In yet another installment of our continuing series of commentaries on commentaries in the media ("They report it, we give it the once-over..."), your friends at RTUF offer the following:
1. Paul McMorrow in today's Boston Globe: A chance to reclaim the Esplanade. Taking the opportunity presented by the non-profit Esplanade Association's recent release of "Esplanade 2020" (their long-range planning proposal for reinvigorating the Boston shore of the Charles River Basin), McMorrow speaks emphatically to the need to roll back some of the more stunningly bad public infrastructure decisions of the last half century, especially the transmogrification of Storrow Drive from a simple park road into an interstate wanna-be and the blight that is the Bowker Overpass connecting Storrow to the Fenway, which casts a critical part of the Commonwealth Avenue mall and the mouth of the Muddy River into perpetual shadow. The piece is well worth a read. Bottom line: knowing what we know today, we have to seize every chance we are offered to reconstruct and renovate our infrastructure in a way that supoprts, instead of degrades, the urban fabric. Get out there, and get to it.
2. Jane Brody in the New York Times over the last three weeks, starting with: Communities learn the good life can be a killer. Wth her typical combination of seeing the problem broadly, researching it carefully, and then making it personal, Ms. Brody walks through the personal/public health aspects of some of the very issues we here at RTUF have been highlighting in this first installment, and then the subsequent pieces Making city streets safer and Advice from a 70 year-old cyclist. There is undeniably a link between how we organize, deign, and construct our built environment and public health. In a sense, automobile-oriented suburban development was a massive national experiment on the health effects of removing virtually every opportunity for incidential physical activity from our lives. And the results of the experiment are not promising, especially (though by no means exclusively) increased obesity rates and elevated risk factors for the suite of diseases that come with it. Successfully and convincinlgy linking a public policy issue to public and personal health has proven to be a winning strategy on many issues. On this basis, the prospects for moving the needle even further in the urban design conversation seem to keep getting better. I haven't caught it yet, but the PBS documentary on "Designing Healthy Communities" looks like it'll be well worth watching. RTUF Note: In the interest of full disclosure, readers should be aware that I spent 11 years of my life living a few doors up the street from Ms. Brody, her husband Richard Enguist, and her twin boys Erik and Lorin, in Brooklyn.
3. RTUF Milestone Announcement: We surpassed 5,000 visitors earlier today. Many thanks to RTUF Nation for visiting from time to time and, even, when the mood hits you, commenting.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Blog Post No. 2012-4: More about Boston City Hall and the meaning of civic architecture
RTUF Nation knows that we've blogged more than once about Government Center, City Hall Plaza and the edifice that is Boston City Hall here at the little blog that could. Mostly, we've talked about how gainfully using the windswept plaza that replaced tightly-knit though unquestionably seedy Scollay Square has been a problem that the city has grappled with since the day the last brick in the plaza was put down. And now, even as the decades-long effort has taken on new and different forms and finally begins to show some promise, we have yet another defense of Boston City Hall itself, the heart of the problem or the solution, depending on your perspective. This time it's Leon Neyfakh in, where else, The Boston Globe, writing about the building's genesis 50 years ago: How Boston City Hall Was Born. The basic argument in the piece is that the 1962 design competition for the new building and its subsequent construction was, at some level, the precipitating event that announced the New Boston and signaled the end of the old:
Whatever else you might think about it, Boston City Hall is an improbable building. Call it a giant concrete harmonica or a bold architectural achievement, but to walk by this strange, asymmetrical structure in Government Center is to wonder how on earth it landed there.
Boston City Hall has come in for significant criticism over the years. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has proposed selling it and investing in a more conventional headquarters. But the truly remarkable fact is that it was built in the first place. Experimental architecture, after all, is something we expect from museums and universities, not municipal governments. Take a look at other cities — Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles — and you’ll find city halls adorned with columns and arches, domes and porticos. Some are made of marble. Some have giant clocks. Then there’s ours, which looks like a fossilized spaceship.
Yet it wasn’t aliens who brought it here. Surprisingly, it was a group of Boston politicians and businessmen, along with two young architects named Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, who conceived of the building as a dramatic gesture intended to help usher in a new era in Boston history. This year marks the 50th anniversary of a decisive moment in that campaign: namely, an unusual design competition mounted by Mayor John F. Collins, in which architects were invited to imagine a brand-new, forward-looking home for Boston’s city government.
Boston was a very different place then. Until the 1950s, it had been a city “dying on the vine,” as US News & World Report put it, and the situation had improved only marginally when Collins took office in 1960. Economically stagnant, notoriously in thrall to political corruption, the city had seen little development for decades. As business owners decamped and residents fled to the suburbs, a fear took hold that Boston would soon be hollowed out for good.
