One neighborhood wary, another welcoming

Last of three parts

As wrangling continues over the final designs for the Rose Kennedy Greenway, one thing is certain: The submersion of the Central Artery will transform two of the city's most ethnically cohesive neighborhoods, Chinatown and the North End.

In Chinatown, the end of the $14.6 billion project signals the disappearance of the exit ramps and roadway stretches that hemmed in the neighborhood. But it will also bring new challenges -- of newcomers, intensive development, and luxury residential projects that could seriously alter the composition of a tightly knit neighborhood. Anxiety is already heightened as the bordering high-rent Leather District flourishes, bringing more and more affluent residents and imperiling the area's Asian identity.

Chinatown residents have reacted to the proposals for the Greenway warily, with some feeling betrayed by public works projects in the past and struggling with the effects of nearby development. Fear runs high that mom-and-pop stores and restaurants will be displaced by a swank new urban scene; residents are pressing for open space and affordable housing to maintain a livable place for the many older people who live there.

North End residents, by contrast, have greeted the dismantling of the elevated highway with a sense of hopefulness and relief -- and a determination to shape the future of their neighborhood. The Central Artery left the bustling commercial hub of Cross Street in shadows and cut off the neighborhood from the rest of the city -- even from Haymarket, the open-air market for fresh produce and seafood that embodied the old-country ways of Italian immigrants.

Now, as the city restitches the North End to Downtown, residents of the neighborhood -- from first-generation immigrants to young professionals in converted condomiums -- are actively participating in the Greenway's design, attempting to make sure that the last vestiges of the beloved enclave don't disappear and injecting Italian-style touches to the parks. The North Enders are in some ways better prepared for the transformation, having gone through three decades of gentrification and grown accustomed to absorbing outsiders.

Still, they have never faced anything like the Greenway -- envisioned as a magnet of amenities and open space not just for tourists, but for thousands of new residents that city planners want to attract to Downtown. Urban living is popular again, but planners know it works best when residential buildings, cafes, parks, and museums are clustered; development pressures, therefore, are likely to be intense.

That may be why established residents have been paying such close attention. Burying the highway has become both blessing and curse. In the places that thousands call home, the pace of change is about to quicken.