Rose Kennedy Greenway

[ablarc]

What you have right now is a transitional phase between the removal of all those overhead structures and the filling in of the resulting empty lots. Give it a few more years.

By that time...

...the balance in urban Boston between the city-verite of the North and South Ends and the office park New Look of Kendall Square and Longwood will have shifted decisively toward the latter.

(Kendall Square: the wave of Boston's future.)

 

[stellarfun]

A mini-Greenway gets bushwhacked by NIMBYs who don't live in the neighborhood, (Another San Francisco story, and I know some don't like comparing SFO to BOS, but they are considered by many to be sister cities: size, demographics, commerce, coastal location, politics, even MBTA trolleys, although SFO is not a university town.)

One wishes that Boston currently had an architectural/planning critic -- one who is not sycophantic to NIMBYs and politicians -- with a newspaper forum. The link at the bottom also links to a comments section, which by 3 AM PST, was going strong.

Larger agendas stall city's best-laid plans

John KingTuesday, February 19, 2008

If you want to see what's wrong with planning in San Francisco - and how the city suffers as a result - take a stroll down Octavia Boulevard.

A year ago, four empty lots along the way were awarded to architects and developers who won a civic competition. Neighborhood leaders helped draw up the rules. They praised the winning designs.

But today the land's still empty, and there's no telling when that might change. Those fenced-off lots are in limbo - victims of a larger process in which everyone has his own utopian demands, and nobody's shy about gumming up the works if he doesn't get what he wants.

The delay is especially frustrating because Octavia Boulevard should be a success story.

An elevated freeway once loomed there. Now that structure touches earth south of Market Street, replaced by a four-block boulevard designed to handle commute traffic in the middle and local traffic on the sides. The roadway is softened by trees and shrubs that, almost 30 months after opening day, already look great. A small neighborhood park on the north end is a wonderful segue from the boulevard to ever-more-prosperous Hayes Street.

The boulevard exists because Hayes Valley residents persuaded city voters to endorse their desire for change. And when it came time to fill the land left behind, neighbors kept their standards high.

Working with city officials, they crafted a truly progressive approach to redevelopment. Freed-up land would be used for housing, with 50 percent reserved for low-income residents. Land-sale proceeds would help pay off city costs related to the boulevard and other transportation and streetscape improvements.

But wait, as they say on late-night television, there's more.

When the first four boulevard lots went on the market in 2006, guidelines requested "excellence and innovation in urban infill and architectural design." In other words, the city said it wanted to do business with teams that would propose buildings of lasting merit.

"We weren't concerned about getting the most we could from those sites," says Rich Hillis of the Mayor's Office of Economic and Workforce Development. "As long as we received fair market value, we wanted good design."

The winners selected last February lived up to expectations.

Two of the sites - a pair of 16-foot-wide slivers between Fell and Oak streets - would be filled with scaffold-thin glass jewels designed by Envelope A+D, an Oakland firm. The parcel where the boulevard meets Market Street was awarded to a sleek design by Stanley Saitowitz with enticing retail spaces.

The most intriguing team won the largest site. A collaboration of five architectural firms and developer Build Inc. nabbed a full-block chunk where freeway ramps once connected to Oak and Fell streets.

The team's scheme is like the boulevard, refreshingly old-fashioned. It calls for 12 buildings, designed and built one at a time.

In a rational world you'd see construction crews out there by now, installing their Porta Pottis and getting ready to start. The land would be sold, the projects would be approved. Octavia Boulevard's potential would be taking three-dimensional form.

Instead, nothing's happened.

When those first four lots were put up for sale in the fall of 2006, Hillis and other bureaucrats assumed that the Planning Commission would soon approve a new long-range plan for a string of neighborhoods along Market Street from the Castro to Civic Center, Hayes Valley included. The work on the plan had started in 2000 - that's not a typo - and various drafts had kicked around since 2002.

Nope. The commission debated the so-called Market & Octavia Neighborhood Plan until April. The Board of Supervisors' Land Use Committee didn't hold a hearing until October. The committee's second hearing didn't occur until Feb. 11.

In between, activists who wanted changes they couldn't get from the commission held a series of meetings with Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who formally introduced the plan to the board. Mirkarimi's revisions follow the activists' cues, such as tighter restrictions on parking and doubling the developer fee beyond the one imposed by the Planning Commission.

