Watery Dreams: Redressing an "Urban Lake"By Jane Holtz Kay Running -- or, some would say, lolling -- from source to sea, the Charles River is part artifact, part gift of nature, part playground. But the phrase that its designer, Charles Eliot used to describe the Charles River Basin is singular: "Court of honor." The parkmaker who designed the watery gem wrapped with green shores envisioned it as the centerpiece in his plan of parks and parkways, paths and reservations created for the state's "Emerald Metropolis." As it was designed in 1893, so it is today. Limned from dam to dam, the treasured 8.5 mile long segment where the Charles' serpentine waters open into an "urban lake" is Boston's core. Shouldered by some 12 neighborhoods and four cities, the Charles River Basin is the even larger region's heart: its lookout, watery community, borderland and sacred space. The residents of Boston, Cambridge, Newton and Watertown live on the edges of this waterpark; neighbors, near and far, play out their lives and leisure on and around its waters. Colleges and communities, businesses and boathouses, stake their turf about it, station their academies and build their mini-empires to frame this waterway in New England's hub.
Unfortunately, "walking" is not the operative word for many of these neighbors trying to reach its shores. For all the eminence of this site, its surroundings are not always easily accessible across the rabid highways. Over time, the river's banks have narrowed and its views closed. The majesty of Eliot's masterwork endures but the trees and plantings often fall well below the peak of their useful or aesthetic life. The national image of "the people's river," with its crowds celebrating under spacious skies crackling with fourth of July fireworks, belies the fact that the ground below is in a shabby state. Though far cleaner than the mid-20th century days when college crews dubbed the water's salacious debris "Charles River whitefish," the edges of this "living landscape" are eroded and in need of repair. The new master plan addresses all this and more. "After a century of use, the Basin is showing signs of wear," notes the ASLA-award winning document, prepared by Goody, Clancy and Associates for the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) and managed by landscape architect and planner Herb Nolan. About the size of a fold-over map, the plan is designed to serve as an "executive summary," says Julia B. O'Brien, director of planning for the MDC. Packed with images and words, the Charles River Basin plan is an elegantly-designed document that spells out the restoration and re-creation needed, aesthetically, recreationally, politically, horticulturally and historically, in order to revive the 1300-acre basin. "We take it for granted and love it to death," concludes the larger 192-page draft plan due early next year. The combined policy guide and advocacy action piece carries a price tag of close to $100 million to refurbish and fit out the "world-renowned regional water-park." Everything from narrowing roads to fixing trees and seawall: "The works," says Nolan.
The full menu is needed to bring back the Basin. It is an incredible cachement," says Nolan, but it needs nourishment. Despite its bird's eye view magnificence, the ambling river and the edges sculpted for the full complement of human enterprise and natural (or "second" natural) habitat are worn. The flotilla of barges, rowboats and motorboats drawn from public or private boat clubs and universities and the sailboats tilting picturesquely towards the west as a keen fall wind buoys their route overcrowd the space. The river is at full capacity on the surface and assaulted on its shores. Stewing pollutants mar some greenswards, turning their rich surfaces yellow and brown. Parkways paved and expanded swallowing the historic plan have undermined Eliot's legacy for half a century. Celebrating crowds at those 150 events a year may sound like a shoreside counterpart of Jane Jacobs' eyes on the street, but the sight and fury of their stomping feet, beach chairs and blankets take their toll.
To identify and define this enterprise, the planners wisely drew on those concerned. Beginning almost five years ago, they signed on some 200 local advocates and regional river users to form the Basin's Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) . Leapfrogging from place to place, committee members spent hours in meetings and workshops, from historic to natural landscape, parkways and parks, but -- always -- the river. "This is a water park," Nolan emphasizes. "It's not just green space." The need is "to fall in love with the river as a whole," to advance a larger agenda.
