• in 2001 the MBTA outlined a plan for a new transit corridor running through Boston and six other cities - the Urban Ring
• in 2002 the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) - now part of the state Dept. of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) - released its Charles River Master Plan
• between June 2000 and April 2003, Harvard spent over $460 million to acquire real estate along both sides of the river

Relevant moves are also being made by Boston University, MIT, the biotech-biomedical industry, and a host of other institutions, both public and private. Some of these plans may never make it past the computer screen. New plans may emerge.

Here we can only take a few jabs at a huge, complex subject.

We will begin in a little meadow near the Cambridge end of the B.U. Bridge.

The white geese

Bob LaTrémouille has spent a lot of time on that patch of ground over the past seven years.

When I first met him, twenty years ago, he was already spending more time being a community activist than practicing his specialty, zoning law. Over the years, he has been continually at war with the policies and practices of many of the politicians, bureaucrats, developers, and activists who contest the Cambridge arena. He has described them - some of them, anyway - as "sick… bizarre… reprehensible… evil… vile… reprehensible scum." Apparently, they don’t much like Bob either.

Almost every week he is on cable TV or standing before the glowering eyes of the city council, denouncing the "destroyers of the river." He says there is "a flat out pogrom" against the community of white geese who spend their days honking and waddling around near the B.U. Bridge, unconcerned with human notions of toilet training.

A lot of people agree with LaTrémouille, admire the birds, and keep coming to him with information and complaints about other things that are going on up and down the river. He talks and writes about all these things, connecting everything with the fate of the geese.

At times, the discourse seems a bit incoherent.

But the main point gets across. A lot is going on in the so-called lower basin of the Charles River. And a lot converges at the place where the geese live.

• On a cold, blustery day a few weeks ago I came here with a friend to see the geese up close. You should come too.

Stepping down into a miniature meadow, you find yourself in a world apart - surprisingly calm and warm, and even subtly numinous. There are quite a lot of white geese here. Startling if you’re not used to them, because they’re pretty big. What’s more, they have guests - gulls, pigeons, and Canada geese.

It’s also a surprise to see the railroad track, though you know there’s supposed to be one there. Some say a man who worked for the railroad brought the first geese here just twenty-three years ago.… or was it the man who worked at the CSO stormwater installation across the way?

Look up that track onto the railroad bridge, and you’ll see a second set of tracks that don’t lead anywhere. Nobody has to convince you this structure been here for a hundred years.

• Marilyn Wellons has spent a lot of time down here, too. She first noticed "a pattern of escalating violence against the geese" four years ago. There were unfounded rumors that they carried the West Nile Virus. Someone left a threatening note on her car windshield. Birds started turning up dead and mutilated.

In response, Wellons and LaTrémouille organized Friends of the White Geese. They generally oppose the activities of two other groups:

• Friends of Magazine Beach, residents and boaters who advocate an ‘upgrading’ for this sector of the riverbank; Cambridge city councilor Henrietta Davis is a founding member.
• The Charles River Conservancy, founded in 1999 with corporate and institutional sponsorship, recruits volunteers to help ‘revitalize the parklands’ in cooperation with the MDC/DCR. Goose defenders are afraid that such volunteering may feed a vigilante mentality in some individuals.

Friends of the White Geese think this is the connection between public agencies and guys creeping around at night to knife birds and addle their eggs. You may consider it a stretch, but someone is doing this stuff, and whoever it is may think they’re helping to revitalize the parklands. If there are death squads for human beings, why not for birds?

Humane dispositions

Now the Friends of Magazine Beach (yes, it really used to be a beach, folks, fifty years ago) could not get the cash-strapped MDC to make the improvements they wanted . So they went to State Representative (now Senator) Jarrett Barrios, who negotiated a deal: the City of Cambridge agreed to pay the entire $1.5 million cost. The existing muddy banks and softball-soccer field are to be dug up and replaced, graded and furnished with pathways.

