A walk in progress

A tour of the (more or less) finished sections of the new Greenway reveals that intentions have been met - and missed

CHINATOWN The effect is to take you out of the city altogether and make you feel you're in a natural setting. (Photos by pat greenhouse/globe staff)

There might as well be three Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenways. That's how varied are the segments into which it's divided.

Each was designed by a different landscape architect. The Greenway, as a result, is an instructive little anthology of three different design goals, three different attitudes toward public space in the city.

It wouldn't be fair to make final judgments about the Greenway or how well, eventually, it will turn out. Chunks remain unfinished. There are four sites along its length where buildings are proposed. We don't know yet which of these will be realized, or what they will look like.

But we've been waiting for the Greenway a long time. There's an irresistible urge, before winter sets in, to get out and take a walk on it. I did that on a recent Sunday. I deliberately made a point of not doing any special research. I wanted to be an ordinary stroller, seeing the Greenway freshly, trying to figure it out for myself, rather than approaching it through the minds of its designers.

I started at the Greenway's southern end, in Chinatown. This segment, the smallest of the three, was designed by landscape architect Carol Johnson Associates of Boston. It's not one space. It's three or four, of different sizes and shapes, divided by cross streets.

Johnson's design goal for the Greenway seems to be to recapture a feeling of the coastline of Boston in the days when it was located near here, before landfill projects extended the city farther out into the harbor. Long, loose piles of rugged boulders, like those of a breakwater, line a pedestrian path. The path isn't straight, but wanders as if it were following a natural water line. Plantings feel random, as if they'd grown up spontaneously.

The effect is to take you out of the city altogether and make you feel you're in a natural setting. It's an attitude toward nature in the city that recalls the work of the great 19th-century park designer Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted's parks, like Franklin Park in Boston, are a sanitized version of nature, suitable for romantic strolling.

The other feature of the Chinatown Greenway isn't quite in place yet. It consists of big, red, steel, boxlike frames, perhaps 15 feet tall, with bamboo shoots just beginning to climb up inside them. When the shoots fill the frames the effect will be that of a series of bamboo box hedges. That's something quite different from the seafront feeling of other parts of the Chinatown park, but it's very Chinese. And it introduces an element of invention and surprise that's all too lacking in other sections of the Greenway.

When you walk north from Chinatown, you pass through a no man's land dominated by the Federal Reserve tower. Here, at sidewalk level, a hideous array of metal stanchions are deployed to foil truck bombers from approaching the bank. They are about as welcoming as a row of bayonets. They're not part of the Greenway, of course, but they interrupt it.

When the Greenway does pick up again, it's another kind of no man's land. This is the string of sites where there was to have been a glass conservatory, managed by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. That plan fell through, and the area, today, is occupied by a presumably temporary, rather boring array of green lawns shaped into gentle slopes and hillocks. You feel you're on an abandoned golf course.

OK, fast forward. We're now in what was supposed to be the heart and soul of the Greenway, the so-called wharf district, which runs from Northern Avenue all the way almost to the North End. By far the longest of the three Greenway segments, it was designed by EDAW, a giant firm of planners and landscape architects with 34 offices worldwide.

For this observer, this key part of the Greenway is a perplexing mess. Its two focal points are a circular plaza in front of the great arch of Rowes Wharf, and a rectangular area, which I'll call Lantern Square, farther up near the Aquarium.

The Rowes plaza is pleasant enough, in an unimaginative sort of way, although there doesn't seem to be any particular reason why it's located here. Lantern Square, on the other hand - intended as the climax of the Greenway - is a timid disaster. It's surrounded on three sides by tall metal towers. At night, the towers serve as street lights. Apparently they're supposed to frame the space and, by doing so, define it as a great public square. But they are much too flimsy to accomplish that goal. In fact they appear temporary, as if they're leftovers from some stage set that is in the process of being removed.

Each tower frames, at its feet, a granite seat that looks as stiff and uncomfortable as a furnishing from an Egyptian tomb. Each also supports an overhead metal grille, the purpose of which is unclear, since its open slats don't protect the seat below from either sun or rain.

There are other random moves here - a round pattern in the pavement, a few metal benches, some grass. Lantern Square and its environs look as if they'd been designed by an international committee, no two of whose members spoke the same language. EDAW's design goal is to create a celebratory urban space, a place where we gather to cheer our heroes and mix with one another. But it doesn't come off.

It's a pleasure, after that disappointment, to move on to the North End piece of the Greenway, even though you still have to traverse a construction site to get there. Designed by landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, of Seattle, the North End is the place where the Greenway, at long last, sings. It's clear at the first glance that this park is the product of a designer who knew what she wanted and how to get it. The park is clear, bold, simple, practical, and memorable.

A long grandstand, its roof protecting a single row of benches, lines the park on the harbor side. Vines are climbing up on it, and they will, presumably, eventually extend out over the open roof to convert the entire grandstand into a green arbor. The grandstand looks out over generous plazas and playing fields, on the far side of which - the city side - there's a buffer of thick planting. That's about it: no fuss, few small gestures. The design goal seems clear: to create a place that can be taken over by any group that wants it, from soccer players to picnickers to food stalls to skateboarders, with a quiet line of witnesses along the grandstand.

An odd little paving strip of granite angles its way across Gustafson's lawn. It's inexplicable to me, but it does no harm.

The North End park is a gem. I like the Chinatown park, too. As for the Wharf District parks - well, it's helpful to remember that even great cities don't always get things right for the first few centuries. It took half a millennium to finish the Piazza San Marco, in Venice.

A lot of things are going to change around the Greenway, some of them soon. Privately owned sites on both sides will reorient themselves toward the new parks, to take advantage of this valuable frontage. Buildings will sprout new wings and entrances and, one hopes, coffee bars and restaurants with tables and chairs. The Greenway needs that kind of active, vital edge. And Mayor Menino's "Crossroads Initiative," the brainchild of Toronto planner Ken Greenberg, will, if it's fully implemented, upgrade the streets that cross the Greenway, widening sidewalks and planting trees.

Also due to change is the resident population. As more people come to live downtown and become users of the Greenway, it will be safer and livelier. Finally, much depends on the work of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, the group that will manage the Greenway. There's talk of concerts, cafes, performances, ice skating. They'll be needed. Under-programmed, ill-maintained open space in a city quickly degenerates into a wasteland of blowing newspapers, homeless men, and worse.

I'm trying to be hopeful. The depressing truth is that the Greenway, already years overdue, is not what we hoped. As noted, long stretches remain unfinished. Of the three more or less finished park segments, one is very good, one is OK, and one is very weak.

Also promised were four new buildings - two museums, a YMCA, and a "Garden Under Glass," none of which has been started. There was also to be a visitors' center. Maybe, if we live long enough, some of these will bring a splash of vitality and a more human scale to a stretch of land that feels, today, shapeless and unfocused.

So this is a very preliminary report. A lot more needs to happen if the potential of the Greenway is ever to be realized.

Robert Campbell, the Globe's architecture critic, can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.