It was in this context that the city decided to demolish the neighborhood known as Scollay Square and build in its place what would come to be called Government Center. Forceful and bewildering, Kallmann and McKinnell’s Boston City Hall would be the centerpiece of this controversial plan to revitalize Boston’s economy and convince its citizens — and the world — that the city was changing.
When the winning design was unveiled in the spring of 1962, “It sent a signal that the city was taking itself seriously,” said Keith Morgan, an architectural historian at Boston University. “That the city wanted to be something better than it had been.”
In other words, Boston was on a losing streak and needed to get its mojo back, and the new City Hall was just the object building needed to make it happen. Let's test that theory out a bit, shall we?
Virtually every city in the Northeast and the Rust Belt had to endure the same anti-urban orgy of disinvestment and victim-blaming in the first quarter century after the Second World War. So, in a sense, all of those places were in the same fix, trying to show that they were still viable or, at the very least, weren't going to go down without a fight. There was a need for a new New York, a new Philadelphia and a new Baltimore as much as there was for a New Boston.
Clearly, some cities did better than others in reinventing themselves, and Boston has to stand as one of the great urban success stories of the second half of the 20th century. Neyfakh's article would have us believe that this is due, perhaps principally, to the message sent out by the City Hall design competition and the design jury's politics-free selection of the design proposed by Kallman, McKinnell, and Knowles. The city was demonstrably leaving its past behind and striking out in a different direction. While one can't deny that City Hall and Government Center in general are radical departures from what had been the norm and had to have had a kind of "Did Boston really do that?" effect, we might want to consider instead the city's built-in advantages in the post-industrial American economy, especially the role played by its world class universities and hospitals, which ensured that it would play a major role in the high-tech and bio-tech booms of the last forty years. So, put me in the camp of not being convinced that coincidence is causality in this case. If the region's central core didn't have the Mass General, the Longwood Medical Area institutions, Harvard, and MIT, and all of the supporting institutions and infrastructure in between, I'm not sure that clearing the downtrodden heart of the city and building a modernist monument would have really made much difference. Similarly, I don't know that a renovated, instead of annihilated Scollay Square couldn't have been the heart of the New Boston in much the same way that Times Square is now the restored heart of New York, even though it has much the same physical layout and feel as it did 50 years ago. So, maybe the question is, did Boston really have to tear down some its best, while admittedly ragged, urban fabric and replace it with a buidling that is clearly more interesting as a piece of sculpture and a disastrously failed plaza in order to show that it "wanted to be something better than it had been." Dramatic, yes. Wise? Not so much.
Maybe, in defense of the City's public officials who had to deal with the world as it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, not as we wish it might have been from a vantage point 50 years down the road, there wasn't any other way to make an architectural statement than to go for full-throttle modernist brutalism and hire Le Corbusier disciples. I get that. But it doesn't change the sub-optimal urban fabric that we still have on our hands and it also doesn't change the tragically apt observation of Ada Louise Huxtable, cited in Neyfakh's article, regarding "the architectural gap, or abyss, as it exists between those who design and those who use the 20th century’s buildings." However the building came to be and whatever its intention may have been, there remains a massive difference of opinion and considered judgment about Boston City Hall between most of us here in the real world, and the insular world of architectural crticism. To the former group, the building remains an inefficient and alienating place that we sometimes have to enter when we deal with the City. Rather than admit the building's many manifest faults, the latter group continues to defend even its worst features and the unwelcoming urban environment that results as simply something that the rest of us just don't understand. Fifty years on, you can't argue that this is a knee-jerk reaction in the heat of the moment or that the general public is simply resistant to change in whatever form, regardless how beneficial. If you can't get people to love your building 50 years after it was built, maybe there really is something amiss with what you designed, no matter how monumental.
Whatever else you might think about it, Boston City Hall is an improbable building. Call it a giant concrete harmonica or a bold architectural achievement, but to walk by this strange, asymmetrical structure in Government Center is to wonder how on earth it landed there.
Boston City Hall has come in for significant criticism over the years. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has proposed selling it and investing in a more conventional headquarters. But the truly remarkable fact is that it was built in the first place. Experimental architecture, after all, is something we expect from museums and universities, not municipal governments. Take a look at other cities — Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles — and you’ll find city halls adorned with columns and arches, domes and porticos. Some are made of marble. Some have giant clocks. Then there’s ours, which looks like a fossilized spaceship.
Yet it wasn’t aliens who brought it here. Surprisingly, it was a group of Boston politicians and businessmen, along with two young architects named Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, who conceived of the building as a dramatic gesture intended to help usher in a new era in Boston history. This year marks the 50th anniversary of a decisive moment in that campaign: namely, an unusual design competition mounted by Mayor John F. Collins, in which architects were invited to imagine a brand-new, forward-looking home for Boston’s city government.
