Is Morrissey Boulevard a parkway (featuring a waterfront park with recreational activities), a highway (for commuters living outside the city), or a street (with park access for neighborhood residents)? It matters. The Livable Streets site provided a historical perspective why the highway era is over:
“During the early years of automobile ascendancy, New York’s Robert Moses perfected the strategy of using the public desire for parks as a wedge for the creation of “parkways” that were actually an early version of a regional highway system. In Massachusetts, the Olmsted-derived Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) — previously solely focused on preserving water-shed forests, beaches, and parks — saw this as an opportunity to turn the narrow corridors between its “reservations” into a similar network of higher-capacity roads… By the 1960s, the state Highway Department was able to tap into the open spigot of federal Interstate funding and eventually usurped the MDC growth strategy… But it has only been in the past few years, as the last of the highway-focused staff fade into retirement, that the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR, the new agency into which the increasingly discredited MDC was merged in 2003) has begun exploring ways to turn its parkways and boulevards back into linear parks that allow leisurely walking, bicycling, and driving while increasing public access and enjoyment of nearby natural resources… In 1953 the MDC widened Morrissey Boulevard into a six-to-ten lane, high-volume, fast-moving highway. But even though the creation of the Southeast Expressway (today’s I-93) in 1959 eliminated Morrissey’s role as the main gateway to the south shore, nothing was done to restore the adjacent community’s former access to the Harbor or to end the unspeakably unsafe conditions for walkers or bike riders. This was allowed partly because Massachusetts was still ignoring its rivers and coast…”