tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31656859604087386832024-02-18T22:18:55.565-05:00Restoring the Urban FabricA humble blog, seeking only to point out and even celebrate those instances where tears in the urban fabric have been recently restored.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger100125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-86847548616742447082015-06-07T19:56:00.000-04:002015-06-07T19:59:02.896-04:00Otherwise occupied...<b><i>...that's the message for the time being, RTUF Nation</i></b><br />
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I've helped some like-minded neighbors here in Roslindale (a.k.a., God's Country) get "<a href="http://www.walkuproslindale.org/weblog/" target="_blank">WalkUP Roslindale</a>," a new walkable development-supportive group, off the ground. As I've noted in several recent posts here at RTUF, the next couple of years are likely to prove pivotal in what kind of city we will be over the next several decades. Multiple visioning and planning efforts are afoot to address the wave of new neighbors and businesses heading our way. For now, it seems the best place to push for what I conceive to be the right thing is here at home.<br />
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Thanks for your support the last 6 years. - MJL<br />
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Blog Post No. 2015-7.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-49286645745404814132015-05-22T20:11:00.002-04:002015-05-22T20:11:42.223-04:00This is big Boston planning news...<b><i>...BRA Director of Planning Position on the block</i></b><br />
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This is not entirely unexpected, but <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/05/20/boston-city-planner-terminated-leave-post-end-month/elyXBWOC2uFk5kxRhMznCN/story.html" target="_blank">it is big news</a>: Kairos Shen, who has been a key BRA player and in many ways was the last mayor's urban planning and design muse, will be moving on from his position as the city's Chief Planner at month's end. Along with the active transportation director and chief
of streets positions that the city is currently advertising, hiring a new chief
planner would represent the final major move of the opening round of the new
administration in charting a new direction on development, planning, and the
use of public space in Boston. It was an open secret in Boston that the last mayor very tightly and personally controlled development decisions in this city for
his entire 20 year administration, notwithstanding that he always tried to deny
it when asked directly. He was, in effect, the real chief planner and decision-maker.
Kairos was one of a group of fairly effective folks at the BRA who kept their
heads mostly down and worked within that construct and so stayed around a long time.<br />
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The new mayor, Marty Walsh, shows many signs of not wanting to be that
controlling, whether simply by inclination (he comes from the building trades
and seems to have a generally pro-growth bent) or as a form of reaction to such a long
period of tight control and a recognition that such a way of doing business is
ultimately not optimal. This has the development community somewhat at sea -- after the last regime, it can seem like no one is in charge. This is admittedly a meaningful problem insofar as the zoning code in Boston is an unholy mess in which a
main organizing principle is to force every project worth doing at almost every
scale into the discretionary zoning relief process so that development
decisions can be run from the Mayor's office and based on the Mayor's own
political calculus. I am not exaggerating. It seems the Walsh administration really wants to get away from that and has been building the necessary predicate for
about a year now by recognizing the unavoidable population trend (Boston is forecast
to add 70,000 new residents in the next 15 years, which would put the city over 700,000 residents for the first time since the 1950s), developing a new housing plan that tries
to accommodate that increase in population (53,000 new units of all stripes are
needed), proposing new workforce housing growth zones along key transit
corridors to target the residential market segment that has been lagging most
significantly (the first time in the 15 years I've been following development
in Boston that the words "growth" and "zone" have appeared
next to each other), and then pushing, simultaneously, a new transportation
master plan (<a href="http://goboston2030.org/en/" target="_blank">Go Boston 2030</a>) and a new citywide master plan (<a href="http://imagine.boston.gov/" target="_blank">Imagine Boston</a>). Unless all of this effort is to be
wasted, this points to some fairly significant rezoning starting sometime in
late 2016 that will presumably create new rules of the road that, one certainly
hopes, will provide for much more of worth to be done as-of-right (could be a
true form-based code or a hybrid, I'm personally not picky). Getting from here
to there will be the hard part though ultimately well worth it. And whomever the Walsh Administration brings on as our chief planner will be a huge part of that.<br />
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P.S. We note that the interim director of planning, Tad Read, is a long-time friend of this blog's author and someone who has "gotten it" on the key issues of the day for some time. Tad's a great choice as the interim director and rates a real look for the permanent role.<br />
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Blog Post No. 2015-6.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-76762260950119493572015-05-06T12:42:00.001-04:002015-05-22T19:50:29.355-04:00Welcoming Roche Brothers to DTX...<i><b>...in which we contemplate the turning of yet another tide</b></i><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuxKzbw_NgtsPR2MsUoQZ4feeIVRYIX5Dh09DsKxD2QIsa2Hr3N95gppPmYZza3WUhKZC-5q9_1cCUb0MQSmy00HaFNHVgjuwWwC9ZBP48IvIovfALvrF0zS3nEmBK30DXskQ9UY72DbA/s1600/Revised+street+view.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuxKzbw_NgtsPR2MsUoQZ4feeIVRYIX5Dh09DsKxD2QIsa2Hr3N95gppPmYZza3WUhKZC-5q9_1cCUb0MQSmy00HaFNHVgjuwWwC9ZBP48IvIovfALvrF0zS3nEmBK30DXskQ9UY72DbA/s1600/Revised+street+view.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Photo 1</b>: Exterior view, down Summer Street toward Washington.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiUAGZ8t5DB9Tio0WkXjy2WXoNDawel9NCvKzYqLPJUY3lzXYEPIJKdGyyO7mxnTvKDVCxC-E0lHAkYcGdlJ6brysIOtapx_fGH1Z5-yDm8e5iSiYCwlKTP8m7mMcqBNW3VDEp57foU8w/s1600/20150430_170938.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiUAGZ8t5DB9Tio0WkXjy2WXoNDawel9NCvKzYqLPJUY3lzXYEPIJKdGyyO7mxnTvKDVCxC-E0lHAkYcGdlJ6brysIOtapx_fGH1Z5-yDm8e5iSiYCwlKTP8m7mMcqBNW3VDEp57foU8w/s1600/20150430_170938.jpg" width="180" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Photo 2</b>: Front view, with outdoor seating in foreground.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0JquSh44qWn9Hf518yUVFGyefBiW6_pmW7OjrpmsUaQMiwEgNUSFxtal6dMPjXTA2wlyzg2eJJn-rBatrnl_kyH101LTjIdFnZs5ZxP3oNqg7WMd8gKngDmCJff8YQHt99IVTLNfzo3Y/s1600/20150430_171011+(3).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0JquSh44qWn9Hf518yUVFGyefBiW6_pmW7OjrpmsUaQMiwEgNUSFxtal6dMPjXTA2wlyzg2eJJn-rBatrnl_kyH101LTjIdFnZs5ZxP3oNqg7WMd8gKngDmCJff8YQHt99IVTLNfzo3Y/s1600/20150430_171011+(3).jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Photo 3</b>: Interior on street level (prepared foods).</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-OnbTLCPpUWb71kj5VF76FvnU1wfJHeRmjWifdVaLqEDUa0UW1P5CehJ8EuO958BQSHGF3MPqjQ-Qzj4uQq4uSa7jBNmJRyfBaFkJi8DYwtRFU0FZz6Rr7IFtgfM4REkR3q-kDuYKwrg/s1600/20150430_171102+(3).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-OnbTLCPpUWb71kj5VF76FvnU1wfJHeRmjWifdVaLqEDUa0UW1P5CehJ8EuO958BQSHGF3MPqjQ-Qzj4uQq4uSa7jBNmJRyfBaFkJi8DYwtRFU0FZz6Rr7IFtgfM4REkR3q-kDuYKwrg/s1600/20150430_171102+(3).jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Photo 4</b>: Lower level, looking back to escalator.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW0qpDCSD1Kb0Rdi58TOv0Gn3PjcH5t61E7Cm-sGU0_bPFgHmgnQLKa2JqfXqv2pDzYsYgRYYLch8HpxBPMGwtDXjP1YnD4ZKt6uxVsxLtkoperCKLigDXlYUX2aj0EaiV329aBz9gQL4/s1600/20150430_171049.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW0qpDCSD1Kb0Rdi58TOv0Gn3PjcH5t61E7Cm-sGU0_bPFgHmgnQLKa2JqfXqv2pDzYsYgRYYLch8HpxBPMGwtDXjP1YnD4ZKt6uxVsxLtkoperCKLigDXlYUX2aj0EaiV329aBz9gQL4/s1600/20150430_171049.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Photo 5</b>: Lower level, main supermarket floor.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV78IGJCMIOAQfwssCJ2HMAdt9fQ5t2xT0RNu5xfcEp7GdsxKc7aDO4gOdYPPUNzpFZOawGQ5xN7Ckafl39uiqS6nPzsxgkUob6uuaT0ZZCT132x1lfPJGevvNspQ2jsQ1M8pT2BvbRbM/s1600/20150430_202121.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV78IGJCMIOAQfwssCJ2HMAdt9fQ5t2xT0RNu5xfcEp7GdsxKc7aDO4gOdYPPUNzpFZOawGQ5xN7Ckafl39uiqS6nPzsxgkUob6uuaT0ZZCT132x1lfPJGevvNspQ2jsQ1M8pT2BvbRbM/s1600/20150430_202121.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Photo 6</b>: Exit to MBTA Concourse at lower level.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi58BJrLtVEfGmz0Sj8R7zYPaSfLM-6J0AoVmbfgQlDyhGREIvsAQGtyQhfjK_4vXuUWWvtuxf07tV8ubTwephFDFJzy3RhL-Vzb45W8Ng0w11fGjAyV4UJvD0kwLQcH0Fdj2auH-XocBk/s1600/20150430_202057.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi58BJrLtVEfGmz0Sj8R7zYPaSfLM-6J0AoVmbfgQlDyhGREIvsAQGtyQhfjK_4vXuUWWvtuxf07tV8ubTwephFDFJzy3RhL-Vzb45W8Ng0w11fGjAyV4UJvD0kwLQcH0Fdj2auH-XocBk/s1600/20150430_202057.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Photo 7</b>: On the MBTA Concourse, facing toward entrance.</td></tr>
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<b><i>The Location:</i></b> The proverbial walkable "Main & Main" of Boston - <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/Downtown+Crossing,+Boston,+MA/@42.3555886,-71.0603042,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x89e3708322817c0b:0x9fdcf07e5102b44c" target="_blank">Downtown Crossing</a>. Specifically at Winter, Summer, and Washington streets, in the Daniel Burnham-designed building that was the flagship store for Filene's for several decades.<br />
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<b><i>The Story:</i></b> It is here that Roche Brothers, a well-respected, locally-owned, and thoroughly mainstream suburban supermarket chain has decided to enter the urban market with a 25,000 sf store at a highly visible and attention-grabbing location. And make no mistake, this is a departure for Roche Brothers. They were founded in Roslindale (a.k.a, God's Country) in the early 1950s and never ventured any closer to the regional core, opting instead to spread into the western suburbs and eventually north and south of town (even going to the Cape for one of their locations). In the process, they left their original Roslindale Square location (leaving a hole that wasn't plugged until the community rose up to create the Village Market in the late 1990s) and have been headquartered for many years in Wellesley. A glance at their <a href="http://www.rochebros.com/locations/" target="_blank">location map</a> (which needs to be updated to show the new store) shows clearly how suburban their footprint is. Until now, the only store they have had within the city limits of Boston is in West Roxbury, the last neighborhood you reach before you hit the suburbs in Dedham. The pictures below the location map tell the story as eloquently as this weblog ever could: The WR store is somewhat walkable/bikeable (I've done both myself), but the full roster is, without exception, much larger and far more auto-served than DTX. In that sense, this is a little bit like the "One of these things is not like the others" segments on Sesame Street. Roche Brothers DTX is the outlier, without doubt.<br />
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And so, we come to the thought that this post is intended to provoke. What would bring conventional, suburban Roche Brothers down to the epicenter of the urban core? Clearly, it's the turning tide that is sweeping the area, including <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2013/05/boston-commercial-real-estate-now.html" target="_blank">the massive residential/retail tower going up next to this location</a>, as well as the <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2012/04/blog-post-no-2012-07-hayward-place.html" target="_blank">Hayward Place building</a>, Millennium Ritz-Carlton, <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/search?q=province" target="_blank">45 Province</a>, restoration of the Opera House, Paramount, and Modern theaters The list could go on. There's a residential neighborhood taking shape in a part of town that hasn't been that way for more than a century. Now, Roche Brothers are good guys -- particularly to their old hometown of Roslindale/West Roxbury, where they have funded all kinds of community facilities out of a strong sense of corporate citizenship. But they didn't need to come to DTX to demonstrate that. No, they're coming to DTX for the money, because the market is clearly ramping up downtown, and a supermarket here just makes sense. I think it's safe to predict that the sales per square foot at this location are going to be the highest in their portfolio and will more than make up for the learning curve they're going to endure in learning how to efficiently supply and operate a store this "small" at this location. Time will tell, but your humble blogspondent will testify that this location was very, very busy each time I've visited it in the last few days, whether midday or in the evening. I don't see them regretting this decision.<br />