Boston was a very different place then. Until the 1950s, it had been a city “dying on the vine,” as US News & World Report put it, and the situation had improved only marginally when Collins took office in 1960. Economically stagnant, notoriously in thrall to political corruption, the city had seen little development for decades. As business owners decamped and residents fled to the suburbs, a fear took hold that Boston would soon be hollowed out for good.
It was in this context that the city decided to demolish the neighborhood known as Scollay Square and build in its place what would come to be called Government Center. Forceful and bewildering, Kallmann and McKinnell’s Boston City Hall would be the centerpiece of this controversial plan to revitalize Boston’s economy and convince its citizens — and the world — that the city was changing.
When the winning design was unveiled in the spring of 1962, “It sent a signal that the city was taking itself seriously,” said Keith Morgan, an architectural historian at Boston University. “That the city wanted to be something better than it had been.”
In other words, Boston was on a losing streak and needed to get its mojo back, and the new City Hall was just the object building needed to make it happen. Let's test that theory out a bit, shall we?
Virtually every city in the Northeast and the Rust Belt had to endure the same anti-urban orgy of disinvestment and victim-blaming in the first quarter century after the Second World War. So, in a sense, all of those places were in the same fix, trying to show that they were still viable or, at the very least, weren't going to go down without a fight. There was a need for a new New York, a new Philadelphia and a new Baltimore as much as there was for a New Boston.
Clearly, some cities did better than others in reinventing themselves, and Boston has to stand as one of the great urban success stories of the second half of the 20th century. Neyfakh's article would have us believe that this is due, perhaps principally, to the message sent out by the City Hall design competition and the design jury's politics-free selection of the design proposed by Kallman, McKinnell, and Knowles. The city was demonstrably leaving its past behind and striking out in a different direction. While one can't deny that City Hall and Government Center in general are radical departures from what had been the norm and had to have had a kind of "Did Boston really do that?" effect, we might want to consider instead the city's built-in advantages in the post-industrial American economy, especially the role played by its world class universities and hospitals, which ensured that it would play a major role in the high-tech and bio-tech booms of the last forty years. So, put me in the camp of not being convinced that coincidence is causality in this case. If the region's central core didn't have the Mass General, the Longwood Medical Area institutions, Harvard, and MIT, and all of the supporting institutions and infrastructure in between, I'm not sure that clearing the downtrodden heart of the city and building a modernist monument would have really made much difference. Similarly, I don't know that a renovated, instead of annihilated Scollay Square couldn't have been the heart of the New Boston in much the same way that Times Square is now the restored heart of New York, even though it has much the same physical layout and feel as it did 50 years ago. So, maybe the question is, did Boston really have to tear down some its best, while admittedly ragged, urban fabric and replace it with a buidling that is clearly more interesting as a piece of sculpture and a disastrously failed plaza in order to show that it "wanted to be something better than it had been." Dramatic, yes. Wise? Not so much.
Maybe, in defense of the City's public officials who had to deal with the world as it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, not as we wish it might have been from a vantage point 50 years down the road, there wasn't any other way to make an architectural statement than to go for full-throttle modernist brutalism and hire Le Corbusier disciples. I get that. But it doesn't change the sub-optimal urban fabric that we still have on our hands and it also doesn't change the tragically apt observation of Ada Louise Huxtable, cited in Neyfakh's article, regarding "the architectural gap, or abyss, as it exists between those who design and those who use the 20th century’s buildings." However the building came to be and whatever its intention may have been, there remains a massive difference of opinion and considered judgment about Boston City Hall between most of us here in the real world, and the insular world of architectural crticism. To the former group, the building remains an inefficient and alienating place that we sometimes have to enter when we deal with the City. Rather than admit the building's many manifest faults, the latter group continues to defend even its worst features and the unwelcoming urban environment that results as simply something that the rest of us just don't understand. Fifty years on, you can't argue that this is a knee-jerk reaction in the heat of the moment or that the general public is simply resistant to change in whatever form, regardless how beneficial. If you can't get people to love your building 50 years after it was built, maybe there really is something amiss with what you designed, no matter how monumental.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Blog Post No. 2012-3: Kevin White's passing...
...points to a shocking factoid from Boston's urban fabric past
Kevin H. White, Mayor of Boston from 1968 to 1984, died a week ago last Friday. For the old towne, it was a really big deal. Not only was Kevin White a four-term Mayor (which I believe was the record until Tom Menino's election in 2009 to a fifth term, which he is currently enjoying), those 16 years when he was mayor constitute the fulcrum on which the city's recent history pivoted.
