BY ELIZABETH PADJEN

Ramps for the 1,400-car garage are camouflaged by walls and plantings.

From the October 2014 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

At 10:30 on a July morning, an east wind brings a damp chill off the harbor and gray clouds hang overhead like sodden hammocks. And still, people come to the park. They are everywhere—perched on walls, settled onto benches, hunched over tables outside the café. Some stare into space. Some check out the passersby. Many more peer at screens. It’s a perfect morning for a cozy cup of tea in the hotel across the street or coffee at a nearby Starbucks. That’s where you’d expect all these people to be. Not in a park.

But this is the Norman B. Leventhal Park—better known to Bostonians as Post Office Square or simply P.O. Square, and it is the recipient of ASLA’s 2014 Landmark Award, which honors projects finished between 15 and 50 years ago that have kept their original design integrity and make a major contribution to the civic realm. “The fact that it’s still there, intact, is important,” said one juror. “How many other parks that are 15 years old haven’t been renovated?” Another juror said: “It’s one of the best landscapes in our country, simply for what it did for the financial district. It allowed people to get outside and get some nature in the urban environment.”

Almost any park in a dense city core can attract a lunchtime crowd on a glorious summer day; very few draw much interest on gloomy mornings. The 1.7 acres of P.O. Square, however, aren’t merely in the heart of the city’s financial district; they are its heart. The park is as close as you can get to a tourist-free zone in downtown, the place you head to if you want to study the habits of Boston’s businesspeople in the wild. It’s also the place you head to if you want to study great city spaces.

The year was 1991 and, in Boston, things were grim. The banking crisis of the late 1980s had hit the city’s financial and development sectors hard; job loss in Massachusetts was the highest in the country. Tim Berners-Lee introduced the program “WorldWideWeb” to the Internet that year—an event that would one day contribute to the city’s regained fortunes—but no one on the south side of the Charles River much noticed or cared. People did, however, notice the opening of the park at Post Office Square. It was an instant hit.

The city’s mood and economic outlook had been very different at the start of the park’s gestation just 10 years before. New high-rises were sprouting everywhere; to describe the business community as giddy would not be much of an overstatement. One respected developer (not all of them were) was Norman Leventhal, whose firm, the Beacon Companies, had just opened One Post Office Square, a 40-story office tower, and the adjacent Meridien Hotel (now the Langham Hotel), a renovation of the former Federal Reserve building. It was not the prime location that it is today—directly across the street was a dingy, two-story concrete parking structure that would have felt at home in Soviet Moscow, as would its formal name: “Parking Garage Unit 3.” Leventhal saw an opportunity: Replacing that structure with underground parking could financially support a park that would serve as the focus of a renewed Post Office Square.

The design concept for P.O. Square inspired the marketing slogan “Park Above/Park Below.”

In the great tradition of Boston urban development, the square was actually more of a triangle, “square” being a handy term for “a leftover space where a bunch of streets come together at weird angles.” Post Office Square historically was only a tiny wedge of space just north of the parking garage, where the Angell Memorial Fountain was built in 1912 as a watering trough for horses. In 1981, work was finishing up on a project that transformed the square and fountain into a diminutive park. Leventhal’s idea would not only extend the physical space of the square, but would also carry the civic spirit of the Angell Memorial Park to a new level.

Aerial views of the site from that era make the notion of replacing the garage with a park seem obvious, maybe even inevitable. But there was nothing inevitable about the outcome. The garage was owned by the city but locked into a long-term lease, effectively printing money for an operator with no motivation to give it up. And other developers had designs on the site, too. A proposal for a 52-story tower seemed to be gaining the most traction.

Seven years passed before ground broke—seven years that must have felt agonizingly long to Leventhal but that laid the foundations for the success of the park today. Friends of Post Office Square was established in 1983 to develop and manage the project; the board of directors included, as it does today, the CEOs of some of Boston’s largest institutions, people with the political and financial acumen to make their deep sense of civic obligation more than simple altruism. While they assembled the sophisticated financial structure to build the project and ensure its long-term survival, they also immersed themselves in the world of landscape architecture, traveling to learn from other parks and cities. A team led by Karen Alschuler, then a planner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, wrote the program for a design competition that caught the eye of the landscape architect Craig Halvorson, FASLA, who had founded his own firm, the Halvorson Company (now Halvorson Design Partnership), just a few years earlier.

“I was never very big on doing competitions,” Halvorson says. “The odds of winning, the amount of effort and money—it really wasn’t a very good business decision.” But this competition was different, and he was struck by the program’s thoughtfulness and clarity. “It was designed for success. Because it was an unorthodox approach—it was a public–private cooperative—they had to invent the whole process.”

Today, Halvorson credits the process for the project’s achievement. “Everybody had ownership and was working together. It was very democratic.” The Friends had already hired Ellenzweig Associates and Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas to design the seven-floor underground parking structure. Halvorson was given leeway to hire an architect for the above-grade structures, but chose to work with Harry Ellenzweig (who died last June), a decision that led to greater give-and-take in the design process. Later, when an outside committee was convened to select artists for the park, Halvorson participated in the discussion; he was not given a vote but was given a veto.