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<i><b>Post Script</b></i> -- The final photo shows a fairly lifeless exterior to the MBTA concourse entrance/exit. Much more can be done here, possibly including some exterior merchandise or table/chair combinations to create some activity. Vibrancy below ground is part of the equation here, even if only to call attention to the fact that retail activity has returned in a big way to the basement of the Filene's building.<br />
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<b><i>Post Post Script</i></b> -- It is also clearly time to rethink DTX as a pedestrian zone. The portion shown in Photo 1 works incredibly well, as does the Winter Street block. The rest, not so much. Seems like one solution would be to let motor vehicles back in, all times of the day, BUT at a very low, heavily enforced speed, say 10 or 15 mph to show that shared streets can work.<br />
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Blog Post No. 2015-5.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-6924106383628684532015-04-13T19:46:00.000-04:002015-04-13T19:46:19.541-04:00An instructive and dispositive juxtaposition on the question of the Casey OverpassIt's been a long time coming: the Casey Overpass at Forest Hills is finally coming down in the very, very near future. Of course, nothing touching the public realm in any meaningful way in this country is ever easy or fast (so badly have we collectively treated that public realm and sown distrust and fear of change - Casey itself being part of that legacy). But Casey occupies a category of its own by virtue of the substantial ramping up of opposition to its demolition and replacement with an at-grade boulevard configuration <u>after</u> MassDOT, the commonwealth's state transportation agency, announced the decision over three years ago.<br />
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For those who haven't been following this, I will note briefly that the Casey Overpass is an elevated roadway that puts the Arborway/Route 203/Morton Street above ground in the area of the Forest Hills Orange Line/Commuter Rail station -- an area which lies at the intersection of several neighborhoods including Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, Hyde Park, Dorchester, and Mattapan. The demolition decision came after an extended public process during which MassDOT considered, with community input and a citizens' working advisory group, whether to replace what was already a badly deteriorated eyesore with a new overpass or remove the overpass completely in favor of an at-grade facility. Your humble blogspondent lives about a mile and a half from Forest Hills down in Roslindale (a.k.a,, God's Country), and though I pass through Forest Hills a couple of times each day, it is typically while on the Commuter Rail. That is not to say, however, that I don't sometimes access the Orange Line at Forest Hills station or the businesses right in the vicinity by car, by bus or by bicycle, and even sometimes by foot. I do, but my experience and therefore my strong support lies with the at-grade solution that MassDOT has chosen. Whether the judgment of history will be on our side and Casey is therefore truly a "relic" of an era best forgotten remains to be seen, I guess, but in my view, with the opportunity presented, Casey comes down because it reflects a mindset that puts a premium on moving automobile traffic as quickly as possible at the expense of all other modes and without regard for what elevated facilities such as these do to the areas immediately abutting them. As such, replacing Casey with a new overpass would require that we, as a commonwealth, spend inordinate amounts of money to construct and then maintain, over the long-term, an elevated structure that perpetuates what I view as a fundamentally flawed prioritization of people in cars over people on foot, on bikes, or on transit, that is reflected in Casey's very existence and in countless other decisions made over the last several decades. Further, the lower cost of going for an at-grade solution when compared to a new overpass allows for much more to be done to enhance the pedestrian and bicycle experience through the area. It's a clear win-win.<br />
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And so, as the day of reckoning for Casey draws ever closer, we have a final point-counterpoint from the two sides of the debate in the community. Chris Lovett, of the Boston Neighborhood Network's News show, had Clay Harper of <a href="http://arborwaymatters.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Arborway Matters</a> on as the pro at-grade voice, and Kevin Moloney of Bridging Forest Hills as the anti at-grade voice, at the end of March/beginning of April. The videos have been posted to youtube and can be viewed here (h/t to Clay, who, not surprisingly, posted this on his blog as well). Draw your own conclusions -- you already know where I stand:<br />
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<a href="https://youtu.be/0n5UOswThM8" target="_blank">Clay Harper - Pro At-Grade</a><br />
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<a href="https://youtu.be/o6HqDHls1Dc" target="_blank">Kevin Moloney - Anti At-Grade</a><br />
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Blog Post No. 2015-4.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-34930620234148997242015-03-31T19:56:00.000-04:002015-04-01T08:34:19.879-04:00A blast from the past...Robert Moses in his own wordsThe document at this link -- <br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> -- is an amazing artifact of urban America in the half century from the 1920s through the 1970s. (h/t Steve Lawton) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Born in 1969, I literally grew up in the place that Robert Moses left me -- a disfigured but still magnificent New York. I can safely say my anger and awe at reading the man at length in
his own words are in equal proportion. He is revealed as a perfectly magnificent bastard in every
way. Each purported defense against a supposedly false accusation, each instance of Red-baiting, and every quotation from other angry old men (I mean -- Leo Durocher!) just seals
the verdict of history tighter, and the lack of self-consciousness and introspection is complete and utterly impregnable. This is a man who never gave anything he did a second thought and was proud to have done so. Reading this, I have the distinct feeling Caro
was too easy on Moses in <i>The Power Broker</i>…and that is saying a lot.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Now, I've touched on Moses at this weblog before -- <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2011/11/blog-post-no-2011-18-anthony-flint.html" target="_blank">2011-18 (Reviewing an Anthony Flint piece in <i>The Boston Globe</i>)</a> and <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2010/06/blog-post-no-2010-13-washington-beech.html" target="_blank">2010-13 (Reconsidering Jane Jacobs' Legacy)</a>. But I don't think I've indicated quite how visceral my distaste for and disappointment at the man and what he represents are. I think I was in 9th grade when I got <i>The Power Broker</i> as a Christmas present from my mother and it became a kind of Rosetta Stone for finally understanding the everyday world of late 1970s/early 1980s New York -- a place demonstrably in decline with abandoned and burned out neighborhoods, graffiti covered and broken-down subways, sprawling highway infrastructure that had been punched through neighborhoods and used to seal off the waterfront from the rest of the city already crumbling due to lack of maintenance, and big project failures like Westway showing that the party was over and the hangover was well underway. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">All of it suddenly made sense -- we had had choices, and we had routinely chosen the wrong things. </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And in the area of infrastructure, Robert Moses was largely responsible for decades of bad choices, both in the major mistakes actually made and in the meaningful opportunities squandered, and there were many of both. For every Cross-Bronx or Gowanus Expressway, there was also the failure to save Penn Station or expand the subway system. It may well be true that had Moses not existed, the zeitgeist would have had to create him, so perfectly did he embody the mid-century's headlong rush to both refashion our cities in the image and likeness of a happy motoring republic (credit: Jim Kunstler) and then to abandon those same cities at the earliest opportunity on the auto infrastructure thus created. But that does not absolve him from responsibility in gutting a great and good city and leaving the remains at the side of the road. The pattern repeated itself over and over across this great land -- New York was not unique in this respect, it's just that its problems were that much more pronounced because they were at that much greater a scale.</span><br />
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Blog Post No. 2015-3.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-41500568386820227682015-03-21T09:49:00.003-04:002015-03-21T09:52:15.143-04:00Thinking about Boston's Workforce Housing Growth ZonesYour humble RTUF blogspondent <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2014/12/this-could-turn-out-to-be-very-big-day.html" target="_blank">predicted back in December that the Mayor's speech on "Growth Zones" would turn out to be a big deal</a>. And I stand by that prediction. But there is no denying that the details on the Growth Zones have been slow in coming. So, having given the matter some thought and having put some of those thoughts on paper, I was lucky enough that my friends at the Real Estate Bar Association put those thoughts in the current quarterly of the REBA News. You can check them out here at page 2: <a href="http://issuu.com/thewarrengroup/docs/reba_maraprlpfinal" target="_blank">Getting down to specifics on Boston's growth zones</a>. Thoughts, as always, welcome in the comments section. - MJL<br />
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Blog Post No. 2015-2.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-57025072632431109072015-01-18T08:34:00.000-05:002015-01-20T09:44:33.494-05:00Parcel 24 becomes One Greenway...<i><b>...and Chinatown regains some ground</b></i><br />
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<b><i>The Photos:</i></b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqvKSxypH0MlgXWmFNOLj20Y4l9YpPWAiK6F4fiHO24XCEG6-cGaaH0BKWX6Ly3lNw9ufZMMaTfegGiQBVc2nvnbDRd1OhrE9c-RWjWq5h4rPxVE_C3xo8NUXa4elAjubZoY_8qLZhn3M/s1600/One+Greenway+-+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqvKSxypH0MlgXWmFNOLj20Y4l9YpPWAiK6F4fiHO24XCEG6-cGaaH0BKWX6Ly3lNw9ufZMMaTfegGiQBVc2nvnbDRd1OhrE9c-RWjWq5h4rPxVE_C3xo8NUXa4elAjubZoY_8qLZhn3M/s1600/One+Greenway+-+1.jpg" height="200" width="112" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Photo 1</u>: Looking east on Kneeland Street.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt0pbe7M8oZ1zqKkvi2m-FOkO1SwVvA9q03ghOyzuZxOsEYRzhgx7oHLXAqsRWcws9S55s4KmUzuzoed9P3lBRF4BnsPeeQv6UOQYIGlhkLt8RVRf-FZk7CjONlNu9Ydi0YpYqKjfv150/s1600/One+Greenway+-+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt0pbe7M8oZ1zqKkvi2m-FOkO1SwVvA9q03ghOyzuZxOsEYRzhgx7oHLXAqsRWcws9S55s4KmUzuzoed9P3lBRF4BnsPeeQv6UOQYIGlhkLt8RVRf-FZk7CjONlNu9Ydi0YpYqKjfv150/s1600/One+Greenway+-+2.jpg" height="112" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Photo 2</u>: Looking south on Hudson Street.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX6VHxqhR2rXZ0NHgyaYk1yh5_WNy-oy0vgrjP8RaSjSFhFKwhmZU4wJ1y622B3QIFKYmdELVTcic-AwBuCfmKAcIIWanVTeyFqvx8eWC3HJUlIYHFqLqUsfXlt8AAdwY8_JM5qFUeO6Y/s1600/20150116_151630.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX6VHxqhR2rXZ0NHgyaYk1yh5_WNy-oy0vgrjP8RaSjSFhFKwhmZU4wJ1y622B3QIFKYmdELVTcic-AwBuCfmKAcIIWanVTeyFqvx8eWC3HJUlIYHFqLqUsfXlt8AAdwY8_JM5qFUeO6Y/s1600/20150116_151630.jpg" height="200" width="112" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Photo 3</u>: Looking south on Albany Street.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgePcPdfexUnfb6spPZCytkKC-dfxZrVhw8JvRxT3sV0x-dpgr-NeFfBc8wx7eTvLrv9miCerE06702SB6LSX8FLmRlAmincAIab43f13eLbN9X5UuUFNJYOZZ_JDxyi0KUYgXri3C9WQ4/s1600/20150116_151854.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgePcPdfexUnfb6spPZCytkKC-dfxZrVhw8JvRxT3sV0x-dpgr-NeFfBc8wx7eTvLrv9miCerE06702SB6LSX8FLmRlAmincAIab43f13eLbN9X5UuUFNJYOZZ_JDxyi0KUYgXri3C9WQ4/s1600/20150116_151854.jpg" height="200" width="112" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Photo 4</u>: From the parking lot between Tyler and Hudson,<br />
