OWNERSHIP
CONDTIONS
CONTEXT
HISTORY
DESIGN ISSUES
TESTIMONIES

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OWNERSHIP:
The MBTA owned the land during construction. Once the Orange Line and the park had been completed, the MBTA transferred parcels of the land to public agencies -- primarily to the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC).

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CONDITIONS:
The linear Southwest Corridor Park follows the Orange Line rapid transit system from downtown Boston to Forest Hills station in Jamaica Plain. In its entirety, the Southwest Corridor Park is 4.7 miles in length with a total of 52 acres of parkland. Twenty-seven of these acres are in the Heart of the City. Three of the nineteen Orange Line stations lie in the Heart of the City. Stonybrook and Green Street are neighborhood stations accessed primarily by people on foot, while Forest Hills is a regional transportation hub that connects to parking lots, buses, and a commuter rail. Three sets of railroad tracks extend from downtown Boston to the community of Forest Hills.

The southern sections of the Southwest Corridor Park include tennis courts, basketball courts, expansive open areas, five tot-lots, fountains, three community gardens, passive sitting areas, and paved biking and walking paths. Portions of the Orange Line are covered with decking to provide space for parkland and playground facilities. Interruptions to the flow of the park occur at Williams Street, Green Street, and Boylston Street.

The designers of the Southwest Corridor Park referred to the park as a "new strand of the Emerald Necklace." They designed the park to minimize maintenance costs. Original discussion about the plan revolved around supplemental support for maintenance from community organizations. The design incorporated low shrubs, high visibility, and an open, flexible landscape.

Signage:
The park has effective signage that raises awareness of both the extent of the park and the types of activities that are possible there. Main signs are about six feet tall, two feet wide and in full color. Other signs facilitate the separation of biking and walking paths. Signage at Forest Hills Station offers historical background on the Arnold Arboretum, Franklin Park, Forest Hills Cemetery, and the Emerald Necklace, as well as the State Diagnostic Laboratory and the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital. While the places themselves are shown on the map, it is not clear how one should access them.

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CONTEXT:
Surrounding communities:
Land use on either side of the Southwest Corridor Park and the Orange Line is predominantly residential. The communities are comprised predominantly of two- and three-family homes. A strip of industrial factories and businesses runs along the eastern edge of the park with homes mixed in among them. 

The communities east of the park -- known as "Brookside" and "Stony Brook" -- are significantly more dependent on transit than the communities west of the park (Otake, "Analysis and strategies for transit justice in Greater Boston," 2002). Railroad tracks can often isolate communities from each other, and the Orange Line does create a barrier between communities immediately north of both Forest Hills Station and Green Street Station. However, landscaped decks stretch over extensive sections of the corridor. These grassy playspaces draw the communities on either side of the park together.

Ecological context:
The Southwest Corridor closely parallels the Stony Brook, the culverted stream that served much of the original industry in Jamaica Plain. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency required a full environmental impact statement from the MBTA before the Southwest Corridor Park and the Orange Line were built. The addition of convenient, safe, low-emission transportation that is accessible by parkland has had positive repercussions for air quality in particular.

Connections to other greenspaces:
Those who drafted the original plans for the Southwest Corridor Park perceived the connection between the Southwest Corridor Park and Franklin Park at Forest Hills to be critically important to the area. One MBTA planning document states, "An important landscaped pedestrian and bicycle linkage is also being developed between the [Southwest Corridor] Park and Franklin Park along Morton Street." Original designs for the Southwest Corridor Park show a significant swath of greenspace east of the Arborway between Washington and Franklin Park. However, in 2002, 500 Arborway and the City's Department of Public Works Pole Yard consume much of this space (Kaiser Engineers, Inc., "Southwest Corridor Park: a new strand in Boston's Emerald Necklace," 1986). The actual connection is narrow and tapers off to nothing just south of Forest Hills Street.

In order walk from Forest Hills Station to Franklin Park, pedestrians must be extraordinary well oriented. No signage tells them to cross two major streets and follow an increasingly poorly defined trail to a major rotary at Morton Street.

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HISTORY:
The history of the Southwest Corridor played a significant role in the social, ecological, and economic redevelopment of the Heart of the City. The story of the Southwest Corridor -- the successful struggle against plans for an expressway through the Heart of the City -- is one of the defining narratives of the area.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, under the Federal Interstate Highway Program, developed plans for a southwest Boston segment of Interstate I-95. The State planned to replace the Elevated Orange Line with an eight-lane highway that would circle Boston's central district, connect with a federally funded interstate, and cut directly through Heart of the City communities. By the late 1960s, a final design for the highway was well underway. The State had acquired the strip of land -- dubbed the Southwest Corridor -- and begun to demolish homes and businesses to clear the way for the interstate.

