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Renaissance on the Charles - continued

Another project in Newton will improve both water quality and riverside access. On the edge of the scenic Lakes District, where the Charles broadens into a lagoon marked by numerous inlets, the city is capping its 36-year-old Rumford Avenue landfill with clean earth. The landfill has been dribbling pollution into the river's Purgatory Cove for years. When the capping is done, the land will link two adjacent playgrounds, effectively creating a continuous park from the Marriott in Auburndale to the Waltham line.

The dump restoration could evive an area that 90 years ago was perhaps the most heavily used recreational area in the nation, according to river historian Max Hall. At that time, more than 4,200 canoes were kept in waters of the Lakes District. Newton's Norumbega Park and Riverside Park, in Weston, served by streetcar and railroad lines, were vibrant recreational meccas. They offered dance halls, a zoo, and baseball fields. There were also boats for hire, which were rowed under the watch of Victorian rangers who enforced a no-kissing rule for couples enjoying the river.

But beginning in the 1930s, worsening sewage problems and industrial pollution made that stretch of river a less inviting place. The construction of Route 128, which ruined Riverside Park, and the demise of the Commonwealth Avenue streetcar led both recreational areas to fall into disuse, and they were razed in the mid-'60s. The Marriott sits at the site of the old Norumbega Park, and much of Riverside Park was claimed by highway ramps.

With the water-chestnut plague abating and the dump on the verge of becoming a park, there is new hope that the Newton-Waltham stretch of the Charles can reclaim some of its early-20th-century glory. ``It's a great stretch of river that's becoming available,'' says Newton public works chief James Hickey.

Miles downstream, east of the Museum of Science, lies a stretch of the Charles sometimes called the ``forgotten half-mile.'' Since Eliot's era, urban planners have dreamed of connecting the Esplanade to Boston Harbor and the USS Constitution site, in Charlestown. Now that link is finally being forged - but, ironically, only as a byproduct of a vast new barrier to be built between the harbor and the Charles River basin: the Central Artery project's Charles River crossing.

The publication in 1990 of the state's plan to build an 18-lane bridge over the river, along with 70 acres of elevated ramps on the Cambridge and Boston banks, ignited one of the most pitched public-planning battles in Boston's recent history. The state ignobly called its proposal ``Scheme Z'' - its first 25 plans were rejected as even worse.

A coalition of neighborhood groups, Cambridge officials, and parkland enthusiasts formed to demand, if not an all-tunnel alternative to Scheme Z, at least something less overwhelming. Coalition members forced the creation of a 45-person review committee that spent much of 1992 and 1993 trying to produce a better alternative. They also persuaded John DeVillars, when he was still state environmental affairs secretary in 1990-91, to require that the Artery project pay for parkland improvements well up the Esplanade, including new skating facilities in the Storrow Lagoon and conversion of the MDC police station at Leverett Circle in Boston into a visitors center. In his 1991 certificate approving the Artery project, DeVillars required that the parks be built before the new highway.

But in 1993, the DeVillars requirements were quietly gutted by Governor William F. Weld's administration. Weld aides whittled down the parks commitment to $80 million, none of it to be spent west of the Museum of Science. And this summer, Cambridge lost a federal lawsuit that sought to force the state to locate most of the ramps in tunnels.

What will be built in place of Scheme Z, most people who led the fight against it believe, is not much better, a difference of degree rather than of kind. The battle succeeded in pushing ramps back from the river to open up more parkland. But landscape architects warn that what is touted as a majestic ``cable-stayed'' bridge over the river is unlikely ever to be the postcard picture of Boston that its boosters claim. At 14 lanes, with a roadbed pitched on an awkward downhill slant toward Boston, the bridge will be ``too big to be graceful,'' says one discouraged Artery planner.

``All these elevated structures are at odds with the original brilliant concept for the downtown Central Artery - to remove the blighting elevated highway structures and replace them with underground tunnels,'' says Cambridge transportation engineeer Stephen H. Kaiser, a key foe of Scheme Z.

As big an obstacle as the $10 billion Artery project is to the goal of linking the river to its ultimate salty destination, the money it is coughing up for the river will finally allow the realization of at least a part of the century-old dream for an Esplanade extension.

Next spring, the MDC will open the first part of the new parkland link, a rebuilt Paul Revere Landing Park on the Charlestown side of the river. The MDC's planned link from the Museum of Science to the harbor will include more than 30 acres of parkland squeezed in around ramps and cement plants. It will require a crosswalk over the busy highway in front of the museum, new pedestrian bridges 22 feet above the North Station railroad tracks, and a forbidding passage, as wide as a football field is long, under the Artery bridge.

``The road will not fade away,'' laments Julia O'Brien, MDC planning director. Agrees MDC official Karl Haglund, who is designing the new parks: ``It's long and dark and challenging. The question we really have is: Are people going to use it?''

Perhaps the best hope for the new parks and trails is that soon they will be the front yard for several hundred people who will be paying up to $2,000 a month for the privilege of living there. After years of legal wrangling, Congress Group Ventures is now erecting two 24-story apartment towers, totaling 435 units, in a forgotten corner of Cambridge, across the O'Brien Highway from the Museum of Science. As part of the Museum Towers project, Congress Group has agreed to tear down the MDC's central services garage, which will be replaced with a lagoon, a boat launch, and pathways.

