People's Park or Disposable Landscape?

By Jane Holtz Kay

Built with corporate money this splendid waterfront park has just one fatal flaw: The public loves it.

Locally, they call it "Ned's Park." Not "Eastport Park," its proper name. Not "South Boston Seaport Park" to indicate where it is located. Not even "Halvorson Design Associates Park," the designers of what may be the finest modernist public park in the city. The general label is "Ned's Park," and therein lies the cloud of controversy that shadows its future.

Robust granite seat walls serve park visitors who want to stay awhile. All photos by Frederica Matera.

"Ned" is Edward C. Johnson, the former CEO and prominent power broker of Fidelity Investments, a company that includes Pembroke Realty. He is the Medici who funded this park which merges landscape art and public access next to two office buildings and a hotel assigned to Pembroke under a 90-year lease from the Massport Authority planning agency.

Eastport Park, like all spaces on the city's waterfront, is supposed to hew to Chapter 91, a Massachusetts law that requires waterfront plans to include public access-a permanent right of the city's residence to use space in seaside areas. Given that mandate of a people's park, the Halvorson Design Partnership designed a space open and accessible to the public. Opened in 2000, the dense and thoughtful "green room", as landscape architect Craig Halvorson, ASLA, describes it was designed to meet those obligations. And does.

Today's park is a rich mix of coastal plants, paths, and sturdy benches. Phillips' granite sculptures and another artwork suggests the astronomy and lore of seagoing, rough seaside shores, and urban nooks. The benches shape zones for conversation, spaces in which to sit alone or with companions; the varied stone paving makes for an interesting mosaic, and the sculptures provoke a smile. "Come play," says the park, and on one visit I did, walking up and around, sitting on the amphitheater steps, and avoiding the benches bearing signs now offering signs saying "Caution! Bench surface gets extremely hot" and wondering why trees above wouldn't do the job.

The park invites public entry around edges graced by the likes of Shingu's kinetic sculpture gateway.

Nonetheless, the parks gardens and the paths weaving throughout, punctuated by seaside plants, art, and artifacts, welcome visitors and neighbors.

But just how long that will continue is not clear. The park's future came into question about two years after it was opened, when word emerged that Johnson intended to alter the design. As shown in the drawings circulated privately to landscape architects and others, the new design would alter the public nature of the park-carefully achieved by open pathways and visual axes through the space. By enclosing the park in green walls around the edge-with denser planting to separate it from the street-and by removing sculptures and shifting, paths, the plan would make the park more removed from the public, more privatized..and attached to the Pembroke offices and hotel next door.

Word of this new design-authored by English landscape architect Elizabeth Banks with drawings by Pressley Associates of Cambridge-triggered the concern of other landscape architects in the Boston area. Artist David Phillips, who collaborated on the design, was also agitated by word of Johnson's plans Phillips took the cast to court and won a stay. In the limbo since that court decision, concern has intensified for both he park and the surrounding seaport areas.

The South Boston Waterfront it is the city's latest hot spot for development. Like many other urban waterfronts in this country and elsewhere, it is much less active with oceangoing commerce. Instead, it offers 125 redevelopment acres interspersed among aging industrial buildings . Some of these worn brick structures house artists; others offer stylish or seedy places to eat. Oceans of surface parking and stand-alone structures- including the recent glass wave of Manulife Financial headquarters, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-rob the surrounding streets of urbanity. Going by foot from, say South Station or Boston's lively wharves to the Children's Museum requires weaving through vacant lots and other pedestrian-unfriendly places.

Artist David Phillips' site-specific granite sculptures are seamlessly integrated into the design.

Across six wide lanes of traffic from Eastport Park stands the lifeless façade of Boston's work of three notable Boston architectural firms, The Stubbins Associates, Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, and Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott. Following the trend of tired brick historicism that characterizes many of Boston's recent buildings, these three structures are bland, lifeless and aloof from the city streets.

Still, the future could be more promising if planning were to move to a more public, thoughtful mode...or simply stay true to the intent of Chapter 91. The original Halvorson plan did so. In its wake, Pembroke Realty agreed to allow Eastport Park to flourish as a place to eat a brown-bag lunch, linger and enjoy the art, or simply drift into stare into space. But it was not to be. The developer demurred: Johnson ha been working behind the scenes-in violation of the agreement , say advocates those who resist his plans-to alter the park to discourage use by the its true public client.

If those who deplore the potential remake of the park view Johnson's actions as defiant of his agreement, Jim Doolin, deputy director of design at the little-loved Massport, sees it as "no big deal." Outsiders speculate that the agency would be hardpressed not to assent to the powerbroker whose "charitable" hand can be used as a whip. Understaffed and more interested in planning for airport runways, roads, garages, and giant artifacts of the auto age, the agency is cast in the Robert Moses, big-picture planning role...hardly an ally of the average Jane Or Joe.

Flourishing salt-tolerant plants, lavishly arrayed at pedestrian scale, allow views in and out of the park.

Still, despite its unfriendly pedestrian environment and negligent planners, the waterfront shows signs of life, and the greened and groomed Eastport Park could play a role. Good urban design and realtor interests don't always ally, but Halvorson, also landscape architect for downtown's popular Post Office Square, made a good choice in collaborating with artists Phillips and Judy McKie who shared in shaping the lively, versatile and engaging place. Aiming to relate the city to the water and they created a maritime oasis open to all.

Alas, it may not survive. If Johnson gets his way, the space's outward orientation will go, the park will be visually severed from the rest of the South Boston waterfront.

Will this public/private park endure? Behind the scenes landscape architects and others complain. They write, they e-mail one another, and try to rally. All to little avail thus far. "What Johnson always wanted was a green wall," says one insider. While park enthusiasts hope that John will not prevail in the face of the civil lawsuit that Phillips won in U.S. District Court. The artist's sin winning argument was based on the U.S. Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, inspired by the dismantling of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in New York's Federal Plaza, pus the state's Art Preservation Act. The court issued a restraining order. The works remain. Whether Johnson will appeals is up for speculation, but knowledgeable green activists, and Johnson observers ay that what Johnson wants, Johnson gets.

"We feel that the park has been a great success," says a spokesman for Pembroke Realty. "The new design for the public will make it even more so," he insists. Many landscape architects, planners and passersby beg to differ.

This critic-at-large article ran in the March, 2004 issue of Landscape Architecture.

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