looking northeast.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0vnbPQ1t2zP1bsTAQ4yMY82AAhJux2bIKPg_cj4SlJ_67FGJkFPfRxNDwqfzs_9VQPjfaxDJsdTeh8hsWmOM9qRE9p958BPrxanOWcJLiLc75YRKGO10_1lauyKSICj7bG6kwYp2nXGI/s1600/20150116_152246.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0vnbPQ1t2zP1bsTAQ4yMY82AAhJux2bIKPg_cj4SlJ_67FGJkFPfRxNDwqfzs_9VQPjfaxDJsdTeh8hsWmOM9qRE9p958BPrxanOWcJLiLc75YRKGO10_1lauyKSICj7bG6kwYp2nXGI/s1600/20150116_152246.jpg" height="112" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Photo 5</u>: Harrison Avenue, looking south from Essex Street.</td></tr>
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<b><i>The Location:</i></b> <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/90+Kneeland+St,+Boston,+MA+02111/@42.3502929,-71.0602838,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x89e37a7833560815:0xd2b662148d7958ab" target="_blank">Approx. 90 Kneeland Street</a>, or the block bounded by Kneeland, Hudson, and Albany streets, Boston's Chinatown.<br />
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<b><i>The Story</i></b>: One particularly interesting aspect urban life is the changing makeup of the people who populate certain patches of ground in successive waves before moving on and out, sometimes willingly, sometimes not. Much of what is now the southern half of Boston's Chinatown, effectively the area south of Kneeland Street and east of Washington and bounded on the other 2 sides by the Fitzgerald Expressway and the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension, was part of the South Bay/South Cove until being filled in the 1830s. Soon after being developed, the neighborhood experienced a wave of Irish immigration and, then, in relatively rapid succession over the next hundred years, European Jews, Syrians and Lebanese, and finally Chinese and East Asian immigrants. The area today is the southern half of Chinatown, which has long been handicapped by the fact that a substantial swath was taken for the aforementioned turnpike extension and expressway 50 years ago, resulting in multiple highway on- and off-ramps and the trench of the turnpike itself. Parcel 24's location was, before the highway, a regular block bounded by Kneeland, Hudson, Harvard, and Albany, and home to dozens of mid-19th century Boston row houses, similar in scale and character, it seems, to nearby Bay Village.<br />
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With the Big Dig's submergence of the highway, Parcel 24 became available for potential redevelopment and Asian CDC, Chinatown's homegrown community development corporation, teamed with New Boston Fund to obtain the redevelopment rights from the state to pursue the mixed-use project that is now dubbed One Greeway. It has been a long road back: Those rights were initially acquired almost a decade ago, but construction of the project was delayed by the Great Recession's real estate downturn and only commenced in late 2013. As can be seen from the photos, One Greenway is another in the wave of new buildings that we here at RTUF have found worthy of note. It puts height at the right place - along Kneeland - meets its key street frontages appropriately and activates them with retail uses, and represents the kind of thoughtful infill development that we need more of.<br />
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<b><i>The RTUF Sketch</i></b>: The sketch shows that the building shown on the photos above is just the north building of the development, to be followed up a public park and a smaller south building:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizlEcCm-34u7KHSOn4GXOsu35GCHuWplrhRuyJfGcpXNjUuuuawl5-yTm8qS5Je5QXGE01h_GvNWb3x__BYyRLbAX0bd6XeuLYvbWfzi0BQtjiE1wWEB2MWcQSO08g_Sm_rEz8C-M4ay4/s1600/Scan1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizlEcCm-34u7KHSOn4GXOsu35GCHuWplrhRuyJfGcpXNjUuuuawl5-yTm8qS5Je5QXGE01h_GvNWb3x__BYyRLbAX0bd6XeuLYvbWfzi0BQtjiE1wWEB2MWcQSO08g_Sm_rEz8C-M4ay4/s1600/Scan1.jpg" height="200" width="153" /></a></div>
<i><b>A post script</b></i>: A while back, RTUF took a look at Franklin Street at Arch and called for much less paved space for cars and more space for people (<a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2014/05/its-really-way-past-time-to-reduce.html" target="_blank">It's really way past time...</a>). The last photo above, of Harrison Avenue below Essex Street, is another such location. Way too much pavement going to waste. Come spring, this would be an ideal location for some traffic barrels, some tables and chairs and a few umbrellas. Definitely underperforming for those of us on foot.<br />
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<i>Blog Post No. 2015-1.</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-62118390993955460502014-12-10T17:03:00.002-05:002014-12-10T17:03:32.730-05:00This could turn out to be a very big day...<i><b>...for the cause of walkable urban places here in New England's central city</b></i><br />
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I'm sorry I missed the <a href="http://www.bankerandtradesman.com/news162123.html" target="_blank">Mayor's speech about development issues before the Boston Chamber of Commerce this morning</a>. Seriously. I had a conflict, but had I known what he was going to say, I would have been there. The news that he's finally made Brian Golden the actual, as opposed to just interim, director of the BRA is big enough, but then the Mayor went on to say the following:<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Planners talk about “Smart Growth.” But it goes deeper. It’s about our identity. Our values. </span><span style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 1.375em;">Our vision. We should show America there’s a better way to grow. A Boston way. </span><span style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 1.375em;">Growth should enhance the best qualities of our city. </span><span style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 1.375em;">Neighborhoods should reflect our historic tradition and our bold innovation. </span><span style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 1.375em;">Our economy should be world-class and inclusive. </span><span style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 1.375em;">New buildings should be creative, sustainable, and inspiring.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>I want to share with you some new policy initiatives that illustrate how we are shaping our growth around these values.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>We start by moving forward one of the key strategies in our Housing Plan: Growth Zones for transit-oriented workforce housing. Boston needs more housing. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every neighborhood has its own character. In some places, density is not only appropriate – it is badly needed.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i> It is needed to bring prices back within reach.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i> It is needed to spur retail investment.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i> It is needed to breathe new life into under-developed streets.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>We’re starting with two transit corridors. One Growth Zone will run along the Red Line, on Dorchester Avenue between Broadway and Andrew stations in South Boston. Another will follow the Orange Line in Jamaica Plain, from Forest Hills to Jackson Square. The T stops in these great neighborhoods should be embedded in thriving, healthy, walkable communities. And they will be.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>More zones will come. When other neighborhoods see the kind of vibrancy that smart density produces, the conversation about new housing across our city will change for the better.</i></span></div>
To borrow a phrase from Charlie Pierce -- Do you see what the Mayor did there? He laid out the the broad vision -- places that are creative, sustainable, and inspiring. He talked about a specific policy initiative: Growth Zones for transit-oriented workforce housing. Then he said the key words -- <b><i>"In some places, density is not only appropriate -- it is badly needed." </i></b><br />
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And then...he named two names:<br />
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<ul>
<li>First, Dorchester Avenue between Broadway and Andrew stations on the Red Line, and, then, </li>
<li>Second, the Southwest Corridor between Forest Hills and Jackson Square stations.</li>
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[<i>Brief aside: Your humble blogspondent has previously given voice to the do-over needed on the Southwest Corridor here: <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/search?q=southwest+corridor" target="_blank">Of the Bartlett Square Condos</a></i>]<br />
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Now, the details of Growth Zones obviously need to be fleshed out and fought over and they can't be temporizing or putting off battles to another day or the next project, but I think we'll get to that pretty soon. The big news here is that there are now 2 corridors in <u>existing</u> neighborhoods -- not out in the Seaport/Innovation District, or the Allston Interchange or some other relatively clean slate -- where the City's highest elected official and the one who wields most of the power has said we want and need to see housing growth. We've all known for a long time that luxury condominiums downtown and on the waterfront are nice to look at and without question have improved the streetscape, but you really couldn't know that the tide was turning until the City actually put a stake in the ground and said more intense growth would happen in existing places with lower land costs and therefore a better shot at producing homes and apartments for people with incomes more in line with what most of us can afford. That day has now come.<br />
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From this day forward, the goal has been set. We know what the City's direction is. So now, we speak up for Growth Zones that actually promote growth and the right kind of development in the right places. And the Mayor indicated that "More zones will come." Let me be the first to highly recommend my own corner of the world, Roslindale Square, a.k.a., God's Country. The square has tightly woven existing urban fabric and a whole slew of one-story commercial buildings that were once two and three stories and can be again. We have fantastic bus transit service, perhaps the best in the entire region for an outlying location, by virtue of which we experience effectively headway service for the 1 mile trek to or from Forest Hills and the Orange Line terminus (and that stretch is flat enough that meaningful bike infrastructure would make the subway that much more accessible). We have a commuter rail stop on a line on which Saturday service will be restored at the end of this month. And we have an active main streets organization (the first urban main street in the US) that can help the BRA, our local electeds and the rest of the City government lead the conversation for a Growth Zone that will allow us to capitalize on this opportunity at this moment.<br />
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I repeat, the day has come, and we have the Mayor to thank for it.<br />
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The full text of the Mayor's prepared remarks can be found <a href="http://www.wbur.org/2014/12/10/walsh-boston-chamber-remarks" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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<i>Blog Post No. 2014-13</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-46152856108453922782014-11-18T10:45:00.001-05:002014-11-18T10:45:56.576-05:00Whither the Innovation District......or the rare occasion on which Robert Campbell goes a bit overboard.<br />
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<em><strong>The Place:</strong></em><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcYZfaHJnXqMiH5CygUMZSeEx7UGADqr3LcbgckjXerihNya0GT68xaYpjpyHx3Z2XdbSlbP7udXrzaKGnlZXL63s8fQf1drbS65QiCYt_rnwcckzVKx5aM4sMAEPfombfSEVHUAMGmfY/s1600/map-bostons-innovation-district.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcYZfaHJnXqMiH5CygUMZSeEx7UGADqr3LcbgckjXerihNya0GT68xaYpjpyHx3Z2XdbSlbP7udXrzaKGnlZXL63s8fQf1drbS65QiCYt_rnwcckzVKx5aM4sMAEPfombfSEVHUAMGmfY/s1600/map-bostons-innovation-district.jpg" height="226" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em>Credit:</em> seaportinnovationdistrict.com.</td></tr>
