Tom Keane

The Grass Isn't Greener

The Greenway is nothing more than the world's most expensive median strip - and a hard lesson for the city.

In 2004, Big Dig workers began dismantling the old elevated Central Artery, leaving a moonscape of debris and construction equipment in their wake. But fear not, officials assured us, something wondrous would soon emerge: the 15-acre Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway.

Well, it's emerged, all right. Not wondrous, though, wretched - wretched not only in execution but also in conception. Poor Rose's Greenway neither cures the ills left by the Big Dig nor gives us a decent piece of open space.

Odds are, you've never walked its length, and in your mind's eye the notion of a "greenway" conveys some sense of meandering parkland, a cool, green r espite from urban rigors. Far from it. The Greenway is less a park than a series of disjointed "parklettes." Officially, there are four (Chinatown, Dewey Square, the Wharf, and the North End). In reality, it's more like 15, with each of the spaces cut up by cross streets. The parklettes are filled with the various gimcracks beloved by landscape architects who try to "define" spaces, inject "whimsy," and "echo" history, but which really look more like leftovers from a giant Tonka Toy.

I walk the Greenway at noon on a pleasant winter's day, and it feels as if I'm on the world's most expensive median strip. Three lanes of traffic travel on each side of me, two roaring and honking mechanistic rivers. People are out; the city is busy. Yet on my excursion, it occurs to me that I have found the answer to Southwest Airlines' "Wanna Get Away?" query. Visit the Greenway. I'm the sole pedestrian, alone in a crowded city. If Thoreau were alive and seeking solitude today, he might have chosen the Greenway over Walden Pond.

I'm being unfair. Come summertime, I have little doubt that workers from nearby office buildings will venture outside to catch some noontime sun. Good for them. Still, I imagine I could put together a list of 100 things Boston might have done to improve itself, and nowhere on that list would be, "Create more outside places for office workers to lunch." But $14.8 billion later, that's what we've got.

The real problem, however, is not the insipidity of the parklettes. Rather, it's the notion of the Greenway itself. I have long been skeptical that open space was the best use for these new acres. I had hoped to be wrong, but, sadly, am not.

What should we have done instead? Stand in one of the North End parklettes and look east. You'll see the densely packed brick buildings of the North End. Look west and, lo and behold, you'll see the same kinds of buildings in the Haymarket. Why is that? Because the two sides used to be one. The elevated highway was built back in an era - the 1950s - when urban planners did whatever they wanted. They wanted a north-south highway and, r-i-i-p, homes were torn down and 20,000 residents were summarily displaced. ("Ah," I can hear real estate developers sighing, "Those were the days.") Many, quite accurately, described the Central Artery as a wound through the city and, carrying the metaphor further, the purpose of the Big Dig was to close that wound.

Instead, we've just turned the wound into a scar. The right approach would have been to build across, filling in the emptiness with the kinds of buildings that exist on both sides and knitting the two halves together. That's true not only of the North End, but also of the other halves divided by the parklettes: Chinatown could link with the Leather District, downtown with the waterfront. Instead, we've kept in place a mile-long moat between two parts of the city. Sure, with the elevated highway down, at least one can see the other side. But the division remains.

And so the Greenway fails. As a park - or series of parks - it's dull, hard to reach, and seems doomed to become a trash-strewn no man's land. Ultimately, it's an object lesson for the next time we decide to fix one of our broken spaces (City Hall Plaza leaps to mind). The Greenway lacks courage, insisting on remembering - or paying homage to? - a regretted roadway that would have been better forgotten.

Originally published in The Boston Globe Magazine, January 27, 2008.

Campaign tinkering

The Fortnight That Wasn't

IN THE wake of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the candidates worked hastily to retool their campaigns. Barack Obama announced that in an effort to shore up his appeal to white ethnic voters, he was changing his surname to O'Bama. Mitt Romney promised voters in Michigan that if they chose him he would stop using metaphors that related to the Olympics. While saying he was pleased with the results in New Hampshire, John McCain asked that votes be counted more quickly in future primaries so that he could give his victory speeches prior to bedtime.

Looking ahead to the next round of primaries, Hillary Clinton warned voters that she would come to their states and start tearing up if polls there showed they were not supporting her candidacy. Rudy Giuliani defended his decision not to campaign in the early primaries, saying they were mostly beauty contests that measured little more than candidates' likability. "Later on, once people are ready to vote for someone unlikable, I feel confident they'll choose me," he said. Huckabee supporters rejected feelers from the Romney campaign to switch their support, saying they "weren't born yesterday." However, they did concede they were created just 6,000 years ago.

And in Massachusetts, residents said that Obama's inspirational message of nonpartisanship and "yes we can" reminded them of Governor Deval Patrick's own "together we can" campaign in 2006, and they looked forward to the day when Obama is president and every state in the country would have destination casinos.

In other news, global warming skeptics said that near-record snowfall in New England at the end of 2007 vindicated their doubts, while global warming advocates said record warm temperatures in early January proved they were right all along.

Google unveiled Oogle, the latest iteration of its Street View software. Unlike Street View, which displays a 360-degree views of streets at ground level, Oogle concentrates on second and third floor levels, using photographs shot in the early morning and evening. Google dismissed complaints by privacy advocates that Oogle was a blatant attempt at voyeurism. "All these images are taken on public streets," said a spokesperson for the company. "It's exactly what you could see walking down the street - if you were 30-feet tall, that is."