On a late afternoon, painted in the cliched russets and yellows of early fall, Nolan, plunges us through late afternoon traffic to trace the turf of the land surveyed in the renewal plan. Heading west from the terminus of the handsome Longfellow Bridge, fondly called the "Salt and Pepper" bridge (though shaking more rust off its worn arches than other condiments these days), we trace along the river's northern perimeter, Cambridge and Watertown, upriver towards Brighton and out towards Newton's upper basin. The landscape architect's show-and-tell narrative ranges from the large (viewmaking and land-shaping) to the small (horticultural and arboreal adjustments), pointing out the specifics of plants to be groomed, altered or uprooted; of dredging here, depaving there. Overcrowded invasives mar our view of the Head of the Charles near MIT where late afternoon crews are busily training for the next weekend's classic race drawing 300,000 spectators to these shores. With "hundreds of people trampling to get a view" there is a great need to eradicate the sumac and phragmite or plant natives, says Nolan. "Opening windows to the water to establish scenic overlooks," he calls it, pointing to the lack of sightlines at MIT, in contrast to the more open coutured banks and lawns before the classic brick dorms of Harvard University's middle Basin next in sight.
The parkways, now a'whoosh with the cars of 120,000 daily riders, diminish the joys on every hand and traffic-calming to reclaim and soften them is part of the plan. Greenough Boulevard, a little-used roadway nearby, is high on the list for traffic-calming. A public rally on the subject called by three state representatives and a senator in early October; drew some 60 people to discuss reducing four underutilized lanes to two, says Renata von Tscharner, founder of the new 300-member Charles River Conservancy. Downriver, Cambridge's pedestrianized Memorial Drive, welcomes some 6000 rollerbladers, bikers and walkers every Sunday and has become the boulevard's role model. The times are ripe for repair and other agencies share in the planners' work. The Army Corps of Engineers has remediated Squibnocket Park, creating a passive park dotted by mature honey locusts and offering views of the Charles' upper basin. Not far away, the corps is also scrubbing a superfund site at the uranium-studded Watertown arsenal to release nine more acres of parkland. Dismal locales like the former Brighton abattoir (slaughterhouse), frozen forever in concrete and mall, will take work but some of the plan's bolder suggestions look to buy back what can be bought here, too.
If the master plan's list is prodigious -- as much citymaking as parkmaking -- the potential is there in this ambitious endeavor. Not simply a wish list, the work of both housekeeping and heroic construction goes on. Sometimes it is simple. A few cans of paint to line a bike path and reduce four driving lanes to two converted Charles River Road. Sometimes it is arduous. Riverbank restoration will not happen in a day. And, not only planners, but local politicians but communities to push them are essential to pay the ticket. Still, the inch-by-inch, row by row work of building has already created two tot lot playgrounds - one, beside the more rural Herter Park in Brighton; another at Gloucester Street along the Esplanade in town. Elsewhere, work to save the long line of the historic London Plane Trees on Memorial Drive, cause celebre of a '60s campaign to Save the Sycamores, proceeds. Despite the master plan's 100 million dollar price tag, many of these projects have demanded more friends than funds; more public support than corporate bankrolling.. Yet, the question still persists: who will survey and support the new work? For all the communities' current satisfaction rate with the parks noted in a recent survey of the Basin-area zip code, half of those questioned deplored the noise of traffic; 45 percent lamented the crowded parkways, and one-third, criticized the unsafe environs at night. In a time of weakened agencies and diminished public dollars, hardpressed governments must depend on this community to make the plan a reality. Nolan hopes and thinks they can do it. "It's not your usual park," he says. The Charles River Basin has abundant "eyes and ears." Those eyes and ears of the river's consciousness-raised citizens exist at many levels. Sometimes, planning partners are benign, sometimes less so. The Friends of Magazine Beach restoration secured $1.4 million dollars from Cambridge City Hall to develop new river-friendly athletic fields, a tot lot, small landing and pathways. Nearby, the Hyatt hotel chain is drawn in to restore the old granite seawall and its nearby shores for more self-serving or commercial reasons, creating the familiar queasiness of private-public relations. More destructively, Boston University's work to build a new sailing pavilion on the Boston side of the river has provoked a series of hostile community meetings.