Some concerns are neighborhood based and genuine. In other cases, it looks as if some activists want to up the ante here so that when they move to the next fight - over a larger area known in planning circles as the Eastern Neighborhoods, which includes everything from Potrero Hill to portions of the Mission and the industrial waterfront - they can tighten the screws even more: kick up the fees an extra notch or require builders to add more subsidized housing to their projects.

That's how the game is played in San Francisco, whatever political direction people are coming from: Always push for more, never feel qualms about changing the rules. And as long as Mayor Gavin Newsom slings mud with several supervisors, things aren't likely to change.

Now, neighbors and builders who don't like the activists' fiddling are raising a ruckus of their own. When the plan goes back to the committee next week, other supervisors might weigh in with revisions as well.

As for the four lots, the teams don't want to buy them because it isn't clear what the final costs will be.

I'm not saying there aren't legitimate changes that might improve the overall plan. But it's absurd that one small piece of the map - which evolved because of true community involvement - is jeopardized by the larger games.

Something eventually will get built. My fear is that the process will drag out so long the details won't matter. Whoever controls the land by then will just want to cut corners and move on.

If that happens, Octavia Boulevard won't be such a success after all. It will be yet another example of how in the endless battle over San Francisco's growth, the landscape - the one we all share - so often loses out.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/19/DDDHV2JOE.DTL

 

[czsz]

One wishes that Boston currently had an architectural/planning critic -- one who is not sycophantic to NIMBYs and politicians -- with a newspaper forum

I don't think Campbell is that bad...

 

[statler]

Paved with good intention
He wants Central Artery to be remembered

By John C. Drake, Globe Staff | February 20, 2008

He might be the only person in Boston with fond memories of the elevated Central Artery, the almost perpetually clogged highway through downtown Boston that became the raison d'?tre for the tunnels of the Big Dig.

Charlestown resident and former North End retailer Vincent F. Zarrilli wants visitors to the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway to know the urban oasis winds its way through Boston only because the once unsightly highway cleared its path.

Zarrilli's goal is to see a bronze plaque erected somewhere on the Greenway that lists what he asserts were the artery's considerable benefits before it came down in 2004: It provided an easier north-south route through the city; it pushed the stream of commuting cars from ground level to the elevated highway; provided hundreds of parking spaces for the North End; and it protected from development the patch that has become the Greenway.

Big Dig and park officials say that erecting a monument to what many ultimately saw as Boston's other green monster is something to consider.

Zarrilli acknowledges, though, that since his recollections of the highway differ markedly from the prevailing view of the roadway, namely that it was an overutilized eyesore that cut off the city's waterfront from downtown, the idea is likely to encounter resistance.

"Even I am happy to see it gone," said Zarrilli, a longtime critic of the Big Dig who dreamed up an alternative proposal during its planning stages called the Boston Bypass, which would have consisted of a series of bridges from Neponset Circle to Sullivan Square. But he says a plaque is necessary to "counter 20-plus years of artery bashing and do justice to the benefits the artery provided."

Former North End city councilor Paul J. Scapicchio was puzzled by the idea.

"I've heard of memorials to fallen firefighters; I've heard of memorials to fallen soldiers and heroes. I've never heard of a memorial to a fallen highway," said Scapicchio, who resigned from the City Council in 2006. "It was a big piece of metal and steel in the middle of Boston. It served its purpose and had its time. I don't think anybody really remembers that fondly."

Anticipating that sort of reaction, Zarrilli is starting by offering a decidedly more modest proposal. The elevated artery was also known as the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway, for Boston's early 1900s mayor. Two highway plaques honoring the man affectionately called Honey Fitz now sit in storage in Chinatown, and Zarrilli is pressing the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority to place them on the Greenway, which is named after Fitzgerald's daughter Rose.

Turnpike Authority spokesman Mac Daniel said the agency is in talks with Zarrilli to find an appropriate location for the plaques.

"We are very much in favor of bringing these plaques back to the light of day," Daniel said. "The details about where they will be placed and when have yet to be determined."

Nancy Brennan, executive director of the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, said the group's board has not considered whether it would be appropriate to place the plaques in the public space. With the exception of brick tributes on "Mother's Walk," the conservancy generally has opposed placing memorials along the 1-mile stretch of parks, but Brennan said she does not think the plaques are considered memorials.

She was particularly interested in the idea of recognizing that the park is a legacy of the old highway, though she thought a plaque might not be the ideal method.