Old Boston was the city before Kevin White.The New Boston is what we've had since. From a societal perspective, court-ordered busing of public school students to remedy past de facto segregation was the big game-changing event. It resulted in riots across Boston on a close to daily basis in the mid-1970s that made national news. By all accounts, busing hit the mayor and the city he ran like a ton of bricks. From a physical and built environment perspective, White's 16 years were equally critical. Many of the landmarks of today's central Boston took shape and/or assumed their current forms during White's mayoralty. Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market is probably the best known, but there are many others.
One pair of projects that I did know about (and which has even appeared in one of this weblog's prior entries (see Blog Post 2009-7)), but whose significance I hadn't quite understood until now, was the Four Seasons Hotel and Heritage on the Garden -- effectively occupying two full blocks on the section of Boylston Street directly across from the Public Garden. The projects were planned toward the end of White's tenure and completed in the mid-late 1980s under the aegis of the Park Plaza Urban Renewal Plan. While both buildings are of red brick, the Four Seasons is a somewhat modernist take on the idea, while Heritage on the Common is more historicist in its treatment of the context.
Read that first paragraph again. Fronting the Public Garden in the era just before the Four Seasons and Heritage on the Garden were built: a McDonald's, a gas station, and the Hillbilly Lounge? Really? How was that even possible? Even granting that the Hillbilly Lounge seems to have had a level of character and authenticity as well as irony (hillbillies in Boston?) that is virtually irreplaceable, on what planet would a city with the civic pride of Boston allow a block with the symbolic importance of Boylston Street between Charles and Arlington to become the equivalent of a section of suburban arterial? If you are searching for a metaphor for the profoundly anti-urban quarter century that followed the Second World War in this country, you could do worse. Boston Common and the Public Garden are critical image-making public spaces, but their huge combined importance can make you forget how small they really are, the Public Garden in particular. It's just four blocks long by two blocks wide. There is simply no space to waste. That Kevin White presided over a city that healed that particular piece of espeically egregious urban fabric violation in such an enduring and permanent-feeling way is to his profound credit. Right place, right time, right guy.
RTUF Note: This post was revised after its initial posting to reverse the order of the photos and to improve readability. - MJL.
Kevin H. White, Mayor of Boston from 1968 to 1984, died a week ago last Friday. For the old towne, it was a really big deal. Not only was Kevin White a four-term Mayor (which I believe was the record until Tom Menino's election in 2009 to a fifth term, which he is currently enjoying), those 16 years when he was mayor constitute the fulcrum on which the city's recent history pivoted.
Old Boston was the city before Kevin White.The New Boston is what we've had since. From a societal perspective, court-ordered busing of public school students to remedy past de facto segregation was the big game-changing event. It resulted in riots across Boston on a close to daily basis in the mid-1970s that made national news. By all accounts, busing hit the mayor and the city he ran like a ton of bricks. From a physical and built environment perspective, White's 16 years were equally critical. Many of the landmarks of today's central Boston took shape and/or assumed their current forms during White's mayoralty. Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market is probably the best known, but there are many others.
One pair of projects that I did know about (and which has even appeared in one of this weblog's prior entries (see Blog Post 2009-7)), but whose significance I hadn't quite understood until now, was the Four Seasons Hotel and Heritage on the Garden -- effectively occupying two full blocks on the section of Boylston Street directly across from the Public Garden. The projects were planned toward the end of White's tenure and completed in the mid-late 1980s under the aegis of the Park Plaza Urban Renewal Plan. While both buildings are of red brick, the Four Seasons is a somewhat modernist take on the idea, while Heritage on the Common is more historicist in its treatment of the context.
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| Four Seasons Hotel, 200 Boylston Street, Boston, MA Photo Credit: startle.com |
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| 300 Boylston Street (a.k.a, Heritage on the Garden) - 300 Boylston Street, Boston, MA Photo Credit: Heritage on the Garden. |
But what is truly interesting about the project, at least to me and at least now, is what it replaced. I hadn't quite realized what it replaced until Brian McGrory wrote an excellent piece about Kevin White's legacy in the Boston Globe last week -- The Loner and the City He Loved. Here's how McGrory opened his piece:
It’s virtually impossible to imagine that the rarefied streets of the Back Bay were ever home to flophouses, or to grasp that outsiders ventured into the South End at their own risk after dark, or to realize that a McDonald’s, a gas station, and a lounge called the Hillbilly Ranch ever fronted the Public Garden in the space where the Four Seasons Hotel and the Heritage now proudly stand.
This is how it was when Kevin White arrived to the Boston mayoralty in 1968. Sixteen always fascinating, often tumultuous, and invariably controversial years later, he left behind a city that was profoundly and permanently changed.
