It may look like a park and have people walk in it like it's a park, but the far end of Long Wharf isn't a park, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled today.
The ruling is a victory for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which wants to turn an open-air kiosk-like structure there into a restaurant.
A group of ten North End residents has fought the idea for years - and won a victory in Suffolk Superior Court, when a judge ruled that end of Long Wharf was a park on which a restaurant could not be built without a two-thirds vote of the state legislature, under a section of the state constitution that pertains to the preservation of parkland and open space.
But the state's highest court ruled today that intent is everything, and that the BRA took over the wharf in 1970 under its authority to revitalize the area and promote real-estate development - as part of an urban-renewal plan dating to 1964 - rather than to put a park in. Therefore, the court concluded, the area is not subject to the constitutional restriction, known as Article 97: