Restoring the Urban Fabric

Blog Post No. 2012-3: Kevin White's passing...

2012-02-07T21:44:00.000-05:00

...points to a shocking factoid from Boston's urban fabric past

Kevin H. White, Mayor of Boston from 1968 to 1984, died a week ago last Friday. For the old towne, it was a really big deal. Not only was Kevin White a four-term Mayor (which I believe was the record until Tom Menino's election in 2009 to a fifth term, which he is currently enjoying), those 16 years when he was mayor constitute the fulcrum on which the city's recent history pivoted.

Old Boston was the city before Kevin White.The New Boston is what we've had since. From a societal perspective, court-ordered busing of public school students to remedy past de facto segregation was the big game-changing event. It resulted in riots across Boston on a close to daily basis in the mid-1970s that made national news. By all accounts, busing hit the mayor and the city he ran like a ton of bricks. From a physical and built environment perspective, White's 16 years were equally critical. Many of the landmarks of today's central Boston took shape and/or assumed their current forms during White's mayoralty. Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market is probably the best known, but there are many others.

One pair of projects that I did know about (and which has even appeared in one of this weblog's prior entries (see Blog Post 2009-7)), but whose significance I hadn't quite understood until now, was the Four Seasons Hotel and Heritage on the Garden -- effectively occupying two full blocks on the section of Boylston Street directly across from the Public Garden. The projects were planned toward the end of White's tenure and completed in the mid-late 1980s under the aegis of the Park Plaza Urban Renewal Plan. While both buildings are of red brick, the Four Seasons is a somewhat modernist take on the idea, while Heritage on the Common is more historicist in its treatment of the context.

300 Boylston Street (a.k.a, Heritage on the Garden) - 300 Boylston Street, Boston, MA
Photo Credit: Heritage on the Garden.

Four Seasons Hotel, 200 Boylston Street, Boston, MA
Photo Credit: startle.com

But what is truly interesting about the project, at least to me and at least now, is what it replaced. And I hadn't quite realized what it replaced until Brian McGrory wrote an excellent piece about Kevin White's legacy in the Boston Globe last week -- The Loner and the City He Loved. Here's how McGrory opened his piece:

It’s virtually impossible to imagine that the rarefied streets of the Back Bay were ever home to flophouses, or to grasp that outsiders ventured into the South End at their own risk after dark, or to realize that a McDonald’s, a gas station, and a lounge called the Hillbilly Ranch ever fronted the Public Garden in the space where the Four Seasons Hotel and the Heritage now proudly stand.

This is how it was when Kevin White arrived to the Boston mayoralty in 1968. Sixteen always fascinating, often tumultuous, and invariably controversial years later, he left behind a city that was profoundly and permanently changed.

The part that is shocking to me is what, at least according to McGrory, occupied the prime real estate fronting the Public Garden in the era just before the Four Seasons and Heritage on the Garden were built: a McDonald's, a gas station, and the Hillbilly Lounge? Really? How was that even possible? Even granting that the Hillbilly Lounge seems to have had a level of character and authenticity as well as irony (hillbillies in Boston?) that is virtually irreplaceable, on what planet would a city with the civic pride of Boston allow a block with the symbolic importance of Boylston Street between Charles and Arlington to become the equivalent of a section of suburban arterial? If you are searching for a metaphor for the profoundly anti-urban quarter century that followed the Second World War in this country, you could do worse. Boston Common and the Public Garden are critical image-making public spaces, but their huge combined importance can make you forget how small they really are, the Public Garden in particular. It's just four blocks long by two blocks wide. There is simply no space to waste. That Kevin White presided over a city that healed that particular piece of espeically egregious urban fabric violation in such an enduring and permanent-feeling way is to his profound credit. Right place, right time, right guy.

Blog Post No. 2012-2: Catching up on form-based coding here in balmy NE

2012-01-31T22:10:00.001-05:00

As crazy as the last couple of months of the year were, it's no excuse to be a month into 2012 and still be catching up...but such is life. I'm frankly despairing at this point of making much of the NE FBC Tracker. So, I'll post briefly here about FBCs here in bizarrely balmy NE. The editors of The Urban Lawyer, the quarterly journal of the American Bar Association's State and Local Governmental Section, saw fit to publish an article I wrote on the current crop of New England's form-based codes last fall. You can find it here: Gaining Ground in the Final Frontier: Surveying Legal Issues Raised by New England's Form-Based Codes. Comments, as always, are welcome.

