A decades-old pancake breakfast with local celebrity chefs used to run every year on Commonwealth Avenue Mall, until it was canceled because organizers worried it was tearing up the grass and tree roots.
Against that backdrop, this particular August stands out. In the span of a few weeks, 130 elephants arrived on Commonwealth Avenue Mall, and a stretch of Newbury Street that hadn't seen a new public gathering space in years got one. The exhibit and plaza were two notable additions to the neighborhood's public spaces.
The Ground Beneath Back Bay
Start with the ground beneath Marlborough Street: Back Bay's filled land and groundwater conditions shape its built environment.
The neighborhood sits on filled land, and most of the buildings that went up on it before the 20th century rest on wood pilings driven 15 to 25 feet into the old riverbed silt. Those pilings only last if they stay wet. The moment groundwater drops and exposes the tops of the piles to air, bacteria start eating the wood, and buildings begin to settle unevenly. The Boston Public Library's main branch in Copley Square found this out in 1929, when a drop in the water table forced foundation repairs that cost over $200,000, something like $3.5 million today. Trinity Church, built in 1877, sits on 4,500 of these piles, and by 2003 the parish had installed an automatic backup system: if groundwater dips too low, a float in the basement triggers a solenoid that refills the water table with city water, quietly, before anyone upstairs notices a problem.
The Boston Groundwater Trust has run this monitoring operation since 1986, tracking more than 800 observation wells across the neighborhood on a five-to-six-week cycle. In July, the Trust's executive director, Christian Simonelli, led a public walking tour out of Copley Square explaining exactly how this works and why the whole system depends on nothing shifting too fast. It's useful context for anyone who lives here: groundwater monitoring is part of maintaining the stability of Back Bay's historic buildings.
Then 130 Elephants Arrived on Commonwealth Avenue Mall
The Mall’s summer exhibit offers another example of a new use for a public space.
The Great Elephant Migration installed 130 life-size elephant sculptures along the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, opening to the public on August 8 and staying through September 13. Each one is hand-carved from dried lantana root, an invasive plant, by Indigenous artisans from India's Nilgiri Hills, and each is modeled on a real elephant that shares its landscape with those communities. The project has raised $1.4 million since its touring exhibition launched in 2024, and every sculpture here, priced roughly $8,000 to $22,000 depending on size, will eventually be sold to benefit a paired conservation group, including at least one local beneficiary: the New England Aquarium's work protecting North Atlantic right whales.
What makes the placement notable isn't the art. It's the address. The exhibit's organizers picked Commonwealth Avenue specifically because it evokes the fragmented wildlife corridors the project is trying to highlight, connecting the Public Garden to the rest of the Emerald Necklace. But a local civic leader quoted by the Boston Globe, who has watched the Mall turn down plenty of proposed activations over the years including that pancake breakfast, called this one a good match anyway, describing it as a rare pairing of serious art with a historic, protected setting. Its placement also connected the exhibit’s conservation themes with a historic public landscape.
Newbury Got Its First New Room in Years
A few blocks over, the change is more permanent. Lyrik Back Bay, the new development at 400 Newbury Street, opened with an open-air plaza that didn't exist on this stretch of the street before, and it's been filling that space with a weekly schedule that gives residents an actual reason to walk past rather than just through.
The anchor tenant is Rosa y Marigold, a 100-seat Peruvian restaurant from Maria Rondeau and JuanMa Calderón, the couple behind Celeste in Somerville's Union Square and La Royal in Cambridge. It's their biggest project yet, and it's the first of their restaurants built for a neighborhood that isn't primarily their regulars. The kitchen serves pan con chicharrón, a fried pork and sweet potato sandwich traditionally eaten on Sundays in Peru, every day of the week, from lunch through late night. During Dine Out Boston's summer run, August 1 through 15, the restaurant offered three-course lunch and dinner menus at $27 and $46.
The plaza around it runs its own recurring calendar:
| Day | Time | What's Happening |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | 10:15–11:00 a.m. | Little Groove free music classes for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers |
| Monday | 4:00–7:00 p.m. | Free watercolor workshops, first come first served |
| Tuesday | 6:00–7:00 p.m. | Berklee's "Summer in the City" concert series, rotating student and alumni performers |
The Tuesday series alone has cycled through a different act nearly every week this summer, with Ceferino Vergara playing August 11, Jade Faria on August 18, and Mason Windley closing out the month on August 25. None of it requires a ticket or a reservation. It just requires showing up at a spot that, a year ago, was a construction site.
Open Newbury's Car-Free Sundays
Open Newbury Street has been doing something similar for a decade, just more slowly. The city piloted the program in 2016 with a single Sunday of closing Newbury to cars between Berkeley Street and Massachusetts Avenue. It expanded to three Sundays a year from 2017 through 2019, grew to six in 2022, and this year runs ten Sundays plus a planned December Holiday Stroll, the same footprint as last year. On August 23, the street was scheduled to be car-free from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with parking restrictions starting at 5 a.m. Three more Sundays follow in September and one in October.
Mayor Michelle Wu's office frames it as a chance for residents to support the more than 400 businesses along the mile-long stretch without dodging traffic, while the program's steady expansion has made the car-free Sundays a recurring part of the neighborhood calendar.
What This Adds Up To
These public-space changes took place alongside the groundwater monitoring and maintenance described above. The wood piles are still down there, still needing groundwater to stay put, still requiring a nonprofit trust to keep an eye on 800 wells. The canceled pancake breakfast is one example: its organizers worried about damage to the Mall's grass and tree roots. This August brought together three public-space changes: a temporary art installation on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, a new plaza with a weekly calendar on Newbury Street, and another season of Open Newbury.
If you live here, that's worth noticing while it's happening. The elephants are gone after September 13. The plaza calendar resets every week. Only the groundwater keeps doing the same quiet work it's done since 1986, whether anyone's watching or not.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this looks like on paper versus what it actually feels like to live in day to day, that's a conversation I have often. Reach out to Boston Real Estate Pros to schedule a consultation.
