Closing Down "Open Space"

By Jane Holtz Kay

Americans are singing the ballad of open space. As countless citizens bemoan the loss of "open space," still others vote to save it. If the don't-fence-me-in phrase hasn't become a moral imperative, it certainly seems a green one. But just what exactly is this thing called open space, this creed of the wild or wide open spaces that makes us wax lyrical?

Certainly, the art of landscaping -- that placemaking of shaped space, of organized and tenanted space, of space filled, contoured and labeled from Boston's "Emerald Necklace" to today's proposed East Coast Greenway along the eastern seaboard coast -- is prized. But why the phrase "open space"? Why a concept that seems more a void for free-for-all pavers and ballpark proponents than promise for the future? Can't we find a less vacuous phrase?

Look through the recent Pioneers in Landscape Architecture, (McGraw-Hill, 2000), a book recording 160 "geniuses and ordinary folk" who impacted our landscape, and you find projects ranging from "the apogee of the City Beautiful movement" to its destruction the "nadir of urban sprawl and impulsive automobility." The biographies of talented land-shapers compiled by editors Charles Birnbaum and Robin Karson include makers and promoters of country places and city spaces, of parks and gardens, of linear and curvilinear patterns, of roundabouts and memorials -- of designed space that attracted, and attracts, allegiance.

Yet, while this rich heritage is obvious to landscape architects, its power to shape today's cities has been lost to most Americans. When planning models switched from park-maker and community builder Frederick Law Olmsted to park-wrecker and community-blaster as Robert Moses‹the nation seemed to lose its faith in urban placemaking altogether. Its citizens narrowed their sights. Forgotten is the fact that defined space, visionary space -- not "open space" --is what makes the pulse race and the place pulse.

The results of this urban amnesia are corrosive. An untutored mind-set and policies hostile to good public planning undercut today's labors to rebuild our vacated cities and brownfields.

A lame vocabulary further enfeebles our work to create a "congregated human life under glorious and necessarily artificial conditions, as Olmsted put it. And so, lacking a positive, greener vision of the future, plans inevitably succumb to a factional slicing and dicing that undercuts the restoration of our lost landscapes.

Today, Boston is a city illustrating that point. Split from its seaport by the Central Artery roadway that smashed through the city in the 1950s, this man-made town has the opportunity to re-contour and stitch the desecrated swath. The builders of the current $15 billion "Big Dig" highway tunnel replacement will eventually release the thirty-acre surface beneath the grim "elevated" that formerly separated the jammed downtown and the waterfront.

On an evening last fall, "on the cusp of testing designs," as San Francisco planner Karen Alschuler put it, the latest plans for the connecting spaces emerged. Orchestrated by her firm, SMWM, with landscape architects Halverson Company and the Cecil Group, the prospects filled the screen for a public presentation at Faneuil Hall. A blur of statements and images -- swelling, popping, sweeping -- moved across the map of the neighborhoods involved as she described attempts to "build a common ground" for the "essential open space." But where was the compelling vision for reclaiming that long-suffering site? The potpourri of plants and all-purpose artifacts -- trellises here, a carousel there -- seemed ungrounded and unconnected to the raveled turf they would inhabit.

"What is open space?" a memorandum from the Subcommittee on Open Space from Boston's parks department asked, seeking to define the goals for the Big Dig Landscape. "Open to the sky. Accessible to the public... you know it when you see it," it went on. "Hard vs. soft... includes paved surfaces, green surfaces including grass, trees, bushes, and flower beds, water surfaces including ice and edging; active vs. passive and both. Structure vs. nonstructure and both with the buildings subservient...." Such vague mandates do not a livable city inspire, here or elsewhere.

For Boston's issues and problems in claiming a vanished landscape are not singular. In an era of enlarging urban ambitions and makeovers, this historic city has peers in uncovering asphalt wastelands and vitalizing exhausted brownfields. IN paved-over and historically polluted places like Providence, the Bronx, Milwaukee, and Louisville, urbanites are jackhammering the tarred-over past to reconnect urban neighborhoods. As in Boston, not one of these lost-and-found landscapes is a tabular rasa; as in this old city, the art and politics of creating a good public place are complex and, as with Boston's brutalized artery moonscape, freed land demands more green vision and less nebulous "open space."

Here, even after the pricey dismantling and burying of the elevated roadway, the mile-and-a-half of surface corridor running from North to South Stations will still hold six traffic lanes. For some optimists, the green corridor sandwiched in the middle of these roads parallels the Back Bay's 19th century Commonwealth avenue, a graceful tree-lined boulevard between brick rowhouses. For landscape architect Craig Halvorson it represents a common ground, a landscaped "ramble" snaking down the street. For others, it is just an island in a sea of traffic that remains a gash and obstacle to crossing between the downtown and the harbor.

Preparing for the spring release of the design, Halvorson's office walls held the more detailed plans for six to eight new park areas scattered within he corridor and connecting to the communities to either side, plus the infill of six-to-eight story buildings to reunite the corridor.

In the State House, a legislative committee worked to find a single agency or "owner" to organize and maintain the project and find funds beyond today's meager $65 million purse. Neighborhood by neighborhood, faction by faction, those pursuing urban green spaces and those seeking urban gold (sometimes inseparable) are struggling to fill in the blanks and link the neighborhoods along the route once etched by early Boston planners, running now from the upscaled and altered North End to the old waterfront/wharf area, through midtown, the Leather District and Chinatown.

As the hour advances, Central Artery corridor visions and coalitions vary. Halvorson talks abut blending the mobility of a corridor with the quietude of a green space and looks for a phrase to make the notion compelling. Curtis Davis, architect on the Mayor's Task Force, envisions the makeover as a "Gateway Park," looking to the sea.

Preservationists look to retrieve the urban nineteenth century waterfront of the now-mangled city and fear a "green barrier" of so-called open space that is really still a highway that makes crossing impassible. Developers, as is their wont, concoct deals to build on their piece of the rock. Activists scan their nodes to safeguard them.

In the end, so-called common ground is easier to contemplate than establish. Perhaps it always was. Still, traversing Olmsted's not-too-distant Fenway along the Muddy River where movement and repose live in harmony or the late embodiment in the Charles River Esplanade, the glorious alliance between people and place cultivated in the 19th century still thrives.

Today's scrap of paved space is far smaller. And such bygone works of art and environment brought about by enlightened clients, a perceptive city and brilliant landscape architects seem all too bygone. Yet hope lingers here. For all such fears some still recall the city's Olmstedian roots in creating a city for "congregated human life under glorious and necessarily artificial conditions." As cities start to thrive once more, today's Boston, like much of America, presents itself for the re-shaping.

Originally published in Landscape Architecture magazine, January, 2001.

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