bare branches you can see. Wade into the wetlands and harvest the berries, or buy them at florist shops. But be wary of poking them into your window box. The birds will swoop in for a feast, and you will be left with bare sticks.

I’m thankful for New England churches, not necessarily for their religion but for their architecture. Every small town has one marking its center, many built before the separation of church and state. Along with Cape Cod, Federal and Greek Revival-style houses, they create a sense of place that few other American regions can match. They embody Louis Sullivan’s directive that “form follows function.”

It is too bad Walter Gropius hadn’t seen them when he began his career in Germany, since their simple shapes, balanced features, clear volumes and modest ornamentation anticipated his theories by more than a century. Some Bauhaus or International Style buildings are fine, but those old Congregational churches comprise some of the world’s best simple architecture.

We also should thank the Registry of Motor Vehicles this year for not sweating the small stuff. It finally allowed Lindsay Miller to wear a spaghetti strainer on her head for her driver’s license photo. According to a report in the Boston Globe, Miller calls herself a “Pastafarian”—a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who, its followers say, might have created the world. While we’re at it, let’s be thankful for yet another religion based on magic and improbabilities. Whatever spins your dial, as one might say.

We should also be thankful for Police Commissioner William Evans. He won’t remember me, but I met him at Back Bay neighborhood meetings when he was District 4’s captain. He was straightforward, unruffled, sensible and articulate about policing matters. When he talks, as he did recently telling Bostonians the police were beefing up security at certain venues in response to the Paris mayhem, he commands respect and admiration. Lucky Bostonians.

We should be thankful for our parks, especially the newest one. The Greenway has come into its own, with trees, shrubs and perennials maturing nicely, a staff that calms neighbors rather than inflaming them, and lovable activities, attractions and art we.

I was skeptical about the airborne Echelman sculpture, since her similar works had appeared many times elsewhere. I was afraid it would be like those dreadful cows that surfaced in every city.

I was wrong. The aerial sculpture was fabulous. We should thank the owners of the buildings at 125 High Street, International Place and the Intercontinental Hotel, from which it hung, for being good sports.

Finally, we should give thanks for musicians. The night after President Kennedy was murdered, Leonard Bernstein assembled the New York Philharmonic for a television performance of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. The music didn’t change the tragedy, but it reminded listeners that civilization’s beauty is bigger than some creepy guy with a gun.

After the massacres on November 13, a pianist set up his grand piano on a Paris street and played Imagine, confirming that the Beatles have made it into the classical musical canon.

It didn’t change things either, but the performance reminded listeners that there is a better world out there than eight pathetic murderers.

Embracing the Greenway

It has been six years since the Rose Kennedy Greenway’s first spring. It has been even longer since the Greenway was established, since the non-profits that hoped to cover the ramps abandoned their plans, and since frustrated horticultural volunteers fled the park leaders as too annoying to deal with.

Things are looking up though.

With a change in Greenway leadership, hostilities are way down. The unfortunate planting beds at the north end of the park are being replaced. The activities in the park are not only interesting; some are memorable. Such activities are a rarity in Boston’s parks, which for better or worse are often lauded for their passivity. On the Greenway, however, a lot is going on. The park itself looks good. And the edges, which are more important to a successful space than most people think, are considerably better, if not ideal in every location.

Four of us took a walk down the Greenway from Causeway Street to South Station in the kind of sunny, cool weather we dream about all winter.

Our strongest impression was that this park is heavily used, and maybe even loved. People were everywhere. Children and adults were tracking the maze in the Armenian Heritage Park. A long line waited to get onto the fanciful creatures spinning on the carousel. The water fountain near the light sculpture looked as if it had not yet been turned on, but children were skirting it, expecting it to start spraying momentarily.

Food trucks dotted the edges of the Greenway. Cookie Monstah had positioned two, one near each end. The Harbor Fog sculpture was fizzing. All the hammocks and tables and chairs were filled, and many people lay on the grass soaking up the sun.

When we rounded a corner, the Janet Echelman fiber sculpture came into view, billowing from its cables attached to International Place and the Intercontinental Hotel. When this sculpture was announced, I was concerned. Similar Echelman works are in other cities. Would the Greenway sculpture be like those blasted cows—shown everywhere, with no sense of place, and ultimately boring?