"The people who use the park, which are a lot of low- and moderate-income families," said Barrios, are "not the squeaky wheels that the goose lovers are…." He thought the geese were a nuisance and should be "humanely disposed of."

LaTrémouille demanded to know what was meant by the phrase, "humanely disposed of." Barrios denied that it meant killing birds. But when a leaflet appeared suggesting that he should himself be "humanely disposed of," he appeared to take it as a threat. Woops….

Moreover for the goose defenders, this was not about improving playing fields. What the deal actually meant was that taxpayer money would be used to subsidize Boston University, and at the same time drive out the white geese. And indeed, for several years the MDC/DCR has let BU use the area for its graduation ceremonies; it calls the neighboring goose meadow The BU Triangle. BU has had people come over to ‘its’ Triangle to hack down a lot of vegetation, including bushes used as nesting areas by the white geese and a pair of hawks.

Jennifer Wright, head of the Cambridge Conservation Commission, believes that the city’s only control over Magazine Beach is her agency’s power under the state’s Wetlands Protection Act. But Assistant City Manager Richard Rossi bluntly informed a public meeting in 2001 that the plans would not be altered because "we’re paying the bill."

Enter, Lords of the Urban Ring

The Urban Ring is a plan for a mass transit corridor from Chelsea to South Boston, running through Everett, Somerville, Cambridge, and Brookline. Today everyone has to travel into the center of Boston and out again to get to any other point on the rail system. The Ring would link the existing rail system at points a few miles out, freeing riders from the necessity of passing through the center.

The plan is laid out in three phases. Phase 2 includes a modification of the Grand Junction railroad bridge which runs under under the BU Bridge - remember, this is where the geese live - to accommodate two lanes of bus traffic. A dedicated bus route is to be constructed alongside the B&A tracks that run through the MIT area toward East Cambridge.

Right now , in the words of one traffic engineer, all this is "just chalk on a map." We spoke with a number of observers who agreed. No money has been appropriated to do any of this work, only to study it.

The studies are a mandated part of the mass transit agreement forced out of the Big Dig in the early 1990s by the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF). Douglas Foy, who then headed the CLF, is now a top official in Governor Romney’s cabinet.

Like Routes 128 and 495, the Urban Ring will stimulate real estate development. The fashionable discourse about environmental justice and sustainability only obscures this economic reality.

The chalk on the map reminds old-timers of the planned route of the Inner Belt highway, defeated by neighborhood resistance in the 1960s. But the Inner Belt was a wide highway, meant to carry non-stop traffic between downtown Boston and the suburbs. The Urban Ring is meant to serve the intensive redevelopment of the very neighborhoods which were then slated for annihilation.

Cambridge’s city manager Healy and then-representative Barrios protested strongly when Phase 2 of the Urban Ring was omitted from projections made in 2002 by the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO). MPO’s said this was because there was " not now sufficient revenue to fund it." Barrios wrote that the route through Cambridgeport was so "essential" that the agency "should simply assume more money will be accessible."

Perhaps that was right. Maybe we should assume that.

To see why, let’s flap on over to the other side of the river.

The universities and the riverfront

The same people who told us not to expect an Urban Ring to come down the pike very soon, are very concerned about Harvard University’s moves on its new Allston holdings. They are pretty sure that Harvard will try to get the present Mass. Turnpike exit moved from Allston to the Grand Junction Railroad Bridge. That’s the one that runs under the BU bridge and touches ground in the goose meadow. Hmm.