"Mr. Zarrilli's idea really has us talking over here," she said. "A big part of our mission, besides caring for the parks, is an educational mission that allows people to understand the parks and their bigger Boston historical context. Our education people would like to think about it some more and maybe take the idea and make it a little broader and more universal than a plaque that some people may not be able to read or find in strolls along the Greenway."

Daniel said memorials to the elevated artery actually exist, in fact if not in name. "There are two old sections of the elevated artery at Congress Street and Clinton Street that are meant to kind of memorialize or in some way remember what once stood on that ground," Daniel said. "They were left there on purpose to be incorporated as part of the Greenway and as a form of public sculpture."

Describing his ideas over coffee at a Charlestown Dunkin' Donuts recently, Zarrilli rifled through a tattered leather briefcase to pull out documents, including clippings from the Globe, that he says prove the Central Artery was seen as beneficial by motorists when it opened in the 1950s.

He is not trying to make the case that it should not have been replaced, nor is he looking to reignite battles over whether the Big Dig was a good idea.

"I'm saying let's get the truth out to counter 20 to 25 years of artery bashing," he said. "It's setting the record straight."

Scapicchio was incredulous at the idea of a formal memorial. He remembers sitting in his grandfather's North End blacksmith shop, which was in the shadow of the Central Artery.

"I think people are happy that it's not there," he said. "If you want to do a memorial to John Fitzgerald or the Fitzgerald family somewhere, that's fine. But because they named the highway after him, you memorialize the highway? I just don't get it."

John C. Drake can be reached at jdrake@globe.com.

Link

 

[stellarfun]

^^^
The Globe seems to have an affinity for these fringe ideas. I remember stories featuring the idea of an artist (I think) who wanted to leave the Central Artery standing and use it as a pedestrian promenade and observation deck.

 

[statler]

How big are these plaques? Could they just hang them on the remaining steel girders and call it a day?

 

[type001]

People are already starting to miss the Central Artery, and right now it is at the stage where it comes out in pecular ways (i.e. - someone thinks it might be a good idea to have a plaque in rememberance of the highway). Believe me, the evasion of the central artery will become ever more clear when folks realize how much wasted space there is between North and South Station. I mean c'mon, they couldn't plan for at least 2 towers on the stretch.

I defended the Greenway for a while, but then something happened to make me change my mind... Late Fall in New England came. Here's a riddle for you. What's the difference between the central artery and the greenway? The Central Artery was in use all year.

 

[statler]

^^ Fair enough.

It is this sentiment that bothers me:

Zarrilli's goal is to see a bronze plaque erected somewhere on the Greenway that lists what he asserts were the artery's considerable benefits before it came down in 2004: It provided an easier north-south route through the city; it pushed the stream of commuting cars from ground level to the elevated highway; provided hundreds of parking spaces for the North End; and it protected from development the patch that has become the Greenway.

Neither of the two bolded 'benifits' actually benefited the city. They should not be memorialized.

 

[Ron Newman]

The highway should be remembered in some form. A wall in the Boston History Museum, with photos and maps and people's stories, would be ideal.

 

[JoeGallows]

The highway should be remembered in some form.

There are two remaining green, steel beams on the Greenway (near Quincy Market and the other by Congress Street) and of course, the remaining open scar. Remembrance enough, no?

Unless, of course, we remeber the highway for what it did to the city, rather than just the highway itself.

 

[Ron Newman]

Well yes, I mean remembering the construction of the highway, its effect while it was standing, and its demolition and replacement by a tunnel. That would easily fill the wall I'm suggesting. People visiting Boston would find this interesting, as would future generations of locals.

 

[czsz]

VanS posted the NY Times article on the Dig being "done" here:
http://www.archboston.org/community/showpost.php?p=46145&postcount=5

There's also a slideshow with some new images of the corridor. Let's see how the newspaper of record represents the Greenway to the rest of the country:

One gets the sense that February wasn't the best month to do this shoot...

The only other person: another photographer

Scar 2 Scar

File name: "dig death.jpg"

It's just barren prairieland, but, finally, North End dogs have somewhere to shit other than the harbor

Yay onramps (+ landscaping + office park pomo...looks like a denser Wellesley)

Run, run from the evil pylons!

They couldn't forget one of Boston's greatest civic assets (see far left)

These look great...if you have a bird's eye perspective

They're probably breaking park rules, but they're the only people keeping this anywhere near as lively as a suburban Shaw's parking lot

Looks great...from afar

Takeaway lines:

?It?s going to be way better, I think, than anything I dreamed of,? said Frederick Salvucci, a former Massachusetts transportation secretary who helped conceive of the Big Dig in the 1970s and championed it through multiple delays and cost overruns.

