Rose Kennedy Greenway “A Design Disaster”

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One of the "placeless" blocks of Boston's Rose Kennedy Greenway.

Jane Jacobs made famous the isolating effect of Boston’s Central Artery on Boston’s North End.   As she is celebrated this weekend with Jane’s Walks around the world, the situation in Boston reminds us that few of her lessons have truly been learned by the professionals planning cities today.

As Jane Jacobs said, “People do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners and designers wish they would.”

This week the Architecture critic for the Boston Globe tore apart the design of the Greenway, saying, “The Greenway is a design disaster.”  We have been meaning to put this on our “Hall of Shame” but this critic has done it for us!:

The Greenway, by contrast [to Quincy Market], is placeless desert. It’s a series of oversize shapeless spaces, none of which seems to have a purpose… There are things to look at but nothing to do.

The Greenway serves effectively as a beautiful new median for the very cars it was meant to replace.

The Boston Globe has been leading a pointed and educated discussion on the future of the greenway.  Last week the editorial board tried to point a way forward from what they describe as a failure on every front:

The Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway should be a 21st-century complement to the Boston Common: A gathering place, a town center, public ground. It can assume whatever form Bostonians choose. An emerald necklace. A grand boulevard. A waterfront lawn.  It is now none of those things.

Last fall, they did a piece on the emerging strategy for planning parks around uses and programming, highlighting two of our recent projects, Discovery Green and Campus Martius.

More information: Greenway Quiet as Other Parks Draw Crowds.

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  • http://twitter.com/danspock Dan Spock

    It is with profound sadness that I see this recognition years after I anticipated just such a failure. I lived in Boston during the early days when the Big Dig was just getting started and the design proposals for the Greenway were still quite fluid. The planners were not only indifferent to advice, but were overly eager to force the design of the new parks to conform to the constraints dictated by the highway construction. I pointed out problems such as the fact that the edges of the park and surface roads were left utterly untreated so as to offer blank walls all along. The edge lots and road alignments could have been accomplished so as to create strips of retail and wide sidewalks along the edges of the corridor, but all of the attention was on the park corridor instead. A disastrous decision was made to not sink the subsurface highway below grade enough to support the load of earth necessary to grow trees in many locations. We can add the Greenway to the long list of Boston redevelopment disasters: Government Center, the old West End, Melnea Cass Blvd, the list goes on.

  • Fernando Barbosa

    Mr Spock is absolutely right! I've been to Boston as a visitor and it's a pitty.

  • Aaron

    This web page explains alot to me. I am a urban planning student from Australia and visted Boston in 2009. I came across this greenway and wondered at the time what it was for. I did not stay long and merely passed through as there was nothing to do and nothing happening.

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  • Guest

    As a long time resident of Boston’s North End, I actually like the space of the Rose Kennedy. Thats right, I actually LIKE the space. Although the North End section is heavily used these days which is fantastic, I find myself heading down, farther afield towards South Station. Why? Because the space feels like mine; a personal, linear back yard. The’s a hushed, quiet tranquility for being in such a dense urban environment. And the thing I REALLY like most about it? There’s literally NO tourists. While they support our economy, blah, blah, blah, I could honestly care less. They’re annoying, hickish, and stupid. They shop, they take photos, the laugh, their children run amok. They are the complete antithesis of what Bostonians are.  So get out of my alley, stop pissing on my doorstep, stop being loud at night when you are drunk as a skunk, and for christ sake, stay out of my backyard.