The Rose Kennedy Greenway is the park above the Big Dig, seperating Haymarket from the North End, and it promises to be a beautiful addition to Boston's pearl, err, uhm, Emerald Necklace. If they ever finish it, that is. Of course, actually finishing a Big Dig project seems sort of passe now, so we're not holding our breath. Every day, we walk past a walled-off pile of rubble and dirt with some remedial CAD drawings on placards of what it will look like, but see nary a worker. There are bulldozers and backhoes and fronthoes and whatever else Bob the Builder machinery is required for the nonexistant crews to pretend to be working, but we've never actually seen activity in the walled debris garden. That is until this morning.

Before you get all worried, there's a reason. According to a 30-something-word passage in a law passed a few years back, the city has to consider building a memorial to the Armenian genocide, and some Armenians would like to see a memorial park built in the Rose Kennedy Greenway. The Greenway committee (which includes Kennedy's granddaughter) doesn't want it, and the Globe is reporting that the committee has said "it would exert influence to delay or relocate the park," since they don't have any real authority to prevent it from being built (how passive-aggressive; we love it!). At first we thought, yeah, what's she got against Armenians? But lo and behold, the Real Reason ™ they don't want the memorial is because of the slippery slope installing one ethnic memorial will create. The committee fears that in no time, every immigrant group in the city will be demanding its own genocide memorial, and that would just be tacky.

But, back to the workers. If the Armenian genocide memorial is approved, it would likely put some sort of timetable, an exit strategy if you will, on the construction of the Greenway, and that would send the wrong message to the citizens of Boston. Those selfless state employees are committed to seeing this thing to its end, or lack thereof. But of course, bureaucracy has a well-known bias, and since the Greenway is so close to that interminable monument to governmental efficency, City Hall Plaza, they had to make it look like there is real progress occurring this morning. The media does nothing but report on the negative in the Big Dig, when just the other day a single tree rose from the center of the concrete rubble. We've turned the corner people.

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