We roam by the elegant (the quirky charm of Lotte Crabtree's 1939 cat-head fountain for weary felines), and the beatendown (wooden docks in disrepair), but also the refurbished where the Beacon Hill and Back Bay neighborhood and garden clubs have planted and tended. The front of the Hatch Shell is lined with the summer's remnant of sweet potato vines and flowers while the oval space near the Arthur Fiedler footbridge offers prairie plantings rising high, as if to bring western offerings to Boston in return for the east's legacy of the lawn to the frontier. The think-tidal, act-local spirit prevails. Find a segment of the Charles and you find fans ready to become advocates. From the Charles River Watershed Association, the earliest allies and strongest supporters who began to clean the river over a generation ago and changed the mindset towards it; to the forceful Friends of Magazine Beach, to an unnamed but energetic band of Watertown neighbors who secured the narrowing of a road there. Add to these, the politicians prodded by their neighborhoods and you have a great potential in the radius an estimated two million users. Still, for all this body of enthusiasts and advocates, the execution of this plan remains head-lite, if not head-less. Despite its role in commandeering the master plan, the stewardship of the MDC is essentially absent without leave, many feel. The heirs to the Metropolitan Park System, suffer from neglect, malign and benign. Struggling to maintain the turn-of-the-century remains of their 162-miles of landscaped parkway and waters in the midst of automotive wear and tear, they suffer slights not only from that legislature which holds the purse strings from without but the revolving commissioners-without-resume appointed for their political pasts. Until a governor appears who knows the difference between urban parks and state forests--the difference between a finely-tuned, urban resource and a laissez-faire state forest valued for its ecological function, stewardship will lag. The historic gifts of parkmaking and park-protecting are long gone from the heads of state and the MDC bears the brunt. Deprived of a policing force to behave as agents protecting the park (vs. whistleblowers catching speeders); depleted from their original water-tending mission by the Massachusetts Water Resources Administration which took over cleaning Boston Harbor, the MDC looked even weaker than today when a green ribbon commission looked them over in 1996. "Vision is not their long suit or their budgetary possibility," says one member of that commission. "They're their own worst enemy," she goes on. "The agency doesn't deal with the public well." "Make them get rid of the political patronage; make them accountable, beginning with a copy of the budget," says another wearied activist. The only thing worse than today's situation would be the takeover by the Mass. Highway department (who, as they said of New York City "Master Builder" Robert Moses, would pave over their grandmother to get to Thanksgiving dinner) or, in today's update, would happily handover Eliot's pleasure drive to heavy trucks and pedal-to-the metal speeders. Still, the MDC is more pitied than profaned by open space advocates. "Tight and competent but impotent in a nepotistic system" is the consensus, gathered from more than one outsider who deplores the agency's attrition and mismanagement under this roster of hack commissioners since Governor Michael Dukakis' reign. "They have staff to do basic maintenance," says Nolan, "but they can't keep up without a designated superintendent and crew so they can take pride in their work. Maintenance is the most important, the number one idea," he says. "Without that, all is for not."
