Rings Fountain

I can’t help but keep thinking to myself how walkable the city of Boston is. It was summer and it was very warm but the heat wasn’t getting to me as much as it did the previous day. Perhaps it is because I already had a good night’s sleep and I was fully recharged. The city has numerous small parks which provide a pleasant place for people to walk in. More impressively, there is a nice green belt which is just behind the harbor. Apparently, this was all intentional. This entire stretch is the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway.

First where did this greenway come from. A few decades back, there was a highway here which follows the curve of the current greenway. The John Fitzgerald Expressway used to be a major highway here. Because of limited space to expand, there was massive traffic here as the population of the city grew. This needed a rethink of how to solve this infrastructure problem. The solution was called the Big Dig – essentially it called for the removal of the expressway and move it underground. The Big Dig took a long time to complete and it was one of the largest highway projects in the United States, typical issues hounded it, including delays and of course blowing the budget. But you can’t really stop once you started.

Ultimately, the Big Dig was completed in 2003 and it relieved a lot of the issues that was plaguing the city. So now that the expressway has moved underground, what happened to the space where the highway used to be? It was turned into a park. This park follows the old expressway line and as you can imagine, it is quite substantial. It is named the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in honor of the mother of the Kennedys political family. This greenway is a great addition to the livability of the city of Boston as it cuts right through the city and gives it the lungs it needs.

[xmlgm {http://www.worldwanderings.net/kml/RoseFitzgeraldKennedyGreenway.kmz} zoom=19]