The Greenway is a giant monument to mediocre urban planning. The city has missed a once-in-its-history chance to:

= Reattach the North End to the rest of the city.
= Reattach the city to its harbor.
= Provide a people-scaled, pedestrian-friendly corridor of the type that has been wildly successful in many European cities.
= Create a real focal point for a city that lacks one.

Instead, the space was chopped up into groups of parcels that were developed to the lowest common denominator standards of urban design, with no overall coordination and a complete lack of imagination. Our reward has been a mixture of concrete wastelands and uninviting tundra that are unattractive during the day and downright scary at night.

Who’s to blame? Competing city and state agencies and bickering neighborhood interests, none of whom care about anything other than their own parochial interests.

Criminal, but so, so predictable.

BTW, the main point of your post is, to be charitable, uninformed. These days relatively mature trees are transplanted all the time as part of landscape projects. no need to wait for decades.

That’s a great pic of Comm ave…doesnt that give the greenway folk hope — that it will look better?

skru the fact that it wont happen in our lifetime…

THEY GOTTA PLANT TREES for the Greenway to get green…

Walk from Bulfinch to Reginas yesterday for lunch —

the green area closest to Zakim? The grass is already burning — NO TREES — all I could think about is how bad this will look in three years? With nothing but dirt/ burnt grass…

Terrible…

Plant something…even if small…just do it.

TREEMONT

The Greenway ends at Haymarket. Any land north from there to Causeway Street is being sold off for development, and is planted with green grass only as an interim measure. Come back in a few years and you’ll find buildings there, not trees.