The Rose Kennedy Greenway is officially open for business! Tune in today at 1 pm for a lively discussion about the new park.

Do you like what you see out there? Do you think it needs work? How about the rest of the neighborhood? Are you like Mayor Menino, who wants to avoid the “Manhattanization” of downtown, with ever taller buildings forming an “urban canyon” around the parks? Or would greater density suit you?

We want to hear from you! Leave your comments here, or call during the show at 1-800-423-TALK.

We’ll have Peter Meade, chair of the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy in the studio. Also on tap will be Thomas Piper, a research scientist at MIT’s Department of Urban Planning.

Tom spent much of 2002 traveling, checking out the great boulevards, avenues, and public spaces of the world as part of the Boston Globe/MIT/WCVB joint effort “Beyond the Big Dig.” He thinks the Greenway needs a lot of work before it can stack up internationally.

We’re also going to check in on the Greenway’s sister project, the BRA’s Crossroads Initiative. It’ll be pretty tough for the Greenway to reconnect downtown with the harbor without great cross streets to take you there; Crossroads Initiative project manager Peter Gori will give us the skinny. A big improvement project for Broad Street is apparently about to get under way.

For those of you following along at home, here are some helpful links to check out before/during the show:

The conservancy has this nice “walk in the park” feature set up on their site; it gives a basic overview of the four major park segments.

Writer Tom Keane wrote this article in January calling the Greenway “nothing more than the world’s most expensive median strip.”

Landscape architect Shirley Kressel wrote a Globe Op-Ed this summer calling the Greenway Conservancy a “private power grab” with public dollars.  The conservancy shot back with a staunch defense.