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<strong><em>The Article</em>:</strong> This is another in our series of reviewing what certain key regional media outlets (usually <em>The Boston Globe</em>) are saying about the urban scene (a.k.a., They-report-it-and-we-give-it-the-once-over). This time around we're back to weblog inspiration Robert Campbell, who recently took on the evolving state of urban design affairs in the Innovation District and found it sorely lacking in <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/11/15/innovation/qhy7BbQiICARapsRJGsjaL/story.html" target="_blank">Innovation District needs a human touch</a>. There's a fair amount of truth in what Campbell says, but from my perspective we need to remember that, for all of the faults identified, we're trading 50+ years of surface parking use for much, much improved urban fabric and the district is only partially built out. Reserving judgment is almost always the better path. And the reference to office parks in suburban Dallas feels unnecessary and gratuitous - there is plenty of office park terrain right here in eastern Massachusetts to provide a point of comparison. Perhaps the most far-reaching and ultimately non-recoverable mistake was allowing the street network to be dictated by then-EOT on an effectively superblock/suburban arterial model that puts the really fine-grained urban fabric of places like Beacon Hill or the North End out of reach. Campbell is also right about the highlights (especially Independence Wharf and the park at D Street) and the real lowlight, which is Seaport Boulevard, the district's main drag. Giving Seaport Boulevard a better treatment than overwide travel lanes and concrete paved medians would be a huge step in the right direction and one that should be taken sooner rather than later.<br />
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Blog Post No. 2014-12.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-59497528496129246122014-10-27T19:01:00.000-04:002014-10-27T19:03:37.927-04:00City Hall Plaza starts its needed downsizing...<strong>...and the MBTA finally starts on a Government Center Station headhouse that meets its location</strong><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkFTeyt9gRoE2Je8s64Ey6QitAZx4F4ZVWF6vgfI4mr9_HYS_HNoRv37loIZI3y6egjFBoM199GBWYxyGWUUr6iSUj24xXdHGu6lSHyrmnb0MIEB305ShOd9iQT67rh1j2jWNUPJnxiCs/s1600/1280px-Government_Center_headhouse%5B1%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkFTeyt9gRoE2Je8s64Ey6QitAZx4F4ZVWF6vgfI4mr9_HYS_HNoRv37loIZI3y6egjFBoM199GBWYxyGWUUr6iSUj24xXdHGu6lSHyrmnb0MIEB305ShOd9iQT67rh1j2jWNUPJnxiCs/s1600/1280px-Government_Center_headhouse%5B1%5D.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Act 1</u>: The former headhouse,<br />
now demolished.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRzsFRdadhLjlXeo55V17jnCna89f8Rd7PkzreUabOIu3ztH0o79pMy7B24NKbrweuQBC0UTh1zmF1B9spjYlaKGWOfA39A_SWHPshH3PR8iDGP8EUiO4H95SLnb8jcJ5tAmlMdgGCwo/s1600/20141009_144424.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRzsFRdadhLjlXeo55V17jnCna89f8Rd7PkzreUabOIu3ztH0o79pMy7B24NKbrweuQBC0UTh1zmF1B9spjYlaKGWOfA39A_SWHPshH3PR8iDGP8EUiO4H95SLnb8jcJ5tAmlMdgGCwo/s1600/20141009_144424.jpg" height="112" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Act 2</u>: The new headhouse,<br />
under construction.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgleZYMlptlK0Iwiin4ZWuCtUrXfHvLDFofXctOMHEjUiNZZw7ANeg8yCD3UccCHnFdTvgiMNg75W_dWcC6lLamdX8HuYxaXlOaLlayu3SHg8vADekUAA-gR5etBnG56SePJuMcdXj6NTs/s1600/images%5B10%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgleZYMlptlK0Iwiin4ZWuCtUrXfHvLDFofXctOMHEjUiNZZw7ANeg8yCD3UccCHnFdTvgiMNg75W_dWcC6lLamdX8HuYxaXlOaLlayu3SHg8vADekUAA-gR5etBnG56SePJuMcdXj6NTs/s1600/images%5B10%5D.jpg" height="147" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Act 3</u>: The new headhouse,<br />
as it will look upon completion.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<em>The Location</em>: <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=City+Hall+Plaza,+Boston,+MA&hl=en&ll=42.360407,-71.058905&spn=0.003278,0.008256&sll=42.34589,-71.042849&sspn=0.003279,0.008256&oq=city+hall+plaza&gl=us&hq=City+Hall+Plaza,+Boston,+MA&t=m&z=18" target="_blank">City Hall Plaza, Boston, MA</a>.<br />
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<em>The Story</em>: We've visited this location for the weblog before, advocating for <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html" target="_blank">rotating, temporary installations</a> back in April 2010, thinking about more aggressive street re-introduction <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post-no-2010-8-three-things.html" target="_blank">later that year</a> (since the plaza obliterated a very tight piece of urban fabric half a century ago that has its own restoration logic, even though it is virtually impossible to achieve), and countering <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2012/02/blog-post-no-2012-4-more-about-boston.html" target="_blank">revisionism about City Hall itself</a> in 2012. Having finally concluded, I think out of necessity, that a massive re-do isn't feasible, the new administration <a href="http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=7130" target="_blank">finally decided earlier this year</a>, with the help of Utile Architecture + Planning, as its main planning consultant, to openly opt for a kind of tree-led downsizing of the plaza's blank and badly dysfunctional slate. You can see the overall gameplan here:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3RJSMOZorohGuE0F5OhLWh3pDyWc_mTF45yxLi2p1zKswt7uE2E9S2goKsNiIX9MRpnvJh_fQG1vmrWhRv6AEdTinGibPCCMPsPd8Ga9fWNtJ-x6H6sB8pjQ0pluUnWU1hjeWxSomujI/s1600/02-boston-city-hall-plaza-landscape-intervention-archpaper%5B1%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3RJSMOZorohGuE0F5OhLWh3pDyWc_mTF45yxLi2p1zKswt7uE2E9S2goKsNiIX9MRpnvJh_fQG1vmrWhRv6AEdTinGibPCCMPsPd8Ga9fWNtJ-x6H6sB8pjQ0pluUnWU1hjeWxSomujI/s1600/02-boston-city-hall-plaza-landscape-intervention-archpaper%5B1%5D.jpg" height="171" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Credit</u>: Utile; <em>Architect's Newspaper</em>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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And the effort, interestingly, is being led by the replacement of the hideously god-awful, bunker-like, 1960s-era Government Center station headhouse with a new glass headhouse and pavilion that is much more substantial in all dimensions, and will provide a real sense of arrival/departure when completed in early 2016. To go into and out of the old headhouse on a regular basis, or even only occasionally, was to know, deep down, just how unimportant rail transit was to a city and commonwealth that, to speak plainly, absolutely relies on rail transit to keep it from seizing up completely on auto congestion. It gave you almost a palpable sense of sadness.<br />
<br />
It appears that this initial phase will include the "bosques," or groupings of trees, shown along Cambridge Street and adjacent to the headhouse as well as the new stairway-eliminating ramps and wider sidewalks at the intersection of Cambridge and Court Streets. Eventually, several additional bosques are planned to help create a more manageable, intimate central gathering place. I'm usually not one to suggest that just dropping in some happy trees to hide your urban design mistakes, whether new or old, is a good idea, but I do believe I have finally found a use for landscape urbanism. If you look closely, I think you can also see that there's an intent to surreptitiously restore Cornhill Street on the right-hand side. Now <em>that's</em> the kind of thing that warms a still-recovering transportation planner's heart...<br />
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<em>Special credit to the piece by Alex Ulam posted to the Architect's Newspaper website with a date of March 5, 2014. Thanks, Alex.</em><br />
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Blog Post No. 2014-11.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-41855868083855666882014-09-03T22:31:00.002-04:002014-09-07T15:23:50.657-04:00Just because it's happening in New York...<strong><em>...doesn't mean it's bad or shouldn't happen here</em></strong><br />
<br />
Your faithful blogspondent grew up, as is well-known by this time to RTUF Nation, down to the south. That is to say, in New York, the big, bad city of broken dreams and shattered romances. Among the surprises of living in Boston for the last 17 years (since coming north to obtain a law degree at what must be Pope Frank's favorite JD mill in the Commonwealth), perhaps the most suprising thing is the depth of the anti-New York reflex in this town. I get it about the Yankees (to begin with, who wouldn't loathe George Steinbrenner simply on sight?), and certainly the Jets, but it extends to virtually everything and is not even properly classified as a reflex. It is a deep-seated aversion, like discussing the theory of evolution among certain fundamentalists, or trying to get my friend Frankie-bell Galvin to agree that the sun rises in the east after he's heard President Obama just said the same thing. It's subconscious, it's visceral, it cannot be reasoned with, but, on the plus side, it tends to hurt only the benighted.<br />
<br />
This all came forcefully to mind recently when I had the opportunity to sit down with some fellow tactical urbanism proponents and a former city official and brainstorm about where and how Boston might find the way to turn some of its excess, underused and unsightly public space into vibrant urban spaces and plazas. The conversation wound its way around to a brief discussion of one key tactical urbanism tactic -- the overnight public plaza within an existing street right of way that ultimately matures into a permanent public space. As it so happens, perhaps the highest profile and most successful of this kind of TU intervention has been Times Square in New York. Basically, virtually overnight several years ago, NYCDOT's then-commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, moved forward, on land her agency controlled within the existing street right of way of Broadway, and <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/56794/" target="_blank">shut down auto traffic</a> on the iconic thoroughfare from 42nd to 47th streets, allowing auto traffic only on the cross streets. To someone on foot, tourist and native alike, this was a no-brainer. To go to Times Square before this change was really to be in Times Traffic-Islands-Narrow-Sidewalks because the pedestrian-available parts of the square had been systematically squeezed back over the course of the automobile era to the point where the ratio of the space for cars to the space for people was grotesquely out of whack. Something had needed to happen to reverse this ratio for many, many years. Rather than do nothing until the final plaza could be built, Ms. Sadik-Khan, to paraphrase Boston's own Mel King, identifed the mess, found the broom in her hand to be more than sufficient to get meaningful change going, and started sweeping. <br />
<br />
Now, five years on, the permanent installations and art work are well underway or already on the scene and Times Square feels much, much different. And it's all due to a willingness to use low-tech, low-capital cost, temporary interventions to show what can be done, demonstrate and actual experience what can be and build a constituency around permanent change for a place. What a shame that one reaction during the discussion was deeply reflexive -- what good is anything from New York? -- and also tragically emblematic. It would be a shame of epic proportions if Boston misses this wave just because the folks who dress in black 3.5 hours to the south have done it first. And, yes, I'm looking specifically at you, <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2014/05/its-really-way-past-time-to-reduce.html" target="_blank">Franklin Street at Arch Street</a> - NYC Phobia can't save you forever!!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWcAGM2u0mGRz9QfB5hL5J1_C9QnZfKah2_RCxvHpCLRYdqLzoXGZ4lmqIEg8zUSYE3DWeBpp4LA_USWKxyJVsFU6UKxyKeNSV-rnOUSuxUgxovIa0b4iZqq97b5QDVjnVrC2yJG-ICwg/s1600/20140730_115003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWcAGM2u0mGRz9QfB5hL5J1_C9QnZfKah2_RCxvHpCLRYdqLzoXGZ4lmqIEg8zUSYE3DWeBpp4LA_USWKxyJVsFU6UKxyKeNSV-rnOUSuxUgxovIa0b4iZqq97b5QDVjnVrC2yJG-ICwg/s1600/20140730_115003.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>View 1</u> - South on Broadway, across the block between<br />
42nd and 43rd streets.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB7mvlZP5hkirqK4spCtZVcqlQpgXSzy3ycoXff0KlRiycACRLuoN14Hiej5j3XzJobS4dpT_Wm-7WG9CETrvDOCLSAVv2puFrnS36oGiDmO8asGiVmwTYUk3GAiYcYUVxrLdHD8JVmvc/s1600/20140730_115017+(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB7mvlZP5hkirqK4spCtZVcqlQpgXSzy3ycoXff0KlRiycACRLuoN14Hiej5j3XzJobS4dpT_Wm-7WG9CETrvDOCLSAVv2puFrnS36oGiDmO8asGiVmwTYUk3GAiYcYUVxrLdHD8JVmvc/s1600/20140730_115017+(2).jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>View 2</u> - North on Broadway, across 7th Avenue<br />
