Boston's Big Dig

  

At mid-20th century, Boston was in the midst of a severe three-decade long economic and population decline which, it was hoped, could be stemmed, if not actually reversed, by improving access to the struggling downtown. The solution was to add the then most sought after urban way cutting right into and through the heart of the city. The day’s media labeled it, with pride, ”Boston’s Highway in the Sky”. The goals for this sky road were to add substantial new auto traffic capacity, decongest the obsolete and Crooked called) the most dilapidated old fabric so that visual prominence as much as its traffic-moving capabilities was a sign of progress. Siegfried Gideon’s contemporaneous message, about the need for “bold saber strokes” to modernize the city, were being heard loud and clear in Boston.

(The essay’s subtitle is a play on Siegfried Gideon’s monumental 1941 book, Space, Time and Architecture, in which he championed the transformative potential of modern architecture and culture, including the ability to conceive and build projects, such as the Central Artery.)

 

Boston is enjoying a sustained period of renewal and prosperity(apart from today’s economy).It is considered among the real success stories of the capacity for revival that America’s older central cities have been showing over the prior decade. To enhance its status as one of the nation's most urbane places, it replaced the infrastructure that was a prior generation’s hope for renewal, but quickly became functionally obsolete and a visual and environmental nuisance as well. The replacement is a more modern—and wider (this fact is of-ten overlooked) traffic artery—now built out of sight, mostly. Its visible features planned to be not road ways, but parks and similar amenities believed today to be essential for the health of an important American downtown. Some of the city building lessons that can be drawn from Boston's metamorphosis since the 1950s include：

 

1.Transportation is a dominant force in shaping cities, as it has already been, but specific transportation solutions can impede as well as catalyze urbanity. The 1950s hope was that wider, faster highways would slow the rates of urban disinvestment and suburban flight. In most cities better highways accelerated peripheral growth, making it easier to leave not Commute to the center.

 

2.While a powerful force of urbanization, mobility should not be pursued as an independent variable. Writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities soon after the completion of the Artery, Jane Jacobs decried massive interventions for so singular a purpose as moving automobiles and referred to ”intricate mingling” as the essence of cities. While welcoming, no doubt, the removal of the Artery she would be critical of those who argue that open space alone will provide for her intricate mingling.

 

3.The original Artery was built with little fear of consequences, including the displacement of son]e 20,000 Bostonians, the Severing of dozens of local streets and the bisecting of several poor, ethnic neighborhoods. Today’s Artery rebuilders-and citizens even more-are mindful of the risks of so large an undertaking and insist on mitigation. Beyond minimizing disruption during construction the demanded mitigation included open space and public facilities, transit improvements, pedestrian amenities, adjacent roadways, upgraded utilities, air-quality and other environmental Concerns, neighborhood facilities, housing, public art, and many others. These have added billions to the cost of the project, but are the very components that wise long-view planning would recommend as a transportation network is altered.

 

4.Building urban infrastructure is hard. Rebuilding it is much harder. The cost of the original Artery construction was a then astronomical 110,000,000 US dollars (over 800,000,000 in today’s US dollars). The reconstruction, mitigation included, was costing nearly 100,000,000 US dollars each month for more than a decade! Apart from dollars there are the difficulties of reaching consensus.

 

5.City making requires time, patience, and persistence of vision. Yet, over time values change, requiring adjustment to the vision. The earliest musings about a north/south “Business Thoroughfare,” essentially a broad city street, occurred around 1910. Serious proposals for a highway began in the 1930s. Final planning took place in the late 1940s.Construction took nearly another decade. The calls to widen/remove/relocate the highway began in the early 1970s,a mere dozen years following its completion. It has taken thirty years to realize that improbable vision of re-construction. Hopefully, today’s underground highway and surface Greenway will serve the city longer, but a further corollary to the above is：

 

6.The impacts of planning decisions are not often felt immediately and then do not always turn out as anticipated. Few would have guessed in the 1 950s that a road designed to carry 75,000 cars per day-twice the then needed capacity—would within a generation serve (poorly, of course) more than twice the designed capacity. As many have pointed out, the temporary improvement gained by added road capacity soon evaporates as additional traffic is enticed to use that capacity. But that does not mean that no increased traffic capacity should have been built during the 1 950s.We cannot now be sure what the course of Boston’s economic recovery would have been had not the Artery, or some other version of it, been built.