We decided I had needlessly worried. Something this big and beautiful is engaging, fun, and more interesting than plaster cows, even if it has been done elsewhere.

Underneath the sculpture stood an intricate box filled with reading material, and many people were gathered round. This UNI Project, an outdoor library, is in its second year on the Greenway. Full disclosure: it is our daughter and her husband who conceived of the UNI and had the structure made, but since it is part of the draw of the Greenway, I didn’t think it was fair NOT to mention it.

In Dewey Square the farmer’s market was not operating, since it is open only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But the plaza was filled with people anyway. We turned to look at the artwork on the side of the air intake building. It is fine, but I was nostalgic for the controversy and the attention the provocative Os Gemeos mural had attracted.

The edges of the long park are better than the last time I walked the Greenway with a group to consider its condition. On each side, the trees and shrubs, especially when they are planted on berms, provide a sense of enclosure and refuge from the traffic that still mars the place. Even better are the edges on the other side of the Surface Road. (Can we find a better name for this boulevard? Fitzgerald Avenue?)

It has taken several years for buildings whose blank walls faced the overhead Central Artery to open up. But they are doing so. I started to count them, but gave up because several more may open in the next few weeks.

Some building owners have cut windows into their walls facing the Greenway. Others have opened up the ground floor, and now many outdoor restaurants overlook the park. A few parking lots and dead spaces remain. The worst is the Harbor Garage, whose owner, the persistent Don Chiofaro, has proposed a dynamic, beautiful pathway to the sea between two buildings.

Some still oppose his plan, but his idea to create a path between his buildings from the Greenway to the harbor is exactly what the Greenway needs. Such an opening also occurs dramatically at the Boston Harbor Hotel. But when one is next to the impervious Intercontinental Hotel and the black fence outside Harbor Towers, there sadly is no sense that an ocean lies on the other side. The shortish, blockish, blackish Intercontinental is evidence that it is not height that matters here—it is permeability.

More pathways need to be open to the sea and to the downtown. Faneuil Hall Marketplace, for example, has not yet taken advantage of its new neighbor.

All in all, however, the area has much promise. If you’ve lived here long enough you may remember all the negativity and predictions of doom about the Big Dig. Yes, it was expensive and way over budget. It was also the best money we have spent in the last 50 years. Just think of what it would be like in this now beautiful city to have that overhead green traffic monster still in our midst.

Bafflement near the Greenway

Something is going on next to the Greenway that I don’t understand. Parcel 7 is the parking garage on Congress Street whose offices and ground floor remain unoccupied. A public market is slated for the ground floor.

Parcel 9 is a vacant irregularly-shaped site near Parcel 7 on which Frank Keefe and his board want to build the Boston Museum.

Adjacent to both sites are the weekend Haymarket pushcarts. The BRA now calls the whole thing (and Quincy Market) the Market District, a fine name.

After talking with people who are involved and attending some meetings, I’m still baffled about many things concerning this small piece of the city.

My uncle, the newspaper editor, told me if I didn’t understand something, it probably wasn’t because I was stupid. It was because someone wasn’t telling me the whole story.

I still don’t have the whole story, but now I can identify questions I can’t answer. I suspect the situation arises from some traditional Boston pathological behaviors to which this effort has been subjected. It involves turf battles, neighborhood parochialism, old patterns threatened by new ones, and the blight of Boston pessimism. Continue reading →

Greenway blues

Our daughter, who grew up in downtown Boston, came down from New Hampshire to take her children for a walk on the Greenway.

 “It’s a median,” she grumbled. Then she went off to the Public Garden.

And there it is—the contrast. How is it that the 19th century city that got its open spaces so right with the Public Garden, Commonwealth Avenue, Louisburg Square, the small squares in the South End, and an enhanced Boston Common, got it so wrong in the 20th and 21st—City Hall Plaza, the new parks along the Charles River with no people in them, Copley Square, which had to be redone several times, and now the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway?

 The answers have to do with the modernist movement in architecture and contradictorily, the romantic notion that anything green and open in a city is better than buildings. But that’s for another time. This is about the Greenway. Continue reading →