``One of the chief marketing challenges is to get people over here to see it,'' says architect George N. Cole, of Congress Group. ``It's sort of terra incognita. People don't even know how to get here.'' But Cole and others are convinced that the 1,200 people expected to live in the apartments and work at a new office building next door will become an important force in keeping the parks maintained and active. Says Cole: ``You're going to have a constituency here. You're going to have a neighborhood.'' Even as work proceeds to push riverfront parks to the east and west, new attention is being paid to the center of the renaissance, the Charles River basin. And what only a decade or so ago seemed like a ludicrous dream - making the basin clean enough for swimming and fishing - is a goal that now seems surprisingly close to doable.

Like so many other improvements under way along the Charles, the revitalization of the basin's water quality has roots that go back decades. In 1908, after two decades of planning, engineers completed a dam spanning the Charles - in front of what is now the science museum - that finally controlled tidal flows into the river. In four stages through the 1950s, the once-fetid muddy tidal flats were reclaimed by revetments, to become the parks that today define the Back Bay and Cambridge.

While Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the MDC were busy reclaiming the banks of the river, however, the river itself went from bad to worse. As late as the early 1950s, the MDC maintained five river beaches in this stretch, including Magazine Beach, in Cambridgeport, Gerry's Landing, in Cambridge, Charlesbank Beach, in the later-flattened West End, and beaches near the Watertown Dam and in Brighton.

But by the 1960s, swimming and fishing in the Charles were becoming memories, as suburban development and industrial dumping overwhelmed inadequate sewers, leaving the river a smelly, dangerous mess. The rowers never went away, but they got used to tetanus shots and occasional bouts of diarrhea as the price of using the Charles River.

Since the passage of the federal Clean Water Act, in 1972, the state has spent more than $200 million on water-quality improvements to the Charles. Those include a major sewage-treatment plant at the site of the former Magazine Beach; the plant processes the discharges from combined sewer overflows, or CSOs. But in parts of Cambridge and Boston where street drains and residential sewers flow to a single pipe, a big rainstorm can overwhelm the system and cause sewage and street runoff to spew out CSOs into the river, typically about 30 times a year at Magazine Beach.

The fate of the CSOs is likely to be one of the most important factors shaping the future health of the Charles. Over the past year, DeVillars and groups such as the Charles River Watershed Association and the advocacy group Save the Harbor/Save the Bay have been locked in a standoff with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority over what to do about CSOs along the Charles.

After giving in to pressure to spend an extra $25 million to eliminate CSOs entirely from the Boston side of the river, the authority is resisting demands from DeVillars and others that it commit $60 million or more to all but eliminate sewage overflows at Magazine Beach.

To Water Resources Authority officials, the $60 million - which they fear could soar to $200 million - seems like a waste. ``You're not going to see any change in the hours of swimming and boating,'' says Michael Hornbrook, an agency official. At times when the CSOs would normally kick into action, Hornbrook says, ``the basin will still be overwhelmed by other non-CSO sources of pollution,'' such as urban detritus and dog feces that wash into storm drains.

Joseph Favaloro, of the budget-controlling Massachusetts Water Resources Authority Advisory Board, says the proposal smacks of environmental extremists demanding that every water and sewer customer in Greater Boston spend an extra $6 a month for futile improvements to a river that many never use.

The scientific jury is still out on just how much of the Lower Charles's pollution can be blamed on CSOs, how much on storm drains, and how much on the already-polluted water that flows over Watertown Dam from the upper 70 miles of the river. But extensive testing conducted by volunteers of the Charles River Watershed Association has shown that much of the basin is clean enough for swimming during dry days and could be made even better by eliminating the Magazine Beach CSOs. DeVillars - who is already banging away on Boston and nine other riverfront communities to clean up illegal sewer connections and storm drains that lead to the Charles - sees no reason to ``wait and see'' whether one day CSOs are the only factor causing the river to flunk pollution tests.

The issue could be decided as soon as December, when the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, and other parties to the Boston Harbor cleanup lawsuit return to federal court for a court-ordered evaluation of the river's health. River advocates hope US District Court Judge A. David Mazzone will rule that, given the progress that has been achieved in the river over the last decade, the Water Resources Authority must go the extra step and end the CSO discharges at Magazine Beach.

Whatever the ultimate technological decisions about how and when to continue the cleanup of the Charles, it seems undeniable that the river is on a roll. More than at any time in recent decades, the potential for a clean and healthy Charles - one whose banks and water could be enjoyed by swimmers, fishermen, boaters, and strollers - seems attainable.

Standing on Magazine Beach one day this summer, as DeVillars announced to a gathering of local officials and reporters the latest small but steady improvements in the Charles's health, state Senator Warren Tolman, a Watertown Democrat, gestured broadly toward the river behind him. ``This is a jewel here,'' Tolman said. ``This is a diamond for the whole metropolitan area. We should make it everything it can be.''