CONTEXT and HISTORY:
Frederick Law Olmsted intended Columbia Road to be a continuation of the Emerald Necklace -- the Boston City park network that connects parkland from the Back Bay Fens to Franklin Park. Under his original plan, Franklin Park would be connected to Marine Park and Pleasure Bay via Columbia Road, the Dorchesterway, and the Strandway (collectively the William J. Day Boulevard). The park system would thus have resembled a horseshoe of continuous greenway and parks.
The conditions of Columbia Road when the parks system was being established, however, precluded this vision from becoming a reality. When Columbia Road was formally designed in the late 1800s, there was already a relatively high density of buildings. The road had street rails that were used by a streetcar trolley connecting Uphams Corner and Franklin Park. There was a grass strip in the center and roads on either side, one for commercial traffic and the other for pleasure traffic. As a result, Columbia Road failed to serve the purposes of either the businesses or the pleasure travelers well, and there was not enough room for what Olmsted considered a proper parkway.
During a period of high racial tensions in the area in the 1960s, Columbia Road served as a barrier between two opposed ethnic groups -- the blacks and the Irish. According to one social history of the area, "The very presence of a black face in parts of Irish Dorchester was considered sufficient provocation for a chase and beating; the sanctity of the neighborhood and parish was of paramount importance" (Levine and Harmon, The Death of an American Jewish Community, 1994, p176).
Physical improvements to Columbia Road were made between 1992 and 1993. More recently, the Boston Department of Parks and Recreation began planting and maintaining trees, grass, and planters along the western-most section of Columbia Road. Despite the recent "greening" of parts of Columbia Road by the Boston Department of Parks and Recreation, the corridor is not a parkway along the lines of other sections of the Emerald Necklace in Jamaica Plain.
https://web.archive.org/web/2011052...an.harvard.edu/hotc/DisplayPlace.asp?id=11460
