Back Bay and the Emerald Necklace: Olmsted's First Park System
The neighborhood you are walking in did not exist in eighteen fifty-seven. The park system that knits it together was a sewage-flushing engineering crisis that Frederick Law Olmsted solved as landscape design, while Central Park was still under construction in New York.
Start
Public Garden: The Park That Looks Like It Should Be Olmsted's
Public Garden: The Park That Looks Like It Should Be Olmsted's
George F. Meacham, 1859. The first public botanical garden in America, sitting on Back Bay fill.
Commonwealth Avenue Mall: The French Boulevard That Is Not His Either
Arthur Gilman, 1856. A Paris boulevard imported wholesale and set down on filled-in tidal flat.
Copley Square: Two Buildings, Forty-Five Hundred Piles
Trinity Church (Henry Hobson Richardson, 1877) and the BPL McKim Building (1895). One hundred metres apart, both standing on the same engineered fill.
Back Bay Fens: The Sewage Problem Solved as Landscape
Olmsted, hired 1878. The Fens was a tidal sanitary marsh, then a freshwater lagoon after the 1910 Charles River Dam.
Charlesgate: The Seam That Was Cut
Olmsted's 1880s connector linking the Fens to the Charles River, severed by Storrow Drive in the 1950s and the Bowker Overpass in 1965.
Kelleher Rose Garden: The Hidden Shurcliff Layer
1931 Olmsted Brothers addition, inside the post-1910 freshwater Fens. The visible Fens is a second-generation design layered over Olmsted Senior's tidal-marsh original.
The Riverway: Where the System Crosses the City Line
Olmsted, proposed 1881, completed 1895. The next link in the chain, and the point where the parkway leaves Back Bay for Brookline.
Best Time to Visit
Late morning to mid-afternoon. The Public Garden swan boats run roughly mid-April through Labor Day. The Kelleher Rose Garden peak bloom is June through October. Trinity Church and the BPL McKim Building interiors are open daily; check trinitychurchboston.org and bpl.org for current hours.
Pro Tips
- •Wear comfortable walking shoes. The route is about six kilometres on a mix of sidewalk, gravel park path, and earth. The Fens segment has uneven footing in places.
- •Bring water. There are restrooms and water at the BPL McKim Building (Copley Square, free entry seven days a week) and seasonal restrooms in the Fens.
- •At Copley Square, walk into the lower floor of the BPL behind the lions. The Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center is free and holds the original sheet-by-sheet survey maps of the Back Bay fill, year by year from 1857 to 1882.
- •Trinity Church interior is open daily for self-guided visits; the church website lists current admission and tour pricing. Even from the plaza, walking around to the back of the church and looking at the stone base, you can read where the masonry meets the engineered ground.
Safety & Precautions
- The Charlesgate stop sits under the Bowker Overpass and next to Storrow Drive. The traffic noise is loud. The narrative is short for that reason; do not linger if the noise is uncomfortable.
- The Fens path network is mostly accessible but has gravel and earth sections that can be muddy after rain. Sturdy shoes recommended.
- The Copley Square to Fens segment is the longest single walking leg of the tour, about 1.9 kilometres along Boylston Street and Huntington or Westland Avenue. Pace yourself.
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