to the Cohan statue in Duffy Square.</td></tr>
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Blog Post No. 2014-10.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-89099101437371666432014-08-02T10:59:00.000-04:002014-09-03T21:28:01.478-04:00We are living in the golden age of good beer in this country...And your faithful blogspondent visited <a href="http://treehousebrew.com/" target="_blank">Tree House Brewing</a>, yet another strong signal of this fact, a week ago out in Monson, MA. Here are the pix:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_acnK_RjtAPiBN5XrokIehvJP9kccg_hAqsMTUjB5J5Nr5AdAP9IVTIlUWPk2h7VZcwO6j4Hf3gkJFW15NzY8S7dN2PfSfd38Im_f_2Zq6-zenkZhM833x9YLFqa2bgLu1IaSv5ymUNE/s1600/20140726_104330.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_acnK_RjtAPiBN5XrokIehvJP9kccg_hAqsMTUjB5J5Nr5AdAP9IVTIlUWPk2h7VZcwO6j4Hf3gkJFW15NzY8S7dN2PfSfd38Im_f_2Zq6-zenkZhM833x9YLFqa2bgLu1IaSv5ymUNE/s1600/20140726_104330.jpg" height="112" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em>Photo 1</em>: Tree House is now located on Koran Farm in Monson, MA.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg45hZqGNGEnw9D0_RMtqEa3dR_lGa6DrheCvhzmS481gxASHB8Sl7hyphenhyphenCS6g_rVayhyphenhyphenD00z4RBFNt6cFbJtJTvmDeNzgAJ4xUWvoh2ojS57PXeq0ftjWQEw-5HU8EP99CJi3KbHHMvoN6o/s1600/20140726_104509.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg45hZqGNGEnw9D0_RMtqEa3dR_lGa6DrheCvhzmS481gxASHB8Sl7hyphenhyphenCS6g_rVayhyphenhyphenD00z4RBFNt6cFbJtJTvmDeNzgAJ4xUWvoh2ojS57PXeq0ftjWQEw-5HU8EP99CJi3KbHHMvoN6o/s1600/20140726_104509.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em>Photo 2</em>: The brews are dispensed from a small tasting and swag shed across from the silo. <br />
This was the line at around 10:30 am, with opening at 11 am.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD6CduEDoTUrHmHkr6eGes2yO7qkq76SfGYMp1qKYX-wvHEI5IOtJDA3cx-JtyqIn75vfNt70v-l0rgXhn_g4Guh0_stXuTW-RxbNC2fecfHYJCuNAMO-xJcoOG1Iv_J8OTp8OV2fHH1U/s1600/20140726_104534.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD6CduEDoTUrHmHkr6eGes2yO7qkq76SfGYMp1qKYX-wvHEI5IOtJDA3cx-JtyqIn75vfNt70v-l0rgXhn_g4Guh0_stXuTW-RxbNC2fecfHYJCuNAMO-xJcoOG1Iv_J8OTp8OV2fHH1U/s1600/20140726_104534.jpg" height="200" width="112" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em>Photo 3</em>: The varieties available differ, I believe each weekend.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic0-2ys4IbO5yGsgjJPeeBJ0ArO4QIGun2ctbwwu3hfASrj_626_W6wprBisGHj-gq0wPZjB8cbvjB05_bA6Pd8Xi_TmisltD4Satme0sS35UvuqHHmIa0mv27t2yxmI4IxJdQ5_q8CjY/s1600/20140726_110445.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic0-2ys4IbO5yGsgjJPeeBJ0ArO4QIGun2ctbwwu3hfASrj_626_W6wprBisGHj-gq0wPZjB8cbvjB05_bA6Pd8Xi_TmisltD4Satme0sS35UvuqHHmIa0mv27t2yxmI4IxJdQ5_q8CjY/s1600/20140726_110445.jpg" height="112" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em>Photo 4</em>: Inside the shed, dispensing at the far end.</td></tr>
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<span id="goog_433295625"></span><span id="goog_433295626">Nationally, beer consumption continues to fluctuate narrowly in volume from year to year, but craft brews such as Tree House make up a greater share of that sideways volume every year, like <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-you-wont-be-drinking-a-bud-during-the-super-bowl-2014-01-31" target="_blank">clockwork</a>. I hesitate to read too much into this particular piece of data in terms of broader trends. But it is now clear that at least in the beer market, Americans have firmly opted for quality over quantity. Why drink gallons of mass produced, low-quality, shipped-from-God-knows-where and brewed-God-knows-when beer, no matter how cheap, if you can enjoy a couple or three very tasty, high-quality brews that reflect great craft and thoughtfulness in their preparation and were made, just a couple of days ago, by the guys doling them out to you over the counter on a beautiful Saturday morning? Life is just too short to drink Beer X because of its amusing ad campaigns. </span>I would further suggest that this is of a piece with the movement toward locally-grown food and, dare we say it, living in more walkable settings that trade larger homes for better connectivity. And, at least as far as beer goes, we even have poor, maligned Jimmy Carter to thank for part of it since he <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/08/jimmy-carter-not-the-king-of-beers-updated/61599/" target="_blank">signed the law that legalized homebrewing on the federal level</a> (45 years after Prohibition had been repealed) and there appears to be little question that homebrewing as a movement led to the craft beer industry we know today.<br />
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One final note in the interest of full disclosure: Tree House has a personal connection to this blog since Mrs. RTUF went to high school with Dean Rohan, one of the owners. That said, they brew excellent beer and have been on a meteoric trajectory, starting only a couple of years ago in a garage in next door Brimfield, now relocated to the farm in Monson, and soon to be in a brand new, larger building near the silo that will allow for greater production and on-premises consumption in addition to just tastings. Take a visit if you're in the area. It's worth the trip.<br />
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Blog Post No. 2014-9Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-79546806463918551542014-07-24T18:07:00.000-04:002014-07-24T18:07:07.698-04:00Thinking about the impact of ventilation exhaust noise on Washington Mall...<b>... or Installment No. 3 in Targeting New Urban Fabric Restoration</b><br />
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We're going to try audio/video for the first time, because you really need to hear this one. So, here goes:<br />
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<object width="320" height="266" class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/s_vi/AblzfgeIRGs/default.jpg?sqp=CLD6xZ4F&rs=AOn4CLCh3NUV67c-fvvGgyia90X-O0cnOw"><param name="movie" value="https://www.youtube.com/v/AblzfgeIRGs?version=3&f=user_uploads&c=google-webdrive-0&app=youtube_gdata" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/AblzfgeIRGs?version=3&f=user_uploads&c=google-webdrive-0&app=youtube_gdata" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object></div>
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<strong><em>The Location</em></strong>: <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=28+state+street+boston&hnear=28+State+Street,+Boston,+Massachusetts+02203&gl=us&t=m&z=16" target="_blank">Washington Mall (28 State Street)</a>, Boston, MA.<br />
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<strong><em>The Story</em>:</strong> This is actually part of two separate RTUF series. There's the one where we try to prime the pump (indicated above), and also where we observe that relatively small changes can make substantial differences. There is no question that Washington Mall, the less-than-perfect pedestrianized stub-end of Washington Street that resulted from urban renewal lo those many decades ago, is substantially less than it should be, especially considering its location at the very heart of downtown Boston and, if you trace it all the way back, the center of the old Town of Boston. It's directly across the street from the Old State House/Boston Massacre site marker (major attractions on the Freedom Trail), and down a short block from City Hall. There should be more going on here than there is.<br />
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And so, dear RTUF Nation, you may wonder why this is? It seems that part of the problem is sub-par urban design at 28 State that placed a relatively dead face to the mall side of the building. This is a condition exacerbated after 9/11, when heightened security measures went into place for high-rises and the number of entry points to most buildings was significantly reduced. Another part of it, I do believe -- and I hope you agree after seeing and hearing the video -- is that a substantial and substantially loud HVAC exhaust vent was placed in the ceiling of the arcade at 28 State and, to make matters worse, that vent is now knocking and pinging on top of being loud. It is a significant deterrent to sitting/standing/trying to carry on a conversation in a location that would otherwise at least have a fighting chance of being comfortable. The Ames Hotel, which came in a few years ago to the then-empty Ames Building, tried to put an outdoor patio at this location and spent what appears to have been a fair amount of money furnishing it. But that failed fairly rapidly and the patio is now completely unused. I strongly suspect that the noise from this exhuast vent was a substantial part of the reason why the patio didn't work.<br />
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I won't attempt to sort out the issues here -- whether 28 State's vent is violating the City's noise ordinance or whether the Ames Hotel folks should have tried to reach a deal to quiet the thing -- but the lesson I want to draw is that the urban ensemble required to create great places is sometimes a pretty delicate thing. This is a space that, given the surrounding foot traffic, should be lively. Instead, because of the overhead sound pollution, it just can't get there. It's another example of the ways in which we have collectively allowed ourselves to degrade the public realm. Part of the solution going forward has to be that we pay more attention to these kinds of details so we have an urban fabric that is comfortable as well as functional.<br />
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<strong>The RTUF Sketch</strong>:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN2_XawkfqZS5Naaa2zRTN5Uvg_eycoDIgXlLvO_1gNfWbk7mWLBy76eNDEWtvV19YQmVAyimEKFe6alnQLNfDGuuMVCvty1NLMMz58x5r7_PGp-Ww-dGtqkRmj2D8VFIhOZ9h8R7qtbg/s1600/RTUF+Sketch+--+28+State+Exhaust+Vent.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN2_XawkfqZS5Naaa2zRTN5Uvg_eycoDIgXlLvO_1gNfWbk7mWLBy76eNDEWtvV19YQmVAyimEKFe6alnQLNfDGuuMVCvty1NLMMz58x5r7_PGp-Ww-dGtqkRmj2D8VFIhOZ9h8R7qtbg/s1600/RTUF+Sketch+--+28+State+Exhaust+Vent.jpg" height="320" width="247" /></a></div>
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Blog Post No. 2014-8Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-67172666739098362282014-06-14T16:57:00.001-04:002014-06-14T16:57:08.958-04:00One Canal continues the restoration of the Bulfinch Triangle<strong><em>The Images:</em></strong><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA2S8B3ok2C3J0V0sEp3SdmuJdpXj4Uh1tgDEsvRCF1Yy_3Ekzykccsv3UMgnTGgnWkx2AcjwwkdSKL27cd_KVAhshUOliwcG23gKHaImmzez8jiOekOnJBTinnEpBYXGhg6rJKdh2nsU/s1600/20140521_123557.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA2S8B3ok2C3J0V0sEp3SdmuJdpXj4Uh1tgDEsvRCF1Yy_3Ekzykccsv3UMgnTGgnWkx2AcjwwkdSKL27cd_KVAhshUOliwcG23gKHaImmzez8jiOekOnJBTinnEpBYXGhg6rJKdh2nsU/s1600/20140521_123557.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Image 1</u>: Looking down one side of the Triangle, along North Washington Street,<br />
from Haymarket Square.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD7CYSL974gsupAL_jg3oI3HgVZ1xjRIMEmLZSJ7CCzBae4eIfERh-y-lx1bGJaebQ3jnzUF9dGMj1CGMPWfhEENfJyZvy097m1U4Efa8ox2IlU1a94PuuV4CGFyMMIQnJ6y32I7Oy3kI/s1600/20140521_123503.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD7CYSL974gsupAL_jg3oI3HgVZ1xjRIMEmLZSJ7CCzBae4eIfERh-y-lx1bGJaebQ3jnzUF9dGMj1CGMPWfhEENfJyZvy097m1U4Efa8ox2IlU1a94PuuV4CGFyMMIQnJ6y32I7Oy3kI/s1600/20140521_123503.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Image 2</u>: Looking down the other side of the Triangle, along Merrimac Street,<br />
from Haymarket Square.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbKfcLhikOOL_KDbY7D5WTR0clJZtGA0luvJKwxjmP2IjzoxO1Aym5UKetOnSA4eEvyfwSlOkBhEPvIVKeFc_fLWSOC1-r2TDPZd4Vprp7Ojt6EFIz96r3pe9_i2NRdtOVhM1rC9ZbK1A/s1600/20140521_123950.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbKfcLhikOOL_KDbY7D5WTR0clJZtGA0luvJKwxjmP2IjzoxO1Aym5UKetOnSA4eEvyfwSlOkBhEPvIVKeFc_fLWSOC1-r2TDPZd4Vprp7Ojt6EFIz96r3pe9_i2NRdtOVhM1rC9ZbK1A/s1600/20140521_123950.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Image 3</u>: Looking across the One Canal site from Valenti Way toward downtown,<br />
with the Government Center Garage in between.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbFq2cVSrrwQN76IVAwAHdvveuHWiCicc1ig1qQYqJg7JmyJYaOLRVAHKhKrHqLKJwy8TFYDr2j1H-qEG2h1yh46bE6f5Ox1Ht4vHeUsAAFCu_I4FvZWptZP3h7E4xzE_HSxc7dxHGyqY/s1600/20140521_123729.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbFq2cVSrrwQN76IVAwAHdvveuHWiCicc1ig1qQYqJg7JmyJYaOLRVAHKhKrHqLKJwy8TFYDr2j1H-qEG2h1yh46bE6f5Ox1Ht4vHeUsAAFCu_I4FvZWptZP3h7E4xzE_HSxc7dxHGyqY/s1600/20140521_123729.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Image 4</u>: The One Canal site from Haymarket Square.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh60KG7QO6vsH-nMVuSlhIWChq7WioDIfV31r4CJHvQOBoV1IC9ve0h4dzxki5S3HOlrR_ogqvlLxawCVeLH5on576MlYDkb7sAUglbeopV5wwXpgfr1ynciOCJMYB5E7G2gXbERHL7P_8/s1600/Completed+Image+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh60KG7QO6vsH-nMVuSlhIWChq7WioDIfV31r4CJHvQOBoV1IC9ve0h4dzxki5S3HOlrR_ogqvlLxawCVeLH5on576MlYDkb7sAUglbeopV5wwXpgfr1ynciOCJMYB5E7G2gXbERHL7P_8/s1600/Completed+Image+1.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Image 5</u>: Rendering of the completed project, almost same viewpoint<br />
