1924

1992 (more or less the same today)

The Beacon Entrance hasn't been lucky.  One wonders what would be the thoughts of the drivers of those speeding cars — oblivious and encapsulated as they are — if they knew that someone, once upon a time, cared enough about the little patch of earth and water beneath the Park Drive overpass to place 100,000 plants there.  No other part of Olmsted's Emerald Necklace has been so devastated.

More has been lost than flora.  The Emerald necklace was part of a new public world that Bostonians were creating in the late nineteenth century.  It provided places to which people of different classes, ages, and sexes could go from their private homes or offices.  Here they could meet and mix, could see and be seen, in a new, engagingly theatrical awareness of their membership in a larger and more cosmopolitan community.  For today's drivers, by contrast, the only shared public world is the media world — the cyberspace, as some now call it — of the car radio.

...It's too late now for the Beacon Entrance.  In his "Notes on the Plan of Franklin Park," Olmsted quoted the English critic and historian John Ruskin in words that can serve as a sad caption for these two views: "Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for and say, 'See!  This our fathers did for us.'"