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 →