By Charlie McCabe
The newspaper excerpt below is from the August 18, 2013 edition of the Boston Globe.
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Boston Globe: August 18, 2013
When I interviewed for a job at the Rose Kennedy Greeenway Conservancy in mid-December 2011, they had just repaired the Occupy Boston campsite at Dewey Square Park after a 73-day encampment. Having replaced both the irrigation system and the lawn, they were planning a new garden design for installation in the spring. A couple of months later, in my first week on the job in February 2012, the Conservancy was responding to allegations of a "too high" salary for their executive director. Times were challenging, but the organization's efforts were starting to pay off, bringing art, food, and activities into the park in efforts to boost visitorship.
My job was to continue that effort and bring scores of events and programming into the greenway at as little cost as possible. Given my background running a small, scrappy citywide parks nonprofit in Austin for nearly seven years, this didn't seem too difficult to figure out, just a lot of work. I had two staff members working with me, and they were already planning for a food truck festival in early May that had been postponed from the fall due to the Occupy encampment, so we were off to a good start.
Replanting the Dewey Square Park garden beds, spring 2012
Underlying the programming push was a robust food truck program and continual free summer events ranging from yoga to Morris dancing demonstrations (yup, it's real, look it up), to a weekly craft market and a biweekly farmers market. The gardens and lawns of the Greenway, benefitting from an all-organic approach to plant care, were thriving. We had some creative ideas about temporary public art, and our slow and steady efforts to construct a one-of-a-kind carousel to replace the seasonal one currently in operation were taking shape.
Food Truck Festival, fall 2012
I was returning to Boston after a long absence, 26 years since graduating from college and heading west to California, then to Austin. The accents and some of the terminology were different from Austin to Boston, but policies and procedures for city permitting of large events were quite similar, for better or worse.
Many Bostonians were still skeptical about the benefits of the Greenway, given the enormous costs associated with the Big Dig. We now had a set of parks where previously there had been an elevated highway, but people couldn't easily transition to thinking of hanging out in a space where for decades they had parked their cars under a four-story-tall freeway. The Big Dig was a massive construction project that brought noise, dirt, and dust for over 15 years through the heart of Boston. And while we had a beautiful green ribbon of newly planted parks, the Greenway was missing the "shiny objects" that Big Dig backers had promoted, including a museum, a YMCA, a cultural center, and a "garden under glass," leaving many people bitterly disappointed.
Food Truck Festival, spring 2013
So we focused on free programming, providing as much as we could, filling the calendar during the peak season of April through October. We combined multiple offerings in a day — food trucks, the farmers market, activity carts for kids (with college students serving as play attendants) and exercise classes like yoga, tai chi, and crossfit — to make the Greenway a destination for the whole day rather than just one stop.
Temporary artwork, The Figment Festival, July 2013
There were some events that worked better than others (like the Figment Festival), and some where we could barely maintain control (like the Boston Food Festival, which was huge, chaotic, and generally "like nailing jelly to a tree" as the old Texas saying goes). But, we learned, adjusted, and planned for the following years, streamlining events, and declining to host others that had proven too much of a burden for our small programming staff.
Boston Food Festival, fall 2013
Our public art program continued to grow, with help from board members and several Boston art institutions. In the summer of 2012, we commissioned our first mural at Dewey Square, the Giant of Boston, painted by Sao Paulo artists Os Gemeos. It was intentionally bright, bold, and unexpected, and unintentionally controversial. It invigorated an ongoing series of efforts to bring temporary public art to the Greenway, and since then, the efforts have only grown in scope and scale.
The Giant of Boston: 2012-2013, Dewey Square Park
In October of 2012, we hosted a Boston vs. New York City food truck festival that brought thousands of people back to Dewey Square Park. Overall, we hosted over 300 programs and events in 2012, and would continue to add more in ensuing years. The next year, 2013, we unveiled the new Greenway Carousel, after six months of construction, opening on Labor Day weekend in September 2013. It was a proud moment bringing a unique carousel featuring hand-picked and handcrafted New England wildlife, based on local children's drawings of animals from the land, air, and sea. In less than a year, over 100,000 people bought a ticket and rode the carousel.
Carousel preview in the Boston Globe, August 2013
There were over a million visits to the Greenway in 2013 as a result, putting the Greenway and the Conservancy that managed it on solid footing for the first time. Since then, the park has only grown in popularity and offerings (and since 2017, has finally been able to host a beer garden, which we always knew would be the most popular and profitable venture), showing that a little-known, much-derided park could be programmed and enjoyed by all. It just took a little work.
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