Park with Chinatown flair is first of three to blossom on Greenway

A 1-acre parcel at the edge of Chinatown, formerly an offramp from Interstate 93, was reborn yesterday as the first of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway's parks, complete with towering bamboo trees, purple azaleas, Chinese willows, and a wide promenade winding along a lazy, babbling brook.

"It's really nice," said Anna Maria Kesera, 48, of Boston, as she paused next to a small waterfall and looked around the park. "I like that Boston is improving into a city that looks nice, like a European city or Montreal or San Francisco. It's something different."

The $4.5 million park represents a significant change for a part of Boston that was once divided by the Central Artery and was later transformed into a giant construction zone while the highway was buried. Winding from the old Chinatown gate to a new, red modernistic gate at Surface Road and Essex Street, the park incorporates aspects of Chinese culture, artistically represented by the fan-shaped pattern of the paving stones and landscaping with Asian grasses, flowers, and trees.

"This very site was an ugly, unsafe ramp that went to the Expressway and cut right through the heart of Chinatown," said House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi, who joined other political officials and community leaders at a ribbon-cutting in the park yesterday. "It was not a great entrance to the neighborhood. This will bring us back to the kind of open space we want to see in this city."

The park is at the south end of the Greenway, a milelong string of shaded sidewalks, open plazas, wide lawns, and multiple parks that begins at North Station. The Greenway was first proposed in the 1970s as a way to reconnect Boston's waterfront with the rest of the city after completion of the Big Dig.

The Greenway's three parks - in Chinatown, the Wharf District, and the North End - had been scheduled to open late last year and early this summer. Now, the plan is to have the parks in the Wharf District and the North End "either opened or partially open by the end of October," said Mac Daniel, spokesman for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, which is constructing the parks.

Even then, the Greenway won't be quite finished, said Peter Meade, chairman of the Greenway Conservancy, a private group created in 2004 to manage the parks.

"To have everything open, we're talking sometime next year," Meade said after yesterday's ceremony, adding that work on the project, which has a total pricetag of roughly $100 million, is still needed near some I-93 ramps.

Fund-raising is underway for three buildings that eventually will be located on the Greenway - a YMCA near the North End, a Boston Museum near Quincy Market, and the New Center for Arts and Culture, an exhibition space near Rowes Wharf.

In an interview after the ceremony, DiMasi said he is working on legislation to provide for the Greenway's maintenance after the turnpike's commitment to the project expires in five years.

"I'm keeping a close eye on all of the parks," DiMasi said. "We're going to try to address how to keep these parks as beautiful as they are on the first day they are opened."

Arthur Bolt, 45, said he has been enjoying the Chinatown park since fences surrounding it were removed last week.

"So far, so good," Bolt said, sitting on a stone wall while taking a break from his job in a nearby office tower. "It's something we've been waiting to have open for a long time. . . . I come over here to sit down, listen to the water. It takes the stress away."

Ryan Haggerty can be reached at rhaggerty@globe.com.