No Time To Leave Downtown Boston
By ANTHONY FLINT
January 21 2007
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino's proposal to move City Hall to the industrial waterfront in South Boston is a little like moving out of the neighborhood just at the moment real estate prices shoot up.
Just steps away, the Rose Kennedy Greenway, on the surface of the Big Dig, is finally taking shape. The first finished park parcels of the Greenway, at Hanover Street in the North End, are set to open this year. The new public buildings, museums and parks of the Wharf District section of the Greenway will follow. At the northern end of the Greenway, in the area known as Bulfinch Triangle, new mixed-use development will stitch together the urban fabric that was disrupted not only by the hulking Central Artery, but the elevated Green Line tracks as well. Both the highway and the subway are underground now. Urbanism will soon flourish in their place.
The complaint about Boston City Hall is its Brutalist architecture, gloomy interior and location on the barren City Hall Plaza, a problematic public space created in the days of urban renewal, which replaced the West End and Scollay Square with Government Center.
But the one thing the master builders of that era did get right was the name. The city seat of government is indeed at the center of Boston's downtown, a true crossroads. It's between the State House and Fanueil Hall, Downtown Crossing and Bulfinch Triangle. And soon, it will be adjacent to one of the most promising transformations of a downtown anywhere in America.
The mayor's proposal is to sell City Hall for private redevelopment and use the proceeds to build a new City Hall at the site of the Bank of America summer music tent, at an old pier on the eastern section of the South Boston waterfront. That area also is an emerging urban transformation, to be sure. The new home of the Institute for Contemporary Art by Diller + Scofidio just opened, between Henry Cobb's Joseph Moakley Federal Courthouse and the World Trade Center. Condominium and office towers are rising on former industrial parcels, set amid new parks, Raphael Vinoly's new convention center and the Silver Line bus rapid transit route.
But downtown Boston, with a few hundred years' worth of a running start on the South Boston waterfront, is undergoing a different, and in many ways more profound, reinvention. Buildings that once had an elevated highway outside their windows are in high demand, in anticipation of the Greenway being the new front yard. Homes overlooking the Greenway are commanding prices in many cases higher than those with views of the harbor.
It's been a long time coming. The $15 billion Big Dig has been a tortured public works project, dogged by overruns, delays, leaks and a fatal ceiling collapse. The restoration of the surface hasn't been a flawless civic exercise, either. The highway's footprint is a difficult urban design challenge, and immediate neighbors and the rest of the city battled over what should go there. The Massachusetts Horticultural Society has been so badly delayed trying to put botanical gardens on a southern section of the Greenway, the mayor finally had to pull the plug on that project in December.
Staggering costs similarly waylaid a YMCA community center, and special interests, like those that convinced the state legislature to approve an Armenian memorial, threaten to gerrymander the space like Washington's Mall. Bostonians look with envy at what Chicago has been able to do, by contrast, with Millennium Park, itself a reinvention of former railyards.
But all that notwithstanding, the surface restoration of the now-depressed Interstate 93 - the raison d'etre, along with smoother traffic flow, for this mega-project in the first place - is finally happening. The elevated highway structure is gone. Construction and staging areas are being cleared away. You can stand at Summer Street and look across Dewey Square, and begin to imagine the possibilities.
The architecture of the signature public buildings of the Greenway is a work in progress. There are doubts about the engineering plausibility of Moshe Safdie's Boston Museum, a cartoonish ship's hull on stilts over one of the exit/entrance ramp parcels. If the team led by Daniel Libeskind can tone it down in the aftermath of the dizzying Denver Art Museum, the proposed New Center for Arts and Culture, over another ramp parcel, could be a new landmark. A Harbor Park Pavilion, run by the National Park Service, will be a new gateway to the riches of the harbor islands, and will orient the uninitiated amid the meandering 300-year-old streets crisscrossing the Greenway.
The main advantage to the disappearance of the highway, however, is the well-framed open space, set to become a new common ground for the city. In the style of Bryant Park in New York City, the swaths of green, gardens and tasteful paving can be understated and still be wildly successful. Some movable chairs, a fountain anud strategic programming, and Boston will soon enjoy a unique new public realm.
Nowhere is the promise richer than at the North End parks - which just so happen to be closest to City Hall, and which just so happen to open first, later this year. Designed by Crosby Schlessinger Smallridge with Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, the matched set of rectangular lawns, gardens, reflecting pools and gently curving trellis will be a gift to downtown.
The adjacent Haymarket, Boston's farmer's market, could get a lift from the new environs and rival Seattle's Pike Place.
Perhaps most important, Hanover Street will run right between the new park parcels, from the cafes of the North End to the historic Blackstone Block to Congress Street. The intersection of these parks and Hanover Street is going to become some of the most valuable real estate in the city. And think of it: this is a place that's been in gloomy shadows for a half-century.
Jane Jacobs scorned big plans and fought urban renewal. The Big Dig is an infrastructure project that her nemesis, Robert Moses, would have loved. This is a case where they were both right. The project has allowed a flourishing of public space and urbanism that some Bostonians may already be too jaded to appreciate.
Rather than move City Hall just when this party is getting started, the mayor could order a top-to-bottom renovation of the Kallman, McKinnell and Knowles structure, which opened in 1969, and add the beer hall originally envisioned for the basement and a winter garden on the rooftop. Outside on the plaza, restore the beams of light that were supposed to come out of the top of the masts in Chan, Krieger's manufactured edge on Cambridge Street; make sure the new headhouse for the Green and Blue lines at Government Center obliterates the memory of the current bunker; and extend Hanover Street along its original path through City Hall Plaza from Congress up to Cambridge Street. The street and sidewalk is actually still there, in darkness under the failed brick piazza.
Daylighting and restoring Hanover Street would make it two corrections of urban renewal blunders - the elevated highway and City Hall Plaza - instead of just one. The connection to the Greenway - part of the "crossroads" work the mayor himself commissioned and that Ken Greenberg has been sketching out for other spots along the new public space - would be complete.
Move City Hall? This is no time to quit the scene. If the mantra was to renovate, restore and reinvent instead, City Hall could be part of a true 21st-century renewal.
Anthony Flint, public affairs manager at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., is author of "This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America," and a forthcoming book on Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses to be published in 2008 by Random House.
Copyright 2007, Hartford Courant