How bout a quick inventory of Harvard’s land purchases along the river:

• June 2000— Allston Landing, $151.7m
• March 2001— Watertown Arsenal, $180m
• December 2001— Polaroid site, Cambridgeport, $40m
• August 2002— CELCO plant, Western Ave, $14.6m
• April 2003— Mass Turnpike exit, Allston, $75m

After each of these purchases, Harvard representatives followed their honorable tradition of announcing that there were no plans to further develop the land before the next appearance of Halley’s Comet. "It will be years before there is any development by Harvard on the property." (Paul Grogan, July 2000) "Harvard has no immediate or near-term plans for the property." (Lauren Marshall, April 2003)

BU had long considered the colonization of Allston Landing as its own Manifest Destiny, and was prepared to use its abutter status to harass its new neighbor. Harvard mollified BU with an option to buy a 10-acre segment of its parcel.

Last spring Harvard initiated a meeting with residents of Allston’s Charlesbank low-income housing development near the Stadium, offering to buy the site and relocate them in new quarters, presumably well out of sight. (Low-income people, yuck!)

And last fall Harvard secured a zoning truce with the perennially troublesome Riverside neighborhood, in order to go forward with its new riverfront development between Peabody terrace and Western Avenue.

Assurances that the turnpike and its exits would stay just as they are carried the credence they deserved - little. Richard Kindleberger wrote in the Boston Globe, that a developer would have to rearrange the CSX rail yard and the MassPike ramp to make the best use of that land purchased in 2000. The Globe’s Mac Daniel noted that the 2003 deed specifically allows Harvard to move rail easements, roadway, and toll plaza.

Secretary of State William Galvin, who was raised in Allston, asked: "Who ever heard of selling an interstate for the benefit of a university?" The Mass Turnpike Authority (MTA) " didn’t sell just surplus land. They bartered away their right to determine how the course of the road will be shaped for the future."

The MTA’s attitude was: "Whatever dollars we can get, we will take." (Andrew Natsios, June 2000); and, well, Harvard would have to pay for any ramp relocation costs. (Matt Amorello, June 2003)

They may be ready to ante up soon, too - "immediately and in the near-term." A story by Stephen M. Marks in the March 3rd Harvard Crimson details plans to raise billions of dollars more on top of the recently completed $2.6 billion drive. "The lynchpin of the campaign will likely be the University’s new campus in Allston… as the center of the University is moved from the John Harvard statue to the Charles River.… billions more will likely be required to prepare the land and begin construction of the first parts of the new campus, which could happen as soon as five years from now."

Only five years!

The MDC/DCR Charles River Master Plan

The year after the MBTA released the Urban Ring proposal it was the turn of the MDC/DCR’s Charles River Master Plan. It is difficult to do justice to the grandiose vision in this plan. But then, grandiose plans do not always do justice to us.

Like most plans, this one must adapt itself to the plans of others. But not in every instance. Across from Allston in Cambridge is Hell’s Half Acre. This is a small wetlands, located couple of miles upriver from Magazine Beach. Here landscape designers can give play to their values without the complications introduced by new highway exits and science centers .

One of the themes of the Master Plan is a return to the ‘original vision’ of the gentlemen who planned the river’s park system, long, long ago. So there is a desire to get rid of ‘invasive species’ - prolific life forms which produce boring ecosystems by crowding out the original inhabitants.

To this way of thinking, our white geese might be regarded as invasive. Certain plant species are definitely included. Let me reassure you however, that we Americans of European ancestry have received a special exemption and will not be classified as invasive species.

Fully half of Hell’s Half Acre has become a monoculture of the much-despised phragmites - a kind of reeds that shake their florets at you from a height of about twelve feet. These guys favor the banks of sluggishly-flowing rivers - such rivers as the lower Charles has been since the dam was built.

So the plan is to get rid of phragmites. And who would care to defend such a homely vegetable? Well, wouldn’t you know, ten years ago, when the Boston Park Dept was getting ready to attack the phrag thickets near the Fenway victory gardens, a crowd of local residents came out to physically block the cutting. The Master Plan calls for another assault on the Fenway phrags. This could be the end of them, so many of the neighborhood’s activists were driven out after losing rent control.

