Tom Keane

Bless the Mess

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.

   

Diagnosis: Brain-Botch

Stuff happens, but don't worry - when it does, we're not to blame.

Why doesn't Logan Airport have a cellphone lot? In all likelihood, someone just forgot. Cellphone lots are places where drivers can hang out, waiting for their pick-ups to land and call them when they're ready to go. More than half of the largest airports in the country have them, but not Boston. Instead, when you try to wait by any of Logan's five terminals, the state troopers descend, forcing you to move on. The only choice is to circle.

I don't think there's anything nefarious involved – no secret plan to boost revenues at Central Parking, for example (oh, no. Never!). Indeed, a Massachusetts Port Authority spokesman, Richard Walsh, tells me that cellphone lots are a great idea and says someday Logan might have one. So, how is it that the subject never came up during planning and construction of the airport's soon-to-be-completed $4 billion makeover? I can't get a good answer.

I call it a brain-botch, one of those things that in retrospect is obvious but at the time never occurred to anyone. And the funny thing is that, once you notice one brain-botch, you'll start seeing the same kind of knuckleheaded mistakes everywhere, on things both big and small. For example: The new Sagamore Bridge "flyover" was supposed to be the solution to the rotary-angst that has plagued generations of vacationgoers. It turns out that as Cape-bound traffic approaches the bridge, the road drops from two lanes to one. As every driver knows (and just ask those who travel Route 3), lane-drops create traffic jams. Sure enough, on Thanksgiving last year, there was a bigger-than-ever backup. The dropped lane, highway planners claim, was necessary to accommodate other traffic from the south. But if so, why bother with the flyover in the first place? Thomas Cahir, deputy secretary at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation, proffers in an e-mail that safety, not speed, was the reason for the project ("Ease of getting on and off Cape Cod is fourth or fifth on the list," he writes). Hmm. The rest of us thought traffic was the issue – it must be a collective brain-botch.

And not to pick on Massport, but why is it that Fast Lane passes – now used to pay tolls – can't be used to pay for parking at the airport? Spokesman Walsh pooh-poohs the idea, first telling me such a thing would be "cost-prohibitive" and then later saying a survey of airport customers found they don't want it. Neither explanation rings true. Moreover, New York does it: EZ Pass – its version of Fast Lane – is accepted for parking at LaGuardia and Kennedy, as well as at the Newark airport. Someone cynical might point to bureaucratic inertia and infighting between Massport and the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, but not me. I think it must be a brain-botch.

On Storrow Drive eastbound, a sign says "Copley Square second exit." It's actually the first. The Government Center T stop has two escalators – one narrow, one wide. Logically, the wide one would go up to accommodate the rush of passengers exiting from trains. The daily practice, however, is the reverse. Boston's elementary schools go from kindergarten to fifth; its middle schools from sixth to eighth. But the city's three exam schools? They run from seventh to 12th. Brain-botches all.

Brain-botches aren't confined to government. After jets crashed into the twin towers on 9/11, office buildings everywhere started imposing tight security on people walking through their front doors. Microsoft's Outlook Express spell checks the text of an e-mail but not the subject line. Sony greenlighted Basic Instinct 2. There's no good explanation for any of them.

People debate free will versus determinism, but I think brain-botches suggest a third way: Our decisions may be mere fillips of our neurons, a function of random firings of our synapses. It's an explanation that combines the best of both worlds: the illusion of free will without the responsibility. Why did the Cartoon Network give the OK to put Mooninites on Boston bridges? How is it that members of the Vietnam generation got us into Iraq? Oops, comes the answer. Brain-botch. I did it, but it's not my fault.

Originally published in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, March 4, 2007. Illustration by Alex Nabum. © Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

Week in Review: March 2, 2007

A steep slide in stock markets on Tuesday provoked hand wringing among investors who were unsure what they should call the day.  “We thought about ‘Black Tuesday’” said one, “but that’s already taken.  So then we thought, how about ‘Black Monday,’ since the decline really began then.  But it turns out, that’s the name we gave the 1987 crash.”  An official with Dow Jones, which manages the well-known indexes, said, "We considered colors such as ‘brown’ or ‘gray.’ But they just didn’t seem apocalyptic enough.” As the week wore on, stockbrokers said they were now considering ignoring the drop altogether.

Journalists of all political stripes expressed frustration Friday as former Playmate Anna Nicole Smith was buried in the Bahamas next to her late son, Daniel. “Sure, there are still some fascinating issues out there -- who’s Dannielynn’s father, how did she die, does the family get any of J. Howard Marshall’s money?” said one reporter, “But there really is a sense here that the saga is coming to a close.” Television producers and newspaper publishers said they have been desperately seeking the next big story, but none seemed on the horizon. “Britney’s gone underground, Paris is keeping her undies on, and and the Nick and Jessica sex tape looks like it’s a fraud,” said one. “What are we supposed to cover now?  Iraq?”

Closer to home, Gov. Deval Patrick infuriated legislators Tuesday when he delivered his first budget speech from Memorial Hall in Melrose. “None of us knew how to get there,” said one state representative. “We know it’s somewhere north of Boston, but that still left us with a lot of territory.” Members of the Ways and Means committee said they would return the favor. “This budget plan is headed for the place where hell freezes over.  Let’s see the Governor find that.”

Many supporters of the Governor said they were disappointed by the budget as well. “Deval ran a campaign of ideas, high-flung rhetoric and pithy one-liners,” said one.  “Instead, what do we get? Numbers and line items, complicated loopholes and expenses balanced by revenues. It’s all too detailed.” Stung by the criticism, Patrick officials at Administration & Finance promised that next year’s budget would be a one-pager filled with colorful and optimistic metaphors.

Meanwhile, Patrick’s predecessor Mitt Romney this week said that aggressive and critical media scrutiny of his candidacy proved that his efforts to secure the GOP presidential nomination were succeeding. “I'm proud of the fact that the mainstream media isn’t wild about my candidacy, and that’s why I’m going to win,” Romney said, adding that if people instead were saying good things about him, he'd be worried. “In fact, once our favorables drop below 20 percent,” said a campaign spokesman, "Then we'll know for sure that victory is at hand.”

And finally, Boston mayor Thomas Menino said he’d cut average property taxes by $200 if the state would let him raise taxes on meals and telecommunication firms by one percent.  “This is a special, limited time offer,” Menino told Friday’s annual meeting of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau. “Just give me one and I give you back two. It's a really great deal." As the largely corporate crowd sat silently, Menino added, "And, if you act now, I’ll throw in -- absolutely free -- this complete set of super-sharp Ginza knives!”