Rose Kennedy Greenway

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Looks like people are enjoying the park and think tis nice enough to take pictures on. A very good sign.
 
Surprising, yes

Yes, that is surprising.

A bunch of Asians taking photos.
 
I work at 101 Arch St, and usually try to sit out at lunch and read for a bit. I figured I'd try the Greenway for a change. Boy was it disappointing.
The Chinatown park is cutesy, looking like something that was pulled together at the Home Depot garden department. All it lacked were garden gnomes and cement Buddhas. I doubt this park will be with us in its current form 15 years from now.
Walking toward State St., it very much had the feeling of walking down the median strip of a highway. Today was a bit chillier than of late, and a strong, cool and not altogether pleasant breeze was blowing off of the harbor. This whole thing will be Siberia in April, never mind the colder months.
After a little bit, I alighted upon a bench in front of the Boston Harbor Hotel. The view of International Place was impressive. The spot had a bit of a sense of place. Being about 12:30 p.m., a few other workers had also gathered for their lunch break. As I unfolded my paper, the automatic sprinkler behind the bench went off, giving us a mild rinse, scattering we few adventurers.
Wetter and wiser, I thought it might be interesting to compare the Leventhal Park in Post Office Square, so I returned to work by way of that route. In some ways, it is unfair to compare P.O.S. with the Greenway, since it has had longer for the plantings to mature. But a few things jumped out. First, P.O.S. is oriented inward, and has a sense of enclosure that the Greenway lacks. The Greenway has no obvious (as of yet) or planned orientation, either spacially or thematically. It just occupies space. (It was amazing to see how many benches in the Greenway were pointed toward the street to give you a view of the traffic, not toward the park.) Second, the Greenway is very noisy in a way that P.O.S. is not. Perhaps this is a function of the lack of plantings. Next, it is windy as hell. Finally, there is "no there there". P.O.S. has a cafe to draw people.
I've seen Copley Square redone at least three times in my lifetime, so I suppose it is safe to assume that a lot of what we will see on the Greenway in the next few years will be redone at least three times in your lifetimes. No doubt it will be better even a year from now. But the bones of the thing are all wrong. After a short and pleasant stay in front of the Boston Harbor Hotel and walk back through P.O.S., it sure seemed like a series of pocket parks surrounded by some buildings on some of the cross streets would have been the way to go.
 
Tobyjug, thank you for your excellent analysis. I too have the same impressions you have of the greenway, though I've been hoping that my initial impressions would be different. I thought the Chinatown section was pretty, but included too much plaza and not enough plantings and benches. Maybe development of the surrounding buildings into more than cheap restaurants will help in the future. I'm very disappointed in the next sections...even though they were thrown together as a stop-gap for future development they are truly pathetic examples of park-planning. It seems the real attention has been focused on the areas most likely to be used by tourists. We'll see what they are like when they finally open. I must admit, however, that the trellis in the North End section is a mystery to me. Do the planners really think our climate will allow for the vines to cover the open areas above? I can't imagine this trellis will provide sufficient shade or a sense of enclosure the way it's been designed.
 
tobyjug said:
I work at 101 Arch St, and usually try to sit out at lunch and read for a bit. I figured I'd try the Greenway for a change. Boy was it disappointing.
The Chinatown park is cutesy, looking like something that was pulled together at the Home Depot garden department. All it lacked were garden gnomes and cement Buddhas. I doubt this park will be with us in its current form 15 years from now.
Walking toward State St., it very much had the feeling of walking down the median strip of a highway. Today was a bit chillier than of late, and a strong, cool and not altogether pleasant breeze was blowing off of the harbor. This whole thing will be Siberia in April, never mind the colder months.
After a little bit, I alighted upon a bench in front of the Boston Harbor Hotel. The view of International Place was impressive. The spot had a bit of a sense of place. Being about 12:30 p.m., a few other workers had also gathered for their lunch break. As I unfolded my paper, the automatic sprinkler behind the bench went off, giving us a mild rinse, scattering we few adventurers.
Wetter and wiser, I thought it might be interesting to compare the Leventhal Park in Post Office Square, so I returned to work by way of that route. In some ways, it is unfair to compare P.O.S. with the Greenway, since it has had longer for the plantings to mature. But a few things jumped out. First, P.O.S. is oriented inward, and has a sense of enclosure that the Greenway lacks. The Greenway has no obvious (as of yet) or planned orientation, either spacially or thematically. It just occupies space. (It was amazing to see how many benches in the Greenway were pointed toward the street to give you a view of the traffic, not toward the park.) Second, the Greenway is very noisy in a way that P.O.S. is not. Perhaps this is a function of the lack of plantings. Next, it is windy as hell. Finally, there is "no there there". P.O.S. has a cafe to draw people.
I've seen Copley Square redone at least three times in my lifetime, so I suppose it is safe to assume that a lot of what we will see on the Greenway in the next few years will be redone at least three times in your lifetimes. No doubt it will be better even a year from now. But the bones of the thing are all wrong. After a short and pleasant stay in front of the Boston Harbor Hotel and walk back through P.O.S., it sure seemed like a series of pocket parks surrounded by some buildings on some of the cross streets would have been the way to go.
Click to expand...

