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.”
—carol stocker
SAVING GEMS
karen mauney-brodek
stands at the gate by
Boston’s Jamaica Pond,
one of the links in Frederick
Law Olmsted’s Emerald
Necklace.