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New-age design to represent the South End’s history at Peters Park by Ming Pimhatai Tiemchaiyapum
MySouthEnd.com ContributorWednesday Sep 23, 2009 LandWave begins construction on Washington Street
After 10 years of waiting, the construction of LandWave, a public art installation in Peters Park at the corner of Washington and East Berkeley streets, began last Friday, Sept. 18.
The project will be a 100-foot-long by 30-foot-wide art installation built between the Peters Park baseball field fence and Washington Street sidewalk.
"We have broken ground already," said Bob Wells, co-founder of the project. "They poured foundation on Friday on the Washington St. side of the wave. The intention is this fall, the wave structures themselves and all the hard construction will be done around Halloween. Then come back in the spring and apply the mosaic and do the planting and do all the finishing work that we can’t do in the winter time because it’s just too cold. We’ll try to get the heavy construction done before the winter sets in and as soon as we get to the fall and we’ll try to finish the second phase before baseball season starts next year."
The project will have two waves with peaks of 4.5 feet high.
"One side of the wave, facing Washington St., will be multicolor blue glass tiles lain in a pattern, and the other side will be planted with a green groundcover that in the springtime has really pretty little blue flowers on it," said McQueen, the other co-founder of the project. "Then at the crest of the waves will be LED lights underneath so it will be sort of very soft blue glow at night time."
The design will mark the historic spot in Colonial days that used to be the narrowest stripe of land connecting Boston to the mainland before a landfill created much of the South End and Back Bay.
"Where LandWave is in Peters Park used to be all water so the artwork is a metaphor for the land that used to be water," said McQueen, a resident of Washington St. "So that’s why it’s the waves, one side is blue to indicate water and the other side is green to indicate the land."
The project started in 1999 and as time went by, the metaphor idea of the wave expanded.
"And because it was the only spot connecting Boston to the mainland," said Wells, who also lives on Washington St., "getting to Boston or getting to mainland had to come through here so the wave of immigrants also applies to the meaning of this spot where basically everyone who came to Boston had to go through."
The project started under the auspices of Washington Gateway Main Street 10 years ago and now is an independent project working with the UrbanArts Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. It is funded by a variety of grants from various sources including two anonymous foundations, the Browne Fund, the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, the Henderson Foundation, and the New England Foundation for the Arts, to name a few.
"We also got lots and lots of contribution from the individual, ranging from $25 up to $5,000. It’s a lot of different checks but luckily it all adds up," McQueen said with a laugh.
The site is currently surrounded by a fence covered with green fabric, but McQueen and Wells said they plan to cut holes in the fabric so everyone can look in the site as the construction progresses. The project is set to be completed in the spring of 2010. To learn more about the project, please visit www.landwave.org.
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