CultureNOW - Charlesgate (The Beacon Entrance): Peter Vanderwarker

Charlesgate (The Beacon Entrance)

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture, in 1879 created a marvelous miniature park for Boston. It was located at the point where the Back Bay Fens meet the Charles River. Olmsted called his park the Beacon Entrance (the areas is also known as Charlesgate). It was one small link in Olmsted’s concept of a great chain of green space, stretching from Boston Common to Franklin Park, that came to be called the Emerald Necklace.

In both photographs, we’re looking at the site from high up in a building at the corner of Charlesgate West and Commonwealth Avenue. Running through the middle of the new photo is the elevated segment of Park Drive, and beyond it we can see the Back Bay and the river. In the older photo, a single automobile, like the advance guard of an enemy army, is visible in the foreground. The rubber-tired invaders, of course, soon won. To accommodate them, Boston devastated much of its heritage, its beauty, and its livability. The result is clear in the new photo, where Park Drive throws a hideous shadow across a forgotten Beacon Entrance.

Driving above the old park, you’re unaware it exists. Walking through it below, you are in a world that is filthy and dark. It’s hard to remember that Olmsted and his team once planted 100,000 shrubs, vines, flowers, and trees on this patch of land.

Nobody is perfect, not even Olmsted. His original plantings died, perhaps from saltwater carried upward by capillary action. But the park was soon successfully replanted. No record exists of the exact plants used, but old correspondence and notes suggest a Shakespearian profusion of wonderful names. There were not only pine, birch, spruce, and cedar but also dwarf gray willow, dyer’s greenwood, Oregon hilly grape, swamp dewberry, sea lavender, beach peas, sea buckthorn, and Virginia rose.

Things are about to get just a little better at the Beacon Entrance. Olmsted created the Back Bay Fens by taming the old Muddy River. Today, the Muddy River Restoration Project is underway. It’s a joint effort by the city, the state, and the federal government, prompted by a flood in 1996. The entire length of the Fens, including the Beacon Entrance, is being dredged to remove sediments and weeds that were choking the waterways. Banks are being stabilized.

It’s a flood control project, not a park design. There’s no planting plan. Olmsted did engineering, too, but he didn’t forget the sea lavender and the hilly grape."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - The Beacon Entrance," Boston Globe, 2001

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Location

Charlesgate & Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
United States

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