Fascination amid the artery wreckage
Fragments of old steel structures give future greenway site an air of mystery
A walk on the site of the future greenway is a revelation.
I don't think anybody imagined the space would be this big or this dramatic. And I don't think anybody imagined that it would transform our perception of the whole city. But it does.
The Rose Kennedy Greenway is, or will be, a long, twisting snake of space that squirms through downtown Boston along the site of the overhead Central Artery. The hated artery, Boston's other Green Monster, is finally coming down after 45 years.
It's just possible that the greenway site is more stunning today than it will ever be again. That's because of the way the remaining fragments of the old artery stand around in it, like mysterious wreckage from an earlier civilization. They may be junk, but -- as artists long ago discovered -- junk can be visually rich.
Clusters of steel columns and girders look as compelling as a David Smith sculpture. Often they form arches, which frame views of the city the way a proscenium frames a play. The fragments inhabit the space. They enliven it. They are its temporary population. They give it a scale and a measure that it needs. You have to wonder how vacant, how Martian, the space is going to look without them.
Picking your way through this wasteland of construction detritus isn't exactly fun. It's clear that this may be the worst possible year for a political convention. Downtown Boston is going to look like a war zone in July, no question. But for lovers of industrial dreck, among whom I count myself, it's a fascinating war zone. You can't put your camera down.
Standing in the space, you become aware of other things, too. I've always thought of San Francisco as the city that is most visible to itself. From hill to hill, or across the bay, you're always in visual contact with other parts of the city.
Boston is like that now, too. Standing in the artery space, you notice how buildings at the edge of the space take on new importance. They're suddenly standing in the front row.
You see, too, perhaps for the first time, the downtown office towers as a group. They cluster and look over you like a family of giants. You're aware of the water, too, and how close it is. You're aware of the Blackstone Block, the North End, and the Bulfinch Triangle as separate, distinct entities in the city. You feel that you're at the place where the disparate parts of the central city meet.
I wrote those words before seeing a presentation on Tuesday by Ken Greenberg, the Toronto-based urban designer who's been hired by Mayor Menino to figure out how to get the greenway to mesh usefully with the rest of the city around it.
Greenberg, too, sees the greenway as a connector. It can be the place where Boston's many distinct communities, often walled off from one another by natural or man-made barriers, come together on common ground. Both he and the mayor see it as the center of a web of connections, not as an isolated park.
People have been arguing about what to do on the artery surface for 14 years now, and there's still no resolution. Walking the site, I was struck with an irreverent thought: Nobody should even have started designing the surface of the future greenway until the artery came down. Only now can we begin to grasp the nature of the space. We can at last perceive its enormous scale. We can see how hard it will be to fill all that space with life. Standing in it for the first time, we can see and appreciate its intense relationship to every point of the city around it.
My three criteria for a good environment are that it should be interesting, useful, and beautiful -- in descending order. The artery site, filled with dreck, today is endlessly interesting. But it isn't useful, and most people wouldn't call it beautiful. I hope that when the greenway is finished, it will still be as interesting as it is today, and that it will be just as useful as it is beautiful.
Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com. 