Certainly, the constituency for that "thoughtfulness" has certainly grown from those enlisted early on, following the model of the Charles River Watershed caring for the water quality of the 308 square mile watershed. Beginning in 1965, "when the water ran in colors and stunk," in the words of today's director Robert Zimmerman, the water has "come so far that they're actually considering swimming." The potential is there. Julia O'Brien, the articulate gray-haired planner who has wrestled with these problems for thirty years, is not alone in expressing dismay at the suggestion of releasing the MDC's green spaces. "If we ever give up on them as parks, we'll be giving up a lot," she says she says of ongoing gubernatorial and legislative efforts to claim this turf. Today, she says, "there is a whole new initiative." Despite the irony of "new funds for new parks and shortfalls for old" and waiting almost two and a half years to fund printing the plan, she is sanguine. Housed in a 1920's building, a stone's throw from the stone-throwing legislature, she and fellow planners nonetheless knew the state of their treasure and had the will to commission the study. "We've done an enormous amount on the Charles River," O'Brien continues. That body is only one of hundreds of stressed MDC properties ending at the distant Quabbin reservoir. "These are as well-maintained as any in other cities and towns around the country," O'Brien insists. Still, the longtime planner has no trouble admitting that all is not easy atop Beacon Hill. "We try to cobble things together," she goes on, from the navigability of the waters to the palette of trees, but, she admits, "You can feel a little ground down here." "I would call it a curious agency," Patrice Todisco, head of the Greenspace Alliance, sums it, "with a very important mission. This is an agency that cuts across 128 communities, 50 percent in the city. They're consistently talked about," she continues. "Our political environment has not supported these issues. The open space constituency needs to become more sophisticated about how we represent these issues -- health, the economy, the environment. We haven't sold them. We've got a lot of work to do," she says. Up and down river from the central Basin, too, work goes on. Upriver, beyond the locale of the central master plan, the MDC has indeed negotiated with property owners, built pathways and new bridges unlocking beautiful stretches and knitting together the open spaces so much a part of the Eliot vision. Under MDC planner Dan Driscoll, the agency gathered funds from both its own coffers and ISTEA (now TEA-21) federal transpiration funds to establish several miles of pathways along the river linking the old Charles to the lakes district in Newton, demonstrating an entrepreneurial spirit both within and inside the agency.
Weaving in and around its entryway brick residences, boxy buildings thrown like dominos on these random surroundings, we head towards this most recent reclamation of "The People's River." Updated two years ago, the plan for the so-called "New Charles River Basin," consists of three miles of tree-shaded bikeways and almost four miles of pathways, leading walkers around Charlestown and the North and West Ends to complete the long-bereft finale to the river. Beneath the detritus of old highways and new, sliding under the concrete underbelly of the sleek artifact of Christian Menn's wiry bridge and wrapping around the ravaged wharves of the old warehouses, the New Basin begins to take life. "From the railroad bridges that cross the river near North Station, views of the Nashua Meadows open out to the beacons and the Green Line viaduct upstream," says the planning document.
Will the last link from between the Charles River and Boston Harbor complete Eliot's dream? Haglund likens this last, most devastated, industrial site to the kind of wreckscape-- the wasted, wanton land--that Olmsted and Eliot alike transformed into parks for people. A visionary in his own right Eliot saw this dreary landscape as the heart of an open space system. A century later, the system is fatigued, encroached by the automobile, financially drained and ill-maintained by the state's leadership. But to the towns along today's black-and-blue basin, this linear park and playground is their urban sustenance. "A river touching the back of a town is like a wing. River towns are winged towns," Henry David Thoreau once wrote. His words of watery light and flight and escape told the tale of the water's gift as an exodus for the imagination. But to the towns along today's black-and-blue Charles River Basin, their river is not flight but salvation. With an army of advocates and some public attention to this plan, the historic waterpark could be an urban coming home and comeback place for the new century. The future of Eliot's "court of honor" -- and the river's not-so-royal tributaries -- depends on that. This article appeared in Landscape Architecture magazine, January 2002.
|
Entering its second century, the makeover to this masterwork would restore battered portions like "Hell's Half Acre," and retrieve cherished swaths like the Esplanade's hard-used banks. "Hundred-year-old trees are dying," declares the master plan. "Granite steps and balustrades are deteriorating, parkland turf is severely compacted and worn, historic bridges need structural work." More specifically, it breaks down the blemishes in five categories or columns: "The Historic Landscape," "The Natural Landscape," "The River," "The Parks," and "The Parkways and Paths."