 

7.Cities are more resilient than we sometimes believe, while local optimism and caution are occasionally found in reverse of prevailing economic conditions. The Boston of the 1950s should have been a dispiriting place, well along to shedding one quarter of its population and nearly a third of its taxable economy. While there was opposition to the Artery construction, especially among those whose homes and neighborhoods were sacrificed to the cause, there was a general optimism about the future because projects like the Artery were underway. Newspaper headlines looked forward to better days. Amidst more prosperous times today (than Boston’s 1 950s) there is a prevailing Caution, if not outright pessimism, about diminishing qualities of life, and even about whether we are planning wisely for the post Artery era. Headlines, rarely laudatory in recent years, focus on cost overruns not the seminal achievement of removing tile blight of a major urban highway while increasing traffic capacity.

So the Big Dig has been a great achievement, albeit a lengthy and costly one. Ah, but now for a substantial lament, and a necessary personal disclaimer. The project’s most enduring gift to the City of Boston, beyond a better functioning roadway system, was to be an extraordinary series of open spaces and public realm enhancements in place of the elevated highway. That goal has proven to be elusive. Expressed disappointment with the ”Rose Kennedy Greenway,” as the surface above the buried highway was named, outnumber outpourings of genuine affection. There are advocates to be sure, but their praise seems less earnest, rather a masking, one suspects, of disappointment. Since Bostonians’ waited for the ”good stuff” so long, through much daily disruption and with such grand expectations, they find it difficult to admit to the shortcomings.

 

Segments of the Greenway are well designed, and contribute substantially to the life of the downtown. By far the best of these are the two North End Parks designed by the Seattle-based firm of Gustafson, Guthrie, Nichol LTD with the support of Crosby, Schlesinger, Smallridge LLC of Boston. These parks are sited to either side of a restored Hanover Street, one of the oldest streets in the city having been severed by the original Central Artery, but now once more connecting the lively North End to the Government Center Area. Each of these parks contains a rich array “of planted areas of trees and flowerbeds, open lawns, sitting and play areas. These parks have been ‘‘adopted’’ by the nearby North End residents who make good use of them. Thus they function somewhat like traditional neighborhood parks, while also attracting tourists and visitors who populate the Hanover Street corridor. Unfortunately, to the north and south are open ramp parcels that isolate these two parks from other landscaped segments of the Greenway.

 

Another special environment has been created adjacent to Boston’s ”Chinatown” district. Conceptualized by the talented Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu and executed by Carl R. Johnson and Associates of Boston, this quite small oasis presents a modern interpretation of a traditional Chinese garden. And like such enabling one to experience a beautiful retreat from the expanse and bustle of the adjacent city.

 

A fountain marks the center of the Wharf District Parks. Light columns frame the two central parcels. Trees grow in grass moulds. Below：North End Parks designed by Gustafson Guthrie Nichol with Crosby Schlesinger Smallridge function like traditional neighborhood parks, while also attracting tourists

 

Between these two carefully crafted public places, each benefitting from an adjacent residential area, is a long stretch of less compelling landscapes. The large paved plaza and subway kiosks at Dewey Square, designed by the Associates, are elegant enough, but the area over—all appears somehow featureless. The shallow depth of both road and transit tunnels at this location prevented substantial plantings and so exacerbates the sense of openness and shapelessness. A lengthy segment between Dewey Square and Rowes Wharf has yet to be designed, but has been landscaped in a decidedly suburban office park manner as a ”temporary measure” by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The biggest disappointment are the Wharf District parcels, designed by EDAW(now AECOM)with the support of Copley Wolff Design Group of Boston, the latter firm also designed, under a separate contract, the sidewalk streetscapes along the two surface streets which bracket the Greenway. This is at the midpoint of the Greenway most immediately connecting the downtown to the harbor, and yet the landscape treatments here are simpleminded, almost banal, with the exception of the (now near ubiquitous) interactive fountain that kids and their parents of course enjoy. Here, too, difficult below grade constraints may have constrained the designers, but that is no real excuse. Lastly, the four sets of ramp parcels remain uncovered with increasing doubt as to when, if ever, they will be capped with the cultural facilities that earlier plans recommended. The overall result is hardly a continuous Greenway, regardless its name.

 

Despite what planners say about how it's just a matter of time before the Greenway gets better and we learn to love it and use it more, this plan—net believes that it is destined to remain a mediocre public environment, though, of course, a significant improvement over the old Central Artery—that fact, by the way, not being a legitimate excuse for its mediocrity. It was a conceptual error to plan for the entirety of the corridor as a linear greenway in the first place.

