Walk to the Sea

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Leventhal, founder along with his brother of The Beacon Companies in the late 1940s, is perhaps Boston's best known developer.

Now more or less retired and living at Rowes Wharf, which his company developed from a prime piece of Boston's long-neglected waterfront, Leventhal went into business before the elevated Central Artery bisected the city, but he envisioned it coming down and making way for something better.

The magnificent rotunda at Rowes Wharf, at the end of Broad Street, was built in the 1980s on a prime piece of Boston's long-neglected waterfront, back when the harbor's edge was still mostly wasted -- no longer industrially useful but not yet employed for the enjoyment of new generations.

A few old places -- Anthony's Pier 4, Jimmy's Harborside Restaurant, The Wharf in the North End -- had capitalized on the romance and attraction of the water. But some of the wharves were broken down or used for parking cars.

It wasn't till almost two decades later that the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway materialized, and it all fit together, the aesthetics of Boston's harbor realized and thoughtfully exploited.

The Walk to the Sea, from the top of Beacon Hill down State Street to the waterfront, will feature panels of the evolution of a city that has repeatedly reinvented itself.

Mayor Tom Menino announced that the milelong walk would be named after Leventhal at his 90th birthday party last year.

The Walk was moved from its previous location, leading right out of Faneuil Hall Marketplace and across one of the four Wharf District blocks on the Greenway, then toward Christopher Columbus Park. It now goes down State Street, from Beacon Hill.

It's sort of a historic spur of the Freedom Trail.

Longtimers at the Boston Redevelopment Authority said the concept of the Walk to the Sea dates to the era of city planner Ed Logue. The idea -- after completion of both Government Center and waterfront urban renewal efforts -- was to connect two of the most prominent of Boston's historical pasts.

The Walk to the Sea will tie the political world, on Beacon Hill, to the commercial (then maritime) world, which no place symbolizes better than the tip of Long Wharf.

GETTING INVOLVED

MoveMassachusetts, the transporation group active during Big Dig years and now revived, holds its regular monthly meeting Friday, Sept. 26, at 8-9:30 a.m., at Brown Rudnick offices on the 18th floor of One Financial Center, across from South Station. The topic is "Urban Ring Phase 2: Connecting to the Future," and speakers are Ned Codd, manager of plan development in the state transportation office, and Tom Nally of A Better City, chairman of the Urban Ring Citizens Advisory Committee.

1330 BOYLSTON STREET



Mayor Menino and Steve Samuels

Dozens gathered on Boylston Street near Fenway Park on Thursday, a week ago, to watch the ceremonial ribbon cut on 1330 Boylston, developer Steve Samuels' latest creation.

The $140 million mixed-use project, with 215 residences and 15,000 square feet of as-yet-unleased retail space prime for a restaurant, will also house 90,000 square feet for the Fenway Community Health Center. That part will open early next year.

Everybody said nice things about everybody, but it's well known that the Red Sox -- Larry Lucchino was there -- want to make sure the area doesn't get "Manhattanized," and everybody else has to worry about what the Red Sox think.

A new street in the neighborhood will connect Boylston to Longwood Avenue and extend on to John Rosenthal's future One Kenmore development, partially on Turnpike air rights along Beacon Street.

The new street cutting across the neighborhood will make the Fenway blocks, sizewise, more in keeping with traditional city spaces. And Samuels said it facilitates his next mixed-use project for the area, getting rid of the service station and tire store across Boylston from 1330.