The Emerald Necklace and the City That Grew Naturally Around its Park.

In terms of being a relational landscape, the Emerald Necklace can be best understood in its relationship with flood management and climate change. Originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted to clean up the newly built Back Bay neighborhood, the Emerald Necklace served as both a landscape an ecological tool to mimic marshlands. The site of the Back Bay used to be a damned-off pond that was used by nearby residents to dump their garbage and sewer. Over time, the bay became dirty and unhealthy and the city decided to infill the bay as it was a public health problem and the city needed new space to house its growing population. Olmsted was hired to create a park that would complement this new development and clean up the water and the area which had become a public health crisis. In this regard, the Emerald Necklace has a strong relationship with the Back Bay as it was meant to clean up and beautify the newly built neighborhood.

When designing the park, Olmsted took into account how the spaces he was designing would interact with the nearby environment. These considerations came in two forms: the health and well-being of Boston’s citizens; and the carefully designed salt marshes that would filtrate and clean the water from the Muddy River as it emptied into the Charles River Basin. Olmsted considered what types of plants and fauna would use and inhabit the spaces he designed. Many of the plants Olmsted planted died the first year and he had to replant them which goes to show that nothing planned is ever perfect or precise.

When the Charles River was dam-off in 1910, the basin changed to freshwater and many of the plants that Olmsted had planted and flourished had died. In the place of a wetland, the Kelleher Rose Garden was built and replaced with many exotic plants and flowers. Boston residents did not like this as they saw it as intervening with Olmstead’s vision. Another change that was catastrophic to the Emerald Necklace park system was highway construction in the 1950s and 60s. The section of the Back Bay declined in quality after parkland was seized to build highways, reducing the Charlesgate Park into shreds of its former self. The highway construction also made the water more stagnant and the Back Bay Fens began to decline in quality. So much so, that the Fens area was prone to vacant and empty homes which were often set on fire by owners for the insurance money. The fires resulted in the death of a little girl, and there is a memorial near the Kelleher Rose Garden commemorating her death and the struggle to get the city of Boston to investigate the fires. In the end, the residents were the ones who uncovered everything as police refused to investigate and the city of Boston turned a blind eye due to the area having a high population of disadvantaged people.

In this manner, the Emerald Necklace can be understood as a radicalized landscape that has seen the rise and fall of communities around Boston. Highway construction in the US can be best understood as “negro removal” and in Boston, it was no different. The original highway plans for Boston saw the destruction of primarily Black areas of the Roxbury neighborhood and plans to run the proposed highways through the Emerald Necklace. A park system designed to alleviate the modern problems of city dwellers and the Federal government came in and placed smug-making machines to pollute inner-city neighborhoods in favor of white suburbanites. The Emerald Necklace and its history cannot get more racialized than this. 

As global warming becomes more and more of an everyday problem, we will need more ways of dealing with its effects. Climate change is also expected to impact more poor and marginalized communities worldwide despite their lower carbon footprint. The Emerald Necklace not only acts as a flood management system, but it can also help collect runoff stormwater and collect it in its many ponds. The nearby neighborhoods in which the Emerald Necklace runs through will benefit from the clean air all the trees provide, storage of rainwater, and the health benefits being near nature provides.

The Emerald Necklace is not just a system of parks, but a sort of backbone for Boston, connecting many of its neighborhoods and managing the flow of people, bicyclists, and goods all through a network of unseen connections. Boston is unique in the regard that the park system came first for many parts of the city so the relationships and the built environment were shaped by the creation of the Emerald Necklace. The park has played a part and will continue to shape and influence things like property values, access to public space, and climate change resiliency in the future as the city of Boston changes and grows.

Omarlyn Martinez

“The Emerald Necklace and the City That Grew Naturally Around its Park.”

My Emerald Transect is about dealing with climate change and how the linear park system can help alleviate the effects of climate change. It is also just an exploration of the Emerald Necklace through my eyes.

Keywords: climate change; racialized; alluring; future; green infrastructure.