Promised Landscape
| From Features | By Emily HiestandWhen Boston’s hulking Central Artery descends, at last, into its new tunnel, and the I-beams and girders of the old elevated highway are carted off, one great plum of the Big Dig will stand revealed: twenty-five acres of newly open land — civic territory promised for a people’s park.
Following the trace of the highway, the park will arc from Kneeland Street in Chinatown to the North End of bocce courts and saints’ days, swinging within a block or so of the harbor, so close the breezes that ply the terrain can be tinged with salt. Bordering the parkland are such neighbors as the New England Aquarium and Quincy Market, the South Station Terminal, the Boston Harbor Hotel, and the former Flour and Grain Exchange. Also a little luncheonette named Jake’s, and the cool, briny world of the James Hook Lobster Company.
Atlantic Avenue, circa 1950.
Photo by Leslie Jones
Atlantic Avenue, summer 2002.
Photo by Emily Heistand
In a mature city like Boston, new civic space of this significance is a great rarity. “A chance like this comes along once, maybe twice, a century,” reflects Hubie Jones, dean emeritus of BU’s School of Social Work and a coleader of Boston’s City-to-City Program. “And we must get it right, because this new park will affect the lives of Bostonians for generations.”
The jury is still out on whether we will get it right. A creative and transparent political process for shepherding the park into reality has not yet fully emerged, and as I write, there are several unanswered questions, including such humdingers as: who is the client for the new park? Who will fund it? Who will take care of it? Can planners tame the gnarly traffic currently slated to sandwich the land, on a road that Jane Holtz Kay, author of Asphalt Nation, rightly calls “a brutalizing six-lane raceway”? Hovering over these many questions is another that subsumes them all — namely, what should the new park be?
It turns out that envisioning a major new civic realm is not only about spatial ingenuity, but also about values. What values do the people of Boston want to inscribe on a new and symbolic landscape? As catalyst for that question, the terrain is already serving the city as a canvas for imagination and desire, a kind of screen onto which urbanists and artists, skateboarders, ecologists and engineers, lovers of nature and lovers of cafés, moguls, pols, and preservationists are all projecting images of transformation.
The terrain has long been understood as connective tissue — a landscape that can physically reseam zones of the city separated for fifty years by the overwhelming mass and sonic wall of the elevated Central Artery. Many citizens have seen that the terrain can also be connective socially — a realm of convergence that could increase the city’s commonplace civilization. “Boston is still struggling to achieve social integration of all our citizens,” says Jones (SSW’57), “and this park is a chance to create some common ground. I’ve seen it happen. I have felt that pulse. In Chicago, for example, citizens pour into their city on weekends to enjoy the great parks and piers, the museums. And everyone comes. But here in Boston we have a paradox. Visitors find our city very special — historic, and friendly, and famously walkable. But many residents, many people of color, do not feel welcome in their own city, outside their neighborhoods. Can one park solve all of Boston’s social problems? Of course not. But the new parkland is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use physical change to foster a culture of collaboration.”
At several public forums, Bostonians have had many ideas about the virtues to inscribe on common ground. For starters, fun. Citizens of the old Puritan capital have called for much joie de vivre, for cafés and sledding hills, a hip-hop recording pavilion, movies at night on the vent stack walls, a dance hall, and more than one ice cream parlor. They want a landscape that offers that most cosmopolitan pleasure of mingling with the bandwidth of humanity. Citizens also long for connection with green and elemental forces, calling for groves of trees, a weather observatory, an apple orchard, and — this swoon of an idea — a marine fountain that ebbs and flows with the nearby tides. They ask for a park that uses energy and water wisely, a sustainable landscape that is urbi et orbi, for the city and for the world. They want peace. And they want safety, a park animated day and night, which means people living along the perimeters of the park, which means homes (affordable, please). Citizens want learning, a pavilion of history, a window to the tunnel below, bookshops, a speakers’ corner. Mozart Mondays, blues and gospel festivals. One man wants a moose. Another a moat. Handsome benches and lighting. A remnant of the steel highway structure left standing, reinvented as a trellis, or a viewing platform, or a stage.
I have been following the citywide lively debate about the parkway-to-be, captured by a conversation that reveals both the strengths and the wounds of our community, and also because the park promises to be an ideal place for flânerie, the practice of strolling a metropolis feeling alive and well — or meditative or blue — but in whatever mood, witnessing the quotidian gratuities a city offers faithfully.
It is broiling hot the day the renowned architectural critic Robert Campbell and I meet at South Station, planning to walk the length of the proposed parkway terrain. Because of the ninety degrees awaiting us, we linger a while in the cool bustle of the terminal, studying an official map of the parkland parcels (available from the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority), drinking iced coffee, listening to the poetry of American place names rumbling over Amtrak’s P.A. On the map, Campbell traces the lines of Boston’s major downtown streets — among them Causeway, Hanover, State, Milk, India, Broad, High, Oliver, Pearl, Summer and Winter, and Congress — and I see how many of these streets radiate toward the harbor, a little like the fingers of a hand, a pattern set long ago, when Boston’s wealth came from the sea, rolling from the harbor up those streets to customhouses and banks. Because these splaying streets will cross and punctuate the parkway, it will feel less like a single entity than a series of linked but individual spaces, none, Campbell points out, as large as the park at Post Office Square. “The new parkway,” he says, “is not an emerald necklace — it’s a charm bracelet.”
