OP-ED; For a vibrant Greenway, privatize!

Thomas M. KEANE, Jr.
725 words
31 May 2002
Boston Herald
All Editions
027
English
(Copyright 2002)

When it comes to city planning, Boston loves big, bloviated discussions that go on forever and seem to amount to little. We're now in the middle of one involving the strip of land the city will soon receive as its gift for enduring the $15 billion Big Dig.

Other recent urban planning exercises don't give much cause for optimism. Remember the years of discussion about City Hall Plaza? It's still a brick wasteland. A new Fenway Park? Turns out we didn't need one after all. The master plan for building over the Turnpike? Taking up shelf space. A new convention center? Huge, almost finished - and almost empty for the foreseeable future.

My best guess is that the Big Dig land (officially dubbed the Rose Kennedy Greenway) will eventually be an eight-lane surface highway that will handle overflow from the soon-to-be congested Big Dig roadways.

OK, I'm a little cranky. But the discussions have had a pie-in- the-sky quality about them. A few observations.

-- Seventy-five-25 has got to go. When the Big Dig was approved, the deal was that 75 percent of the land had to be open space. Bad decision. Boston doesn't need more open space; it needs more built space.

Think about the North End. It's interesting for its streets, shops, people and pasta. No one visits just to go to Christopher Columbus Park. If the North End were somehow 75 percent parkland, it would be visited as frequently as City Hall Plaza - rarely.

And speaking of the plaza: Christmas has been over for five months, but one still can see the Enchanted Village set up on the plaza. Why? It has no place to go and, more importantly, it's not like we need the space. The truth is, Boston can't make effective use of the open spaces it already has.

-- It's not interesting land. The bloviators love to rhapsodize about the preciousness of the new land we're getting. Actually, it's pretty dull - that's why the elevated highway was built there in the first place. If the new land were waterfront property, then it would be interesting. Or if the Greenway were more compact, like the South Boston waterfront, then one could envision some discrete use.

But it's a 200-foot-wide strip running through many sections of the city. It's transitional space, a moat between downtown and the waterfront, that can best be used by fitting in with the uses that surround it.

-- So far, everything is boring. Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell wrote about the Greenway, "Nearly every proposal so far has been a cliche." No kidding.

Take a much-discussed idea: the Horticultural Society's plan for a botanical garden.

Yawn. A place with lots of almost indistinguishable flowers and bushes all carefully labeled is a once-in-a-lifetime experience - we'll only go once. Until the Big Dig came along, few clamored for a botanical garden. Boston can't even keep the Franklin Park Zoo running, where at least the exhibits move.

I don't think that the lack of interesting ideas is due to inherent failure of creativity. Boston doesn't need more exhibits, museums and other Disney-like attractions. What the city needs is real places with real buildings with real people living and working - which leads to my final point.

-- Let the private sector do it. This may seem like heresy. Yet Boston's most interesting neighborhoods were all privately built. Moreover, publicly owned and managed spaces are subject to budgetary and political vicissitudes. Private owners are subject to the far more rational discipline of the markets they are trying to serve.

I know, I know. Visions of the Natick Mall are dancing in your head. Still, the right role of government should be to set strict rules about uses, heights and such things, and then sell small parcels to developers. That, by the way, is how in the 19th century we got the Back Bay - the best example of when a long-winded, public discussion about the creation and use of a new piece of land actually got it right.

Tom Keane can be reached at tom@tomkeane.com

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