Give Him A ?Green? Greenway In Boston
Van Voorhis Doesn?t Need ?A Bunch Of Museums? Over Big Dig
By Scott Van Voorhis
Banker & Tradesman Columnist
05/11/09
Maybe it?s time to make the new Rose Kennedy Greenway truly ?green.?
It never made much sense to me why we spent years building a ribbon of parks through the heart of downtown Boston over the city?s new, underground highway system, only to try and fill it up with a bunch of museums and a YMCA.
Apparently, some nice simple greenery and some pretty benches just won?t cut it in our world-class city.
But the recession may accomplish what skeptics like me never could, casting a deep pall over extravagant plans to raise hundreds of millions for a trio of nonprofit palaces.
The New Center for Arts and Culture, envisioned as a $100 million jewel astride the Greenway outside Rowe?s Wharf, has just called a two-year halt to its fund-raising efforts.
Meanwhile, the Boston Museum, after spending years talking up plans to build on the Greenway, is now pushing to build on an adjacent site in a bid to cut its construction costs. But it has left unexplained how it plans to raise the staggering $120 million needed to add yet another historic attraction to the Hub amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
I probably have the most sympathy for the YMCA of Greater Boston, which hopes to build a new flagship complex over a set of highway ramps on the Greenway near the North End.
But the Y, which has also been crafting its plans for years now, also still needs to raise tens of millions to pay for its building plans.
Of course, the backers of all these projects have been at it for years and were already struggling during the boom years, an era of easy money, to raise the cash they needed. Really, to me, the big question is not whether these grand plans are doomed, but whether or not they linger on in a typically Boston half life, not really alive but not officially dead either.
Not Getting Off The Ground
All three projects face a ?double whammy? as one top Hub expert on financing projects recently told me.
The wealthy donors who typically foot the bill for such projects are reeling from devastating stock market losses. Meanwhile, the banks, which in better times liked to provide loans for such high-profile cultural endeavors, have no appetite to bankroll anything with the slightest risk to it.
?I think it?s extremely difficult to realize, in this climate, how expensive nonprofit initiatives, however well meaning, can get off the ground,? the veteran finance executive told me. ?The kind of giving that occurred in the past, at least for a number of years, is not going to realized again.?
Probably the most surprising are the struggles the proposed New Center for Arts and Culture is now having.
The proposed arts castle, designed by a top international architect Daniel Libeskind, has been backed by some of Boston?s richest real estate developers.
Back during the boom, the project boasted commitments of $30 million and appeared to have the best shot of becoming a reality of any of the Greenway building proposals.
No more. The group recently laid off a staff member and is calling it quits on any more fund raising for the next two years.
The acting director, Francine Achbar, acknowledged it could be 2014 before the museum finally opens ? not 2012, as previously planned.
That sounds pretty optimistic to me, but let?s give Achbar her say here.
?The long and short of it is this is not a time to be trying to raise many millions of dollars for a building campaign,? Achbar said. ?Nobody is building, you know that. If Harvard University, which has the biggest endowment in the world, has stopped all their work, how can a little nonprofit that has been operating for five or six years??
Yet the New Center for Arts and Culture?s challenges, in my view, are dwarfed by those of the proposed Boston Museum, which would chronicle the city?s history.
Never mind the debate over whether a city already packed with historic attractions needs yet another monument to past glory.
At least the arts center has a site to build on. The museum is competing for a site by the Greenway near Government Center that was just put out to bid by the Turnpike Authority.
Provided it can win that competition, it too will then have to start the long and daunting task of raising tens of millions of dollars.
Meanwhile, the YMCA of Greater Boston contends it is still pushing ahead with its plans to build a flagship complex of its own alongside the Greenway.
The timeline here is not encouraging. The nonprofit was already struggling back in 2005, when it temporarily dropped its proposal after the estimated cost skyrocketed to nearly $70 million.
The Y has since come back with a significantly smaller proposal, but there?s still no sign of any imminent groundbreaking.
?Raising money is always huge,? said Kelly Rice, YMCA?s spokeswoman. ?I think the important part in this environment is that you have to keep asking. Some folks are saying we are very interested in the project, but we have to wait until the markets improve until we make a commitment.
?You have to keep moving forward, even in a tighter economy,? she added.
Apparently it?s not an option for any of these ambitious nonprofit builders to face the facts of the current economy and call it a day.
There?s no exit strategy here, at least one they are willing to talk about publicly.
But the rationale for putting up big institutions over or alongside the Boston?s new Greenway, always sketchy to me, may be losing whatever tenuous logic it once had.
When plans for the Greenway were being shaped back in the 1990s, planners were fearful the new downtown parks would wind up beautiful but empty. After all, downtown Boston quickly emptied those days at 5 p.m.
Museums and cultural attractions were needed to draw crowds to the new parks, or so went the argument.
But in the decade or so since, a funny thing happened: Downtown suddenly became the place to live, with posh new condo projects popping up on every other block.
Suddenly, the parks have a built in audience, and the need to draw crowds downtown seems increasingly like a concern of another era.
But if the proponents of these projects won?t reconsider whether they are still needed or even feasible, don?t look for our courageous public sector leaders to supply the missing spine here.
The danger is that even if these projects never get built, they linger on for years, drawing attention and badly needed money from the parks themselves.
