Why is Dartmouth St so wide?

I didn't mean motor-boaters, but rather sailors who love the wide-open space that the current basin offers.
What? The Charles River is for amateur and beginner sailors. And it's not even very good at that. The harbor is for sailors.
 
What? The Charles River is for amateur and beginner sailors. And it's not even very good at that. The harbor is for sailors.

Whatever. I'm not arguing the point... suffice to say that Community Boating is a boon for kids all around the metro-area, and people will put up a fight over anything that would shut it down.
 
Leaving aside the sailboats, the current basin gives great aesthetic pleasure to everyone who walks, runs, bikes, drives, or takes public transit over the Longfellow and Mass Ave. bridges, as well as to users of the riverside paths and roads on both sides. Most cities would kill to have this. Leave it alone.
 
Lest we forget Head of the Charles.

Unless the island is going to include some subway stop on the Urban Ring under Mass Ave and some very large scale development, I don't see much point. A massive park to detract from a water body which is more valuable than the planned park space ever would have been?
 
If we could trust the developers to build anything like the Back Bay or the pictured island design, maybe I could be convinced for it (though if you want to build a new neighborhood aren't there vacant areas that could be used that are already on land? Less well-sited, perhaps, but an island is going to have isolation built in) But practically we'd get towers in a park, a high-end strip mall, and half the island taken up by a parking garage; nothing worth losing the Charles Basin for.
 

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