RTUF Note: This post was revised after its initial posting to reverse the order of the photos and to improve readability. - MJL.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Blog Post No. 2012-2: Catching up on form-based coding here in balmy NE
As crazy as the last couple of months of the year were, it's no excuse to be a month into 2012 and still be catching up...but such is life. I'm frankly despairing at this point of making much of the NE FBC Tracker. So, I'll post briefly here about FBCs here in bizarrely balmy NE. The editors of The Urban Lawyer, the quarterly journal of the American Bar Association's State and Local Governmental Section, saw fit to publish an article I wrote on the current crop of New England's form-based codes last fall. You can find it here: Gaining Ground in the Final Frontier: Surveying Legal Issues Raised by New England's Form-Based Codes. Comments, as always, are welcome.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Blog Post No. 2012-1: Of the Bartlett Square Condos...
...and the Southwest Corridor
The Location: 154-160 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA (MAP HERE) [And check out google street view to see the vacant lot that was here before.)
Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2012.
The Story: Just over a year ago, RTUF focused on the very northern end of the Southwest Corridor in our post on 131 Dartmouth Street (Blog Post No. 2011-1: 131 Dartmouth helps smooth the transition...). To kick off 2012, we turn to the southern end of the corridor, at the intersection of Green Street and Brookside Street, just a stone's throw from the Green stop on the MBTA's Orange Line in Jamaica Plain. The new development here, which replaced a vacant lot, is "Bartlett Square Condos," and it is almost, but not quite, completed. According to the developer's website, there will be a total of 13 residential units (2 of which are 2-level units) above 3 ground floor retail spaces with parking tucked under the building. To be totally honest, there is little that is earthshattering here, just overall smart location and architecture for the building itself, and good urban design where it meets the street. And there are some emblematic "sign of the times" features listed on the website, including a rooftop garden and solar panels generating electricity for common area elements. It will be a challenge to get all of the condo units sold, even in a market as strong overall as Jamaica Plain's.
The perhaps more interesting reason for pointing to Bartlett Square Condos is to highlight the undeniably missed urban development opportunity that the Southwest Corridor has represented since its inception 40 years ago. In the post last year, I discussed the freeway revolt that led to the creation of the corridor after the ill-fated Southwest Expressway was finally put out of its misery in the early 1970s. There can be no doubt that the resulting linear park has been a huge success as a recreational resource. It has been less successful, however, as the home of the relocated Orange Line, which used to run down Washington Street as an elevated train to Forest Hills.
Now, submerging elevated train lines is generally a good idea and almost always results in improved real estate opportunities on the street or streets that the elevated line used to run down. But moving the line over to run through parkland for effectively its entire length from Massachusetts Avenue to the Forest Hills terminus seems to have kept it from being as heavily used as other lines in the MBTA system. Your correspondent is a relatively frequent user of the service and it never reaches the full capacity feeling of, for example, the Red Line, even at the height of rush hour. I may be wrong about this, and if there are readers with access to relevant MBTA ridership data who want to refute me, please do. If, however, I am right and the Orange Line does have relatively low ridership, I would posit that part of the problem is that the Southwest Corridor did too little to bring the urban fabric up to and embrace the stations and their immediate vicinities. Perhaps the extent of the land takings, dislocation, and destruction were too much and the only vision that made sense to those involved at the time was one where green space ruled and denser buidlings were to be kept out. Whatever the reason, it has been a long road back to reconnecting the urban fabric up to and across the corridor. The Bartlett Condos represent, at the scale of the individual building lot, the kind of back-filling that has been gradually playing out along the corridor, including Jamaica Plain NDC's painstaking redevelopment of the former Haffenreffer Brewery complex a bit further up Brookside and the residential infill along Amory Street along the other side of the corridor. The biggest and most ambitious project is at and around the Jackson Square station, where a joint venture led by Urban Edge has been trying to recreate a true urban crossroads from excess vacant lots around the station. The first phase of that development is now finally under way. Here's hoping that there's more to come in allowing the urban fabric to come up to and stretch across the corridor at other appropriate locations. It could turn out to be a win-win as the corridor's green space could see more use and the Orange Line could see more ridership.
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| Photo 1: South-facing facade, along Green Street. |
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| Photo 3: Identification board showing completed project. |
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| Photo 4: Sidewalk and ground floor facade. |
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| Photo 5: Looking in the opposite direction, with Green Street station in left background. |
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| Photo 6: Looking diagonally across Green and Brookside toward the new building. |
Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2012.