 

It was actually never clear why Boston needed a linear greensward at this location. There are sonic remarkable linear open spaces in Boston, including the Charles River Esplanade, Olmsted’s glorious Emerald Necklace, Pleasure Bay in South Boston, along the ocean’s edge(a block away)a completed portion of a 47-mile long Harbor Walk taking shape over three decades, and finally the Southwest Corridor Parks through South End, Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, an open space and transit corridor having substituted for a planned but never built urban highway. The Greenway is not a sibling t()these. It is narrow, edged by wide roads and four sets of highway ramps emerge from the tunnels along its path；it has too many other perpendicular interruptions, again mostly roads；it is poorly landscaped, often for technical reasons not only due to poor funding and less than brilliant landscape architecture；it has too few activities along its edges, too few people living near it, which is what nourishes urban open spaces more than tourists of Office workers；it will be hard to program sufficiently, unlike a smaller space like Post Office Square-more on this later；and difficult and costly to properly maintain. Lastly, the natural pedestrian stream connecting the Boston Common/Freedom Trail/Government Center／Faneuil Hall Marketplace to the city’s waterfront is perpendicular to, not along, the Greenway.

 

The reason it was conceptualized and sold to the public as a greenway was largely due to the unwarranted but very prevalent rumor two decades ago that the Turnpike Authority was going to offset the cost of the Big Dig by selling massive developer air—rights over the tunnel. There was also the matter of various pending lawsuits against the Artery Project by a host of environmental groups who saw it as a highway capacity expansion project(which technically it was)and who hoped that a North Station／South Station transit line would be a part of the mitigation for adding more highway capacity. It was much easier for Big Dig managers to offer”75 percent open space” than to seriously address some of the environmental and transit concerns. To paraphrase Marie Antoinette, ”let them eat open space” served well as a strategy, with the idea of “a two mile park’’ running through the heart of the downtown an irresistible promise. In the late1 980s the Director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority promised 1 0,000 trees along it and a grand new strand of the Emerald Necklace. Citizens believed the rhetoric, hardly imagining paltry four -inch caliper trees, widely spaced, planted along long stretches of it. Some segments seem more ”concrete way” than greenway.

 

In 1987 the Boston Redevelopment Authority retained my firm to develop the city’s first official plan for the future surface corridor. We dubbed it the ”Seven Copley Squares Plan," projecting seven public parks about the size of venerable Copley Square along the corridor. Between each of these were envisioned modest air-rights developments such as cultural facilities and housing so that, like Post Office Square, each new parked by the myriad activities of the city-catalyzing, we hoped, some of Jane Jacob’s intimate minglings. Post Office Square did not yet exist；so today the slogan would have been’ Seven Post Office Squares for the City.’ Post Office Square is brilliant not only for its extensive aim beautiful planting, also on a roof of a substantial underground garage, but because it is perfectly sized for a downtown that seven new parks interspersed with reasonable development in the manner of Copley or Post Office Squares would have done substantially more than the city than the non-continuous Greenway.

 

Some aspects of the earlier idea survive in the identification of several parcels (principally the ramp parcels) for future cultural uses, and the idea of creating clear identifiable places, such as achieved at the North End Park, by far the best-designed portion of the Greenway. But the primary reason for the abandonment of the idea by the city and the Turnpike Authority was that it only promised 50 percent open space while the Environmental Secretary in finally approving the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the project demanded that 75 percent open space had to result. This was another maneuver to appease the environmental opponents of the project, and it worked. How can one argue against open space? The 75 percent rule prevailed, and led to the idea of a continuous Greenway. People walking across it may not instantly recognize it as such. Few confuse it with Commonwealth Avenue, the city’s premier late 19th century ”Parisian” avenue. What Boston got was a “boulevoid” instead of a great new boulevard.

 

Yes, it’s bound to get better over time as adjoining properties turn windows and doors towards it and as the landscape matures. But we are also witnessing the limitation of the original idea of a continuous linear space, shapeless and largely “activity-less”: Winding through our downtown. Had we learned the proper lessons from the successful Post Office Square and the very unsuccessful nearby City Hall Plaza, we might have been less seduced by the clarion call of “just open space no buildings in the corridor “to demand a series of urban parks and squares well defined, well scaled, we located, well spaced, and properly supported by activities and uses at their perimeter. A more vital, varied, enjoyable and more beautiful urban fabric would have better healed the scar of the old highway.