It looks like even the Globe is beginning to realize what a lemon the Greenway is and could remain if sound decision-making and bolder thinking doesn't become part of the authorities' (who are they here, anyway? the state? the Pike? the Conservancy? ... still confused) bag o' tricks:
Trouble on the Greenway
THE MISSION of the proposed Boston Museum seemed a little vague from the start. But at least its location was clear: Parcel 12 along the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, between Faneuil Hall Marketplace and the North End. Yet now museum backers have shifted their gaze to a new site that doesn't pose the engineering and economic challenges raised by trying to build on a surface penetrated by ramps leading in and out of a Big Dig tunnel.
One of the biggest payoffs from the lengthy and expensive depression of the Central Artery was to be the creation of great civic spaces from North Station to Chinatown. The Boston Museum promised a "new icon for Boston, adding beauty, power of place and definition" to the Greenway. But now the museum's world-class architectural firm, Moshe Safdie and Associates, has been given its walking papers. And Frank Keefe, the chief executive of the proposed museum, talks of building a more "sustainable, justifiable" project between Hanover and North streets.
This is the first rumble in what could be a quake along the Greenway. The proposed YMCA of Greater Boston faces a similar construction challenge between New Sudbury and Market streets. Steep development costs based on geotechnical challenges could also upset construction plans for the New Center for Arts and Culture planned for the parcel between International Place and the Boston Harbor Hotel at Rowes Wharf. But developer Ron Druker, who chairs the New Center's board, thinks the project sits on more "terra firma" than the original Boston Museum site, and will benefit from both modest size and design features that work better with the ramps.
The Boston Museum move raises more than just engineering concerns. The original site was to include a visitors' center along a public concourse that would provide orientation movies and one-stop concierge services not currently available to tourists. The new downsized plan, says Keefe, will not emphasize a visitors' center. In fact, the entire museum concept seems to be shifting underfoot. The original plan focused on post-colonial Boston literary traditions, politics, and sports. But Keefe says it now includes the entire New England region, with state-of-the-art interactive exhibits.
Losing the visitors' center in the Boston Museum project shouldn't be a problem if the National Park Service makes good on a plan to build such a center at Faneuil Hall. But visitors may find little more than sod along the Greenway.
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Did the state/Pike/Massport/whoever(?) not do their due diligence at all? Did they vet all these untested groups to ensure their projects were remotely feasible? Does a hamster control the workings of the Great Oz of the Greenway?