The Story: Just over a year ago, RTUF focused on the very northern end of the Southwest Corridor in our post on 131 Dartmouth Street (Blog Post No. 2011-1: 131 Dartmouth helps smooth the transition...). To kick off 2012, we turn to the southern end of the corridor, at the intersection of Green Street and Brookside Street, just a stone's throw from the Green stop on the MBTA's Orange Line in Jamaica Plain. The new development here, which replaced a vacant lot, is "Bartlett Square Condos," and it is almost, but not quite, completed. According to the developer's website, there will be a total of 13 residential units (2 of which are 2-level units) above 3 ground floor retail spaces with parking tucked under the building. To be totally honest, there is little that is earthshattering here, just overall smart location and architecture for the building itself, and good urban design where it meets the street. And there are some emblematic "sign of the times" features listed on the website, including a rooftop garden and solar panels generating electricity for common area elements. It will be a challenge to get all of the condo units sold, even in a market as strong overall as Jamaica Plain's.
The perhaps more interesting reason for pointing to Bartlett Square Condos is to highlight the undeniably missed urban development opportunity that the Southwest Corridor has represented since its inception 40 years ago. In the post last year, I discussed the freeway revolt that led to the creation of the corridor after the ill-fated Southwest Expressway was finally put out of its misery in the early 1970s. There can be no doubt that the resulting linear park has been a huge success as a recreational resource. It has been less successful, however, as the home of the relocated Orange Line, which used to run down Washington Street as an elevated train to Forest Hills.
Now, submerging elevated train lines is generally a good idea and almost always results in improved real estate opportunities on the street or streets that the elevated line used to run down. But moving the line over to run through parkland for effectively its entire length from Massachusetts Avenue to the Forest Hills terminus seems to have kept it from being as heavily used as other lines in the MBTA system. Your correspondent is a relatively frequent user of the service and it never reaches the full capacity feeling of, for example, the Red Line, even at the height of rush hour. I may be wrong about this, and if there are readers with access to relevant MBTA ridership data who want to refute me, please do. If, however, I am right and the Orange Line does have relatively low ridership, I would posit that part of the problem is that the Southwest Corridor did too little to bring the urban fabric up to and embrace the stations and their immediate vicinities. Perhaps the extent of the land takings, dislocation, and destruction were too much and the only vision that made sense to those involved at the time was one where green space ruled and denser buidlings were to be kept out. Whatever the reason, it has been a long road back to reconnecting the urban fabric up to and across the corridor. The Bartlett Condos represent, at the scale of the individual building lot, the kind of back-filling that has been gradually playing out along the corridor, including Jamaica Plain NDC's painstaking redevelopment of the former Haffenreffer Brewery complex a bit further up Brookside and the residential infill along Amory Street along the other side of the corridor. The biggest and most ambitious project is at and around the Jackson Square station, where a joint venture led by Urban Edge has been trying to recreate a true urban crossroads from excess vacant lots around the station. The first phase of that development is now finally under way. Here's hoping that there's more to come in allowing the urban fabric to come up to and stretch across the corridor at other appropriate locations. It could turn out to be a win-win as the corridor's green space could see more use and the Orange Line could see more ridership.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Blog Post No. 2011-21: Rounding out the year...
...with some thoughts on urban supermarkets and the swinging of the proverbial pendulum
Herewith, ladies and gentlemen, this weblog's final post for 2011 and another installment from our wide-ranging search of the available media for interesting articles about the urban fabric and its condition (a.k.a., "They report it, we give it the once over..."). RTUF's intrepid research efforts found an article in yesterday's Boston Globe about certain national supermarket chains discovering urban markets and what that does and doesn't do to their typical store formats and models. The article, entitled "City supermarkets shrink to fit, Whole Foods in Jamaica Plain is latest to try a smaller space," is not comprehensive, but it does introduce a couple of key aspects of the pendulum that is currently swinging toward walkable neighborhoods and tightly-knit urban fabric.
The first aspect is that the suburbs are, generally speaking, already "over-retailed" (i.e., there are already enough outlets of all kinds to serve the needs of the existing population for years to come). As a result, national retail chains of all kinds, including supermarkets, are seeking growth and expansion opportunities in other places, especially urban areas. The second aspect is that national supermarket chains - ranging from prototypical big-boxers like WalMart and Wegmans down to Whole Foods - are experiencing some trepidation and adjustment anxiety as they scale down their standard 100,000 SF+ formats to fit tighter, more centrally-located footprints. The Whole Foods example used is the new location in Jamaica Plain, right next door to God's Country (a.k.a., Roslindale), where they replaced the former "Hi-Lo" foods, a locally-owned outlet that catered especially to that neighborhood's Latino community. Having recently been in that store, I will say that it was a bit different to be in a Whole Foods and not see their typically phenomenal butcher counter out in the open. That said, Whole Foods is certainly no stranger to central Boston locations, as they've been operating near Symphony Hall and in the West End for some time. I'm not too worried that they're going to do OK in JP too.