Tobyjug, I think you are asking that the Greenway (the open space part) be something it was never intended to be: a destination by itself.

To my thinking, making it a destination would mean converting it to something like Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, which is 20 acres, 38 bars and restaurants, 15-20 amusement rides, a concert hall, a mime theater, and 75 percent open space and gardens. Tivoli is seasonal, open six months of the year, and averages about 25,000 paying visitors a day.

Or you could try and replicate a smaller version of the Keukenhof in the Netherlands, which has bulbs upon bulbs upon bulbs (about 7 million). Keukenhof is open two months of the year, and averages 400,000+ paying visitors a month.

As it is, the Greenway will eventually be chopped up by four large cultural buildings (counting the Hort space and the Y), and bisected by a street grid that precludes any long expanse.

And yes, great cities with great parks can screw up their new green spaces. I don't think the Greenway will fall into that because of its pre-ordained limits. But, for example, in Parc de la Villette, Paris screwed up its largest new greenspace and I think they would now rather forget about it than change it. And its been 30 years. (There is now striptease at Parc de la Villette, so I suppose a little bared flesh on the Greenway in 25 years would then make it a destination.)

See worst list here:
http://www.pps.org/info/newsletter/september2004/september2004_best_worst
 
As to the worry that the vines won't grow in on the trellis in the North End Parks; the vines are extremely think on the trellis in the Christopher Columbus Park a few blocks away. As to worrying that the Greenway will be cold in the winter... uh, it's Boston! That's like complaining that water is wet.
 
It wouldn't be as easy to forget the Parc de la Villette if it sat in front of the Louvre. In other words, the Greenway isn't exactly peripheral...
 
I walked by one of the Wharf District parcels a short time ago and asked one of the construction workers when the parcel would be open. He looked at his watch and said in about two hours. (The Wharf District parcels begin on the north between Marketplace Center and Christopher Columbus Park and continue south until just before the Rowes Wharf arch.) No benches have been installed so I asked him about that. He said that the benches are coming from England and have been held up by some Customs problem and would be installed later (hopefully in he near future).

It appears that the parcel I was walking by (the one that is the second Wharf District parcel in from the the southern end) will be fully open to the public while the two to the north of this parcel will be partially open. A construction worker working on the southern-most Wharf District parcel said it would open in about a month.
 
The Wharf District parcel next to Quincy Market was still fenced off yesterday, but it already had a sign up saying what you shouldn't do there (no motor vehicles, no bike riding, no loitering after 11 pm, I forget what else).
 
tobyjug said:
Wetter and wiser, I thought it might be interesting to compare the Leventhal Park in Post Office Square, so I returned to work by way of that route. In some ways, it is unfair to compare P.O.S. with the Greenway, since it has had longer for the plantings to mature. But a few things jumped out. First, P.O.S. is oriented inward, and has a sense of enclosure that the Greenway lacks. The Greenway has no obvious (as of yet) or planned orientation, either spacially or thematically. It just occupies space. (It was amazing to see how many benches in the Greenway were pointed toward the street to give you a view of the traffic, not toward the park.) Second, the Greenway is very noisy in a way that P.O.S. is not. Perhaps this is a function of the lack of plantings. Next, it is windy as hell. Finally, there is "no there there". P.O.S. has a cafe to draw people.
Click to expand...
One faction involved in the design of the Greenway saw the parks not as an exercise in landscape design but as an exercise in politically correct social engineering: a space where the various diversities could be gathered on special occasions to celebrate the fact they don't have much in common. In other words, a space that functions like city hall plaza. That's probably a major reason why when I walked thru the open sections of the Wharf Parks this evening it felt almost like walking thru CHP. Another faction wanted something along the lines of POS park, with the cafes and so on. Obviously they did not win the day.

I'm not particularly bothered, thought. I've always seen the Greenway as a Grand Boulevard, not as destination parks. The function of the parks is to act as catalysts. They give the adjacent landlords incentive to reorient their properties and developers incentive to fill the gaps in the streetwall. And then the properties get filled with restaurants and shops and cafes out front to draw the pedestrians. It's these activities along the edges more than the parks in the middle that are going to bring the Greenway to life. Anyway, as has been pointed out, parks can be redone. Eventually these will be, and at some point they might get them right.
 
