"Greenway becomes people’s park in Boston; It may not fulfill the dream of urban planners, that the scar that was the Central Artery become a world class park, but downtown residents, workers, and visitors are loving it all the same" by Michael Levenson | Globe Staff, August 18, 2013
Five years after it opened, the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway is attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors a year....
The park — for years maligned as a glorified median strip between downtown and the waterfront — has become something of a people’s park, a bustling urban refuge, despite its lack of major attractions.
Downtown office workers line up for the food trucks slinging tacos and Vietnamese sandwiches. Young people practice yoga on the grass, or take advantage of the free Wi-Fi. Children frolic in the fountains. Tourists speaking Arabic and Portuguese pose for photos near the sculpture that billows fog.
That the Greenway has been embraced by so many is a testament to the power of a patch of grass in an area dominated by concrete plazas and towering buildings. Originally envisioned as an emerald gem that would one day rank with the world’s premier urban green spaces, it has instead become a democratic haven, a place for the masses to cool off and unwind, perhaps with a cold drink and a magazine.
Urban planning experts may mourn that the Greenway is not yet all it could or should be. But city residents, workers, and visitors have voted, and they like it.
On Wednesday evening, in the stretch of park across from the North End, three women sat at a café table, swapping stories about their grandchildren. They said they chat there most nights until 10 p.m., and would stay longer but the park staff chain up the chairs.
Two brothers, ages 7 and 11, devoured cake and cannoli from a nearby bakery, a sweet reward before their mother took them to the Museum of Fine Arts. Twenty-somethings in workout gear did knee bends, warming up for a free CrossFit class....
The placid scene was hard to imagine just a decade ago....
The park has benefited from the revitalization of the waterfront....
Some urban designers remain critical, saying it has not lived up to the majestic promises that city and state officials made two decades ago when they first pitched the Greenway as a replacement for the elevated highway. Back then, officials conjured images of an iconic urban destination, like The High Line in New York or Las Ramblas in Barcelona.
But years of budget problems, design disagreements, and management fights forced the park to scale back some of its early ambition. These days it is on more solid footing, with a $4 million annual budget and a $13 million endowment. Still, 50 percent of the park is hard surface, and the land is broken up by highway ramps and cross streets.
“I don’t think the Greenway is going to appear in postcards or academic journals or tourist guides to Boston as one of the great public spaces on the planet,” said Alex Krieger, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design who submitted one of the original designs for the parks in the 1980s. “It’s surely better than an elevated highway, but it will always be OK, and somewhat enjoyable, but hardly the promise of a great public environment that many hoped it could be.”
But people who live in and around the city gravitate toward the parks just the same....
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Related: Greenway to get hotel, food market
