The Stories Project

Boston's Emerald Necklace. These are your parks; these are your stories.

Special memories are made every day in Boston's Emerald Necklace. Many of you come to jog, walk, or meander along winding paths while others of you seek peace and relaxation among towering trees and calm waters. Some attend concerts at the parks; others host barbeques. The Emerald Necklace is a venue of relaxation, rejuvenation, and recreation; it unites friends, families, communities, and cities; it is an escape of natural wonder in an otherwise densely populated metropolis. This summer, the Conservancy is publishing your stories!

See the Emerald Necklace in High Definition and experience what the parks are all about.

From the Capitol to Franklin Park - Running the Necklace with Mark Lowenstein

Mark Lowenstein, author of "Great Runs in Boston," addresses the functional and recreational importance of the Emerald Necklace's linear paths for Boston's commuters, walkers, runners, and bikers and how the Emerald Necklace inspired him to write running guidebooks for the Boston area.

Spontaneous Sundays - Nora Lutz and the Pond Jam

Nora Lutz's story - The Pond Jam - invites us to take a look at how art, music, family, and community come together and are brought together everyday by the parks.

A Community Bands Together - By Roger Gottlieb

Roger Gottlieb, a master storyteller, recounts a time when city dwellers united to save the west bank of Jamaica Pond from apartment developments.

...Stay tuned for more stories!

Questions? Comments? Send your thoughts to Project Developer Igor Kharitonenkov at ikharito@emeraldnecklace.org or call him at (617) 522-2700.

Writing the Riverway - By Philip E. Burnham, Jr.

(Editor's note: Last year we ran a poem by Philip Burnham entitled, “Birthday Greetings VI; The Riverway” in our February E-newsletter. We recently asked him about the inspiration for the poetry. Here's his story.)

One mild October evening in 1959, when I was a senior in college, I asked my girlfriend, Louise, to marry me. We were sitting on a bench in the Riverway after attending a performance of Shaw’s play Heartbreak House, hardly the sort of drama to encourage a proposal of marriage. Louise was a student at Wheelock College. Her dormitory faced the Riverway, so the park was a quiet and private place to stop before returning to her dorm.

The Riverway was also a familiar place during our year of courtship. There on the paths beside the water we walked and sat in the fall and spring, escaping the city, our school life, and the crowded company of other students.

Here in Boston, the closeness of parkland to urban life made the Riverway an appealing attraction. It took so little time to cross the street from Wheelock to wander along the paths bordering the water where the waterfowl swam in the pools and among the reeds growing along the banks. The great trees, many of them oaks, spread a welcome canopy of shade and color over us, and the grass invited us to sit by the water and forget the world beyond.

During Louise’s senior year, we returned to the Riverway as a young married couple. After her graduation we lived in England and then in France for several years returning to spend the balance of our years together in the suburbs of Boston. The Riverway was never forgotten, but it was not a frequent part of our family life, except to tell the story of its beginning.

When Louise died in 2002 I returned to writing poetry, something I had done periodically, but not regularly. Many of the poems dealt with loss and remembrance. I began a series of poems written every February, Louise’s birthday month, called Birthday Greetings. One of those poems became the poem about the Riverway. I did some research about the Emerald Necklace and the Conservancy that cares for it, and from that information and memory, I made the poem.

But this story has another aspect to it. In 2004 I began to date a widow, Chris, who worked in the medical area off Longwood Avenue near the Riverway. She told me that she often walked there or ate lunch there to enjoy the fresh air and the closeness of nature. She suggested that we meet there for a picnic lunch and so we did, more than once. The Riverway, its paths worn with my own earlier walks there, was once again a place of recreation and renewal as both of us moved from worlds of separation into an unknown world of future commitment. After our walks or picnic, Chris would return to her office as Louise had returned to her college residence long ago. Those quiet moments shared under the trees, along the paths, beside the water--reaffirming our lives with the continuing enchantment of the Riverway.

Birthday Greetings VI; The Riverway

out of a muddy river, a water's way
of creation, a dream of ponds and paths,
an ocean waiting at the end of a stream
at the beginning, a meander chain
of light-catcher pools strung together
like rough-cut jewels on a ripple necklace
where broad salt marshes once spread
over a brackish flood, now routed
between sculpted banks, cleared of underbrush
and shadowed in stands of beech and oak.

it was when October slept in the trees
and the river's reeds remembered summer
sunlight filtering down to the water
where ducks and geese, swans and herons
swam and flew into the evening
on a night halfway to winter
you and i sat on a bench in this house of leaves,
inlaid with river, a ceiling of stars,
i asked you to imagine forever,
and when i asked again, you said yes.

so you brought me your dream of creation,
channeling my meanderings
clearing banks of overgrown intentions
designing paths through a landscape
planting brave trees into the future
settling shallows with tawny reeds
stirring the air with the wings of water birds
making an emerald necklace of our lives,
an intentionally civilized wilderness
forty years before we came to the ocean.

Copyright (c) 2008 Philip E. Burnham, Jr.

Philip E. Burnham, Jr., a Cambridge resident, has published four books of poetry. He taught history in the Boston area for more than 35 years. His appreciation for the Riverway reaches back to the 1950's when, as a young man, he strolled along the waterway with his future wife, then a student at Wheelock College. He continues to visit the area and wrote this poem as part of a series of birthday greetings to his wife who passed away in 2002. We thank him for allowing us to share this beautiful poem with you.