Esplanade Riverfront Pavilion | Charlesbank | West End

[Equilibria]

I'm taking my life into my hands creating a new thread for something from November, but I honestly don't remember seeing this on AB yet.

https://www.mass.gov/files/document...lion-publicmeeting3-presentation-11-01-17.pdf

3 separate elements here:

- A recreation center built into an artificial hill adjacent to the Ebersol Fields.

- The redevelopment of the State Police barracks/parking lot into a park.

- Development of an interpretive center and cafe in the adjacent lock house.

 

[dshoost88]

Looks beautiful! I don't have the time today, but would love it if somebody could please mine out screenshots from that PDF to feature in this thread.

 

[fatnoah]

Wow, very interesting. This is the first I've heard about it, too. I wonder how those "public meetings" were publicized.

 

[goldenretrievers]

agreed, very interesting. too bad they didn't include the south bank bridge in the plans...it'll go a long way to revitalizing the west end

http://www.greenwold.com/portfolio/south-bank-bridge/

 

[statler]

Let's go back to this. Olmstead was pretty good at this landscape stuff.

 

[kz1000ps]

Time for some pretty pictures

 

[themissinglink]

Years in the making, $24 million Esplanade pavilion project with café nears finish line - The Boston Globe

The project will transform a long-vacant pool site near the Museum of Science into an all-season gathering place with a café and the Esplanade’s first year-round public restrooms.

www.bostonglobe.com

After more than two decades of planning, a corner of the Charles River Esplanade near the Museum of Science is expected to reopen this fall, transforming a once-vacant former pool site into a year-round public hub.
The $24 million Charlesbank and Smith Family Pavilion has been funded entirely through private donations in what has been long been considered the largest-ever private gift for a state park in Massachusetts. The construction project, which began last June, will convert a long-vacant former site of a public pool into a roughly 9,000-square-foot hub with a café, the Esplanade’s first year-round public restrooms, and other amenities intended to make the waterfront usable throughout the year.
“Right now, water and facilities are closed between mid-October and mid-April, so we’re really a six-month-of-the-year park,” said Jen Mergel, the executive director of the Esplanade Association, the nonprofit organization that has long stewarded the land and raised the funds for construction. With the opening of the pavilion, “we will become a year-round destination for people from more Greater Boston neighborhoods and for tourists.
[...]
The two acres that will reopen as part of the project have been closed off since the mid-1990s, said Mergel, who said she herself remembers swimming in the old Lee Pool complex, which was built in 1951, and then sat unused until it was eventually demolished in 2019.