Inventing the Charles River Basin : urban images and civic discourse in Boston, 1844-1994

Abstract

The Charles River Basin, extending from the foot of Beacon Hill upstream past Harvard's Soldiers Field, has been called Boston's "Central Park." The river looks to all appearances tranquil and unchanging, one of the most visible and carefully preserved natural features of Boston. In fact, the Basin is a totally contrived landscape. Before its creation could begin, the river had first to be imagined as a single public space. Robert Gourlay was the first to envision the Charles as "an amphitheatre of surpassing beauty." In 1844 he called for a "Science of City Building" which would harmonize "the streams, the islands, and the promontories" of Boston into a grand panorama. That vision also encompassed a "New Town" on the mud flats of the city's Back Bay, where education and opportunity would end the oppression of poverty. Two generations later, in their plan for a metropolitan park system, Sylvester Baxter and Charles Eliot advocated the "scientific selection" of public open space to establish a framework for the growth of the region. At the end of the twentieth century, Boston set out to build the largest highway project in the history of the United States. The Central Artery/Tunnel Project would demolish the forty-year-old elevated highway that cut through the heart of the city and replace it with a new underground road; it would also build the world's widest cable-stayed suspension bridge across the Charles River. In the course of the highway's design, more scientific analysis was brought to bear on the highway and its effects on the Charles River than Gourlay, Baxter, or Eliot could have imagined. Yet the unifying culture of refinement that sustained the creation of the metropolitan park system had dissipated; the planning for the Central Artery took place in a culture of disciplinary rather than civic professionalism. The highway project's critics had no disagreement with the benefits of demolishing the elevated highway. They argued for an equally ambitious vision for the neighborhoods around the Charles River and for the river itself, as the central public space of the metropolis.