The Risky Business of Parking Lot Creation

While enlightened businesses want transit so badly they commission studies to build it faster and more cheaply, according to The Washington Post, others are still old-school. The computer storage giant EMC in Hopkinton, Massachussetts, recently sought a zoning change to build a 900-space parking lot near corporate headquarters off Interstate 495. The unspoken threat here is that the company couldn’t possibly continue to call Hopkinton home without accommodating employees who drive to work. But the asphalt would go down on environmentally sensitive land – a little bit of paradise paved to put up a parking lot.

The tension in the town that is the start of the Boston Marathon every spring recalls another similar episode more than 80 years ago in Boston. The then-burgeoning retail store Sears, located a few blocks from Fenway Park in a stately building now known as Landmark Center, complained to city leaders that it couldn’t possibly stay in town without more parking for a warehouse, distribution, and the equivalent of an outlet store for its catalog. Boston wasn’t about to lose Sears, so the parking went in. The minor detail was that it went on a segment of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace. The Muddy River was covered, and the continuous greensward got itself a car-filled interruption, between the Back Bay Fens section and the Riverway.