Mr. Salvucci and others hope the new corridor, replacing what he called ?a big ugly slash in the city,? will eventually rival cherished public spaces like Las Ramblas in Barcelona and the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

...

Jerold Kayden, a professor of urban planning and design at Harvard, said that the parks lacked boldness and creativity and that the corridor remained ?an urban void.? It might have been more interesting, Professor Kayden said, to leave the highway intact as an elevated park like the planned High Line, formerly a railway, on the West Side of Manhattan.

?One would be hard-pressed to say this is a creative, cohesive, singular public space that will redefine the city of Boston,? he said. ?And that is too bad, when you have that much space.?

 

[Ron Newman]

I doubt that any park is going to look lively in Februrary, even Copley Square or Boston Common. Let's revisit this in May.

 

[itchy]

It's true, no park will look so hot in February. If, however, a residential neighborhood had been pieced back together, or even if offices had been built, it would've been infinitely livelier.

Perhaps, though, the engineering difficulties of building a functional new neighborhood over the tunnels would've been too much. In that case, leaving the Central Artery up and building cafes, shops, offices underneath and leaving the top open for a High Line-esque promenade would've ensured something other than the prairie effect.

Even if the park works great 4-5 months a year (which, given the frequent intersections and traffic on both sides, is unlikely), that's still 4-5 months a year out of 12. Boston's city planners and NIMBYs have again proven themselves inept. How many strikes do they get?!

 

[czsz]

I doubt that any park is going to look lively in Februrary, even Copley Square or Boston Common. Let's revisit this in May.

This excuse is growing tiresome. Copley Square is small enough to at least not have a deadening effect on the surrounding neighborhood during winter - and compact enough to play host to events like the First Night celebrations. Boston Common has its skating pond and, perhaps more importantly, people who live on it. Maybe the Times did this scar a service by exposing its seasonal fallowness.

Boston should be placing parks where they really serve people and where they will be used for more than 4-5 months of the year, as itchy says. This city's planners ineptly grope toward Barcelona and San Francisco, ignoring their climates as much as their actual plans.

Northern cities (Montreal, Quebec, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Reykjavik, Edinburgh) have always been most successful where they huddle together for warmth. This was instinctive for the settlers who first built Boston, who crowded the narrow streets the Artery obliterated. One wonders if the people building the city today (or howling for greenspace) are only those who "appreciate" it from air conditioned offices and heated cars.

 

[Ron Newman]

I'd still like to see how this space gets used in warm weather. It was not complete and ready for use last fall. Some parts of it, like the pergolas in the North End section, will take years to reach their intended appearance. And I suspect some parts will get redesigned over time -- just as both Copley Square and Christopher Columbus Park did.

The Esplanade and Hatch Shell Oval are intensively used from April through October, but right now, I doubt you'll find more than a small number of dog-walkers and joggers.

 

[czsz]

You can already see the inherent failures of the North End parcel. The pergola turns its back to the neighborhood and street completely; the prairie goes unplanted with trees and spills toward a city that looks shocked and directionless. Flawed from conception; not something I'm ready to wait 20 years to see revised.

The Esplanade and Hatch Shell are hard by the Charles. No alternate development could really cure that. The Greenway, though, is in the heart of the city. It needs to embrace the city's needs - and in winter, it doesn't need a vast new wind tunnel.

 

[nm88]

cz, all true. 70% for park land was an arbitrary number that was arrived at by, I believe, politicians. A way to sell the decade of pain as worthwhile.

That in mind, when the few parcels meant to have buildings -- YMCA, Boston Museum, etc. -- this, hopefully, will help enliven and contain the RKG.

Otherwise, time to rethink...

 

[Beton Brut]

?It?s going to be way better, I think, than anything I dreamed of,? said Frederick Salvucci...

Could be a quote from Donald Rumsfeld.

In the grand and storied history of bad ideas, the Greenway ranks up there with the good people of Troy deciding it was a fine idea to wheel that big wooden horse inside their walls.

Wasn't Mr. Salvucci in the employ of governor of Greek heritage? Where's Laoco?n when we need him?

 

[tobyjug]

Wasn't Mr. Salvucci in the employ of governor of Greek heritage? Where's Laoco?n when we need him?[/QUOTE]

This was no gift. We paid for it, and will continue to do so.