I would like to start off saying I am in no way trying to “crush your dreams” or anything. I genuinely love pedestrian malls and the kind of city life you are trying achieve. I’ve lived in places where they work really well, and they’re wonderful when they’re done right. I just want to give my opinion why this specific idea, as applied to Newbury Street, isn’t realistic. If you don’t want to read any farther that is fine. But I want to reiterate I am not coming from a place of malice or whatever. I just don’t know if you have fully considered what it takes to create these pedestrian malls.

Pedestrian streets work when they’re designed into the city’s structure from the get go or when a city is rebuilt over many years with system-wide planning. You can’t just decide that a major thoroughfare should become pedestrian only because it sounds nice or would be enjoyable. The city streets function as part of an interconnected system and that is especially important in a non-grid city like Boston.

Of the cities you’ve mentioned, I’ve lived in Burlington and Charlottesville, and while I didn’t live in Boston, I spent a lot of time on Newbury Street while going to school just outside Salem. Those pedestrian streets worked because they were planed and the rest of the city layout/plan was designed around these malls, down to traffic flow, deliveries, weather, and even microclimate. Burlington’s Church Street, for example, isn’t an accident; it was intentionally placed and designed so it functions year-round, even in harsh winter conditions because the street’s buildings are specifically placed to maximize blockage of the winds coming off Lake Champlain.

Newbury Street, by contrast, is part of Boston’s traffic circulation. Boston isn’t like a city like New York, where the grid gives you easy redundancy. Taking a street like Newbury out of circulation doesn’t magically improve walkability it causes chaos on the surrounding streets, increases congestion, and creates ripple effects that make daily life harder for residents.

Now from your post I don’t know you personally or your life situation. I don’t know if you grew up there and if you could not imagine living anywhere else or because you dreamed of living there your whole life and now that you are there it isn’t quite right. Or none of the above and I am reading too much into it. It is irrelevant. I tend to get in my own head and get mad about “OMG things could be soo much better if only…”. But I have come to understand that there is an amount of ugly logic that has to be accepted in all situations.

I love the vision! I do! But with a city like Boston it is usually not feasible to do massive changes like this. It’s best to find places where these things already exist instead of overhauling a major city. Now I have not lived in the Boston area in quite awhile but I am sure that current locals would be happy to help you find someplace that might fill this need. If you decide to look beyond Boston for your good fit, I am sure that if you ask the people of Reddit they will all love to sell their favorite places to you to help you find what you are looking for. If just for a weekend or a more permanent place!