Rose Kennedy Greenway

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Looks like the curbs are already falling apart. I thought they used granite curbs, but these look like concrete curbs, which don't hold up well to impacts from snowplows.
 
salt + water + frost + thin undulating concrete planes + limited & narrow points of drainage + poorly coated steel + a few seasons of New England coastal weather = OH GOODY!

This project appears to be the love child of the M&S harbor park in the Seaport and the Allston Public Library.
 
The Greenway where it borders already successful spaces to activate it is ok. All the ramp segments and areas where the Greenway itself is supposed to do the activating, it fails miserably. The whole problem of tearing down an elevated highway and replacing it with an essentially six lane surface running highway is readily apparent as well.
 
It's nice to see from that article that some actual restaurants will be opening fronting onto the Greenway. Of course, they are really fronting onto 3+ lanes of traffic. Still, I sometimes think there's a chicken that needs to hatch before the egg is laid: get pedestrians walking along the side of the Greenway for real, non-programmed uses, and then there will be a real impetus for improving the pedestrian orientation of the corridor.

And as for the foodtrucks and farmers markets: it's nice to see these enliven the already "working" areas, but they do little for the ramps and other silly bits, and will also disappear in October.
 
Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion celebrates grand opening on greenway
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(Jeremy C. Fox for Boston.com)


Mayor Thomas M. Menino joined with other city and state officials, members of the Boston Harbor Islands Alliance, park rangers and dozens of community members on Thursday to celebrate the grand opening of the Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion.


By Jeremy C. Fox, Town Correspondent

On Thursday, Mayor Thomas M. Menino claimed a victory for improvements on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway as he presided at the grand opening celebration for the Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion.

With four major building projects for the greenway scrapped in the past three years and some critics saying the city and the conservancy that oversees the string of parks had failed to make it an active urban green space, Menino came out swinging.

?A lot of folks write a lot of stories about the greenway ? nobody uses it; it?s a barren wasteland,? Menino said. ?But did anybody come down here this weekend and see how many thousands of people were on the greenway??

With his characteristic pugnacious humor, Menino said critics of the greenway return to the suburbs on the weekend and miss out on the real popularity of the parks. ?This place is a beehive of activity. It?s a new great place to come in the summer months, fall and spring,? the mayor said.

Douglas M. McGarrah, chair of the Boston Harbor Island Alliance?s board, had some fun with the supposed impossibility of building on the greenway as well. He opened the ceremony with a list of the legislation and approvals necessary for the pavilion to be built: an act of the US Congress, an act of the Massachusetts legislature, approval of the Federal Highway Administration and other ?federal bureaucracies,? the approval of the state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, as well as the approval of the Boston Redevelopment Authority and other city agencies.

Amid the humor, though, the celebration was touched with somberness. Two of the planned speakers ? Governor Deval Patrick and Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rick Sullivan ? were unable to attend because they were surveying the destruction in Western Massachusetts wrought by Wednesday?s tornados that killed four people.

Located on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway between Faneuil Hall Marketplace and Long Wharf, the pavilion marks a victory as well for the federal, state and nonprofit partners that oversee the islands: the National Park Service, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and the Boston Harbor Island Alliance. The new pavilion will serve as a gateway to the islands, offering maps, information, ferry tickets and island-related merchandise.

Powered by solar panels atop its concrete canopies, the pavilion is a ?zero net energy? structure that also captures rain to water the surrounding plantings. It was designed by architects from the downtown firm Utile Inc. in collaboration with the landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand and the design and consulting firm IDEO.

Two of the 34 islands ? Georges Island and Spectacle Island ? are accessible by ferry from Long Wharf, just across Atlantic Avenue from the new pavilion, while ferries to other islands leave from South Boston, Hingham, Hull and Quincy. The 39-acre Georges Island is the site of Fort Warren, built to defend Boston Harbor after the War of 1812 and used as a military training camp and as a Civil War prison. Spectacle Island was used by the City of Boston as a landfill until 1959 and rehabilitated in recent years using clay and sediment from the Big Dig.

Thursday?s speakers credited the late US Senator Edward M. Kennedy and US Congressman Michael E. Capuano with securing $5 million from the National Park Service that provided the bulk of the approximately $6 million for the construction of the pavilion.

Kennedy?s widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, reminisced on Thursday about her husband?s love of the outdoors and the ocean and his particular fondness of the Boston Harbor Islands.