Greenway shouldn't be compared to Post Office Square Park

You really can't compare the Greenway park components to the Post Office Square {POS}{Leventhal} Park.

POS park is designed to be a green nucleus around which the towers of POS cluster. It offers the workers in the buildings a place to have lunch. Beyond that function it does provide a channel for people to traverse from one end of the POS to the other and links streets on either side of POS Park. That pedestrian channel function is similar to the apparent predominant function of the Greenway.

A much better comparison is between the Greenway and Commonwealth Avenue from the Public Garden to Kenmore Square. The principle difference is that Commonwealth Ave. Mall is a narrow green thread between two continuous rows of low rise residential buildings {i.e. the North and South sides of Commonwealth Ave.}

In contrast, The Greenway is wide and bordered primarily by individual towers such as International Place, Federal Reserve, 125 High Street, Marketplace Center and large lower buildings such as Rowe's Wharf. It lacks a contiguous and relatively consistent height set of ?walls?.

By simple scaling, if the "walls" of Comm Ave are 4 or 5 stories; then the "walls" of the Greenway should be 20 or so stories {essentially a contiguous row of Intercontinental Hotel's}. Lacking the "walls," The Greenway seems incomplete. This is especially true in its current state of miniature twigs where mighty oaks, etc will eventually grow.

However, there is another type of model for the Greenway. In Krakow Poland, the old Medieval core of the city {the Great Central Square aka Rynek Glowny} and several blocks of buildings used to be surrounded by defensive walls. During the 19th Century, the defensive walls were pulled down {with the exception of a small remaining section retained for the tourists). In the place of the walls, there is now a "Greenway" called the Planty that is about the same width as the RFK Greenway.

The Planty includes, statues, fountains, massed plantings, bits of water, tree shaded paths, benches, informational kiosks and some small plazas in the vicinity of the major streets penetrating into the old section of the city. The inner edge of the Planty is a somewhat random collection of the ends and backs of mostly nineteenth and early twentieth century buildings along the various streets emanating from the Rynek Glowny {no private automobiles are permitted in the Rynek Glowny and limited automobiles on any of the streets within the Planty . The outer border of the Planty is a wide very busy street {actually a number of streets as you circumnavigate the Planty} that in turn includes tram tracks and lots of very busy intersections of the modern car dominated parts of the city.

The key to making the Planty work is that each block of it is independent in details, the only connection is that each block attaches to the next and all feature one or more roughly parallel paths with various crossing paths and the various local landscape elements. The only consistent feature is that there are lots of trees with lots of shade and plenty of benches.

I think the Greenway can succeed in the same way if it is considered block by block -- each as a local park with the linkage being a contiguous path from block to block all the way from below South Station up to above North Station and connecting to Nashua Street Park on one side of the Charles {that in turn connects to the Esplanade and the rest of the Charles} and the Paul Revere Landing and North Wilds on the other side of the Charles{and eventually connecting to the Memorial Drive ?Cambridge Esplanade?}.

On the South the Greenway can connect to the Harborwalk {on South for many miles and back North along the Harborwalk to the North Station} and eventually {after the Post Office moves} to the walk along the Fort Point Channel {and eventually back to the Emerald Necklace and the Park along the Orange Line and back toward Commonwealth Avenue Mall and on to the Common}

All this will take decades {somebody remarked about the several failed attempts at the Copley Square Park} -- but if done right -- will eventually be a major "selling point" for Boston.

Moral of the story ? don?t judge a Park by the first few baby trees and a few benches. Come back in a few years or even a few decades and then we can decide how well it all worked out.

Westy
 
When I was walking along the Greenway near Oliver St, I noticed how noisy it was as well. There is simply a LOT of traffic on it, much of it trucks.

Despite the fact that the highway is now underground, the current surface artery is still one of the most direct ways to drive through downtown.

I wonder if it would have been better with 2 lanes of traffic on each side instead of 3.

I'm hoping that the trees grow fairly quickly and act to buffer the traffic noise.
 
It would have been better with one lane on each side (i.e., side streets inconsequential for traffic but easy enough for peds to cross between the park and the cafes that are supposed to spring up across from the wasteland).

The thing about Krakow's Planty (which really is quite a pleasant park) is that it only really has traffic on one side, which makes it far quieter and more intimate. That, and I do think it's much narrower than the Greenway...at least, it feels that way. Oh, and it's the only real green space in central Krakow, which contrasts to Boston's overabundance in this area (waterfront space, Columbus Park, PO Square, the Common). That, and the fact that it's bordered by an extremely healthy mix of uses (universities, offices, government agencies, tourist sites, apartment houses...it's like a leafier version of the Ringstrasse in Vienna) ensures the Planty actually gets used, and heavily. I don't see the Greenway drawing that intense an interest (with the possible exception of the North End and Chinatown parcels).
 