During this time period, the I-95 plan relocated an estimated 300 businesses and 700 households along the Southwest Corridor. In his 1970 book "Rites of Way," Al Lupo wrote about an elderly couple that was not displaced by plans for I-95 to come through the neighborhood. He writes: "[they had] seen and heard the bulldozers and the earth movers rip up their neighbors' homes and leave a flat dirt wasteland all the way to Number 226. They had watched the machines at work and had seen the vandals rip the plumbing and pipes and all the other vital organs out of the abandoned houses, and finally, they had smelled the stench of arson and had heard the almost nightly wail and clanging of fire engines."

In response to the plans for the highway, a coalition of communities and organizations -- literally thousands of residents -- collaborated to block construction of the new highway. Protest in Jamaica Plain was particularly strong. These efforts took place at a time when resistance to the construction of interstate highways in cities was increasing throughout the nation.

In 1969, in response to community opposition, Governor Sargent appointed a task force chaired by Professor Alan Altshuler, then at MIT, to study the planning and decision-making process for the Southwest Corridor. In 1970, after the task force produced a sharply critical interim report, the Governor announced a moratorium on land acquisition and highway planning and construction. The Governor decided to improve the transit, rail, and local street system rather than build the highway, and in 1975 the Southwest Corridor was officially removed from the Federal Interstate Highway System.

Beginning in 1970, the cleared and vacant land along the Southwest Corridor simply languished unused. Sam Bass Warner called the corridor "a wide, unattended scab" through the neighborhoods (Warner, S.B., To Dwell is to Garden, 1987). In Jamaica Plain as a whole, there was a concurrent 17.7% decline in population between 1970 and 1980. The Centre Street business district went into decline. Robert Glassman, a real estate broker with Jamaica Plain Realty, described the period in this way: "The period from 1973 to '77 was a black hole -- a void. On some streets you couldn't give houses away."

In the mid-1970s, the community garden movement began, in part to fill this void. In 1976, a small group of citizens from community organizations wrote a proposal for a Southwest Corridor Community Farm. The farm drew a wide range of local people to garden in what had become a dangerous urban wasteland. Community members had an opportunity at the farm to create something productive together. After the first year, the farm had a solar heated community greenhouse -- the first in Boston. The garden began to turn a profit and the community garden movement began to spread explosively throughout Boston. By 1987, approximately 125 gardens had been established by communities all over the city (Warner, S.B., To Dwell is to Garden, 1987). 

Meanwhile, plans for a new Orange Line and the Southwest Corridor Park were underway. This was the first time in U.S. history that construction funds allocated for a major expressway had been redirected to a transit project.

Designing the new Orange Line and the Southwest Corridor Park was an extraordinarily complex endeavor due to the involvement of multiple players with often conflicting agendas, ambitious goals and pressure to achieve a successful outcome. Numerous State and City agencies, as well as a wide variety of community groups collaborated over many years on the project. The initial plan for the park and railways was completed in 1978 after a year and a half of collaboration between MBTA consultants, community groups, and individuals in the neighborhoods.

The cost of the project was approximately $750 million. Ultimately, the Southwest Corridor Park received awards for design, engineering, and landscaping, including an award offered only once every four years to ten federally funded projects. The MBTA, which owned the land during construction, transferred parcels of the Southwest Corridor to appropriate public agencies -- primarily to the Metropolitan District Commission.

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DESIGN ISSUES:
According to the original park design, 30 full time people are required for maintenance of the entire park, divided equally into two crews. In 2002, due to State budget cuts, the maintenance crew was reduced to only three people, according to the Jamaica Plain Gazette. Although the State allocated additional resources for park management in July 2002, the MDC entered a hiring freeze that complicated the situation (John Ruch, "Corridor gets some funds," Jamaica Plain Gazette, August 16, 2002).

The success of the park relates to the fact that hundreds of volunteers have offered their time for maintenance work since the park was first established. With a greatly reduced maintenance staff, it is impossible for the MDC to marshal these human volunteer resources towards the park.

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TESTIMONIES:
"The Southwest Corridor Park is the perfect park for America in the 21st Century. There is plenty to do; you can walk to it; it is right next to lots of housing; it is easy to maintain; it is easily accessible by transport" (Richard Heath, who, along with many other dedicated community members, worked for more than a decade to plan the park).

"There's so many implications [to a lack of maintenance of Southwest Corridor Park]. Will people use [the Orange Line] T? Will there be more cars in the city? We've got to keep it healthy and alive. You could theoretically kill something like a whole train line" (Liz Malia, State Representative, Jamaica Plain Gazette, 2002).

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