On today’s Globe op-ed page, the best idea yet on what to do with the planned Rose Kennedy Greenway:
Let’s scrap for good the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Everybody is trying too hard to make something work that won’t. It is not a real urban open space opportunity. It is an after-thought resulting from the demolition of the Central Artery, which removed significant and vital parts of the heart of Boston when it was built.
…two competing ideas exist for the treatment of the space. One is to insert structures compatible in both height and location with the texture and mass of the surrounding city in a way that reinforces the existing street pattern and the sense of progression and extension toward the water’s edge.
The other is to see the residual space as an opportunity for a grand boulevard or open space hopefully embodying the ethos and spiritual significance of the Esplanade and the rest of the Emerald Necklace.
The first idea makes sense. It repairs the scarred and severed tissue of the original city at the same time elevating the importance of the water’s edge.
The argument is even more persuasive when one looks at the ridiculous parade of uses imagined for the liberated parcels: museums we really don’t need, gardens that can’t find the funding, urban congregating places that won’t work, ice skating rinks, European piazzas.
If we can’t call the whole thing off, can’t we at least compromise? Keep some designed parkland on the parcels abutting the North End and Chinatown, the two neighborhoods that are residential and have been hurt by the Artery. Then fully develop the parcels through the Wharf District, which are really too windswept to serve as a leisurely park for half of the year anyway.
People involved - designers, planners, Big Dig supervisors - are understandably caught up in the excitement. But we should step back and think clearly what will function best as urban space.
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