as Image 4. <em>Credit</em>: Trinity Financial/Icon Architecture.</td></tr>
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<strong><em>The Location</em></strong>: <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=1+canal+street,+boston,+ma&hnear=1+Canal+St,+Boston,+Massachusetts+02114&gl=us&t=m&z=16" target="_blank">One Canal Street</a>, Bulfinch Triangle, Boston, MA.<br />
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<strong><em>The Story:</em></strong> A whole lot of what is now land area in Boston was once part of the coves and bays that surrounded the original, clover-like Shawmut Peninsula when John Winthrop and crew sailed into Massachusetts Bay and set up shop in 1630. The area we're in here lies just to the north of the heart of downtown and it was originally part of the North Cove, which opened out into the place where the Charles River and the harbor met. Over the course of the next two centuries, North Cove was gradually filled, starting with a dam along what is now Causeway Street, hence the name (to the upper left in the RTUF sketch and the location of TD Garden and North Station), after which the cove was renamed to the Mill Pond, and then the filling of the entire area to the south and east of that dam in the early 19th century <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/land-reclamation-that-changed-the-shawmut-peninsula-part-two-mill-pond-and-the-bulfinch-triangle" target="_blank">pursuant to a plan drawn up by Charles Bulfinch</a>. The triangular layout of the plan is what gave the Bulfinch Triangle its name, with the three sides of the shape made up by Merrimac, North Washington and Causeway Streets. With the advent of railroading in the middle of the 19th century, the area to the north and west of Causeway Street was subsequently filled and the river completely dammed, and what was left of North Cove was finally gone.<br />
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Come forward another century, and the Bulfinch Triangle itself was eviscerated by the construction of the elevated Central Artery in the 1950s, which split the district in two and took down three full blocks of buidlings in its very heart.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAZHs5cJPGQp_eNhNMht8I_2AnOS_Rl2BNfKjBWuhZZ0aQIKkMZxGyRlu90zP6YXaY_XzX9OiwE6wiZQEhRni67uNS9EElMFfIB2pFWC-OE-Pm3TIvSWYChMmN_lCCA9RNImdre44kGFo/s1600/05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAZHs5cJPGQp_eNhNMht8I_2AnOS_Rl2BNfKjBWuhZZ0aQIKkMZxGyRlu90zP6YXaY_XzX9OiwE6wiZQEhRni67uNS9EElMFfIB2pFWC-OE-Pm3TIvSWYChMmN_lCCA9RNImdre44kGFo/s1600/05.jpg" height="236" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Image 6</u>: Constructing the elevated Central Artery; view looking north<br />
from North Washington Street, Old Boston Garden/North Station in the<br />
background on the left. <em>Credit</em>: The Boston Globe.</td></tr>
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Replacement of the old elevated highway with the Big Dig's system of tunnels and the surface Greenway offered the opportunity to restore the ruptured urban fabric all along its length, and nowhere has that opportunity been better capitalized on than in the Bulfinch Triangle. Two new mid-rise residential buildings have already been built on reclaimed former highway parcels (they're labeled the Avenir and Simpson developments in the sketch below). And now we have Trinity Financial's long-delayed One Canal project rounding out the top tier of the triangle with a 12-story mixed-use building that will wrap around the North Washington frontage and fill out the entire block of Valenti, Canal and North Washington. It has taken time, but the Bulfinch Triangle has been effectively restored. Government Center Garage and North Station -- you're next.<br />
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<em><strong>RTUF Sketch:</strong></em><br />
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(Blog Post No. 2014-7)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-75614941201002333342014-05-24T22:36:00.000-04:002014-06-01T10:26:40.330-04:00It's really way past time to reduce the amount of space allocated to cars on Franklin Street near Downtown Crossing...<strong>...a.k.a. the long-awaited Installment No. 2 in your humble weblog's series on Targeting New Urban Fabric Restoration</strong><br />
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<em><strong>The Photos:</strong></em><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj73gCSCajRA0cYOscQXmFJ1oqYVIa0bbZi8EfTdR3WnRo0sY6-1S9oXvRXs0cgygRQp-laIV5P11iUo6KkJeNi01UljcVz_uv5DzSkeHdXdqwcr8-S3DwY98RGjRvRS4mvx_RfE2tDZe0/s1600/20140521_124844.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj73gCSCajRA0cYOscQXmFJ1oqYVIa0bbZi8EfTdR3WnRo0sY6-1S9oXvRXs0cgygRQp-laIV5P11iUo6KkJeNi01UljcVz_uv5DzSkeHdXdqwcr8-S3DwY98RGjRvRS4mvx_RfE2tDZe0/s1600/20140521_124844.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong>View 1</strong>: Looking down Franklin St. from Otis St. toward P.O. Square.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO9aacMd5dICjpPNUbFRX7eJyzjlpxxQNuqgfCXYfPOSPybCXC_i320-HOpz4P5Ld_qJBNqMxCderSSbePijZ-PJQpNYbL6i6pWWnPjT-tQsimNqO31hIetTM5eiRvxmK0e0aBtMeT9-U/s1600/20140521_124849.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO9aacMd5dICjpPNUbFRX7eJyzjlpxxQNuqgfCXYfPOSPybCXC_i320-HOpz4P5Ld_qJBNqMxCderSSbePijZ-PJQpNYbL6i6pWWnPjT-tQsimNqO31hIetTM5eiRvxmK0e0aBtMeT9-U/s1600/20140521_124849.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong>View 2</strong>: Looking up Franklin St. toward Washington St. and the Filene's site construction.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitGdjrV6jQ3QueMfGVz-Pjoe_b-JdLvoHZoCeVdo7xoBx398Z5lDsStPMAAmhDaOFk9hM0iitdA9Ivi2o5YzowW0Wt0-k5p0Vriid5cULpgu1wv_aBL8ebkEp0hyphenhyphenyFaGt0gCq6CRQqHQ8/s1600/20140521_125015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitGdjrV6jQ3QueMfGVz-Pjoe_b-JdLvoHZoCeVdo7xoBx398Z5lDsStPMAAmhDaOFk9hM0iitdA9Ivi2o5YzowW0Wt0-k5p0Vriid5cULpgu1wv_aBL8ebkEp0hyphenhyphenyFaGt0gCq6CRQqHQ8/s1600/20140521_125015.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong>View 3</strong>: Looking back down Franklin St. from Hawley Pl.</td></tr>
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<strong><em>The Location:</em></strong> Franklin Street, near Downtown Crossing, Boston, MA.<br />
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<strong><em>The Back Story</em></strong>: We'll get to the main course soon enough, but for starters the building on the right in View 2 and just to the left in View 3 was featured in <em>Cityscapes of Boston</em> as an example of shifting tastes in architectural style. It seems this buidling, built in the early 1870s in the post-great fire period, was covered in the late 1950s with Shea Stadium-style multicolored panels by its then-owner, First Federal Savings Bank, as a symbol of hip modernism. Thirty years later, that era's hip modernism was rejected when the successor financial institution, Northeast Savings, scraped it back off and restored the facade. So, a nice story there and a happy ending.<br />
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But this is downtown Boston, friends, and there is almost always more than one layer to consider. As Robert Campbell noted in his <em>Cityscapes</em> write-up, this is also where Charles Bulfinch established the "Tontine Crescent," a legendary grouping of Federal rowhouses that included a widened Franklin Street and a small enclosed garden with a "classical urn." Constructed in the 1790s, Robert reported that this assemblage was demolished in 1858 and the classical urn moved to Bulfinch's grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery. The following image, taken from wikipedia, doesn't seem to have the detail required to do the project justice -- per Robert, inspired, as it was, by "the crescents of Bath, England, [it] must have been one of the great urban groups in Boston's history."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVSkKcU3p1D_MwxBdf6ys0JGDvGhPH3jHzYqiOO8goAyBLvMi2rdK8A0bMUnYi9dCp7HMG5zM3Jk6dSd_dkYtsDra-43Ka7sMZtIYSpBx6B1bszoIM41BeLfm_YVDXH1vah0cP40is1lw/s1600/FranklinSt_ca1830_Boston_SimonsUPNE%5B1%5D.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVSkKcU3p1D_MwxBdf6ys0JGDvGhPH3jHzYqiOO8goAyBLvMi2rdK8A0bMUnYi9dCp7HMG5zM3Jk6dSd_dkYtsDra-43Ka7sMZtIYSpBx6B1bszoIM41BeLfm_YVDXH1vah0cP40is1lw/s1600/FranklinSt_ca1830_Boston_SimonsUPNE%5B1%5D.png" height="257" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong>View 4</strong>: The Tontine Crescent pre-demolition.</td></tr>
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All that's left of this historic development and its small green space today are the cylindrical planters and forlorn modernist sculpture in View 1. It ain't pretty. <br />
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<strong><em>The Bottom Line:</em></strong> And what's even less pretty is the way there is just way too much space devoted to the automobile and way too little space devoted to us humans on foot, particularly here in the pedestrian heart of Boston. Maybe part of the problem is that this has long been the transition space between the Financial District centered around Post Office Square and the historic commerical core at Downtown Crossing. But that's all in flux now. Both districts are changing, especially Downtown Crossing, which has been steadily adding housing units and will experience another significant jump in the number of residents when the residential high-rise on the non-historic half of the Filene's site is completed and occupied sometime in the next couple years.<br />
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Franklin Street at this location in its present state is simply not pulling its weight. There's really hardly any automobile traffic, certainly not enough to remotely justify all the pavement, running, as it does, into an effective dead-end for everyone but taxis and buses at Hawley Street. So, here's your proposal -- give this street a road diet, reduce it by at least a lane of traffic and give that lane (I vote for the right-hand side of the street in View 2) to a much wider sidewalk that would allow for sidewalk dining at the adjacent restaurants. Franklin Street lies in Boston's pedestrian heart. It's time to give more space where space is due.<br />
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And here's an <b>RTUF sketch</b> (a little late arriving) of the proposal:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK_-S2EZNdcJ27jT96u0twzeaf_WOVYUqsIasiQ5n00GRIIqYlYcEDaZ-FBRxb8dbQgB437lauET2DFbKJfKJaOeDUYsfvyNdTZ_tR-PjtQIG9B4CaWHrUyED8ESK2V1-7LSdaC_joaII/s1600/Franklin+Street+Sketch.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK_-S2EZNdcJ27jT96u0twzeaf_WOVYUqsIasiQ5n00GRIIqYlYcEDaZ-FBRxb8dbQgB437lauET2DFbKJfKJaOeDUYsfvyNdTZ_tR-PjtQIG9B4CaWHrUyED8ESK2V1-7LSdaC_joaII/s1600/Franklin+Street+Sketch.jpeg" height="320" width="239" /></a></div>
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(Blog Post No. 2014-6)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-2392633828453027922014-05-17T17:58:00.001-04:002014-05-17T17:58:17.998-04:00Jacob Wirth's gets a new neighbor...finally<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGZ3KRHViwNcMmLNUQbU0hVJbubtPsxz2tK2OKI1WSsaaGZvxyZmlmn_gXSh13Q78uNlubVsPcODKzsnszsOcE-uxcRvHOqbV8hyphenhyphene-7FAWWLNZaw6xmzWlzpA4EFk8Ek_3tLowJYktvmM/s1600/IMG_7291+(Credit+John+A.+Keith).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGZ3KRHViwNcMmLNUQbU0hVJbubtPsxz2tK2OKI1WSsaaGZvxyZmlmn_gXSh13Q78uNlubVsPcODKzsnszsOcE-uxcRvHOqbV8hyphenhyphene-7FAWWLNZaw6xmzWlzpA4EFk8Ek_3tLowJYktvmM/s1600/IMG_7291+(Credit+John+A.+Keith).jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em>View 1</em>: The parking lot that was for many years. (Credit: John A. Keith)</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfBGDPgZvIWX73Sv-kKEoY95AgOakL6iJd7Y25cTIRzURdqRI9TlfpDQOIKFEo3x6p3aG4qS5sj0upPrjt-ejRMh1BuWz9gvk9rmrJMwoYubltCy07-AGPJe6ioJwTQbJIzDAjpfRHnNo/s1600/20140310_153717.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfBGDPgZvIWX73Sv-kKEoY95AgOakL6iJd7Y25cTIRzURdqRI9TlfpDQOIKFEo3x6p3aG4qS5sj0upPrjt-ejRMh1BuWz9gvk9rmrJMwoYubltCy07-AGPJe6ioJwTQbJIzDAjpfRHnNo/s1600/20140310_153717.jpg" height="320" width="180" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em>View 2</em>: Now under construction, same location.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em>View 3</em>: View from across Stuart Street.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em>View 4</em>: Aerial view, completed project (Credit: Boston Advanced Realty).</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em>View 5</em>: Finished front facade at street level (Credit: BRA).</td></tr>
