Save Boston
By Steve Bailey, Globe Columnist | August 18, 2006
The Yankees come to town today for the most critical series of the season. Whether our Sox can compete, we'll know soon enough. But this much I already know: Fenway Park, given up for dead by the previous owners, has never looked better.
Many readers of this column despise Fenway -- they let me know every time I mention the place. But not me. For all its obvious limitations, Fenway is authentic, the real thing, and can't be replicated. It took out-of-town owners (the Globe's parent company is an owner) to appreciate that, and an architect who could see not its imperfections but its possibilities. And she is not done yet.
Last week, I sat in the new State Street Pavilion, above the first base line, with the Red Sox's Most Valuable Planner, Janet Marie Smith, and we talked not about Fenway, but about Boston. What if she could do for Boston what she has done for Fenway, I wanted to know? What would she do?
``In many ways, it is exactly the same as here at Fenway," says Smith, who splits her time between Boston and her Baltimore home. ``The question was why should we go create something new that is mimicking something that is mimicking Fenway, with all its character and imperfections and its layers and years of charm and appeal?" Boston itself is much like that, she says.
``Boston's history is a huge asset . . . It is the urban equivalent to going to a national park," she says. ``It is a fabulous and free way to experience one of our greatest cities. These kinds of things for a city last forever." So while Boston debates the ``what do we do next" question, Smith offers an answer: ``First and foremost, you build on the blocks you have. History is one of the most magical things about it."
Smith talks about the ``postcards" she sees in her head when she thinks of Boston, and not one includes a Hancock, or a Prudential Center. Of the new generation of proposed towers -- epitomized by the mayor's 1,000-foot tower in the Financial District -- she says: ``I hope those tall buildings tend to stay in a district." She adds: ``One thing I would do is adhere to my own rules" -- something Boston frankly fails to do all too often.
While Smith does not consider herself ``antitower," she says it is not the skyline but what happens on the sidewalk that makes a city great. ``There is a presumption in America that towers make a denser city," she says. She likes the lesson of Co-op City in the Bronx with its acres of residential high-rises that actually have less density than low-rise Brooklyn. Forty years after the Prudential Center was built, she adds, Boston is still trying to make the surrounding plaza work.
In renovating Boston, Smith would start with the parks. Many are well maintained, but many aren't. The waterfront, and our current pitiful ability to get down to the water, would be another priority, she says.
Government makes a mistake, she believes, when it abdicates its role to invest in the public realm. The Big Dig, she says, is a great accomplishment, not a mistake, the current public flogging aside. ``It was wonderful that Boston had this vision 20 years ago to do something as major as the Big Dig. The greenway is icing on the cake."
It is investing in the public realm -- mass transit, our parks, and museums -- that will make Boston more attractive as a place to live and more competitive, she says. ``We lose sight often that the public realm is a public investment," Smith says.
One of the prime directives laid down by Sox chief executive Larry Lucchino at Fenway Park was ``to first do no harm," she says. It is good advice when it comes to city building, too.
Not long ago, the Save Fenway crowd looked like crazies. The crazies turned out to be right. Who now will save Boston?
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at
bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.
