They’re calling this Saturday (October 4th) the Inaugural celebration of the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Eventually we’ll get used to calling it that or “the Greenway” (just as we’ll always call Boston Garden, “the Gahden” no matter which bank has bought the name rights). But for now and for those of us who’ve lived here for a while, what we picture isn’t the Greenway but that which it replaces: The Elevated Central Artery, that wretched hulk of rusting steel that elevated traffic congestion and split the city from the waterfront like a gutted codfish.
For the last week I’ve been talking to landscape architects, road builders, residents, and critics about the Greenway that the Big Dig builders billed as a jewel fit for the Emerald Necklace of parkland. What’s ironic is that the motivation for the Big Dig was not to make traffic run faster so much as to get rid of the eyesore of the Elevated Artery and re-knit the scar on the city.
Fred Salvucci, often dubbed the Godfather of the Big Dig, told me today how he went to then Mayor Kevin White in the early Seventies with the idea of moving the artery underground to get White’s approval to advance the idea to then Governor Frank Sergeant.
“He grabs me by the elbow, pulls me over to the brass railing looking down to Faneuil Hall and points to the Elevated Central Artery. ‘ Look at that goddamn hulk of steel out there,’ he says. ‘Raped my city, ripped the city in half…I always said that goddamn thing should be underground. It’s my idea! You go up there and tell Frank Sargeant if he doesn’t put that road underground, I’m going to turn every street in the city one way, out! Go to it.’
Right boss.”
Ironically Salvucci’s and White’s idea of getting rid of the ugly hulk that divided the city from the waterfront and walled off the North End became a huge federal transportation project at phenomenal cost that made the greenway a distant and diminished caboose.
This week we’ll look at what it is, what it could have been, and what it still might be.
Sounds like it’ll be a good show… I’ll be listening.
I HOPE there is still hope for the Greenway. Other cities have done it right despite competing interests and red tape. The problem in Boston is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. What should have happened was a juried international competition for a landscape architect to design the entire Project and an international call for artists specializing in large scale public art works (think of Anish Kapoor’s Cloudgate in Chicago) to be installed on the Greenway.
Competitions such as these generate income from charging fees for submissions. After the juror’s honorarium, the remainder of the money could have gone towards funding the cost of developing the winning designs.
I worked as a National Park Service Ranger at the Boston Harbor Islands this summer, and I walked along the Greenway every day. I’ve found that it’s a beautiful place, especially in comparison to what it once was. Certainly there is more work to be done - as with any park - but is this really such a terrible thing? The Big Dig was a massive undertaking, and with so many different interests and forces at work there was bound to be imperfections in the final product. I am content knowing that the Green Way is a tremendous improvement to the overpass, and that the Greenway of the future will inevitably be an improvement over the current one.