Design New England - May/June 2017

take note

Photographed by

JESSICA DELANEY

karen mauney-brodek was an Atlanta fourth-grader when she first demonstrated (successfully) against a freeway threatening an Olmsted park. Warm, hard-working and full of enthusiasm, she went on to a “really, really fun” career building and restoring dozens of parks for the cities of New York and San Francisco. Last August, Mauney-Brodek became president of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, a nonprofit that works with Boston, Brookline, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to support and restore Frederick Law Olmsted’s masterpiece, a series of linked parks wending like a green necklace from the Back Bay Fens to Franklin Park. “Many people think it was always there, but it’s man-made,” she says.

To improve urban sanitation and drainage, Olmsted dredged and rerouted much of the Muddy River in the late 1800s, creating world famous parkland where once were mud flats. But when Boston sold a link in the necklace for a parking lot more than 80 years ago, the city lost more than scenery. That section of the Muddy River was diverted into narrow underground pipes, creating a choke point that eventually led to about $70 million in flood damage, drowning Kenmore Station.

The conservancy, founded in 1998, helps solve such problems. Last year, Mauney-Brodek saw the buried river resurrected. In April, the former parking lot was rededicated as the Justine Mee Liff Park, in honor of the late great Boston parks commissioner. Future restoration plans include dredging and removing invasive reeds called phragmites to accommodate intensive storm surges. “Olmsted got it pretty right the first time,” says Mauney-Brodek. “We regretted our changes, and now we’re undoing them.”