Put it this way...if you can get the indoor link out to the Hynes lobby, you can get it across the street to the #1 southbound bus shelter via the reanimated/renovated underpass to that side of the road. Then all you need to do is streetscape upper Boylston and/or Ipswich using whatever chunks of that rump of grass along the Pike retaining wall do the trick, to tie a direct path hook-in to the Emerald Necklace. Which will hopefully be a lot more accessible in that area when they tear down the Bowker Overpass and reconfigure the Charlesgate @ Boylston intersection for weaveless traffic flow. You could possibly even hollow out passenger walkways on one or both sides of the Muddy overpass on Boylston for a grade separated slip-under, and if you play your cards right between Mass Ave. and here could potentially do it without a single crosswalk.
Indoors, you take advantage of the next Pru/Copley Place renovation. High-end malls almost always cycle cosmetic makeovers once every 20 years or so. We're getting close to due for one. So you tweak the layout of kiosks, benches, indoor plantings and whatnot for optimized pedestrian flow indoors. It really sucks today--especially during a convention, or summer when kids are loitering about--and makes little attempt to corral the loiterers vs. the people who have to
move across the complex to get to/from their jobs in the towers or to/from their next convention session. So there's a lot to improve on there, and it can be done just with a cosmetic reorg. Crank up the wayfinding bigtime...like, "Freedom (of the Free Market) Trail"-level wayfinding with signature pathmarkers in the tile showing the way through intuitively without having to keep confusedly looking up for signage.
See what's starting to come together here?
-- Get that missing north end link built out and the wayfinding optimized, and we've bound our Crystal City thingy in Back Bay directly to Olmstead's original handiwork. The Muddy River Reservation restoration plans do the rest at cleaning up the environment outbound and optimizing it for ever-better pedestrian travel. Put some oomph behind that gradual effort and bind the wayfinding tightly together, and you've got a pretty grand gateway that runs several miles through both nature and skyscrapers, which the out-of-towners will use in droves.
-- You already have a direct link to SW Corridor Park outside the Westin and BBY station. It's frustratingly underutilized because so few non-natives know of the grade separation to Mass Ave. and the signage from indoors is nearly non-existent. Bind that tight to this next Mall makeover. And keep improving the side paths (which need it) after the air rights end. Actually filling in those SW Corridor air rights is going to be a multi-generational effort, but by improving the traffic calming at the crosswalks and improving the side paths you end up with an effective return circuit to downtown from Forest Hills and the Arboretum.
-- Should the rest of the Pike air rights get filled out before we're all dead, and should they get filled out in a way that extends the Crystal City-type thingy down to the Ink Block, look how close you now are to the Harborwalk. Granted, it's not going to be pretty to connect the last building on the corner of Albany through
all this, but there is a lit sidewalk next to the 93S onramp that spans the Herald St.-W. Broadway block partially under the ramp overhang. Maybe send an
overhead walkway from the last building across Albany to dump on that sidewalk (this would be the end of climate control), and do something to widen the sidewalk and make the underside of that viaduct a lot less scary.
The Harborwalk starts right there at W. Broadway. We know that someday--probably after SSX is done farting around with the track layout--they're going to do a North Bank-type pedestrian overpass over the train tracks to tie into Rolling Bridge Park and the post-USPS redevelopment of Dot Ave. We know that they're seeking gap-filler elsewhere on the small breaks that still exist in the Harborwalk. We also know it connects to the real Freedom Trail at the Navy Yard.
^^Can you imagine what kind of tourism and exhibition $$$$ this city would be pocketing if they could. . .
-- publish a "Boston by Trail" map given out for free everywhere
-- had a 'yellow brick road'/Freedom Trail-style type of fully intuitive wayfinding marking it all
-- connect
ALL THAT mileage together with hardly any crossings of busy streets
-- provide a way to link a significant portion of it indoors to extend the tourist season through cold-but-not-snowy (i.e. Xmas) weather for people who don't mind being outside as long as it isn't all-or-nothing
-- promote the juxtapositions--nature! skyscrapers! the ocean! malls! Old Boston! New Boston!--for the variety of city life the network covers
-- promote it as a non-intimidating way for outsiders to take in the city's variety ("See all the city without crossing streets! Stick to the pathmarker and you'll never get lost or feel unsafe!"). Like, training-wheels urban exploration.
Wow. I mean, of course you are not going to be walking your bike through Copley Place or doing your daily Marathon training jog in there; 'aerobic' bipedal traffic is the one subset this linkage can't accommodate by the very nature of going through a busy shopping mall and convention center. But it can accommodate just about every other type of foot traffic. And we're literally 2 parcels of pending air rights development on the north end away from being able to do the most significant part of this
[hits BRA with shovel for good measure]. Pretty much all of it except for the far more daunting 7 blocks to the Harborwalk end can be locked down within
a year or two if the plans for the new towers at Mass Ave. can bake the connection out of Hynes Auditorium into their designs, and the public-private partnership over the Hynes station renovation can bake the station connection into that design.
The rest like healing and improving the Muddy Reservation out to the Arboretum, streetscaping related to the post-Bowker lane configuration on upper Boylston, tightening the bolts on SW Corridor Park's navigability...gets done with independent projects already in some degree of planning motion or other incremental bits. The interior wayfinding gets laid out during the next Mall cosmetic makeover.
Just apply the 'vision thing' cohesively to it all and don't fuck up or otherwise whiff on the connections through those 2 air rights parcels by the corner of Mass Ave.
[hits BRA with shovel again] and we nailed it.
It's terrifying how close we are to nailing our own Crystal City that connects EVERYTHING to EVERYTHING, and yet nobody on the official end seems to acknowledge that. Do they even know what potential they're sitting on here?
