Final frontier

When the Central Artery is finally buried, a whole new phase of the project will begin

by Laura A. Siegel

Burying the central artery underground will seem easy compared to designing what goes on its surface.

When the Artery tore through Boston in the 1950s, it severed the North End from the rest of the city and cut off pedestrians from the waterfront. Four decades later, the idea behind burying the highway was "to re-knit the city together," says Fred Salvucci, the former state transportation secretary whose vision shaped the Big Dig.

It sounds simple, but plenty of people disagree about how it should be done. They're disputing one main issue: density versus open space. Should the urban streetscape that the highway destroyed be restored? Or should the land be left open for recreation?

Both points of view have merit -- and drawbacks. Though parks are nice, what's built on the Central Artery corridor will need to create vibrant activity downtown to be successful. It should connect to the surrounding neighborhoods and the waterfront. And Boston's varied climate demands spaces that can be used when it's cold and dark outside. If there's not enough to do indoors on the corridor, the city may be left with another barrier -- a strip of empty space instead of steel. At the same time, the city and state have to be careful not to go too far and allow stores and hotels to eat up what was promised as common ground.

The solution: to rethink what is meant by "open space," and to look at it instead as "civic space" -- which could include markets and restaurants and museums as well as parks. And to truly be considered public space, those facilities should be free or very cheap to use, just as outdoor public space would be.

A team of designers recently appointed by the Turnpike Authority just launched a public design process; the first public meeting to discuss ideas for the site was held April 11. Over the next year, the team will work with the public to come up with a rough design encompassing activities, structures, and landscaping for the open space along the whole Central Artery surface. Their recommendations will be the main guideline shaping what the surface will look like five years from now.

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The issue of density versus open space reaches far beyond the Central Artery surface. New Urbanists, a loose group of architects and designers whose guru is Jane Jacobs, argue that density of population and buildings and a mix of uses bring activity and life to cities -- think of the Back Bay, or of Greenwich Village. These ideas challenge the modernist vision of a Garden City, organized by function, with high-rises neatly planted on squares of grass, and cars whisked through on highways to the suburbs -- the vision that brought us the Central Artery in the first place. New Urbanists often clash with open-space advocates, who think the city needs more places where people can enjoy nature.

Building costs Whatever the arguments in favor of denser development on the Central Artery corridor may be, we shouldn't think of it as a way to make money to pay for the Big Dig or maintenance of the remaining open space, as some have suggested. Financing and managing the corridor is a complicated issue -- right now it's owned by four separate city and state agencies, and no one knows quite where the money will come from to pay for it. Some worry that no one will be able to afford the kind of space many residents want, at an estimated $20 million to $40 million to build and $2 million to $4 million each year to maintain. But sacrificing the design of the Artery surface to pay for other parts of the project would be tragically shortsighted. "When you have real-estate interests evaluating parkland, they of course evaluate real estate on a per-square-foot retail return," says Valerie Burns, president of the Boston Natural Areas Fund. "Parks are civic spaces that belong to all of us as a society. It's hard to calculate a dollar return." Besides, building more to pay for other parts of the project wouldn't work. The engineers of the Central Artery tunnel based their designs on the guidelines set by Boston 2000, explains architect and Harvard design professor Alex Krieger. They provided extra support only where the guidelines indicated that heavy buildings would go. "We intentionally built the structure so it will not support high-rise buildings," says Fred Salvucci, former state transportation secretary. The surface above the Central Artery would support modest building, but it couldn't handle office towers or hotels -- the kind of development that would make the land pay. -- LS

Most people agree that urban parks need enough city life nearby to keep them lively at different times of day. But they disagree over whether there's already enough density near the corridor to support the amount of open space now in the plans. Jay Wickersham, assistant secretary of the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act for the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs (EOEA), says there is. "This is right through the heart of the city," he says.

Adds John DeVillars, Massachusetts's former secretary of the environment, who signed the environmental permit for the Big Dig that requires a ratio of 75 percent open space to 25 percent developed space: "We live in a very densely populated city with precious little open space, especially on the waterfront. We ought not to tear a highway down simply to fill the sky with more buildings."

Open-space advocates are more confident than density advocates that the parks themselves will draw enough people -- and they put more value on open space in and of itself. "Boston has so much density that you need spaces that can both accommodate high levels of use and offer the opportunity to just sit and relax and not necessarily have someone five feet away from you," says Valerie Burns, president of the Boston Natural Areas Fund, an open-space advocacy group.

That idyllic vision might work in Southern California, but in downtown Boston? "We live in a winter city," says architect Larry Bluestone. Open places are great in warm weather, "but what happens the other seven months?" he asks. "Small open spaces where you can run into a café would be more valued." Even on a sunny day, big spaces can feel cold and impersonal in the middle of a city -- just think of City Hall Plaza, an example of modernist design that New Urbanists love to hate. And after dark, the prettiest park can feel unsafe -- for example, Boston Common. In winter, nighttime in Boston starts at 4:30 p.m., notes Charles Tseckares, a former president of the Boston Architectural Society who helped plan and design the section of the Artery surface that will go through Charlestown. "I'm concerned you'll have open space taken over by drug dealers, rapists, muggers, you name them," he says.

