After reworking city's face, Greenway gatekeeper retires

At a new park on Fort Point Channel, a large chunk of the old steel bridge that once carried freight trains across the canal has been deleaded, repainted, and installed by the Big Dig as a sculptural reminder of the city's past. It's known affectionately by Turnpike Authority insiders as Fred's Folly No. 3.

Fred is Fred Yalouris, the former director of architecture and urban design for the Big Dig, who retired from the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority last month after 11 years.

His job was to coordinate the cosmetic surgery on the face of a city disfigured by the six-lane Central Artery that cut through in the 1950s. The result is the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, a 30-acre corridor of greenery and public spaces that rejoined downtown with its waterfront after five decades.

Yalouris, 59, is proud of Fred's Folly No. 3 and other relics he helped preserve, including a historic mill wheel and two steel columns that supported the old roadway. He said they are reminders of Boston's heritage and symbols of the positive changes wrought by $15 billion of construction work and 15 years of intense commuting grief.

"It's just extraordinary, the benefits that have accrued to this city," Yalouris said over lunch at the InterContinental Hotel, itself newly constructed along the Greenway and wrapped around Big Dig tunnel ventilation stacks. "It will be seen as a bargain."

In charge of the planning, design, and construction of the Greenway, Yalouris presided over one of the most dramatic transformations any city in the nation has ever seen. In addition to almost 300 acres of parks throughout the city, Yalouris was responsible for 32 new buildings, including ventilation structures for the underground highway.

Yalouris participated in, refereed, or got squeezed in the middle of a decade of monumental battles over the corridor of parks - from the North End through the Wharf District to Chinatown - that is finally expected to be complete this year. Issues included a severely constricted budget for the Chinatown Park and a proposal by the Armenian Heritage Foundation to donate a memorial park.

"Some of the advocate groups were pretty rough," Yalouris said. "A lot of people started out thinking we were the bad guys, and I don't think they ended up thinking that."

A number of the battles were focused on the new green space that is not as well known, in East Boston and elsewhere. Repeated delays on completion of the North Point parks along the Charles River leave 8 acres incomplete even today.

David Seeley, a Leather District resident and neighborhood representative involved in the Chinatown Park process, had as many wrestling matches with Yalouris as anyone.

"Fred was more forthcoming than I had thought he was initially, and his goals and aspirations for the project were never in doubt," Seeley said. "He wanted it to be a great thing, and he was willing to get in there and muck around and get it right, and that was a messy job."

Yalouris said his proudest achievement is completion of the Fort Point Channel edges, which now have four small parks and a stretch of the original granite bulwark incorporated into the city's Harborwalk.

"The Fort Point Channel used to be someplace where you never went," he said. "Now, it's a place you want to go. It has spurred development and civic pride and public use."

As important to Yalouris is what did not get built. He's proud of killing an early Big Dig plan to put a boardwalk on pilings over the channel, 15 feet from the shore. "It could have been a nightmare, there were so many disparate elements" involved in the design, he said.

Yalouris also fought successfully to keep sign clutter off the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, said former Big Dig executive Glen Berkowitz. Virtually free of highway and directional markers, the graceful and picturesque cable-stayed structure has become a symbol not only for the highway and tunnel project, but for the entire city.

While the ferocity of the neighborhood battles surprised him, Yalouris said he achieved his goals in reaching compromises among competing neighborhood and activist groups, including those who opposed Big Dig plans. Some wanted fountains or a merry-go-round in the parks; some didn't. Others wanted cobblestone walks but were opposed by cyclists and the physically challenged, who prefer smooth pavement.

"If I was able to walk away thinking everybody got something of what they wanted - or a fair and responsible explanation for why they didn't," he said, "I felt I had done the right thing."

Some do remain unhappy. Though Boston officials were supposed to have an equal hand in developing the Greenway, Mayor Thomas M. Menino consistently declined to take any financial responsibility for it. The Turnpike and the city were in perpetual conflict - from the selection of a park designer in the early 2000s on - and today City Hall feels it was shut out.

A Boston Redevelopment Authority official pointedly declined comment when asked about Yalouris for this article.

But Shirley Kressel, a landscape architect, neighborhood advocate, and constant critic at public meetings on the Greenway, praised Yalouris. "I always thought Fred was pretty OK," she said. "I think he was what we used to call in older days a real public servant."

Kressel said her only serious disappointment was the Turnpike Authority's insistence on placement of the Armenian heritage park on the Greenway, the equivalent of a $4 million gift for the Greenway, but one that bent the rules in gaining approval. "He supported getting their money for financial reasons," she said.

Yalouris left the Turnpike Authority several months before he planned to, the result of authority cost-cutting. Now, some worry about the transition of care for the Greenway to the not-yet-fully-formed Greenway Conservancy, a private nonprofit group.

"Both organizations thought the timetable was going to be longer," said Nancy Brennan, the conservancy's executive director. "The goal is not to drop the ball."

Anne Fanton, a member of the Mayor's Central Artery Completion Task Force, praised Yalouris for moving the Greenway along. But she said he and the Turnpike erred in dividing the corridor into three distinct districts, to be designed separately.

"That created an artificial division of the Greenway that made it difficult to plan as a cohesive whole," she said.

Educated in archeology at Harvard University and Oxford University, a former professor and college administrator, Yalouris was at Newbury College in the mid-1990s when he read an article by former Massachusetts transportation secretary Alan Altshuler calling for more local talent to be involved in development of the city post-Big Dig. He applied for and got the chief architecture job in 1997. More than a decade later, Yalouris left the job after working the past three years without a vacation, but with the Greenway near completion. He plans to take some time off now.

"I had not expected the public process to be so complex and so consuming," he said. "But as time went along, I felt it was vital to bring neighborhoods together and bring people behind a common goal."

Thomas C. Palmer Jr. can be reached at tpalmer@globe.com.