The article's hand-wringing over how supermarket outfits normally geared to large footprints and suburban parking standards can possibly fit into - gasp - less than 40,000 SF of floor area put me in mind of my own high school days on the East Side of Manhattan. Now, I'll stipulate that New York is an outlier here as it is in many things. But there is little doubt that supermarkets in the big city of broken dreams and shattered romances have survived and thrived for decades in footprints far smaller than 40,000 SF. As a result, there is a part of me that is just astounded to hear people who ought to know better speak about any store that is less than an acre in floor area as if it were a pushcart. Our apartment on 86th Street between 1st Avenue and York Avenue had three supermarkets less than block away -- a D'Agostino's on First Avenue, a Gristede's on York, and a Grand Union across First Avenue on 86th Street. None of these stores had parking and none could have topped 20,000 SF, yet they had everything a supermarket could be reasonably expected to have. If someone really wants to know how to do profitable urban supermarket operations, the smartest thing to do is walk into a D'Agostino's in Manhattan and take notes. It is hardly as exotic as the article makes it sound.
PS Best wishes on a happy and healthy 2012 to everyone from RTUF. LOVE YOUR PLACE!
Herewith, ladies and gentlemen, this weblog's final post for 2011 and another installment from our wide-ranging search of the available media for interesting articles about the urban fabric and its condition (a.k.a., "They report it, we give it the once over..."). RTUF's intrepid research efforts found an article in yesterday's Boston Globe about certain national supermarket chains discovering urban markets and what that does and doesn't do to their typical store formats and models. The article, entitled "City supermarkets shrink to fit, Whole Foods in Jamaica Plain is latest to try a smaller space," is not comprehensive, but it does introduce a couple of key aspects of the pendulum that is currently swinging toward walkable neighborhoods and tightly-knit urban fabric.
The first aspect is that the suburbs are, generally speaking, already "over-retailed" (i.e., there are already enough outlets of all kinds to serve the needs of the existing population for years to come). As a result, national retail chains of all kinds, including supermarkets, are seeking growth and expansion opportunities in other places, especially urban areas. The second aspect is that national supermarket chains - ranging from prototypical big-boxers like WalMart and Wegmans down to Whole Foods - are experiencing some trepidation and adjustment anxiety as they scale down their standard 100,000 SF+ formats to fit tighter, more centrally-located footprints. The Whole Foods example used is the new location in Jamaica Plain, right next door to God's Country (a.k.a., Roslindale), where they replaced the former "Hi-Lo" foods, a locally-owned outlet that catered especially to that neighborhood's Latino community. Having recently been in that store, I will say that it was a bit different to be in a Whole Foods and not see their typically phenomenal butcher counter out in the open. That said, Whole Foods is certainly no stranger to central Boston locations, as they've been operating near Symphony Hall and in the West End for some time. I'm not too worried that they're going to do OK in JP too.
The article's hand-wringing over how supermarket outfits normally geared to large footprints and suburban parking standards can possibly fit into - gasp - less than 40,000 SF of floor area put me in mind of my own high school days on the East Side of Manhattan. Now, I'll stipulate that New York is an outlier here as it is in many things. But there is little doubt that supermarkets in the big city of broken dreams and shattered romances have survived and thrived for decades in footprints far smaller than 40,000 SF. As a result, there is a part of me that is just astounded to hear people who ought to know better speak about any store that is less than an acre in floor area as if it were a pushcart. Our apartment on 86th Street between 1st Avenue and York Avenue had three supermarkets less than block away -- a D'Agostino's on First Avenue, a Gristede's on York, and a Grand Union across First Avenue on 86th Street. None of these stores had parking and none could have topped 20,000 SF, yet they had everything a supermarket could be reasonably expected to have. If someone really wants to know how to do profitable urban supermarket operations, the smartest thing to do is walk into a D'Agostino's in Manhattan and take notes. It is hardly as exotic as the article makes it sound.
PS Best wishes on a happy and healthy 2012 to everyone from RTUF. LOVE YOUR PLACE!
Monday, December 26, 2011
Blog Post No. 2011-20: Appleton Mills comes back to life...
...as the Hamilton Canal District's redevelopment gets underway in earnest
The Location: 219 Jackson Street, Lowell, MA (LINK).
Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2011.
