Along with a hard-nosed and heartfelt editorial opposed to the DCR's evil plan to hand over stewardship of the state's parkways to the Massachusetts Highway Department was this letter to the editor in today's Globe in support of its evil plan to reroute Storrow Drive onto the Esplanade:

Get to work now on Storrow tunnel

THE STORROW Drive tunnel should be rebuilt as quickly and as cheaply as possible ("Revived plan for detour on Esplanade stirs outrage," Page A1, Aug. 16). If that means re-routing traffic onto the Esplanade until the project is completed, so be it.

It seems to me that some Back Bay residents would like us to think that any inconvenience to, or alteration of, their current lifestyle should be viewed as a criminal act.

They would do well to remember an old saying: That's life in the big city.

Bear in mind that the entire Back Bay, including the Esplanade, was nothing but disease- ridden marshland and swamp until it was filled in and built up, by hand labor and draft animals, in the 19th century. Just try to imagine the disruption that people had to put up with then before bemoaning the loss of a handful of trees now.

The rest of us need to get on with our lives. Some of us may well need an ambulance ride to a hospital via Storrow Drive.

None of the rest of us should be expected to underwrite the requisite shift differentials and protracted construction schedules that will be needed if the new tunnel is built in anything other than a straightforward manner.

Get 'er done.

First of all, anyone quoting Larry The Cable Guy has no business going anywhere near a newspaper or a public park.

Secondly, when I joked that the plan was "really about inconveniencing yuppie joggers," I was anticipating the "get 'er done" defense, not advocating it.

Fact is, I use the park almost every day of the week, myself, and am not exactly young anymore, hardly upwardly mobile, and rarely professional (although I have been told that in a certain unflattering light, with just the right skullcap and sunglasses, after a night of hard partying, I ever so slightly resemble, from a certain uncomplimentary angle, Jean Reno in Léon).

Furthermore, as a motor vehicularly challenged individual, who's not been behind the wheel of a car for three years come September, and for seven years before 2003—it's not because I can't drive, have been prohibited from doing so, or have evolved to a higher state of consciousness, really; it's because I'm a cheap bastard and owning, operating, and parking a car is effin expensive—the city's expressways are not at the top of my list of preservationist causes. I actually use its parks, though.

I have already shared my feelings about the Bowker Overpass, which, as landscape architect and preservationist Shary Page Berg wrote in her fascinating Cultural Landscape Report for the Esplanade Association, "largely obliterated the Olmsted designed landscape known as the Beacon Entrance which connected the Back Bay Fens and the Charles River at Charlesgate."

I've also shared my thoughts on the mid-century enthusiasm for building expressways through the middle of city neighborhoods without the least regard to those who live in them. As Richard Sennett has written (and I've quoted him before, but it bears repeating), "we now measure urban spaces in terms of how easy it is to drive through them, to get out of them."

I guess the long and short of it is, the inconveniencing of motorists is not as much a concern for me as the closing—for what is sure to be well over two years—of a big chunk of one of the city's best beloved and hard-won parks. And if you believe the money- and time-saving arguments advanced in favor of the evil scheme, I've got some bridges and tunnels in the area I'd like to sell you.

The class-war justification for destroying pretty things because they're elitist doesn't quite wash with me, either. The truth is, there's nothing inherently elitist about the Esplanade. Working class people are free to use it, along with everybody else. The Hatch Shell was designed with the plebs in mind. And membership at Community Boating, Inc., is still a buck a year for kids and folks with disabilities, and every morning when I pass the boathouse I see scores of people outside waiting for their sailing lessons.

(While events at the Hatch Shell would surely have to be curtailed on account of construction, as far as I know CBI could continue offering classes without interruption.)

Everybody knows that if the Esplanade were a private golf course we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Storrow Drive would go the way of the wind farm. They'd reroute it through Southie, and that'd be the end of it. So the fact that we're talking about the possibility of the closure of part of the Esplanade argues against its being too elitist in the first place.

There was a lot of resistance to Storrow Drive before it was built, by the way, the most vocal of which was from Madam Storrow, after whose husband the highway is named. It was her gift of a million dollars for the beautification of the Charles river bank in 1928 that actually forestalled construction of Storrow Drive. They didn't go ahead with it until she was dead and couldn't do anything about it.

Why? Because everybody knew that in its way Storrow Drive would be a nightmare.  And it's ended up being as bad as the elevated main artery before the Big Dig, which cut off the North End and the harbor from the rest of the city. As Shary Page Berg writes (and she's worth quoting here at length):

The Esplanade was intended as a park that was directly connected to the city that it served.... Storrow Drive now separates the parkland from the city. Access from the south is now almost entirely via pedestrian overpasses that are awkward and difficult to use.

Parkways were envisioned as part of the Esplanade from the beginning, but what Olmsted, Eliot and Shurcliff had in mind were narrow two lane park roads that were primarily for enjoying the scenery. Storrow Drive was built to serve a very different need, and functions as part of the regional transportation system. Some early proposals suggested a partially sunken roadway with adjacent land bermed up so that the road would be barely visible or audible from the park. A key principal associated with construction of Storrow Drive was that any land taken for the road would be mitigated by creation of an equal amount of new parkland.

I agree with the Esplanade Association, essentially, that the park should take precedence.  Just as the needs of those who actually live in the city should be given all due preference over those who merely drive in, out, or through it (and over Larry the Cable Guy, too).