To coordinate and complete that checklist demands an overarching, governing body which has the say (and the naysay). The Metropolitan District Commission, heirs to Eliot's Metropolitan Park System, is that body. But, despite its sponsorship of the plan and recognition of the need to press on with "The Second Century," the MDC is as much a problem as a solution. The 108-year old agency is understaffed and overworked. Its fundgivers and political overseers, the state legislature are, at best, unsupportive or apathetic--when they are not actively attacking the agency or trying to siphon off its parts. And, yet, for all these shortfalls, the MDC knew its weakness enough to solicit the document which has already gone beyond its use as an article of faith to gather groups to plan on many fronts.
Such undertakings tally only a handful of the projects for 25 sites spelled out in 75 pages of the massive detailing of the plan. Tasks designed to bring back blue-green space to communities range from playing fields to leisure parks. Planners have a long menu of artifacts to revive as well. The Basin's statistics are staggering: some 15,000 linear feet of granite seawall and two dams are listed in the documents, not to mention "eight miles of parkways, eleven vehicular and six foot bridges, twelve smaller parks, three and one-half acres of marshland, more than thirty-two miles of pathways, nine public boat landings, nineteen boathouse and yacht clubs, and (deep breath) twenty recreational facilities such as swimming pools and ball fields." These need tending as both infrastructure (stonework, lights on bridges) and "wildlife habitat for hundreds of animal and plant species." They need connecting, too, back to the Charlesgate and other parts of Olmsted's Emerald Necklace that string the whole city to the region. The foundations set by a prodigious generation of parkmakers were strong, despite lack of tending, but they can only last so long without this 21st century stewardship.
On the Esplanade, the classic green turf for celebrants, rollerbladers and boaters, some 200 neighbors members have joined the new Esplanade Association in a classic kind of stewardship. These riverfront residents of the affluent Back Bay and Beacon Hill neighborhoods have begun to help repair the longtime damage of time and the annual summer invasion of Hatch Shell visitors. Co-president Linda Cox traces the slights and successes on a gray and misty afternoon that adds a weapy gauze to the old statuary. Our stroll offers at once a grand outlook and a depressing near-view, from the pleasant route along the classic pathways to the sight of eroded granite seawalls and statuary by Arthur Shurcliff and his peers. Still handsome but ill-treated, as she says. "There's no grouting," Cox goes on pointing out one 1930s granite overlook. "This is urgent, because it's going to be lost," she says as we view yet another crumbling seawall.
Can the communities on the river's edge, compensate for this lack of leadership? Can allying all the abutters-- the bikers, sunbathers, runners, rollerbladers, concertgoers, event-attendeesand their institutions, politicians and powerbrokers--- rouse the MDC, the state or private and community payers and players? While the problem perseveres, the groups continue to shape parks within the park, as Robb Johnson of Cambridgeport's Friends of Magazine Beach puts it, "to have a voice, to make a difference in terms of managing maintenance and short term impact." Are sunbathers and greeners enough to maintain this master plan's potential? "I don't think we can rely on the MDC alone," says Johnson, a land protection specialist at the Sudbury Valley Trust. "The MDC needs to demonstrate great leadership. I'm proud of the MDC plan," he continues, "but none of that's going to do the job without the state. It's a tough time." he goes on. "There needs to be some thoughtfulness."
Downriver, too, beyond the basin dam where the Charles pours into the sea, the once grim last lap, the romantically labeled "Lost Charles," has begun to re-dress itself. Courtesy 80 million dollars in forthcoming highway department mitigation money and a 1994 plan by Carr, Lynch and Sandell, this final and most bedraggled portion of the river basin is moving to finish the last mile to the harbor. Moving beyond its longtime status as little more than where the river meets the road and the relics of industry, the plan covers some 40 acres, Karl Haglund, MDC historian and author of the forthcoming work on Eliot and Inventing the Charles" (MIT Press), explains as he drives us into the scrappy site on the East Cambridge side of the river.