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<em>The Location</em>: 45 Stuart Street, Boston, MA.<br />
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<em>The Story</em>: And the South Hinge Block (on the <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2009/12/blog-post-no-2009-8-w-hotel-boston-100.html" target="_blank">High Spine</a>) is filled completely out. This location has been a parking lot (still, for those keeping score at home, the ultimate urban no-no) for as long as your faithful correspondent has been resident in the Boston area, which is to say since at least 1997 and probably a good deal before that. So, it's rewarding to see it finally returned to being a contributing piece of the urban fabric on the Stuart Street edge between the old town's theater district and Chinatown. Jacob Wirth's, which is more or less the preeminent German restaurant in Boston, can be seen in the top photo in its classic 19th century Boston row buidling, gable turned to the side and curved bay on the right. This will be an interesting juxtaposition if the front facade really looks entirely like View 5. We shall see.<br />
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<em>RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric</em>: This one definitely induces tetris flashbacks...<br />
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(Blog Post No. 2014-5)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-29244287946340350912014-04-19T10:43:00.001-04:002014-04-19T10:43:39.740-04:00Boston Public Market moves one step closer to reality...Time moves faster than most of us, your humble correspondent included, care to admit. So, it was way back in 2010 that RTUF first reported the news that the Boston Public Market folks had won the right to locate on the Greenway in the Haymarket Station/Central Artery Vent Stack/Parking Garage building at the corner of Hanover and Congress Streets. An ideal location, and one we hoped would build momentum and quickly result in something we've sorely missed in Boston for a long time (basically since Quincy Market died nearly 50 years ago): a true, appropriately sized public market to showcase local producers of foodstuffs of all kinds. Well, four years on, our friends at <i>The Boston Globe</i> reported today - <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/04/18/bra-approves-plans-for-public-food-market/1e7C0bdjGTdrr8pzShJogK/story.html" target="_blank">BRA approves plans for public food market</a> - that the project finally reached the point where they could secure approval from the BRA Board under the small project review process on Thursday. They now look to actually start construction this summer. It sounds like they still have something a funding gap to get the whole market up and running in a single phase, so they'll do a first phase now and then round out the space as funds come in. Hopefully within a year of this post, we'll be able to report on our first visit to this major new amenity:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Exterior proposed view (corner of Hanover & Congress streets) (credit: BPMA, <i>Boston Globe</i>)</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Interior rendering (credit: BPMA, <i>Boston Globe</i>)</td></tr>
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(Blog Post No. 2014-4)<span id="goog_1522391524"></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-28037688984853490852014-04-16T12:24:00.001-04:002014-04-16T12:24:38.718-04:00Big News in New Urbanist Circles: Lynn Richards to lead CNU (Blog Post No. 2014-3)You can find the press release here: <a href="http://www.cnu.org/cnu-news/2014/04/lynn-richards-named-new-president-cnu" target="_blank">Lynn Richards named new president of CNU</a>. She replaces former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist, who held the reins for a decade. As the press release indicates (and as this blog has shown), the tide is really turning broadly in favor of the kind of walkable, mixed-use development that CNU has promoted for over 20 years. I don't know Ms. Richards myself, but judging by the enthusiasm of CNU board members with whom I spoke about the decision recently (each of whom steadfastly refused to divulge the identity of the new president until it was finally made public today), I think we're going to be well-led at this critical moment.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-5970442017943468322014-04-12T14:57:00.000-04:002014-04-14T08:41:09.675-04:00Sometimes a simple statistic about a simple thing tells you an awful lot... (Blog Post No. 2014-2)Friend and colleague Wendy Landman, executive director of WalkBoston here in the old Hub o' the Universe, recently pointed me to a Cities Blog piece from <em>The Atlantic</em> to the effect that <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2014/04/us-quick-walk-store-rare-thing-indeed/8837/" target="_blank">In the U.S., a quick walk to the store is a rare thing indeed</a>. Intuitively, anyone who gives the question any thought really shouldn't be surprised at what WalkScore found: even in cities with over 500,000 residents, the vast majority in America do not live anywhere close to the studied metric of a 5 minute walk from home to a store selling fresh produce. So given over have we been to motordom for really the last century that it's almost a shock that there's still anyplace -- outside of usual exception New York (which checks in at 72%) -- where more than half of the housing stock is that close to fresh produce. But San Francisco (59%) and Philadelphia (57%) make it, with a cluster of cities in the 40s, led by your blogspondent's home city making it to 4th on the list at 45%. From there, it gets ugly, and Indianapolis rates as the least walkable on this measureat at just 5%.<br />
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<a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2012_02_01_archive.html" target="_blank">As this weblog has said before</a>, to live in the United States over the last 100 years has been to be the subject of a massive social experiment to see what happens to people and their environments when physical activity -- especially walking -- is squeezed out of their every day routines. It has been systematic, it has been ruthless, and we've all been affected. One of the key benefits of the ultimate demise of motordom will simply be the chance for increasing numbers of us to access things like the fixings for a salad without being forced into our vehicles.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-80464841184274124192014-03-08T16:43:00.000-05:002014-03-08T16:43:47.640-05:00Thought this was kind of cool...The other evening, I found myself on foot heading to an event at the Channel Center in South Boston and went under this overpass below Summer Street at First Street:<br />
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Pretty cool, at least to my mind. Not sure who put this here, or who maintains it, but it's one of those small details in urban life that can make a big difference and show that even something as purely functional as an overpass is something that is cared for and can contribute to the ensemble.<br />
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(Blog Post No. 2014-1)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-90302429068935394412013-12-31T17:05:00.000-05:002014-01-02T17:07:53.631-05:00A holiday thought...as 2013 becomes 2014 (Blog Post No. 2013-10)Your humble correspondent had a ferociously busy fall, so the blogposting was a little thin on the ground the last couple of months. In any event, we here at RTUF Worldwide didn't want to let the calendar turn over without at least one final thought for 2013. And this thought comes with a mild and somewhat oblique ding on Geoff Anderson at Smart Growth America. I don't know Geoff, but I have seen him speak and have great respect for the work he is doing at SGA and the work he did when he was at the EPA Smart Growth office before that. That said, I received a fundraising email from Geoff on behalf of SGA and found the following passage worth commenting on:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><i>One of my favorite holiday movies is a story about family, friendships—and smart growth. You’ve probably seen "It’s a Wonderful Life." If you’re like me, you’ve seen it more than once, and you know the story of Bedford Falls. Bedford Falls is more than just a town to the movie's hero. It's a community, it's home. It's the place where friends and family come together along tree-lined streets, sidewalks, businesses and houses. And when the movie's villain threatens Bedford Falls, the hero knows it is more than just a threat to his housing choices. It is a threat to his home. This is what smart growth is all about. Creating places where families, businesses and communities can come together and thrive. Towns like Bedford Falls need your help...Bedford Falls might be fictional, but it’s a story that plays out across the country every day. No town wants to become a Pottersville.</i></span><br />
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I have to say that appealing to Bedford Falls as depicted in "It's a Wonderful Life" as a symbol of all that is good and place-centered in urban America without any qualification misses the point by a good deal. As depicted, Bedford Falls is certainly idyllic. But at a deeper level there are unmistakable signs that all is not well, and the source of the impending tragedy that will be full-tilt auto-oriented suburbanization is not Old Man Potter but George Bailey himself. It simply cannot be denied that the new housing Bailey Building & Loan is financing in the movie is suburban tract, Levittown-style housing that appears unconnected from the main street and is reachable only by car (or at least, you only see cars in the scene when the Martini family enter their new "castle"). The unbridled greed of Mr. Potter may well be the ultimate source of the accompanying post-war American tragedy of de-industrialization that treated moving jobs to low-wage states and economies as a kind of never-ending parlor game. Yet it is also hard to deny that well-intentioned George is the point of the spear when it comes to the cul-de-sac McMansions that have come to rule suburban America in our time. While I view Jim Kunstler as a decided mixed-bag, his decade-old take on this is essentially perfect and I'm with him that Pottersville looks a whole lot more exciting than what Bedford Falls would almost certainly have become in our time under George's steady hand:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Frank Capra's 1946 movie "It's a Wonderful Life" has become the totemic American Christmas story over the last couple of decades. It was a box-office flop when it came out, but constant holiday-time TV exposure since then turned it into the classic it has now become. It has replaced Dicken's A Christmas Carol with an updated and more accessible American mythology. But a close examination shows that it contains strange, paradoxical, and disturbing messages for our time. </i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The movie was made just after our nation's triumphal victory over manifest evil in World War Two, but it carries a heavy undertone of the Great Depression that preceeded the war. Indeed the story takes place from early in the 20th century to the middle of it and, in a way, can be viewed as a comprehensive social history of America's industrial high tide. To greatly simplify it, the story concerns the denizens of Bedford Falls, New York, a provincial main street town, and one George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), who grows up to preside over a little Savings & Loan Association (a kind of bank that no longer exists thanks to the scandals of the 1980s). Over the years, George struggles with his family-owned bank, tries to help his neighbors, raises a family with wife Mary (Donna Reed), and eventually endures a great personal crisis of conscience and self-worth, from which he is rescued by an angel. In the end, the world is made right and Christmas carols ring out as the credits roll. Oddly, George Bailey's greatest accomplishment in the movie is shown to be the development of Bedford Falls' first suburb, Bailey Park, with a scene of much patriotic hoopla when the first unit is sold to the owner of a local restaurant, Mr. Martini, an immigrant. I say odd because of how innocently clueless our collective imagination was about the consequences of that seemingly benign transaction. Like vicious nano-bots, the little units of suburban America metastisized over the following fifty years to consume and defeat all the small towns like Bedford Falls in America, and all the rich local social and economic networks that the movie celebrates, including