Interestingly, both at the Fenway and at Hell’s Half Acre, these reed forests have been a rendezvous for gay men for as long as anyone can remember. A fact left unmentioned in the MDC/DCR Master Plan, otherwise so full of fascinating historical background.

At Hell’s Half Acre, humans are also on queue to be uprooted. The Marsh Post American Legion is making inappropriate use of the river’s edge. It’s not a yacht club; it doesn’t ‘need’ to be there. The status of war veterans is not what it used to be. Now back downriver, just past the Geese and the BU Bridge.

The historic parkways initiative.

Sounds cool, doesn’t it? It means going back to the way things were when Esplanade meant the Cambridge side of the river. Now in those days, there were no cars, and there weren’t many trees. MIT wasn’t there either, but again there’s a special exemption.

The MDC/DCR notified the Cambridge Conservation Commission 6/30/03, that to help improve Memorial Drive it planned to uproot around 300 trees, mostly located in the wide strip that divides that road east of Mass. Avenue.

The Conservation Commission was appalled at that number, and sent the MDC/DCR to negotiate with the City Arborist and Planting Committee. Conservation Director Jennifer Wright told me that about 65 trees, all on the "central reservation" are now proposed for removal. All but two are considered diseased or mortally damaged. Two saplings must be planted for every adult tree removed.

MDC/DCR’s Joe Orfant confirmed the numbers, and expects removal work to begin this summer.

• Kathy Podgers has lived in Cambridge for forty years, for many of which she has driven up to the river and parked, in the only place on either side of the river where that could be done - off Memorial Drive across from MIT Her windshield carries a card which entitles her to park in a handicap space. It’s hard for her to walk, and only a car gives her practical access to the river.

Last year, just before the Fourth of July, that section Memorial Drive was fenced off - "for security reasons, just for the holiday," she was told. But as the French say, nothing is more permanent than the temporary. The fences stayed up, and it emerged that all 300 riverfront-parking spaces were being eliminated.

A big sign went up: "Historic Parkways Initiative - Demonstration Project." This was Ms Podgers’ introduction to the Charles River Master Plan.

She says she called the MDC/DCR and spoke with Joe Orfant. He told her that not all parking was being removed, that parking would still be available at the four yacht clubs, which included one handicap space per club. Were these spaces going to be available to the public? Well, no.

Ms. Podgers has a question for our elected and appointed officials. "Should public money be used to eliminate public parking… while continuing to provide parking to private yacht clubs, especially considering [that this] violates Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act?"

No officials have answered her in this way, but - sure, why not? Didn’t you know, citizen, that the riverfront where you loved to go for an hour of fresh air and a run for your dog, is known among planners as ‘boathouse row’?

Don’t you realize that the whole Historic Parkways project is in front of MIT; that MIT is the only abutter; that the design work was 100 per cent funded by MIT and NSTAR; and the field survey was conducted by volunteers from the Charles River Conservancy, whose membership overlaps with that of the boat houses; and that their survey was focused on the concerns of bicyclists and joggers?

After finishing with the trees and parking spaces, the Historic Parkways Demonstration Project will have a second phase. We are back at the goose meadow.

A four-lane bridge

Stash Horowitz is a pretty knowledgeable fellow, and he doesn’t live far from the B.U. Bridge. He tends to doubt that the MBTA is actually going to be doing anything with the Grand Junction Railroad Bridge any time soon. Widening it is part of Phase 2 of the Urban Ring. He doubts that this is about to happen, not just because there’s no money, but because he thinks MIT would object to the new roadway that’s supposed to run from the bridge, up along the old B&A railroad tracks among MIT lab buildings, and on to Kendall Square..

Former city councilor Jonathan Myers however, told me that Bob Simha, MIT’s last planning director, seemed positive about that very prospect when it was being discussed in the mid 1990s.

But neighbors are beginning to worry about Harvard trying to get the turnpike exit moved to the B.U. Bridge, and that it could very well succeed, and soon. They are worried about what will happen to the traffic after it leaves such a new bridge.