That's one reason why some people argue for rebuilding what the Central Artery destroyed -- a densely built urban fabric of narrow, meandering streets that made up parts of several neighborhoods: the North Station area, the North End, the Financial District, and Chinatown.

Architect Harry Dodson thinks that development on 80 percent of the corridor, with frequent streets intersecting it, would "patch back together the grid of streets that existed years before." Few people agree with this solution, but Dodson raises a good point. If it's going to re-knit Boston, the corridor has to relate to the parts of the city on either side of it. It shouldn't just "pay homage to the scar that was created by the Central Artery," says Rick Dimino, president of the Artery Business Committee, which represents about 60 Boston businesses.

A word of warning, though: not everyone in favor of density has just the public welfare in mind. "Density" is often a code word for "development," some open-space advocates say. "Some of the developers are licking their chops and trying to get their hands on the land, arguing it's a way to finance the Big Dig, which is nonsense," says Salvucci (see "Building Costs," right). "It's just greed."

But William Wheaton of MIT's Center for Real Estate says flatly, "There's a value to open space and a value to development. If you set aside huge blocks for open space, you're wasting land."

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The public and the media seem to think that when the Artery comes down, a giant green stripe will roll across downtown. That's not the case. Although it will expose 27 acres of land -- a few more acres than the Public Garden -- a quarter of that will be developed and the rest, though designated open space, might not be very green.

Written in stone If designers could begin work on the Central Artery surface with a blank slate, they'd have a lot more room for creativity. But they can't. The ratio of 75 percent open space to 25 percent development in the environmental permit for the Big Dig isn't open for discussion. "It was more art than science, but [the ratio] seemed to be then -- as it does now -- a fair balancing of the commercial opportunity and public-open-space needs," explains former state environmental secretary John DeVillars, who signed the ratio into law. The permit designates the Boston 2000 plan, which incorporates the roughly 75/25 split, as the one solution the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs (EOEA) considers acceptable. Any plan that deviates from Boston 2000 would require filing a Notice of Project Change with the agency. "If that's necessary to accommodate and support a vision that we believe is in the best long-term interest of Boston, we should go there," says Rick Dimino, head of the Artery Business Committee. But such an effort would be unlikely to succeed. "The 75 percent is an extremely firm commitment," says Jay Wickersham, assistant secretary of the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) for EOEA. "I do not anticipate there would be any decrease in the amount of open space." And trying to change the permit "is not feasible from a political perspective," adds James Rooney, the mayor's point man on the Central Artery surface design. Open space was "how this whole project was sold," explains Bennet Heart of the Conservation Law Foundation. Former state transportation secretary Fred Salvucci agrees. "With all the damage done to the project, it would be terrible to break what people see as a commitment," he says. "This takes on a life larger than the specific merits of low-rise development versus open space." -- LS

The corridor will be a block wide in most places and bordered by three-lane tree-lined streets -- imagine the Comm Ave mall with a central strip at least twice as wide. The main open-space pieces will be a park in the North End, a large site to the south that the Massachusetts Horticultural Society will develop, and a swath in between known as the Wharf District.

The Wharf District is where much of the dynamic between open space and density will play out. It will be the longest continuous sweep of open space in the corridor -- half a mile long, from Quincy Market to just past Rowes Wharf -- and it will connect the downtown to the waterfront. Yet it doesn't have the natural community of users adjacent to it that parts of the corridor do in Chinatown and the North End. As Hubert Murray, former chief architect for the Central Artery, points out, "those places that have been designated open space are right next to the largest open space in the Western hemisphere" -- the Atlantic Ocean. One of the greater challenges in designing the corridor lies in figuring out how to attract people to the waterfront and the portion of corridor next to it.

The designers won't be starting from scratch. The entire corridor, including the Wharf District, has already been sketched out in broad plans that must be respected. The Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) defined these plans in a document called "Boston 2000," which the city and state agreed to in 1991 and updated in 1998. The plans discuss what kind of uses each parcel should include and what can be built on each. The Boston zoning codes incorporated those parcel-by-parcel plans, and the state environmental permit for the Big Dig made them law. So although a quarter of the corridor is marked for housing or commercial use, the permit requires that the other 75 percent be open space (see "Written in Stone," above). But definitions of "open space" may be more flexible than you think.

The phrase conjures up images of grassy parks. But that's not exactly what the zoning and Boston 2000 require. With a nod from the Zoning Board of Appeals, the zoning would allow much of the open space in the Wharf District, for instance, to include cultural facilities, cafés, restaurants, and retail and service operations. And most parcels in the Wharf District are already zoned for buildings two stories high covering up to 15 percent of the land area.

That grants some leeway in designing the open space. And density and indoor activity can be increased without violating the environmental regulations, if we look at open space as civic space. That means space accessible to the public, whether technically "open" or not. The approval of a building on part of the Horticultural Society's open-space site set an important precedent for substituting indoor civic space for outdoor open space. And a proposal for a community center on the North End's piece of open space has received a lot of local support. Other indoor places -- like museums, or enclosed pavilions, or winter gardens with cafés -- might also win approval if designed as part of a broader park system.

