(already subscribe? log in).

A chance to reclaim the Esplanade

Paul McMorrow

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 14, 2012|By Paul McMorrow

THE BEAUTIFUL thing about concrete is that it eventually crumbles. Pound it with ice, salt, and relentless traffic for a few decades, and it falls to pieces. This is a tremendous hassle for the engineers whose job it is to keep roadways and bridges in single pieces. But for those whose lives are shaped by concrete infrastructure, the material’s finite lifespan is its greatest quality.

Hulking roadways are decaying across the Boston area. The Longfellow Bridge, Storrow Drive, and Somerville’s McGrath-O’Brien Highway will all require major reconstruction efforts within the next several years. The end of these structures’ usable lives presents an opportunity - to correct past mistakes, reduce our overreliance on automobiles, and make our cities more lively places. It’s the opportunity to swap engineering from the 1950s with modern, human-scale design.

Last week, the Esplanade Association unveiled a blueprint for revitalizing the park alongside the Charles River. The private advocacy group’s plan deals at length with ways to mitigate or overcome the presence of Storrow Drive, the high-speed parkway that separates the Esplanade from Boston. That, in turn, speaks to the degree to which the roadway has degraded the park.

Storrow Drive and the elevated Bowker Overpass, which connects Storrow to the Fenway and Longwood, are monuments to an era when planners equated a city’s welfare with the efficiency of its traffic patterns. They obliterated the urban fabric in the name of easing travelers’ trips through the city. These road construction projects did nothing to bolster the affected neighborhoods, but they did degrade the very things that make cities lively in the first place.

Storrow Drive was built as a two-lane low-speed park road. It doesn’t just run alongside the Esplanade; it’s inside the park. Storrow was expanded to its current six-lane incarnation in the 1950s, with the expansion coming at the expense of the park that created it. At Charles Circle, traffic barrels under the Longfellow Bridge on what was once parkland, squeezing bikers and pedestrians onto a narrow ribbon of asphalt; the mammoth Bowker Overpass severs Kenmore Square from the Back Bay, and turns the connection between the Esplanade and the Fens into a dark, filthy patch of dirt. In both places, automotive infrastructure swept aside green space and active pedestrian zones, and the city is worse off for it.