This one is easy for me:
the Rose Kennedy Greenway.
The RKG is a sprawling monument to this city's lack of leadership and vision in planning absolutely anything on a grand scale (see also, SB Seaport). There was a genuine, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to sew together the gash cleaved in the city's fabric by the elevated expressway. Instead, the wound has been immortalized.
And with what? The RKG lacks any clear sense of identity or purpose. It's a trickle of dressed-up lawn flanked by six lanes of traffic and strangled with on- and off-ramps. It's overwhelmed by surrounding auto traffic, prompting its designers to install walls, shrubbery, and other barriers at every turn to separate pedestrians physically and visually from the streets around them. This leads to a conspicuously introverted space, prohibits freedom of movement, and disconnects it from the city it's supposed to have "knitted together", essentially acting as much like a barrier as the old elevated artery it replaced.
And not only is it disconnected from the city, it is disconnected from itself. Try to walk the length of the Greenway. It's impossible. The road/ramp configurations make it impossible to island-hop from park to park.
Not to mention that it's virtually uninhabitable a good four months of the year. And even in seasons when the weather is relatively mild, the wind off the harbor remains fearsome.
These are just a few of the problems with our new Greenway. It has way too many to list here. It's just a dumb idea, IMO. By far the worst, most frustrating, most heartbreaking new addition to the city in '08.
