Good moves on Greenway
By Yvonne Abraham
Globe Columnist / October 19, 2008
If you want to see how great the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway can and should be, head down to Chinatown any day of the week.
There, at the edge of the new park just outside the Chinatown Gate, you will find a bunch of guys sitting at dinky tables playing Chinese chess.
This is usually a two-man game, but it takes at least eight to play it in Chinatown: two to move the pieces around, and six to sit around barking advice at them in Cantonese.
At one table on a recent morning, a gray-haired man faced a Boston cop. They stared at the board, slowly sliding around the white disks labeled with red and green characters. Other men chain-smoked Shuangxi cigarettes, jiggled their legs, and watched.
"Why are you afraid of the cannon?" one spectator demanded of the older man. "One move, you can kill the general."
"Kill that one, you should kill that one," offered another.
The elderly man ignored them. He moved his piece. The cop cornered him.
"We told you so!" the men said, according to an interpreter.
This gang of enthusiasts - mostly retired men and restaurant workers between shifts - started out in the Maxim bakery on Harrison Avenue a few years ago. But the groups that gathered to watch the games got so big they had to move onto the street outside the Sovereign Bank. And then they decamped to the Chinatown Gate Park, at the end of Beach Street.
About a year ago, the games moved to a nook at the very tip of the new Greenway - 27 acres of public space where the elevated expressway used to be.
The groups are cramped in their little corner. One of the tables sits in the dirt under a tree. A few feet away is a handsome paved plaza with sculptures and a fountain and bamboo garden. They could spread out there, but there's no shade. And they don't want to get in other people's way.
A more comfortable set-up would be useful, though.
"No question, it would be much better if we had a permanent place to play," said one of the spectators on Thursday morning. A custodian at a downtown courthouse, he didn't want his name used, lest his wife find out he'd been watching chess all morning.
Here, at the very end of the Greenway, is the promise of the Big Dig fulfilled. The point of that enormously expensive feat was to knit the city together, and to turn the freed-up space into places where neighborhoods could expand and the whole city could visit.
So far, the Greenway mostly has fallen short of those ideals. It needs cafes and museums, though in this economic climate, it's not likely that the various cultural centers proposed will be built anytime soon. It needs more - and edgier - public art. The Interstate 93 ramp insisted upon by the downtown community, and the busy cross-streets that carve the Greenway up make it feel like a fancy traffic island in places.
But the trees will grow. It could take years, but the city's newest public space will fill out. The Greenway will get there.
There is plenty that is great about it already: locals lolling about in the beautiful North End parks; the sopping kids squealing in the flirty, on-and-off fountain between Milk and State streets in summer; the sky and the sunshine where there was none.
And the Chinatown chess men. They achieved something no amount of money or painstaking planning ever could: they have given the place a personality.
Nancy Brennan, executive director of the Greenway Conservancy, knows the immense value of that. She wants to provide better furniture and shade for the chess players so they can move out into the plaza if they want.
For now, the players stack their little tables against a fence every night, and every morning they're still there. And it looks like the men and their mismatched chairs have been here forever.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is
Abraham@globe.com
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