Boston's Downtown Wasteland
22 January 2001 - 1:00pm
Boston's sprawling City Hall Plaza is the plaza that Boston loves to hate. Will any improvement help?
"The fountain in City Hall Plaza here -- once hailed by Architectural Forum magazine as "Boston's answer to the Fontana di Trevi" in Rome -- went on the fritz in the 1970s and disintegrated into a weed-choked hole.Wind speed averages 24 miles per hour on a portion of the plaza's barren flats, which was rated "dangerous and unacceptable" in a 1996 engineers' study. The plaza has no outdoor cafes, just a few scraggly trees and hardly any pedestrian traffic. The main architectural element is the pavement -- a nine-acre plain of 1,246,343 bricks."
Source:
Wall St. Journal, January 22, 2001
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Its very unsuitability for an urban center justifies its current usage as a suburban or ex-urban pattern.
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