Hoping for a clean and fancy Boston Common, city officials plan to boot the events that draw thousands. That’s a mistake.
Last year was busy for the Boston Common. This year, the city promises, will be less so. After years of striving to make the public park the civic and social center of the city, Boston is reversing course. Instead of telling people to come, it’s now telling them to stay away.
I understand the impulse. The place looks dumpy and bedraggled, with statues in disrepair, trash strewn about, and grass worn away. A stiff wind kicks up dirt, making the landscape look like a scene from Lawrence of Arabia. After a litany of complaints, the city finally reacted, allocating funds to repair the Brewer Fountain and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument and to restore the barren turf. The last project is controversial. The Carty Parade Grounds – the largest open spot in the park – will be fenced off for a year (perhaps two). The area will be dug up, and new topsoil will be laid down and grass replanted. Posts and chains will be erected along pathways to prevent pedestrians from cutting through. The upshot, of course, is that most of the big events that so enlivened the city in 2006 will have to go elsewhere. In fact, they may never be allowed to return.
The number of special events held on the Common last year is almost mind-boggling: 1,171, according to records kept by Boston’s Parks and Recreation Department. Some were small – ballgames, corporate and school outings, film shoots, and the like. But others attracted crowds. There was the Winter Festival last February, complete with 3 acres of man-made snow, the We Are America rally in April, and the Walk for Hunger in May. Summer brought the Pride Festival, the Father’s Day “Dads Make a Difference” celebration, the Life is Good Watermelon Festival, hot-air-balloon rides, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s production of The Taming of the Shrew, and Mayor Tom Menino’s Monday Night Movies. Autumn saw Suffolk University’s Centennial Celebration, the notorious HempFest (I went, but I didn’t inhale), the Tufts 10K Road Race for Women, the Respect Life Walk, and the Life Is Good Pumpkin Festival, featuring 30,128 simultaneously illuminated pumpkins – a world record.
Most of those won’t be repeated in 2007. The Shakespeare Company is being pushed back to its too-small haunts by the Parkman Bandstand. Other large events are being told to find accommodations elsewhere. Park officials and some advocates cite a 1996 document, the Boston Common Management Plan, which envisioned smaller and less frequent public events. That, they think, should be the Common’s future. 2006, they believe, was just too much.
Too much? To the contrary. Activity in a public park, especially this public park, isn’t a bad thing. The nonprofit Project for Public Spaces ranks the Common – whose founding in 1634 makes it the nation’s oldest public park – one of the world’s best. The park gets that rank not because it’s especially charming or well-tended but because it gets used. As befits its name, the Common is our common meeting ground. In a time when we lament people “bowling alone,” it is the rare space that allows us to come together.
Some of the Common’s troubles aren’t from use per se but from a failure to keep up with that use. For three weeks following the pumpkin festival, for example, pumpkin seeds littered the ground. Someone – the event’s organizers, the city itself – should have committed the money and resources to clean it up immediately.
Still, let’s grant that good maintenance can only do so much. It would be nice, of course, to have it both ways: Keep the park well used but keep it pristine. But at some point there’s a trade-off. The feet of thousands of people will inevitably kill the grass. And if the turf is to be preserved, the only way to do so is to keep the people away.
It comes down to values: Do we want a Common that’s active but scruffy or beautiful but empty? I’ll take the former, with the life it brings. If what you want is green serenity, you can always cross the street and visit the Public Garden.
Originally published in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, March 18, 2007. © Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.