Tag Archives: Boston parks

Bad bill for good parks

There’s a piece of legislation, House No. 853, that sounds like mom and apple pie. We want to protect our parks. So why not pass a law that would prevent any building not conforming to Boston’s 1990 zoning code from creating any new shadow on the Esplanade, Christopher Columbus Park, the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, Copley Square and the Back Bay Fens and Magazine Beach?

“An act protecting certain public parks” was filed by state Representative Marty Walz, one of the bill’s three sponsors. Walz said that passage of the bill would protect the parks from shadows just as the 1990 legislation protecting the Common has “proven successful in ‘balancing’ development.”

Walz said she sponsored the bill because “we don’t trust the BRA to make the right choices for the city.”

But this bill has problems. It pits parks against other important goals. It further erodes Boston’s autonomy in that the legislature is making decisions that should be left to city officials. Finally, it may end up hurting the parks more than it helps them. Continue reading →

Greenway blues

Our daughter, who grew up in downtown Boston, came down from New Hampshire to take her children for a walk on the Greenway.

 “It’s a median,” she grumbled. Then she went off to the Public Garden.

And there it is—the contrast. How is it that the 19th century city that got its open spaces so right with the Public Garden, Commonwealth Avenue, Louisburg Square, the small squares in the South End, and an enhanced Boston Common, got it so wrong in the 20th and 21st—City Hall Plaza, the new parks along the Charles River with no people in them, Copley Square, which had to be redone several times, and now the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway?

 The answers have to do with the modernist movement in architecture and contradictorily, the romantic notion that anything green and open in a city is better than buildings. But that’s for another time. This is about the Greenway. Continue reading →