Boston, Meet Urban Planning...In Copley Square

What happens when one of America's oldest cities meets new ideas about urban planning?

Starting next year — sometime after the running of the 2022 Boston Marathon, if current plans hold — Copley Square will be closed for renovations and a measure of reinvention. It's already been the target of multiple layers of restoration; changing ideas about what an urban park should be mean one generation rips out a previous generation's innovation.

Not everybody's on board, however.

“Let’s slow down a bit,” Elliott Laffer, the chair of the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, said recently.

For the record, ambivalence about Copley Square is nothing new. It was initially known as “Art Square,” and housed the original, now-demolished Museum of Fine Arts. Years ago, the square was also bisected diagonally by Huntington Avenue.

For much of the 20th Century, Huntington Avenue bisected Copley Square diagonally.

Later, it was reimagined as a modern piazza with a depressed interior — an approach Alex Krieger of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design calls deeply misguided.

“That was just a bad idea,” Krieger said. “It radiated heat, especially during the summer. And in the winter, it was just full of snow.”

For Copley Square to reach its potential, Krieger argues, the park component should finally take precedence.

“Add an additional amount of green space, but not simply lawn,” he said, citing Boston’s Post Office Square as a model to emulate. “Certainly, add more comfortable seating. … Provide the comforts people expect to find in an urban park, as opposed to an Italian piazza.”

For more about Boston's changes, follow GBH News reporter Adam Reilly on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reillyadam

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