History 8: Riverway


By Katie Koenig

The Riverway is the last location in the Emerald Necklace in this article series. It is right in the middle of this chain of parks, connecting Olmsted Park and Jamaica Pond with the Back Bay Fens. It follows the snaking path of the Muddy River, surrounded by vegetation, in order to complete the Emerald Necklace’s iconic green chain.

Olmsted designed it to look like a chunk of natural, untouched land in the middle of urban Boston. However, by the 1950s, one portion of the Riverway was sold to Sears for the development of a parking lot. It took until 1998, after over a decade of Sears renovating and replanting the area to restore the original vision of this greenway, for the city of Boston to purchase it back from Sears, who paid for its redevelopment back into a grassy pond.

Part of Olmsted’s original designs was to curate the Muddy River as a part of Boston’s park systems, and by the time the Olmsted Park System was listed on the National Park Service’s registry of Historic Places, the section containing the Muddy River had officially been named the Riverway. 

In fact, along with Jamaica Pond and Olmsted Park, the Riverway creates an urban greenspace most in-line with the idea of natural conservation. It conserves the original natural views that Olmsted saw while designing the parks, and the paths and architectural features are carefully designed to highlight that beauty.

Nowadays, plenty of focus is put on recent conservation efforts and rehabilitation of natural spaces across the country and across the world, but this isn’t a new concept. Part of what drew me to the Emerald Necklace was its old roots in conservation in the incredibly urban, developed area that is Greater Boston.


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