"A Little Green Space"

Stretching its wheelbase, spreading its track, strapping its concrete bands across the land, the encroaching automobile inches humanity back and back --sheering off a landmark for a thruway, gobbling up a park for a parking garage, turning field and forest into filling station and shopping center. But pockets of resistance are beginning to develop. The latest turned up last week in that cradle of American resistance --Boston.

The proposal had seemed innocent enough: simply to build some passes under or over Memorial Drive, on the Cambridge side of the Charles River so that traffic could move along at the same quick clip as on the well-under passed Storrow Drive on the Boston side. In 1962, State Senator Francis X. McCann got a bill through the legislature ordering the Metropolitan District Commission to build the needed underpasses and overpasses.

Chained to Trees. All was calm until last summer, when Cantabrigians noticed some test borings being taken near the sycamores along Memorial Drive. Blood of the minutemen began to stir. The Cambridge Planning Board concluded that $100,000 worth of electronically controlled traffic signals would serve the same purpose as the $6,000,000 worth of bypasses. In addition, the extra traffic encouraged by the bypasses would require widening Memorial Drive at the expense of the land and trees on the river side of the road--a place especially dear to Cantabrigians for lazy basking.

In a chain reaction, neighborhood groups, civic associations and P.T.A.s began exploding--among them a Citizens' Advisory Committee for Cambridge, including Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey, Radcliffe President Mary I. Bunting, M.I.T. Chairman James R. Killian Jr. Public Relations Wizard Edward L. Bernays became so fired with the cause that he set up an Emergency Committee for the Preservation of Memorial Drive. Said Bernays: "This is a broad action to serve the public interest. The feeling of personal bereavement is terrific. Someone asked: 'Do you think we should chain ourselves to the trees?' There are people going to the hearings with children in their arms--they haven't got a baby sitter, but they go anyway."

Preserving the Amenities. With and without babies, some 400 of them turned up at Boston's Statehouse one morning last week to protest the project before the Committee on Metropolitan Affairs. Every type was heard from--including the executive secretary of The Friends of Nature, who proclaimed the Charles's sycamore trees the most magnificent stand of Oriental plane trees in the U.S. But the biggest hand was for Heart Specialist Paul Dudley White. Dr. White uttered an eloquent plea that Boston "become a brilliant example for the rest of the nation and not just one more maze of speedways to rush people in and out of the city in the current rat race that has infected the country."

Lawyer James Barr Ames of the Citizens' Advisory Committee summed up the situation: "The real story is people rising up to preserve a little green space against the depredation of the automobile. Some state agencies are under so much pressure to develop highways that they find it difficult to remember the parks. We hope this will stiffen them into resisting the automobile, and preserving the amenities."

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