Tripping and Triumphing: New Year's Homeland Highlights

By Jane Holtz Kay

It's holiday time here in the Homeland, formerly known as the hub, and how goes it at year's end?

The grim autumn has turned into a winter of lapsed environmental, historical and social programs. Seasonal festivities are muted by the sound of sirens and low-swooping airplanes over the citiscape. 'Tis the season, then, to contemplate the real and the surreal, the ups and downs in the pre- and post-9/ll world.

In these parts, Bostonians nervously basked in global warming as evergreens went limp, forsythia bloomed, and squirrels turned giddy with spring fever. Meanwhile, those who bemoan the economic downslide watch the number of Boston's homeless hit a pre-Christmas record of 6,00l while the Brimmer Street Garage sells $150,000 parking spaces to shelter cars.

To commend and condemn such events of the past year, we offer our annual report on the landscape and citiscape in the first year of the millennium.

Massport, the agency everyone loves to hate, remains undaunted by its status as a terrorist launch pad, continuing to push for the infamous runway extension. This proposed $200 million dollar runway, too large for neighborhood ear drums and too small to work financially, flies in the face of the reality of diminishing air travel. Logan sees shrinking flights and passenger-lite planes, Massport survives and swells.

The Back Bay Architectural District gets an urban achievement award for its struggle to release the sidewalks from the magazine containers that clutter the city. Litterboxes, in both the literary and visual sense, these structures narrow the sidewalk, block handicap access and trash the pedestrian environment. May the housekeeping, beautifying walking public win a court victory to confirm their labors in March.

"Churchill," the beloved marine mammal and one of 300 endangered Northern Right Whales, became a dead hero entangled in a literal fishnet -- and a bureaucratic net of indifference and incompetence. Years of labors by Richard "Max" Strahan to make killing whales illegal, and frontline activism by the Sierra Club, couldn't delay the death sentence caused by limp measures and lax judicial, state and federal enforcement. Award to the "protecting" agencies who botched prevention and exhausted their resources on salvation.

City Hall's newly enlivened public space was spoon-fed six million dollars to enhance its once-vacant environs. The result: the brick frontispiece of the city is now a grim catchall of artifacts without artistry. Dotted with an ill-sited tent, oddlot objects, dumpster-esque debris, shoddy logo-laden structures and signs, its most conspicuous insult is a fleet of trucks and City Hall cars using the city's front yard as a parking lot.

Environmentalists and farmers - the greeners and the growers - joined hands to preserve the family farm this year. Despite the demise of the federal Dairy Compact to protect dairy farming, the community-based "buy local" initiatives and legislation worked to save the fresh-earth fabric of the state from sprawl. Coming soon, passage of the Food and Farmland Protection Act could bring community preservation of the down-to-earth sort to the farmers on the state's hardpressed soil.

Sustainable energy got a boost in this oil-dependent region when the first wind turbine in the state was hoisted in Hull this season. Churning the free breezes by the sea into power, the first municipal windmill on the East Coast is saving $50,000 in electricity costs this year. May this first project, bolstered by the Mass. Renewable Energy Trust, give birth to other steps away from fossil-fuel consumption.

Bedeck the halls of grassroots activists with Main Street mistletoe for their success in restoring the Jamaica Plain streetcar line, 16 years after its banishment. The hard-fought battle set a precedent that should and could encourage light rail for the long-deprived Washington Street Corridor, bolster rail-lite cities like Somerville and substitute transit-oriented development for statewide sprawl.

The Custom House Tower, once the city's loftiest public symbol and choicest viewing peak, was roped off from true public access this year, long before security became the excuse de jour. Violating the deal that secured the urban treasure, the Marriott privatizers have usurped Boston's treasure for the sake of their paying customers, handcuffing history, pushing out tourists, and cheating the city.

After Operation Sponge soaked up the waterspill and Operation Bolster mended the bridge; after Bechtel's Big Dig budget tripled to $4.5 billion and the digging and dredging saturated our lives, what will happen to the vision - and the legal agreement to maintain the Central Artery Corridor's open space? Not a lot ... is the answer right now. While the Central Artery staff and the state struggle to uphold that accord, the mayor flip-flops and Ric Dimino's buck-a-neer Artery Business Committee wheels and deals to appropriate and sabotage the space, public-be-damned, design by default.

In the Beacon Hill hub of hot property, the generation-old Hill House managed to raise l.8 million dollars from the neighbors to renovate and update a much-sought fire station space. Five years in the making, this new mini-town in the city contributes recreation, education and social activities to children of all ages from six months to eighty-plus years. Ring the bell for community bonding.

In this banner year, bad news was good news for America's trains. Acela's stepped-up service to New York was plumped up with new passengers. And Maine's TrainRiders launched the Downeaster to Portland, filled with happy throngs. Thus encouraged, Secretary of Transportation Kevin Sullivan's letter pushing Congressmen to finish the underground link between North and South Stations could create a seamless and speedy east coast corridor trip.

Stepping forth where Washington backs off, the Bay State persuaded its neighbors to clamp down on the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. As the thermometer continued its record-breaking climb, the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs pressed the six New England governors and five Canadian premiers to roll back emissions to 1990 levels by 20l0, and reduce them 80 percent thereafter.

A first locally and nationally, may this good start warm the heart and chill out the planet for the New Year.

Originally published in Boston Globe December 31, 2001

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