?How Teddy would have loved this day, how he looked forward to this day,? she said. She said Kennedy?s mother, born near the pavilion site in the North End?s Garden Court, taught her children that every child should have access to the outdoors and to look out to sea.

?And every day of her life ? and I mean this, rain or shine, until the last of her 104 and a half years ? Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy was outside breathing in the fresh air,? Reggie Kennedy said. ?Her baby boy Edward Kennedy was the same way.?

?I think we toured just about every national park in Massachusetts on our family history trips, but the Boston Harbor Islands tour was a unique and special time, because he loved the sea,? she said. ?And how he would love this magnificent pavilion. ??



http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news...ton_harbor_islands_pavilion.html?comments=all
 
?But did anybody come down here this weekend and see how many thousands of people were on the greenway??
:rolleyes:
 
I had no idea that IDEO was involved in this too...

...and the Mayor needs to extend his scope beyond Faneuil Hall. He'll see a different story if he does.
 
The Boston Globe said:
With his characteristic pugnacious humor, Menino said critics of the Greenway return to the suburbs on the weekend and miss out on the real popularity of the parks.
Click to expand...

Funny, one might retort that those critics could simply camp on the Greenway all weekend and still be said to have "gone to the suburbs for the weekend."


The Boston Globe said:
Douglas M. McGarrah, chair of the Boston Harbor Island Alliance?s board, had some fun with the supposed impossibility of building on the greenway as well. He opened the ceremony with a list of the legislation and approvals necessary for the pavilion to be built: an act of the US Congress, an act of the Massachusetts legislature, approval of the Federal Highway Administration and other ?federal bureaucracies,? the approval of the state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, as well as the approval of the Boston Redevelopment Authority and other city agencies.
Click to expand...

I don't understand the humor here. McGarrah makes it sound like it really is impossible to build on the Greenway. The Globe implies that he was mocking those who complain about the difficulty of building on/near the Greenway (I'm sure Chiofaro was on the minds of many present) ... but then he does this by running through the impressive litany of permits his (well-connected) organization needed to obtain?

Either Jeremy Fox and his editors need to take a remedial class in composition, or Mr. McGarrah fails to understand what an impediment Menino's (and the federal government's) Star Chamber-esque bureaucracy is.


The Boston Globe said:
Thursday?s speakers credited the late US Senator Edward M. Kennedy and US Congressman Michael E. Capuano with securing $5 million from the National Park Service that provided the bulk of the approximately $6 million for the construction of the pavilion.
Click to expand...

Your tax dollars at work. I know that the cost of construction of any sort of institutional (or especially government) project is going to be exorbitant, but that seems like a lot of cash for two kiosks and a filling-station roof...
 
Menino said critics of the greenway return to the suburbs on the weekend and miss out on the real popularity of the parks.
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Ironically, that said popularity is a simulation of the suburbs.
 
"Menino said critics of the greenway return to the suburbs on the weekend and miss out on the real popularity of the parks."

Says the mayor whom lives in the most suburban part of Boston possible.
 
I feel it's overly cynical to criticize, but does it really make sense to have a whole parcel taken up by this pavilion when only two of the islands are accessible by the wharf it's parked in front of? Will it really be used enough to warrant its placement?
 
Yea, no way in hell that thing really cost 6 million to construct. Imagine what kind of house you could build in NH with 6 million being allocated to construction, never mind the cost of the land itself.
 
The cladding is expensive, as is the custom stone basin, and all the form work for the folding concrete plane roof. The concrete formulation, and presumably custom welded reinforcement bars coated with a marine grade protective layer (well at least I hope it is at least as good as the stuff used in marine footings....), probably cost a good bit extra over standard spec.

Still not seeing $6 million even with every kind of union markup and profiteering on the supplier side. I'd really want to know what the design and consulting fees were. Or if subcontractors to utility companies somehow gamed the Hell out of overtime to make connections to the site.
 
The Commonwealth mall is a single continuous design, even more so in its heyday, when it connected to Charles Gate. The Greenway's first failing was the decision to break it up in to different designs, separated by forbidding ramps and other barriers. You can't walk the length of it without being shunted to the side at intervals. Basically, it's not really a Greenway if you're a pedestrian. Suburban fat headed car brains don't understand that, among many other things.
 
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