« Boston Before & After Plans | Main | Enjoy It While It Lasts »
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Boston Before & After
A photo album at cyurbia.com has great Before & After pictures of Boston since the 1920s such as the the aerial view above of central Boston in 1923. Boston still looked like a medieval city then, with channels of space carved into an almost solid mass of buildings, like riverbeds in a stone plateau. (Click on the photo to enlarge it, or click here for a high-res version — when the magnifying glass appears, use it to scroll around the photo).
In Before & After photos, After is supposed to look better than Before. After 50 years, we are finally coming to a time in urban design when the After pictures have a reasonable chance of looking better than the Before.
Boston's Big Dig has set the stage for a second set of After photos, following the Urban Removal of 1959 - 1963. First came the Central Ahtery in 1959, then the infamous West End clearance of 1961, and finally the uto/dysto/pian Government Center of 1963, with its pig in a poke, the Boston City Hall. A disastrous urban misinterpretation of Le Corbusier's convent La Tourette, you can still find it at greatbuildings.com, which says a lot about the urban design problems of the second half of the 20th century.
Will the next set of After photos look better than the last? The Rose Kennedy Greenway Video at bigdig.com gives some hints, both good and bad.
Of course it's a good thing that the Central Artery has come down, letting the broken connections to the North End and the waterfront be rebuilt. And Boston has a tradition of linear parks in the Fenway and Comm Ave, Boston's great urban spine from the 19th century. But is there too much parkway, and too little urbanism? Time will tell, maybe Newsweek.
The good news is time. Cities endure, and they can always be fixed over time. At the very least, the Big Dig is a good first step.
November 28, 2004 in Architecture, Classicism, New Urbanism, Travel, Urbanism, Weblogs | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/11457/1467168
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Boston Before & After:
» Boston Before from Veritas et Venustas
Human Scale versus Machine ScaleHuman Space versus No Place [Read More]
Tracked on Nov 28, 2004 9:55:22 PM
Comments
The city of Dallas is now at war over the plans to build a tollway-way highway inside the planned trinity River Park, AND inside the flood zone.
I've included a flier that I prepared and passed out to all city council members just before they voted on whether or not to have a November referendum on the issue.
Councilwoman Angela Hunt, was the lone council member out of 15 to stand up for the We the People of Dallas. Ms. Hunt can be contacted at www.angela.hunt@dallascityhall.com for help/contributions. Her website is:www.trinityvote.com
__________________________________
The Trinity River Park War
We The People Vs. The Elite
_________________________________________________
No Troll-Way Highway…
It’s For The ELITE to “GET OFF”!!!
(What we really need is for them to get off our backs!!!)
__________________________________________________
IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS IT WILL BE
REVEALED THAT THE TRINITY RIVER PLAN IS
THE BIGGEST FRAUD IN DALLAS HISTORY,
AND THE BIGGEST RIPOFF OF DALLAS
TAXPAYERS...IF WE THE PEOPLE LET THEM
BUILD THE TROLLWAY...
AND THE PLANNED “PARK".
_______________________________________________
Here are some very revealing facts about the Trinity River Park and Tollway-Highway Plans:
1. Boston, Mass. recently spent 10 years and $14 billion in removing the blight of a downtown highway system that separated the downtown urban residents from the river and harbor recreational areas.
2. There are virtually no access roads into, and throughout the Trinity River Park Plan to take people to the various venues. This is consistent with the access to the Trinity being denied citizens today.
3. There are virtually no recreational venues within the Trinity River Park for people to enjoy. Lots of wetlands, trees, and lots of grassed areas. The Trinity Park is “All Wet” with or without flooding.
4. The proposed Trinity Park has been designed to be a PICTURE POSTCARD, so THEY, the ELITE can look down on it from Eliteville, where there will be "exclude-sive" condos, apartments, hotels lofts, restaurants, shops, etc, separated from the rest of us by a "moat" of the highway barriers of 35, 183, and the TROLL-WAY HIGHWAY. Where are “We The People” in the planned park? Dallas is spending $65 million for one bridge across the Trinity, while Ft. Worth will get 3 for the same price
5. Extending the Trollway-Highway out into the flood plain away from the levees to avoid a confrontation with the U.S. Army Corp. means nothing to the Elite that want the highway, because the Troll-way would just take up some more grassed area. It wouldn't negatively impact the recreational facilities in the planned Trinity Park, it really wouldn't degrade the park...BECAUSE THE PLANNED TRINITY RIVER PARK ISN'T A REAL PARK...IT'S AN ILLUSION. A true park has recreational facilities.
This planned park has “virtually none”. THIS IS NO NEW YORK’S CENTRAL PARK!!!
6. There are no plans today to allow thousands of Dallas citizens to be in THEIR PARK, THE ELITE’S
PARK, BECAUSE, AS JIM SCHUTZE WITH THE OBSERVER JUST WROTE, WE ARE FIGHTING A CULTURAL WAR...A RACIST WAR TO BE LESS POLITICALLY CORRECT.
7. The proposed Troll-way-Highway is all about servicing the Elite, allowing them to GET TO their
residences ASAP, with “GET-OFF” TROLL-WAY EXITS along the PICTURE POSTCARD-NO WE THE PEOPLE Trinity River Park. A TRUE RELIEVER HIGHWAY (WHICH IS HOW THE ELITE ARE SELLING THIS PIG-IN A POKE TROLL-WAY/PARK) WOULD NOT GO FROM 6 LANES TO 4 LANES AT CONTINENTAL, CREATING A MASSIVE TRAFFIC JAM!!! A true reliever highway would remain 6 lanes, and continue on to 30, 35, and 45.
8. The City of Dallas is moving ahead with the design and construction of the new $55 million Woodall Rogers park, started 7 years after the Trinity Park bond package was passed, which will be a PARK WITH PEOPLE, but the people will be of the elite kind, not the kind of people who would
enjoy a true Trinity River Park, not “BLUE COLLAR” working class people.
9. The original $246 million bond package was passed in 1998. In the last 9 years Dallas has spent little to address the calling of the voters for recreational facilities in the Trinity River flood zone. Part of the bond money could have been spent a few years ago on gravel roads, gravel parking lots, open park areas, picnic, barbecue, camping areas, canoe access, and fishing locations along the 7 mile long Urban
Park Trinity River. Instead of serving Dallas residents, Dallas has severely restricted citizen access to the Trinity River flood plain, cutting off all internal roads, and limiting access and recreation to Crow Park, which is accessible from the Sylvan Ave. Bridge. Crow Park is less than 1% of the total Trinity River Park!
As Mr. Jim Schutze pointed out in the Dallas Observer, and as more and more Dallas residents are waking up to, this is a “Cultural War”. There are essentially two classes of people in Dallas; Elite and Non-Elite; Monied, and Non-Monied/Broke. The upcoming November Trinity River Referendum is all about the rights of the 80% of us whose sweat off our brows makes everything work, who are getting less and less, so the 10 to 20% can have more and more at our, at WE THE PEOPLE’S EXPENSE.
Posted by: Richie Sheridan at Aug 19, 2007 4:57:55 PM
