Op-Ed; It's time to thaw out plan to remake Plaza

THOMAS M. KEANE
792 words
4 October 2002
Boston Herald
All Editions
027
English
(Copyright 2002)

The igloo tells you pretty much all you need to know about what's good and bad about plans to remake Boston's City Hall Plaza.

Three stories tall and solid white, the igloo is a tent-like structure that overwhelms the plaza, blocking sunlight from city councilors' offices. It was well-intended. When Macy's purchased Jordan Marsh, it announced it was shutting down the Enchanted Village, a mechanized replica of 19th-century New England life. For generations, the exhibit had been a must-see Christmas destination, an annual trek for families.

Mayor Thomas Menino leapt at the opportunity to keep the tradition alive and in 1998 the Enchanted Village opened on City Hall Plaza. After Christmas, the exhibit was pronounced a success, taken down and, the following year, was re-erected.

And there it has sat, year-round, ever since. The annual cost of constructing and deconstructing the village's temporary home is over $500,000. The city simply doesn't have the money to spare. Meanwhile, attendance at the village has been declining. It's a warm and fuzzy memory in the minds of those who are now adults, but to today's kids, infatuated with GameCubes, it seems clunky and unrealistic.

And so it has been with all of the city's plans to reinvigorate the plaza: well-meaning, badly executed, poorly funded.

Since entering office, Menino has led the charge to do something to a public space that almost everyone agrees is a disgrace. In 1994 he sponsored a design competition and in '95 put together a group called the Trust for City Hall Plaza. Composed mostly of business leaders, each "trustee" had to put up several thousand dollars for the privilege of membership.

The trust came up with big plans, including building a hotel and parking garage on the plaza. Many advocates objected to the seeming privatization of a public space. The General Services Administration, the federal agency that owns and runs the abutting buildings, felt itself excluded and never bought into the trust's ideas. The trust held meetings and appointed advisory groups that never seemed to come to a consensus.

In the end, the trust's principal achievement was much more modest; it built something called a "community arcade." The $2.7 million arcade, 300 feet in length and running along the edge of Cambridge Street, was supposed to, in the parlance of architects, give an edge to the plaza. Yet, while the city talks bravely about how many activities now occur under the arcade, many people think it just looks weird, an afterthought or perhaps, more accurately, a desperate effort to accomplish SOMETHING.

True, the MBTA next summer will break ground on a two-year project to rebuild the ugly headhouse that marks the Government Center T stop. That overdue effort was pushed by the trust. Still, City Hall Plaza remains as moribund, ugly and useless as ever. Actually, not "as ever." The igloo has made it worse.

Another politician might have walked away. Menino, ever the optimist, has not. This week the mayor - himself admitting that efforts over the last few years have been a "failure" - unveiled his latest strategy. He's created the Government Center Task Force, whose agenda is to come up with what the mayor called an "action plan" by next spring.

The name itself is significant. Instead of defining the space as just Plaza, the new task force reaches out to a variety of constituencies. The GSA and the City Council, both excluded from the trust, are members of the new task force, and have pledged their support. Moreover, Menino has added non-business representatives, including Doug Foy, head of the powerhouse Conservation Law Foundation, Patrice Todisco of the Greenspace Alliance, and two neighborhood reps.

All of that is smart. With funding from the Boston Foundation, the new group may well generate some decent proposals. Still, there is one fundamental problem. "We'll come up with the ideas," says task force chairman Robert Walsh, "The money part will be tough."

Money was the issue that ultimately felled the trust's efforts - its rationale for privatizing the plaza was to generate profits that could then fund other improvements. If money was a problem during the boom times, it will be even more problematic today.

Still, there is hope. Menino can be very persuasive when he needs to be. Task force members seem committed to accomplishing something. I would mark it a success if they could just somehow manage to rid of that ridiculous igloo.

Tom Keane can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.

Caption: MENINO: When necessary, he can be very persuasive.

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