Paul's House Diary

I guess they are kind of, sort of trying, just a little bit harder, to make the Greenway passable as more than a median strip, as the parks’ Conservancy put up some steal beams and a few wavy slabs of concrete to block the sun and educate folks on the parcel between Quincy Market and Columbus Park.

The new Harbor Pavilion is the only structure planned for the Greenway that made it to fruition. The original plan was for a glass enclosed cube with a small moat surrounding it that would have tickets and information for ferries between Long Wharf and the Boston Harbor Islands National Park. It was surely more expensive a design than what we received, but I actually prefer this weird mess to another boring glass cube.

This design features varying levels of curved canopies that on rainy days will collect rainwater and funnel it down into a small pebbly pool. Why they decided to make the most interesting part of the design a function that will only reveal itself on rainy days when people don’t tend to go to parks, I do not know. Aside from creating a roughly 6 foot waterfall the effect is rather unimpressive – instead of creating a wall of water it creates a small stream, and instead of that stream feeding another stream, it just hits the ground and disappears. Maybe there is another purpose for this watershow, but aside from making passerbys have to pee I don’t see it.

The Pavilion does liven up a spot on the Greenway that, like most of the park system, was vacant and dull. Now it frames the path that pedestrians will take between the more interesting Columbus park on one side and the more interesting Quincy Market on the other by juxtaposing the lame carousel across from the Pavillion; a replica of a better one that can be found on the Commons, which is also a much better park.

Below are some pictures from Saturday, May 28. The city itself is gorgeous, and so was the weather, so I won’t discount how appealing the whole scene looks. I just hope the parks keep maturing and are something worth visiting in their own right in the coming years.