Phase 2 of the Urban Ring, the MDC/DCR Charles River Master Plan, Phase 2 of the Historic Parkways Initiative, the BU Triangle, the $1.5 million Magazine Beach renovation, and the ambitions of Harvard to build a huge new science campus in Allston - all these forces and plans have brought us back to where we started - the little meadow with the honking and waddling white geese.

When phase 2 of the Historic Parkways Initiative gets here, it is set to follow the plan laid down in the Master Plan:

• "use the abandoned half of the Grand Junction Railroad Bridge to provide pedestrian and bicycle access." Tht old bridge keeps getting wider: now it’s a bus route, a bike path, a train track, and a turnpike exit. Hey, why not do it all at once? Maybe we can get Harvard to pick up the tab.
  • "Regrade the bank and fill the hollow profile. Replant the turf." And where are the geese going to go in the meantime? We’ve been in that hollow. It is their world.
• "Discourage the growth of the flock of feral geese" - kind of redundant .
• "Manage Magazine Beach as a place of celebrations and special events" - BU is already doing that. Just in case the geese get any ideas about moving next door.

An original focus of the Urban Ring was to serve the transportation needs of lower income and minority people. Since that time an awful lot of people have been priced out of the neighborhood. No surprise then, that the 2002 study’s real focus is on real estate development.

"By enhancing transportation and connectivity within these urban neighborhoods, new redevelopment opportunities will occur without promoting sprawl…." A 46% population increase is projected for Cambridgeport over 20 years, the highest rate of increase in the Urban Ring zone. The planners think that "the region’s on-going growth in higher income populations" will concentrate in Cambridgeport, North Point, and Kendall Square.

Although MIT is delaying construction projects and laying off employees, it recently bought the former Polaroid building at Main and Windsor for $15 million. This brings virtually everything east of Lafayette Square under its control, except Union Baptist and the Tootsie Roll factory. Adjacent is MIT’s huge University Park.

Lafayette Square is being reshaped, with the cooperation of MIT/University Park, the City of Cambridge, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A new "park" is planned, at a cost of $4 million, that will cut off Main Street from Mass. Avenue. It will largely block off the lowest-income Cambridge neighborhood -Area 4 - from Central Square and U-Park.

Travellers on an Urban Ring road next to MIT need not encounter Area 4 on their way to Kendall Square.

If there isn’t enough money to do Phase 2 right now, shouldn’t MIT and the City of Cambridge pitch in and help? And in exchange for its support, shouldn’t MIT have access to the road, too? (Remember, it was only supposed to be for buses.) When will MIT decide to develop its holdings east of Lafayette Square? Perhaps that new $300 million joint Harvard-MIT Genome Institute, associated with the nearby Whitehead Institute?

MIT has become increasingly dependent on real estate and investments, and continues to be among the country’s largest defense contractors. Harvard and B.U. have in recent years followed MIT eagerly into the brave new world of bioterrorism and biotechnical research and development. The insiders’ buzzword is Gene Town: Beantown becomes Gene-town. Even the powerful Dept. of Homeland Security might have an interest in weaving the dense web of infrastructure around such patriotic efforts.

Jarrett Barrios was probably right. We should just assume that the Urban Ring money will be forthcoming.

[inserts: foto: Bob LaTrémouille addresses Morse School meeting -Annie Butler sidebar: Harvard funds State turnpike study -Marilyn Wellons] * BU Bridge and Grand Junction RR Bridge

section of Urban Ring, phase 2 We’ve got big plans for you: Grand Junction Railroad and B.U. bridges [Lawrence Prift]

• Did you hear we’re famous? the Charles River white geese, february 2004 [Lawrence Prift] ** Those can go, these can stay [LawrencePrift] feb04
• You’ll have these moved, of course [Lawrence Prift] feb 04
• If I should die before I wake… [Lawrence Prift] feb 04