The Friends had created a designer’s Camelot—a brief, shining moment that marshaled the best impulses of the era and avoided its worst excesses. Postmodernism had brought cartoon buildings to the skyline, but it also sparked thoughtful discussions about architectural legacy and character. Neighborhood groups regularly won developer concessions by invoking the specter of “Manhattanization”; Boston, it was agreed, should be Boston. Learning from the planning missteps of previous decades, the city’s designers became urban adepts. No one was merely a landscape architect, planner, or architect; everyone was also an urban designer, and Boston’s skilled urban design community formed a significant export industry. For once, the design ethos aligned with political leadership: The city’s populist mayor, Raymond Flynn, was well represented by the brash and brilliant Stephen Coyle, the city’s development czar. Design approvals often seemed dependent upon the ability to channel the apocryphal cow responsible for the city’s street layout; projects boasted new pedestrian byways and touted their contributions to street life.

The Halvorson team had been charged with designing a park that would look as if it had always been there. Working with Ellenzweig, who was never able to fully shed his modernist orthodoxy, and the artists Howard Ben Tré and Ross Miller, they took the charge further. The park’s granite and brick recalled a familiar architectural heritage, and its paths ran like dock lines tied to the surrounding city. But its spirit was fresh, urbane, and undeniably modern.

The fountain by the Rhode Island artist Howard Ben Tré becomes a glass-and-bronze sculpture in winter.

 At 11:00 a.m., the park has the aura of a theater before showtime. A café employee wheels out a cart stocked with ice cream and cold drinks. A worker wearing the green shirt of park staff squeegees the top of the polished granite seat wall that encircles the fountain.

Squeegees the granite. This is clearly an alternate public-park universe.

But that’s what you can do when you have a maintenance and programming budget of $370,000 a year for a 1.7-acre park, funded by a garage that generates $12 million in revenues. (In addition to operational costs, debt service, and property taxes, the Friends group gives $100,000 a year to a city parks fund and $364,000 to the city’s general fund.) Like the park, this isn’t just any garage: All sorts of high-end services are provided, including dry cleaning, free audiobooks for pass holders, and—listen up!—clean public restrooms. The Friends group’s general manager, Pamela Messenger, calls it a “car day-care center,” and though she keeps rates just below the city’s highest levels, the garage also benefits from changing commuting patterns, which means high turnover: She sells 2,200 spaces each day in a 1,400-car garage.

That healthy maintenance budget has also nurtured one of the most remarkable aspects of the P.O. Square story: the continuing participation of the original landscape architects. Charles Kozlowski, ASLA, now a principal of Halvorson Design Partnership, has been directly involved with the project for 27 years. He still uses the original 87 job number for billing. Even now, he meets with Messenger, her facilities manager, the landscape maintenance contractor, and the arborist five times a year to review maintenance issues and plant health and to make recommendations for any necessary modifications. Craig Halvorson calls Kozlowski the park’s “editor.”

A vine-covered trellis offers quiet seating areas apart from the popular central lawn.

Together, the team has tackled commonplace problems: replacing some brick pavers, treating insect infestations, wrapping trees with burlap in the spring to thwart sapsuckers—woodpeckers with an affinity for sap. (You have never seen such carefully applied burlap.) More significant, the team has been able to address the essential challenge of all landscapes: change.

With more development in the city and with the growth of the park’s trees, P.O. Square is shadier than it was originally. Growing lawn is harder, and much of it is now slice seeded in the fall. Some lawn—primarily at a corner and an entrance—has been replaced with perennials. In other cases, trees have been removed to allow more light.

Some trees have been removed for other reasons, including health. The bosque of Aristocrat  pears by the café wasn’t thriving; they have been replaced with Autumn Gold ginkgoes. One reason for the park’s immediate public success was the large size of the original plants, which included six large specimen trees “on loan” from the Arnold Arboretum. “No one wanted to sit around and watch [them] grow,” Kozlowski says. “They wanted [them] to look like [they] belonged.” But after a couple of decades of additional growth, that has meant thinning out some trees and shrubs.

 At 12:30, the sun has finally broken through. Walking into the park, you need a moment to shed the city and adapt to this natural world. A steady “cheep cheep” subliminally registers as a truck backing up until the sparrow alights a few feet away. The park is a refuge. Trees and shrubs screen the visual chaos of the city; fountains by Ben Tré drown out the cacophony. Focusing on the trees and shrubs, you start to absorb the variation in texture and form. It’s a subtle, controlled palette that reinforces the structure and sequence of spaces and is equally beguiling in winter, a response to the notion of “a park for all seasons,” as Cynthia Smith, FASLA, now a principal of Halvorson Design Partnership, described the initial design concept to the Friends group.

People are now roosting on every available surface. The lawn is covered with green cushions occupied by coworkers, friends, lovers; the cushions are provided for free by the Friends and dutifully returned by park visitors. A family including three little kids stands out—tourists, surely. But no. They live in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood, where there’s not much green, and so they frequently bring a picnic lunch to daddy, who works in a tower nearby.

Approximately half of the board members of the Friends have been involved with the park since its beginning in the 1980s. Craig Halvorson remembers a conversation with one of them, Robert Weinberg, who explained that the Friends wanted the park to work for people, for the space, and for the city, but not necessarily to get an award. “Of course,” Halvorson concedes, “it didn’t work that way.” Sorry, Bob.

Elizabeth Padjen is an architect and is the former editor of ArchitectureBoston magazine.

Credits: Photography by Ed Wonsek; design plan, Courtesy Halvorson Design Partnership.