George's bank and Mr. Martini's family-owned restaurant. Along similar lines is the sequence in which George Bailey is shown, by the angel who saves him from a suicide attempt, how Bedford Falls would have turned out if George had never been born. The town is renamed Pottersville, after the movie's villain, a greedy rival banker played by Lionel Barrymore. How striking and odd, though, what a wonderful town Pottersville actually appears to be, compared to the real horror of what happened to American towns in the late 20th century. In fact, Pottersville looks like the kind of tourist town that demoralized suburbanites now flock to for country weekends. Standing on Pottersville's lively Main Street, George sees the sidewalks full of people. Some of them are carousing drunks. Some of the businesses are gin-mills, with hints of prostitution and all the other usual quaint human vices of an earlier day (including many that are now part of mainstream American culture). But the catch is that Pottersville is actually portrayed as a town brimming with life and activity! Only the content is considered bad -- too many gin mills and loose women, not enough soda fountains. </i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><i>As we really know, the many Bedford Falls of our nation have uniformly become hollowed-out ghost towns with no life and no activity. And the George Baileys of our world went on to become the WalMart moguls and real estate tycoons who sold out their towns and ultimately destroyed them. So, it really provokes me to wonder what Americans are thinking when they see this beautifully-crafted but deeply paradoxical movie. Do we notice what it is we really have lost? And how insidious the process was? </i></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-66311213246366392802013-09-29T16:21:00.000-04:002013-09-29T16:21:43.325-04:00This time, for once, not what McMorrow said... (Blog Post No. 2013-9)In another of our series on what's happening in coverage of the urban fabric in local media ("they write about it, we give it the once over"), I come today to disagree with the generally very sound Paul McMorrow and his recent opinion piece in the <i>Boston Globe</i> advocating for the demolition of Boston City Hall and its sale as a development site for one or more high-rise towers to punctuate the High Spine's end in downtown west (the last bit about the High Spine is my reading into what Paul is saying). The piece can be found here - <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/09/23/boston-city-hall-should-torn-down/oVs2ywpJg1qHZkmmmZIYIL/story.html" target="_blank">Boston City Hall Should Be Torn Down</a> - and while it's as well written as usual, it's just not doing it for your correspondent.<br />
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I will stipulate that the building is an affront in almost every way (though it's thankfully not a high-rise itself). But the real problem with City Hall from the perspective of living and working and just <i>being</i> in this, our fair city, is its total lack of urban conviviality, its open hostility in the way in which it meets everything around it. Faithful members of RTUF Nation may recall that yours truly blogged about this issue some time ago in <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2010/02/blog-post-no-2010-3-response-and.html" target="_blank">A response and a concern</a>, and what I said then goes quadruple after reading the arguments offered by David Friedman, my fellow Bostonian living up the road in Jamaica Plain who happens, not without importance for the discussion there and here, to be a professor emeritus of architectural history at MIT, in his letter to the editors of the <i>Globe</i> in response to the article ("<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2013/09/26/building-american-classic/g54Wu1VjhNcuEybQry5YFK/story.html" target="_blank">An American Classic</a>"). Maybe he's more than just a "casual observer," but the good professor's letter merely proves, if there remained any meaningful doubt, the building's defenders are largely, if not exclusively, object building fetishists with virtually no regard for the consequences of foisting what amounts to an oversized modernist sculpture on a critically important urban location. And I quite frankly can't see that opening up the atrium at the middle of the building solves any of the problems with the building that matter to me.<br />
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All of that said, I'm not with Paul on tearing the building down. I may have been born and raised in New York and I am very comfortable with tall buildings, but I don't see big height as critical at this location. I'd rather see the city make a real go at opening up the building to the adjacent plaza and, as importantly, Congress Street and filling in the broad array of dead spaces on its perimeter before we decide to tear it down and go somewhere else.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-74707405383255982072013-08-31T10:26:00.001-04:002013-08-31T10:26:23.536-04:00Targeting New Urban Fabric Restoration, Installment No. 1: Cambridge Street at Blossom Street<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>View 1</u>: Looking across mid-block, from N. Anderson Street to Blossom Street.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF73GlGFhVCporx7r9XeEix9_VKJf-4J34gGV_O-8j_4XvMzPqUSWZzuTkPvzdpALdvm10mnVQUy2wMBFZZQfQSxIquO_7gVasOkb8zCcpBEy61eqSQ4RsSL-_kwMRH41BMXknTMGdy5s/s1600/20130813_092131.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF73GlGFhVCporx7r9XeEix9_VKJf-4J34gGV_O-8j_4XvMzPqUSWZzuTkPvzdpALdvm10mnVQUy2wMBFZZQfQSxIquO_7gVasOkb8zCcpBEy61eqSQ4RsSL-_kwMRH41BMXknTMGdy5s/s320/20130813_092131.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>View 2</u>: Looking up Cambridge Street toward Blossom Street.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIMIPKaoDfSQ1hMwgRm1m4CGCWOKEhitjhprySnOBh18GdCdNp2XydMgEN6mAVvFgKyaJF-XBZwYZ4Pz2W73wtynTCeDxGYzpImZ4mTmx4KNKHPjGRUwdrsBcLoh5XBkMVuVIq8Yk1oPM/s1600/20130813_092256.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIMIPKaoDfSQ1hMwgRm1m4CGCWOKEhitjhprySnOBh18GdCdNp2XydMgEN6mAVvFgKyaJF-XBZwYZ4Pz2W73wtynTCeDxGYzpImZ4mTmx4KNKHPjGRUwdrsBcLoh5XBkMVuVIq8Yk1oPM/s320/20130813_092256.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>View 3</u>: Looking back across the corner of Cambridge and Blossom<br />with the main Mass. General complex in the background.</td></tr>
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<i><b>The Location</b></i>: 239 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA. </div>
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<i><b>The Series</b></i>: We've tended to come along after the fact and write about good moves after they've happened. While we here at RTUF will continue doing so, we also thought it might be interesting to point the camera at places that need restoration and give them some attention before that happens (and maybe even encourage something to happen sooner rather than later). So, herewith, Installment 1 of Targeting New Urban Fabric Restoration...</div>
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<i><b>The Story</b></i>: The <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=239+cambridge+street,+boston,+ma&ll=42.360431,-71.066029&spn=0.0127,0.02562&client=safari&oe=UTF-8&hnear=239+Cambridge+St,+Boston,+Massachusetts+02114&gl=us&t=m&z=16&layer=c&cbll=42.361299,-71.066956&panoid=N7D8l3B0swPQiQT7_vSm7Q&cbp=12,269.46,,0,0" target="_blank">Gulf gas station that used to stand at this site</a> is gone, torn down pretty much immediately after the Mass. General bought the site a couple years ago. It looks like the hospital also pulled out the underground tanks at the same time, tossed on some gravel and leveled it off, so the site is ready for action. Unfortunately, there is no action, at least not yet. Let's hope it's not too long before something does happen here. Moving the gas station off was a good thing for Cambridge Street, especially given its suburban/pumps-out-front configuration, but this is an important corner that is now totally blank (MGH isn't even parking vehicles on the site itself, though they are doing it on the adjacent parcels). And it's not like MGH doesn't know how to take an underperforming street front and make it much better, as this weblog has previously reported in <a href="http://restoringtheurbanfabric.blogspot.com/2011/10/mgh-creates-enhanced-front-door-on.html" target="_blank">MGH creates an enhanced front door on Cambridge Street</a> and as you can almost see behind the trees at the left in View 3, where a more-than-adequate liner building was constructed sometime in the 1990s (I believe) to hide the garage in the block between N. Anderson and N. Grove. The RTUF sketch below tries to point out the critical piece of corner frontage that needs to be created here too, and I do believe it will be important to go up at least a few stories to be a strong counterpoint to the relatively tall, aesthetically challenged hotel across Blossom.</div>
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<i><b>The RTUF Sketch</b></i>: The corner, as almost all corners are, is most important, though stretching the the building frontage along Blossom to come closer to or even meet the existing building also makes sense.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-19820768555324699812013-07-31T21:58:00.002-04:002013-08-19T22:29:37.837-04:00In the Back Bay Fens in front of Landmark Center...<i><b>...sometimes restoring the urban fabric means daylighting a long-buried stream</b></i><br />
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So, this item is a bit dated (going back to last summer), but the project really didn't get underway on the Riverway/Fenway until this spring: <a href="http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/fenway-kenmore/2012/10/muddy_river_restoration_begins.html" target="_blank">Muddy River restoration begins</a>. We're talking here about the Muddy River as it meanders through the Riverway/Fenway stretch of the 19th century Emerald Necklace greenway system. In particular, we're focused on the part directly in front of the <i>art deco</i> edifice originally built as a Sears department store and later redeveloped, after Sears departed in the late 1980s, to become the highly successful mixed-use Landmark Center. A Boston Landmarks Commission's report on the building dates the paving-over that Anthony Flint references in <a href="http://m.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/06/risky-business-parking-lot-creation/2110/" target="_blank">The Risky Business of Parking Lot Creation</a> to 1965. For those of you keeping score at home, that means that the city and commonwealth bought themselves about 20 more years of Sears at this location by giving up the Muddy River and forcing it underground. Maybe not as bad a bargain as when New York let the Penn Central Railroad tear down Penn Station (to save the railroad from bankruptcy!) in 1963 to build a tragically mediocre skyscraper and relocate MSG, only to have them, you know, declare bankruptcy within 5 years, but still hardly the way to steward part of a masterpiece of Olmstedian landscape design for the long haul. And you can credit our departing Mayor for having the sustained memory needed to bring the parking lot back into public ownership as part of the Landmark Center redevelopment process. We'll have photos once they're done and the Muddy River again sees the light of day. (Blog Post No. 2013-7)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3165685960408738683.post-48912876804669466422013-06-14T19:55:00.000-04:002013-06-14T19:55:59.739-04:00A small, but meaningful marker of tightly knitted urban fabric (Blog Post No. 2013-6)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8VqIZt71zv4yT_EwVtUfBa_SEJUrkQ4y38a5Z0l4gnlo2tDjBljsIpztKgO-gX0-1AOFATF1wIy2UeDquBQDoqArOqLtLw_I8LQDrBrSQjMmcQqbewITV0tT_ymme9C58Hrz9MqC8PK8/s1600/IMAG0349.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8VqIZt71zv4yT_EwVtUfBa_SEJUrkQ4y38a5Z0l4gnlo2tDjBljsIpztKgO-gX0-1AOFATF1wIy2UeDquBQDoqArOqLtLw_I8LQDrBrSQjMmcQqbewITV0tT_ymme9C58Hrz9MqC8PK8/s320/IMAG0349.jpg" width="191" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tricycle espresso pushcart at Dewey Square, Boston.</td></tr>
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A few years ago, on a family trip to Ireland, I happened upon a mini-truck espresso shop in Galway City at a weekend farmers market. I didn't take a picture at the time, but did think it very cool. Fast forward to this spring, when the tricycle espresso pushcart started appearing in Dewey Square, right here in the Olde Towne. That's South Station in the background. He's there most mornings these days. Pretty darn awesome, and, yes, a sign of urbanism in the mere fact that it exists and has a place to set up shop and make enough to live on.<br />
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[Blog Post No. 2013-07.]Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0