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Friends of the Public Garden enemies of Olympic beach volleyball
By adamg on Fri, 03/13/2015 - 9:11pm
The Friends of the Public Garden board has a simple message for Boston 2024: Get offa their lawns.
The park advocacy group, which also looks after the Common, says it's against Boston 2024's proposals to build a 16,000-seat beach-volleyball stadium on the Common and to use Charles Street and part of the Public Garden for a marathon and bicycle races.
The proposals would shut up to three-quarters of the Common, including the Frog Pond, and a major part of the Public Garden to the public for up to a year, the board says:
Approximately 35,000 people use this as their neighborhood park, and many thousands more from every neighborhood and beyond Boston use it for various forms of recreation and civic gathering. This use would reverse centuries of tradition in the spirit of Boston Common’s origins regarding public rights to use of the Common and non-privatization of public parks. ...
The beach volleyball proposal would necessitate removal of over 50 mature trees on the Common, while the use of the Garden poses a threat of damage to this fragile botanical garden. The Boston Common and Public Garden need to be showcases for the international community of visitors, and welcome people as places of respite during this busy three-week event, not gated venues available only to ticket holders.
Boston 2024 officials say they're looking for alternative sites.
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Comments
Glad to see this statement
Abusing the Common and Public Garden this way is such a deeply offensive idea that it really should sink the entire Boston 2024 proposal.
Scumbags
10 bucks says they floated the Common idea in the first place to outrage people to the point where said people will cheer when they back off and decide to tear down an "underperforming" neighborhood instead.
Not gonna lie
Not gonna lie, one of my proudest moments was hissing when John Fish mentioned this at the first community meeting.
Not very classy, but point was made.
But There Aren't Any Real Beaches Anywhere Near Boston ...
... let alone a sizable beach near any kind of rapid-transit station. If there was, they'd probably want the station to have elevators and ramps and such to provide ADA compliant access to the beach!
... and even if there was a large enough beach with such a Ⓣ station nearby, it'd probably be old and decrepit and wouldn't make for a very impressive entrance to the venue.
Let me ask you a question....?
why on Earth would the masters of the city want to go to Revere when they can just walk across the street to the Olympics?
Because The Very Idea Of Hosting The Olympics Is Sheer Lunacy?
I know!
And you know that old and decrepit, non impressive entrance would require several crossings of wide roads to even get to the beach. And it would be dark and dangerous!
The Olympics wouldn't want ANY of that..
Alternate site
If they're going to do this,* they should plant as many of the events as possible at Devens. It's big, with lots of underused facilities, and there's rail access nearby.
* I really hope they aren't going to have the Olympics here. Life for lots of us is hard enough without disrupting it for rich people to get richer by allowing athletes to have their massive quadrennial orgy.
What offends me
What offends me the most about Boston2024 (from what I think I know at this point*) is that these areas (Common, Franklin Park), including areas far larger than just the venue itself, are essentially shut down for over a year.
If the plan for the games would truly adapt them to the existing facilities, I'd be all for it. No shutting down major parks for months of construction. No closing roads. No special lanes for IOC executives. We can live with crowded T trains for the 3 weeks of the games themselves. We can figure out how to pay for crazy security. But we should not turn the city fully upside down for years in order to get some publicity.
Yikes
Cut down 50 trees? What did Boston 2024 think they were doing? That comment is charitable.
Same reaction
I was skeptical of the idea in general, but I guess I naively assumed that they were promising to somehow do this without doing permanent harm to the park.
But destroying 50 God-damned trees? For a one-off beach volleyball tournament?
The fucking nerve of these assholes. Those are our parks, stay the hell away from them.