The idea of defining open space as civic space has broad support -- from former transportation secretary Salvucci; from Bennet Heart of the Conservation Law Foundation; from the Artery Business Committee; and, crucially, from the Menino administration. "What you certainly don't want is something that is not well-programmed, and may fit within a limited definition of open space but is designed in a way that nobody uses it," says James Rooney, the mayor's point man on the Central Artery surface design.

Even former environmental secretary DeVillars acknowledges that we should now look at the project's requirements as part of a broader whole. "It's far more important to put in place a plan that creates vitality and life, and places of tranquillity and beauty, than it is to adhere to an accountant's definition of the division of that space," he says.

Though they might fit the BRA definitions, civic-space buildings would still be subject to environmental review. The EOEA's Wickersham interprets the term "open space" strictly. "Open space is not development," he says. "The development parcels will be covered with buildings for a wide range of residential, commercial, civic, and community uses. And, by contrast, the open-space parcels are open." Possible uses, he says, might include landscaped parks, open plazas, or farmers' markets. He doesn't rule out public structures on open-space parcels, but says it would have to be looked at parcel by parcel.

Still, this flexibility leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Proposals have included skating rinks, theaters, basketball courts, cafés, historical markers, indoor markets, and a museum of Boston or of the sea. Alex Krieger, a Harvard design professor who has worked on the redesign of City Hall Plaza, the new Fenway Park, and development over the Mass Pike, has been involved with the surface project since the 1980s. He'd like to see five to seven parks the size of Post Office Square strung along the corridor, separated by buildings. About half parks and half buildings and streets, this version of the corridor "would be like a checkerboard or ladder," Krieger explains, rather than one long park.

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For more information If you want to get involved in designing the corridor, an opportunity is coming up soon. The Central Artery design team will hold its next public meeting on Tuesday, May 9, from 6 to 9 p.m., in the New England Room on the fourth floor of the Federal Reserve Bank, at 600 Atlantic Avenue. This meeting will look specifically at what kinds of programming and activities should be planned for the corridor. Participants will be broken up into small groups to discuss ideas. If you can't go, but want to be notified about future meetings, call Carmel Calnan at (617) 951-6192 and she'll put you on the mailing list. To see for yourself the plans thus far in place, call the Boston Redevelopment Authority at (617) 722-4300 and ask for Article 49 of the zoning code. Unfortunately, copies of the original Boston 2000 plan have pretty much run out, but the zoning code incorporates much of it. If you would like a copy of the 1998 brochure that explains the most recent changes to Boston 2000, or if you have questions about Boston 2000, call the BRA's Richard Garver at (617) 918-4367. The Big Dig will soon be adding more information on the design process to its official Web site, www.bigdig.com. To submit your opinions in writing, e-mail the Central Artery Tunnel Project at info@bigdig.com or through www.bigdig.com, or write to Fred Yalouris -- who's overseeing the open-space development -- at the Central Artery Tunnel Project, 185 Kneeland Street, Boston, MA 02111. If you have any questions about the public process, you can e-mail the above address or call the Big Dig's public-information office at (617) 951-6400. -- LS

Boston already has several varied examples of successful urban parks, including Copley Square, Post Office Square, the Comm Ave mall, Boston Common, and the Public Garden. But supporters of open space and advocates for urban density see these spaces as successful for very different reasons -- which is a sign of just how difficult designing the new Central Artery corridor will be. The Natural Areas Fund's Burns says places like Copley Square and Boston Common "are well-used because they're beautiful, they're green, they're open, they offer an opportunity to enter into some kind of civic event or sit and just enjoy a little bit of nature in the midst of the city."

Yet Krieger says those parks work because of what's around them, not just because they're green. "Smaller open spaces like Post Office Square and Copley Square emerge out of the denser urban fabric and give breath to the density around them," he says.

Architect Bluestone, who a decade ago helped develop a proposal for a dense corridor, agrees: "[These] spaces are dependent upon lively adjacent activities in surrounding buildings, whether cafés or retail shops."

In her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote that parks are best populated when they're "situated very close indeed to where active and different currents of life and function come to a focus." Post Office Square bears this out. A wall of office buildings release workers to the park on sunny days -- but it's fairly empty in the evenings. On the Comm Ave mall, however, densely built housing and nearby shops and restaurants draw people out at all times of day and night.

The job ahead -- designing 27 acres that snake through the heart of Boston -- won't be easy. It may even leave some longing for the comparatively simple task of figuring out how to bury a couple of miles of road. What's clear is that the decisions made for the Central Artery surface will affect the city for generations to come. And if it's not designed and built well, the corridor could divide the city in a new way. "If there's nothing inviting people to the space, and there's nothing that's shaping the space, it might be something that looks nice when you're walking by it, but it's not necessarily something you're going to walk in and do something with," Dimino warns. "You don't want to end up re-establishing a barrier where we've just taken one down."

Laura A. Siegel can be reached at lsiegel[a]phx.com.