The Story: The redevelopment of the Hamilton Canal District in Lowell has been mentioned on this weblog before, albeit somewhat in passing, in the final blog post of 2009 (Blog Post No. 2009-9: Breaking with the early pattern of posts...). There, the focus was on the advance of form-based coding in New England. In this post, we come to praise the resurrection of the Appleton Mills, from its virtual demolition-by-neglect in the years after it closed as a working site for manufacturing - at one point, immediately before construction began, the floors were literally falling in on each other - to the great work done by Trinity Financial and Icon Architecture at the request of the City of Lowell to redevelop the former mill into affordable and artist housing.
As noted in the 2009 post, I worked on behalf of my law firm as the city's special counsel to help produce and ensure the consistency of the form-based code for the Hamilton Canal District with Massachusetts law. To be quite frank, it is tremendously rewarding to see the high quality of the as-restored Appleton Mills residential complex, the first phase of the redevelopment enabled by that code. The new courtyard space and the streetscape of the new street are exactly the kind of thoughtful, detailed, and satisfying exterior spaces that we should look for in every piece of new construction we do as a region and nation.
The master plan below shows that much more is to come, including further residential, commercial, and mixed-use buildings, a new courtyard area that the Appleton Mills reconstruction has already partially completed, a new public square and small park, and a multi-story parking garage with street-facing retail at the ground level. If all goes well, there is even the possibility for something near and dear to your RTUF correspondent's reformed transportation planner's heart: a link from the existing historic trolley system from the city's university and the minor league ballpark through downtown Lowell and the district to the MBTA's Lowell commuter rail station and the city's major bus terminal. The Hamilton Canal District is both a tremendous mixed-use development location on its own, with three intersecting canals and great historic architectural bones, and a critical piece of infill between the heart of Lowell's downtown and the aforementioned commuter rail/regional bus station. We will continue to check in on the district's redevelopment as new phases come on line.
Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: No sketch needed this time. Instead, see below and the illustrative master plan prepared by Icon Architecture for Trinity Financial, their client, and the City of Lowell. The Appleton Mills restoration shown here is actually on two parcels -- marked 6 and 7 on the master plan.
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| Photo 1: Looking from Jackson Street, across the Hamilton Canal bridge. |
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| Photo 2: Looking along Hamilton Canal from the bridge. |
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| Photo 3: Looking back across the Appleton courtyard, toward the underpass and bridge beyond. |
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| Photo 4: Looking along the new street ("Street D" in the master plan). |
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| Photo 5: Sidewalk with tree yard. |
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| Photo 6: Looking along the Pawtucket Canal, with former mill wall remnants. |
The Location: 219 Jackson Street, Lowell, MA (LINK).
Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2011.
The Story: The redevelopment of the Hamilton Canal District in Lowell has been mentioned on this weblog before, albeit somewhat in passing, in the final blog post of 2009 (Blog Post No. 2009-9: Breaking with the early pattern of posts...). There, the focus was on the advance of form-based coding in New England. In this post, we come to praise the resurrection of the Appleton Mills, from its virtual demolition-by-neglect in the years after it closed as a working site for manufacturing - at one point, immediately before construction began, the floors were literally falling in on each other - to the great work done by Trinity Financial and Icon Architecture at the request of the City of Lowell to redevelop the former mill into affordable and artist housing.
 |
| Image of the Appleton Mills building (in distance) at the time of groundbreaking in 2009. Credit: City of Lowell, MA. |
As noted in the 2009 post, I worked on behalf of my law firm as the city's special counsel to help produce and ensure the consistency of the form-based code for the Hamilton Canal District with Massachusetts law. To be quite frank, it is tremendously rewarding to see the high quality of the as-restored Appleton Mills residential complex, the first phase of the redevelopment enabled by that code. The new courtyard space and the streetscape of the new street are exactly the kind of thoughtful, detailed, and satisfying exterior spaces that we should look for in every piece of new construction we do as a region and nation.
The master plan below shows that much more is to come, including further residential, commercial, and mixed-use buildings, a new courtyard area that the Appleton Mills reconstruction has already partially completed, a new public square and small park, and a multi-story parking garage with street-facing retail at the ground level. If all goes well, there is even the possibility for something near and dear to your RTUF correspondent's reformed transportation planner's heart: a link from the existing historic trolley system from the city's university and the minor league ballpark through downtown Lowell and the district to the MBTA's Lowell commuter rail station and the city's major bus terminal. The Hamilton Canal District is both a tremendous mixed-use development location on its own, with three intersecting canals and great historic architectural bones, and a critical piece of infill between the heart of Lowell's downtown and the aforementioned commuter rail/regional bus station. We will continue to check in on the district's redevelopment as new phases come on line.
Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: No sketch needed this time. Instead, see below and the illustrative master plan prepared by Icon Architecture for Trinity Financial, their client, and the City of Lowell. The Appleton Mills restoration shown here is actually on two parcels -- marked 6 and 7 on the master plan.
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