Officials running the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway are circulating their latest plans to drive traffic to the downtown Boston park, including a carousel, a farmers’ market, and a makeover of the section near South Station to include wooden flooring with sail-like canopies overhead.
Nancy Brennan, executive director of the Greenway Conservancy, the private organization designated to run the parks, told a gathering at the law firm Goulston & Storrs Thursday night that the farmers’ market will open toward the end of this month, and the carousel will open on the section of the Greenway across from Christopher Columbus Park in early June.
Brennan said installation of wood flooring to replace the grass and shrubs on the park parcel near South Station would proceed next year (or the year after) if the public embraces the idea and enough funds can be raised to pay for the project. Brennan said a large screen would likely be mounted on the air intake building at the end of the parcel, on which movies or live-video feeds would be screened. She said a performance stage would also be built adjacent to the air intake building, and an acrylic ice rink would be installed over the wooden flooring during winter months.
The Greenway plans were unveiled at a panel discussion sponsored by the Urban Land Institute that featured Ed Uhlir, director of design for Millennium Park in Chicago, Kairos Shen, director of planning for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and Richard Dimino, president of the A Better City business group.
The combination panel discussion and slide show presentation was a wake-up call for Boston. Uhlir’s presentation showed that teamwork between a city’s business community and municipal government can produce a world-class park. It also showed that the Greenway isn’t even in the same league as Millennium.
Where Millennium is filled with ambitious and unusual sculptures and attractions that draw huge crowds (for details, see here), the Greenway is largely a blank canvas of grass, shrubs, and fountains. Uhlir confided that architect Frank Gehry, who designed Millennium’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion, is at work on a secret new winter project for the park. In contrast, Brennan’s big news for the Greenway was the opening of the farmers’ market.
Millennium attracted 300,000 people at its opening in July 2004; the Greenway attracted 50,000 at its coming-out party last October. Ulhir said Millennium has raised $220 million in private money; the Greenway says private donors have pledged more than $20 million. Millennium seems flush with cash, while Brennan says the Greenway Conservancy will scrape by in the coming fiscal year with $5.7 million, about $1.5 million less than what she says she needs and about $2.9 million less than what she said she needed last summer.
“That simply is inadequate, but it’s fine and appropriate for FY10,” she said.
The BRA’s Shen cautioned Bostonians about getting carried away with comparisons to Millennium Park, likening Millennium Park to a graduate student and the Greenway to a kindergartner. One is mature and accomplished, the other still developing, he said. “Fundamentally, the two things are very different,” he said.
Photo of Chinatown section of the Greenway by Frank Curran. Photo of Millennium Park’s Crown Fountain courtesy of the city of Chicago.
