Well, they say the rain’s going to continue right through the weekend and maybe up until next weekend. Be careful what you wish for, eh?

I guess it’s as good a time as any to talk a little bit about the Fens, where my garden is. I’ve been meaning to give a little background on it, anyway.

To me the Fenway Victory Gardens is the ultimate community garden. And a slice of history, to boot. it’s the only remaining “victory garden” from WWII, established by FDR as a response to wartime rationing, to encourage Americans on the home-front to grow their own vegetables. Even before that, the Fenway was a part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace, a ring of parks and public spaces that together form a sort of greenbelt for Boston:

Olmsted’s original vision has been sadly compromised, and history has not been particularly kind to the Fenway neighborhood, in my opinion. Yes, it has its charms, but the grand boulevard that once led to it and connected it to the rest of the Back Bay was long ago sacrificed to traffic expediencies. The damage the Mass Pike, the highways, overpasses, underpasses, shortcuts and expressways, have done to the neighborhoods of Boston is incalculable. Like a lot of American cities, it has sacrificed its neighborhoods to the automobile, so that, as Richard Sennett says in Flesh & Stone, which I’ve quoted elsewhere, “we now measure urban spaces in terms of how easy it is to drive through them, to get out of them.” Not so great for those who live in them, but too bad, right?

I mean, take a look at these two photographs from the same perspective, the first from 1926 and the second from ‘91:

This area was once a European-style boulevard that integrated human-scale buildings and pedestrian-maneuverable walks with wide, automobile-accommodating streets. What you notice about the first picture is that Commonwealth Ave., which is pictured, is not only a throughway. It is a place to be in itself. In the picture at right it’s not. The overpass there is a formidable barrier now delineating neighborhoods in the city. Homeless people live under it now, as well. It has become a sort of no-man’s land.

The fracturing of Boston in this way–the dead-ends and empty, unusable spaces–can be found not only here, of course, but all over. And there is almost always a big, ugly barrier dividing one side of the tracks or the highway from the other. A small part of the impetus for the Big Dig was the recognition that the North End, and the Harbor, had been completely cut off from the rest of the city, for the sake of the automobile, for the sake of those who want to get through the city quickly, to the detriment of those who actually live in it.

This is part of modernization, of course, and we have to live with choices made before our time due to visions of what our city should be that we may not share today. But there are still fragments of older visions, too, and the Back bay Fens is a part of what remains of one of those, and a noble and worthy one, at that.

5/12/06

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