Walking along the terrain, it is easy to see that, like the charms of the park itself, the crossing streets could also be connective tissue, the principal lines of movement between the city and its waterfront. Designers envision boulevards of delight, pedestrian streets with arboreal colonnades and long “view corridors” to the sea. Even now, there are moments along the way where, in a gap between buildings, there is a sudden glimpse of a white sail, a tugboat nosing a tanker, a dazzle on blue water. Near India Wharf, I catch a fragment of Coast Guard cutter as Campbell broaches a question at the heart of civitas: what rituals of daily life, and what ceremonial occasions, draw contemporary city dwellers together to share their landscape? What customs, what manners and understandings connect us to one another and to a place? Which is to ask, what makes us citizens and not merely consumers en route to shops? Like Jones and other community-builders, Campbell holds out hope that Bostonians will seize the potential in a reclaimed swath of land, that the city might, as he puts it, “invent the new public realm.”
Eyes Fixed, Heart Open
On another day, on another walk, I turn from visions of a possible future to the quiddity of present reality. For much of its length, the land that may become civic treasure still lies in deep shadow under the highway. Elsewhere, it is the color of desert adobe, baked by sun, pulverized by cranes, edged by Jersey barriers, and booming with sound — a landscape that defies the very idea of cafés and climbing roses. But who will be surprised to hear that even in this condition the terrain and its immediate environ are full of allure and of the countless small things that could stop Flaubert in his tracks, the man who wrote, “Often apropos no matter what, a drop of water, a shell, a hair, you stopped and stayed motionless, eyes fixed, heart open.”
Those construction sounds, for instance. A throaty drumming, and a deep, earth-rattling whaump; percussive thwaupts; a metallic high-hat of a sound; and an eerie twittering like swallows on steroids — all tones and rhythms that belong to the random music of life that John Cage taught us to hear, a music he might have scored as “Metropolis in Metamorphosis.” What else? The limestone trace of a long-gone staircase climbing a red brick Federalist wall; a wooden whale breaching on the roof of a ticket hut; and three of the largest petunia planters ever constructed in the history of humankind, which can be seen — right now — on a plaza bordering the parkland. Two men in suits lean against the epic planters, one saying to the other, quite cheerfully, “Well, those guys are SOBs.” At Congress Street, the parkland passes a gallery where the models of ships in the window cases — schooners and three-masted clippers, sloops, and ketches, a catboat — mingle with reflections of Boston’s slender financial towers: on the glass panes, whaling schooners go ghosting through banks, and insurance buildings emerge from hulls and canvas sails. At the old Northern Avenue Bridge, an operation a swankified city must thank the Lord for — for the sign done up rickety, bait-shack style; for the man in high rubber boots offloading shellfish from Cushing, Maine; for the curls of air condensing from his refrigerated truck. Inside the James Hook Lobster Company, the air is cool and damp and the scent of the sea still clings to littlenecks, oysters, blue-black mussels, and tangles of Jonah crabs. A polite young man named Chuck will show you around a dim room where 60,000 lobsters (more in winter) await shipping; both hard shell and soft, says Chuck, who can explain how filtered saltwater flows over the creatures, how the water comes from the harbor via mighty pumps, and flows back, cleaner than before, some of it streaming from beneath the building, sounding, we agree, like a waterfall.
All along the length of the parkway route, the no-nonsense sidewalks teem with souls who will surely prefer to go wherever they are going via the park when it exists: travelers emerging from the South Station terminal, blinking, rolling black suitcases into town (memo to planners: hold the cobblestone); a weary man pushing a cart of sandwiches, salads, and ice toward some meeting; a woman running lickety-split in a long peony-pink dress and bright white heels — a late bridesmaid? Two middle-aged men in African robes, carrying leather cases. A thin woman in a tube top, pushing an old man slumped in his wheelchair. She stops to prop him up; he slumps; she props him up again. And a couple from Dresden, history buffs, carrying old and new maps of Boston, searching, they explain, for the exact, original, eighteenth-century site of Griffin Wharf, that vanished wharf where, in December of 1773, our predecessors dumped many chests of tea into the inner harbor.
A Little Urban Frisson
At noontime, I come upon three Big Dig workers who have settled near the sidewalk on a berm of grass under a couple of linden trees. They are pulling Gatorade from coolers and their blue jeans are dusted white. Seeing my map, one of them asks, friendly, “Are you lost?” I explain about the park. “Oh right, that park we’re supposed to get.” And what would these men like to see on the dusty land that is their job site? They’re unwrapping subs; hot peppers spice the air. “Jeez, I don’t know,” one muses. “We’ve got this spot,” he says, gesturing at the grass, the lindens. “Pretty women talk to us. What more do we need?” I love this answer. Not everyone knows when a lunch, a tree, some buddies, and a little urban frisson add up to Enough. Upon some reflection, though, the man and his companions agree there is one thing that would add to the great fullness of the present. “You know what would be nice,” he begins, and his pals nod as he adds to the city’s wish list for common ground: “A stocked fish pond, now that would be really nice — a nice place to fish right downtown.”
Emily Hiestand (GRS’88) is a writer and visual artist, whose recent publications include essays in The Pushcart Book of Essays and The Norton Book of Nature Writing.
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