I can't say that I have gone strolling in Krakow or through failed parks in Paris. I have had "boots on the ground" in the park here, with an interest that is not academic, since I fall into the group of persons who might actually use the place.
That being said, who would be disappointed if the Greenway turns into a monumental grand allee? It would be grand to see plans for a large traffic rotary in Dewey Square with Nelson's Column ("Dewey's Column"?) in the middle. It would be thrilling to see plans (or even consideration) of monuments of a scale that would befit a street wall of 20 stories. (You would need obelisks the size of the Bunker Hill Monument...nothing wrong with that.) Instead, what we are offered is a series of cardboard cutouts bearing cheap skate epitaphs in a windblown graveyard.
Can you actually compare Leventhal with the Greenway? Objectively, yes. Qualitatively, no. Leventhal is good. The Greenway is bad. Simple as that. Agreed, no comparison.
How nice it would have been to have seen a series of Leventhal-esqe quadrangles separated by buildings that knit the city back together. Perhaps the surrounding property owners would have maintained the parks. That would have solved one problem (oh, yes, probably less wind and noise too.)
What is most galling is that the "Big Dig" was conceived in the 70's not as a transportation project, but as an exercise in a city building. The "transportation" aspect was a funding pretext. Gutsy. Too bad today's politicians, planners and landscape architects lack the stuff, nuts and guts to finish the job properly.
 
Problems with the Greenway

Possibly the real problem with the Greenway was the idea setting some arbitrary percentage aside as Park (70%)

What should have been done is to set a requirement for a greenway in each segment and then offer the land for development block by block -- It's too late for that now

On the other hand -- its not too late to see the blocks adjacent to the Greenway get developed as if there was a Greenway there

So I suspect that over time we will see many of the buildings that have recently turned their backs to the old Central Artery -- open up to the new opportunities for pedestrian use of the Greenway.

There re plenty{not Planty} 8) of small and one very large surface parking lots that could be put to much better use as borders for the Greenway.

The real problem I think is that some of those silly cultural buildings that have been proposed will get built on the Greenway instead of adjacent to it.

The only major building that should be built on the Greenway is a Grand Glassy Public Market -- even Krakow's ancient Sukience {Old Cloth Market} has too much stone and not enough glass :shock:

Anyway -- what we have is time -- until another Glacier descends on Boston wiping clean all of our human artifacts
:cry:


Westy
 
For comparison The Planty of Krakow

We?ve been discussing comparisons between the RFK Greenway in Boston with other well known Greenbelts/ways ? and specifically we?ve referred to the Planty in Krakow

So -- for those of you who haven't been to Krakow and seen the Planty -- as well as for those who have been and can/can?t remember it fondly 8)

Herewith some links to photos and a map of the Planty

http://www.krakow-info.com/planty.htm

http://www.cracow-life.com/poland/krakow-planty

http://www.krakow.pl/miasto/wizytowka/?id=zlotu.html

http://www.krakow.pl/en/turystyka/content.php?id=trasy/droga_krolewska/mapa.html

http://www.krakow.pl/kultura/markowski/?foto=foto/n6.jpg

http://www.krakow.pl/kultura/markowski/?foto=foto/n8.jpg

http://www.krakow.pl/kultura/markowski/?foto=foto/q_3.jpg



Unfortunately some of the above are only available in Polish -- but the pictures are still valuable

Westy
 
The good news is the North End sections look like they will be a success. The architects were smart to block traffic noise and fumes on the Downtown side with a large raised berm. The North End side is also relatively sheltered from traffic and, once grown in, the ivy canopy should be very cool. The water feature looks like it will also be neat, and the lawn, while small, should be sufficient and safe for kids to play in, people to picnic, lie out, etc.

The bad news is the "heart" of the Greenway, the Wharf District, is an utter failure of urban park design. The only excuse could be that the architects thought there would only be one or two lanes of traffic on either side. Walking through the now-opened sections yesterday afternoon (although it was rush hour), felt like standing on a small plot of grass (with a couple wispy trees) in between two busy highways.

The trees in all sections of the park will take decades to grow to a mature size to help shield traffic. The North End designers seemed to be aware of this and built the Berm and the Canopy. The Wharf Designers completely ignored this. The light blades may look good at night, and the fountain is sure to impress, but there is zero protection from buses, trucks and cars speeding around on all sides. I would not let a kid play unsupervised in the Wharf District as there is nothing there right now to prevent him from running into 3 lanes of traffic (although the yet-to-be-installed benches may help a little).

Anyway, those are my first impressions.
 
That's why a two-way boulevard placed at one side of the Greenway through the Wharf District would have been better than the one-way couplet flanking each side of the greenway. The design I had submitted earlier on this thread shows how this could have been done.

The corridor is still to much like a freeway.
 
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