WHEN SHE WAS HIRED IN 2005 as executive director of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, Nancy Brennan was charged not just with making a park out of the mile-and-a-half ribbon of bald urban land left by the dismantling of the Central Artery. She was also asked to create an artery for the city, one that would energize Boston’s waterfront and downtown neighborhoods and tie the two together. Extravagant plans – for a YMCA, an indoor arboretum, an arts and culture center – were weighed but all collapsed. Brennan had been tasked by the nonprofit Greenway Conservancy – which would in 2009 inherit management of the land from the Turnpike Authority – to raise $20 million to kick off the park and to establish relationships with private donors, which she did in less than two years. But then financial markets collapsed and the country sank into recession. At times, it seemed the project was “teetering,” Brennan recalls. Some argued that the wall of the Central Artery had been replaced with a pointless, empty, grassy moat.
Suddenly and quite spectacularly, however, the park hit a tipping point last summer. The number of people using the Greenway jumped 70 percent from 2010, and even the most casual visitor could sense the heightened energy. Instead of focusing on anything grandiose, Brennan oversaw the planning and implementation of myriad small improvements: free Wi-Fi, food trucks and carts, a carousel, tables and chairs, farmers’ markets, outdoor art, extensive plantings. The individual parcels that make up the park were shaped into destinations of their own, each with a unique character, ranging from contemplative to active. It was a winning formula.
Brennan had worked in museums for most of her career (she came to the Conservancy from the top spot at Plimoth Plantation, and before that ran museums in Bermuda and Baltimore); the Greenway was a different kind of challenge, a part of a living city, a place that’s always in flux. At the moment she’s enthusing over a new carousel coming in 2013 (designed for the Greenway after long consultations with a critical constituency: children) and a just-begun planning process for adding more public art. Soon, Brennan believes, the Greenway will be as beloved as the Common, Esplanade, or Public Garden. And last year, it became clear that the space has a pulse: from pleasure to protest, from children dancing in its fountains to campers occupying Dewey Square.