Tag Archives: urban planning

The more things change . . .

Larry DiCara remembers his first encounter with Mayor Kevin White. It was 1971. DiCara was newly elected to the Boston City Council. The mayor phoned. Would DiCara meet with him?

The young DiCara, outfitted in his best suit, entered the mayor’s office at the new city hall. White stood at the window overlooking Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. White said he had two goals—depress the Central Artery and fix Quincy Market.

White accomplished one goal while still in office. In 1975 Quincy Market and later the North and South Markets opened to immense excitement, bolstering Boston’s downtown success.

But accomplishing that task was much like the Olympics effort today. The knives were out. Pessimism ruled. Doom was predicted. Costs rose. A bold, perhaps transforming plan was mocked, scorned, condemned and denounced.

What saved it was a visionary, a prime mover, a deadline and a tough mayor.

Architect Benjamin Thompson articulated his vision for a successful city when his contemporaries were designing big empty plazas.

“Of all the pieces in the urban puzzle, the marketplace is the most fundamental, most civically important—and most neglected,” he wrote in the Boston Globe, July 4, 1971. “Historic marketplaces, springing up at intersections of navigation and trade routes, were the seed and heart of cities.”

Thompson cited the “natural pageantry of crowds.” He predicted that the crumbling Quincy Market and its flanking buildings could be brought back to life, recreating their original purpose in a contemporary way.

After a false start with one developer, Thompson found the Rouse Company. Rouse developed shopping malls, but also had created Columbia, Md., where housing was built around old-fashioned town centers instead of the usual suburban sprawl.

James Rouse was the prime mover. The Globe’s real estate reporter Anthony Yudis quoted him: “We should always examine the optimums and forget about feasibility. It will compromise us soon enough. Let’s look at what might be and be invigorated by it.”

White was excited by the plan. He wanted Quincy Market completed by Boston 200, the city’s bicentennial celebration, set to begin in 1975. Rouse would fund a portion of the celebration. Out-of-towners Chase Manhattan Bank and what is now called TIAA-CREF put up half the money or $10 million. Boston banks would provide the rest.

The critics erupted.

The meat, cheese and produce purveyors that occupied Quincy Market complained they would be displaced, and the renovated building would be unaffordable. Rouse’s promise they could return for three years with the same rent they were paying in the old building did not move them.

White’s own staff put up a fight. DiCara remembered that Herb Gleason, White’s corporation counsel, supported a scaled-down proposal by Roger Webb, admired for his reclamation of Old City Hall.

As city property, the markets needed approval from the city council for any deal. Yudis reported there was little interest in either proposal. Only three councilors attended the hearing at which the two were presented. The councilors were too busy fussing over the proposed Park Plaza. Yudis wrote, “Some urban experts think the Faneuil Hall-markets plan is the ‘sleeper’ in the future Boston that could have just as much significance as, if not more than, the Park Plaza concept.”

DiCara said it was a tough sell. Dapper O’Neill, Joe Tierney and Freddie Langone opposed the market’s redevelopment, but the proponents were finally able to get six councilors, including DiCara, to vote for it, mainly because of Rouse’s good reputation.

Remarkably, the BRA worked against the Rouse proposal even after the company was designated in 1973.

It took the BRA two years to sign a lease. The BRA board chair predicted the whole enterprise was foolish. “Only one sour note was expressed — several times following the lease signing,” Yudis reported. “The chairman of the BRA, Robert T. Farrell, made it clear to those connected with the project that, in his opinion, the project never will be carried off. Time will tell whether this was an astute observation.”

The BRA director, Robert Kenney, had no faith either in Rouse’s plan. Three months before the market opened he was still working to change it, trying to get a Hyatt Regency hotel into the mix, with the lobby in the rotunda, reported Ian Menzies, a Globe columnist. Rouse was having none of that.

Thompson said putting a hotel into the market was like the recently completed Harbor Towers on the harbor—a way to keep the public out.

Then there was the money problem. Boston banks refused to come up with their share of the financing. By early February 1975 Mayor White had had it. He called the heads of the local financial institutions to his office, recalled Budge Upton, Rouse’s project manager, who, with Rouse, was at the meeting. White told the banks they had 24 hours to arrange the local financing or he would pull the city’s money from their institutions. By the next day White had $10 million from the First National Bank, John Hancock, New England Life, State Street Bank, New England Merchants, National Shawmut, Charlestown Savings, Union Warren, Commonwealth Bank and the Mass. Business Development Corp.

A few months later, Faneuil Hall Marketplace opened. Among many last-minute snafus, said Upton, was awaiting the delivery of 80 wheels for the pushcarts. They arrived at Logan three days before the opening. No one knew if the rehabilitated market would attract any notice.

But on the first day 125,000 people showed up. Menzies then started writing about how the Central Artery had to go—another effort fraught with negativity. It goes to show—conventional wisdom is sometimes just conventional. It isn’t wisdom at all.

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.