In the latest development of a controversial business practice, Fenway Franks announced that it had purchased from the Red Sox the naming rights for Fenway Park, which would henceforth be known as Fenway Park. "Until now, all people thought of when they said 'Fenway Park' was a Boston neighborhood," said a spokesperson for the Company. "But now that we've spent all this money, they'll have to think of our hotdogs."

NASA announced a stepped-up schedule of flights for the shuttle and dismissed worries that the 27-year-old craft was too aged to handle the strains of the additional missions. "We're talking technology from the 1980s, some of the best that's ever been made," said a senior NASA official, as staffers demonstrated how they continued to rely on their 3-pound DynaTAC cellphones, Commodore 64 computers, thermal-paper fax machines and dot-matrix printers. "Sure, today's new-fangled technology may be lighter and a bit glitzier," added the official, "But we're talking rocket science here - not Second Life."

Scientists said they had successfully created a new strain of fluorescent, glow-in-the-dark pigs. Analysts said the market for the animals was likely huge. "This will be a particular boon to people who dine in those dim, pricey, candle-lit restaurants," said one. "Now they'll be able to find their food."

Pitcher Roger Clemens strenuously denied using steroids but did concede that he had received injections of vitamin B12 and painkillers from his former trainer, Brian McNamee. "I did keep wondering why he wouldn't just let me take a One-A-Day and some aspirin," Clemens recalled. "But heck, he's the trainer - if he says I needed a painful shot in my buttocks, who am I to doubt him?"

And finally, the federal government announced a $1.5 billion program to help owners of old-fashioned televisions purchase the equipment needed to keep their sets working after digital signals replace analog a year from now. Officials denied that most of those with the obsolete televisions were NASA employees.

Published on January 13, 2008 on the op-ed page of The Boston Sunday Globe.

Tall Order

If Boston is serious about going green, it needs to join other major cities and embrace the skyscraper.

Sixteen Boston buildings rise 500 feet or more above the city. These are our skyscrapers - a respectable number, but we haven't been keeping pace. All but three were built in the 1980s or earlier. The tallest, the John Hancock, no longer impresses; it now ranks just 46th in the country. Meanwhile, the destruction of the World Trade Center notwithstanding, other cities race ahead. San Francisco has 14 skyscrapers either approved or in planning. New York has 39, Chicago has 30, and Toronto (Toronto!) 19.

Boston is looking to build - maybe - two. That's right: two.

Carol Willis, executive director of the Skyscraper Museum in (where else?) New York, theorizes that skyscrapers are potentially about three things: sex, power, and money. I think this a profound observation until it occurs to me that pretty much everything is about sex, power, and money. Still, stay with her formulation and one can begin to understand why we lag. A lot of us New Englanders are embarrassed about sex, don't like to brag about power, and cringe at ostentatious displays of wealth. Add to that our never-ending love affair with five-story 19th-century town houses and brownstones and a near pathological fear about the "Manhattanization" of Boston (all a consequence, argues Northeastern architecture dean George Thrush, of the way we have made a fetish of our Colonial origins), and one can begin to understand why Boston is so averse to making its skyline bigger and taller.

I know. It sounds as if I have some sort of edifice complex myself. Boston's beauty is its small scale, its human-sized buildings. Real cities don't have to have skyscrapers, do they?

Yes, they do. It's not that I don't like those cute town houses - I live in one. But density is what cities are all about, skyscrapers are the ultimate form of density, and - here's the kicker - they are flat-out the greenest way to build. If we care about Boston, if we care about the environment, we should build up and build tall. A skyline is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, it may save us all.

Smirking analogies aside, skyscrapers aren't really about sex or power, says the museum's Willis. What they are about is money. The first skyscrapers were built because they were an extraordinarily efficient way to add square footage to a parcel of land. When land is expensive, it is far cheaper to build upward. The taller you go (at least until you hit 80 stories), the less the cost per square foot.

Yet today, the most compelling argument for skyscrapers is ecological. Newer skyscrapers are being designed in ways that dramatically minimize their impact on the environment, allowing them to achieve the highest rank possible ("platinum") under the LEED Green Building rating system. Water and heat are recycled. Solar panels reduce the need for outside energy. The entire life cycle of the building is managed, from construction to obsolescence, with some of the original materials getting reused to build other structures. This is all possible because of the building's size, which makes it economically feasible to do things that in a smaller structure would be far too costly.

But even if a skyscraper isn't LEED certified, it is the way the building is used that makes it so profoundly green. When people are packed together, the services needed to support those people are easier and cheaper to provide. Less travel is required. Everything can be provided in bulk. That's why, as David Owen argued in a seminal New Yorker piece in 2004, Manhattan on a per-capita basis may well be the most energy-efficient place in the country. The reason largely boils down to the fact that it is also the densest.

Building tall is building smart. Yet here in Boston, we're unmoved. Catcalls greeted Mayor Tom Menino's push to build a 1,000-foot tower at 115 Winthrop Square. Scorned for its hubris, it was mockingly dubbed "Tommy's Tower," making for an amusing but wrongheaded cheap shot. The very thing that makes cities vital - the proximity of everyone and everything - is what skyscrapers do best. In a world where environmental issues loom ever larger, "the heart of the question is how we build sustainably," says Diane Georgopulos, president-elect of the Boston Society of Architects. Skyscrapers are the answer.

Plus, they do look cool.

Originally published in The Boston Globe Magazine, January 6, 2008.