Blog Post No. 2012-1: Of the Bartlett Square Condos...

2012-01-18T21:11:00.000-05:00

...and the Southwest Corridor

Photo 1: South-facing facade, along Green Street.

Photo 3: Identification board showing completed project.

Photo 4: Sidewalk and ground floor facade.

Photo 5: Looking in the opposite direction, with Green Street station in left background.

Photo 6: Looking diagonally across Green and Brookside toward the new building.

The Location: 154-160 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA (MAP HERE) [And check out google street view to see the vacant lot that was here before.)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2012.

The Story: Just over a year ago, RTUF focused on the very northern end of the Southwest Corridor in our post on 131 Dartmouth Street (Blog Post No. 2011-1: 131 Dartmouth helps smooth the transition...). To kick off 2012, we turn to the southern end of the corridor, at the intersection of Green Street and Brookside Street, just a stone's throw from the Green stop on the MBTA's Orange Line in Jamaica Plain. The new development here, which replaced a vacant lot, is "Bartlett Square Condos," and it is almost, but not quite, completed. According to the developer's website, there will be a total of 13 residential units (2 of which are 2-level units) above 3 ground floor retail spaces with parking tucked under the building. To be totally honest, there is little that is earthshattering here, just overall smart location and architecture for the building itself, and good urban design where it meets the street. And there are some emblematic "sign of the times" features listed on the website, including a rooftop garden and solar panels generating electricity for common area elements. It will be a challenge to get all of the condo units sold, even in a market as strong overall as Jamaica Plain's.

The perhaps more interesting reason for pointing to Bartlett Square Condos is to highlight the undeniably missed urban development opportunity that the Southwest Corridor has represented since its inception 40 years ago. In the post last year, I discussed the freeway revolt that led to the creation of the corridor after the ill-fated Southwest Expressway was finally put out of its misery in the early 1970s. There can be no doubt that the resulting linear park has been a huge success as a recreational resource. It has been less successful, however, as the home of the relocated Orange Line, which used to run down Washington Street as an elevated train to Forest Hills.

Now, submerging elevated train lines is generally a good idea and almost always results in improved real estate opportunities on the street or streets that the elevated line used to run down. But moving the line over to run through parkland for effectively its entire length from Massachusetts Avenue to the Forest Hills terminus seems to have kept it from being as heavily used as other lines in the MBTA system. Your correspondent is a relatively frequent user of the service and it never reaches the full capacity feeling of, for example, the Red Line, even at the height of rush hour. I may be wrong about this, and if there are readers with access to relevant MBTA ridership data who want to refute me, please do. If, however, I am right and the Orange Line does have relatively low ridership, I would posit that part of the problem is that the Southwest Corridor did too little to bring the urban fabric up to and embrace the stations and their immediate vicinities. Perhaps the extent of the land takings, dislocation, and destruction were too much and the only vision that made sense to those involved at the time was one where green space ruled and denser buidlings were to be kept out. Whatever the reason, it has been a long road back to reconnecting the urban fabric up to and across the corridor. The Bartlett Condos represent, at the scale of the individual building lot, the kind of back-filling that has been gradually playing out along the corridor, including Jamaica Plain NDC's painstaking redevelopment of the former Haffenreffer Brewery complex a bit further up Brookside and the residential infill along Amory Street along the other side of the corridor. The biggest and most ambitious project is at and around the Jackson Square station, where a joint venture led by Urban Edge has been trying to recreate a true urban crossroads from excess vacant lots around the station. The first phase of that development is now finally under way. Here's hoping that there's more to come in allowing the urban fabric to come up to and stretch across the corridor at other appropriate locations. It could turn out to be a win-win as the corridor's green space could see more use and the Orange Line could see more ridership.

Blog Post No. 2011-21: Rounding out the year...

2011-12-29T21:16:00.021-05:00

...with some thoughts on urban supermarkets and the swinging of the proverbial pendulum

Herewith, ladies and gentlemen, this weblog's final post for 2011 and another installment from our wide-ranging search of the available media for interesting articles about the urban fabric and its condition (a.k.a., "They report it, we give it the once over..."). RTUF's intrepid research efforts found an article in yesterday's Boston Globe about certain national supermarket chains discovering urban markets and what that does and doesn't do to their typical store formats and models. The article, entitled "City supermarkets shrink to fit, Whole Foods in Jamaica Plain is latest to try a smaller space," is not comprehensive, but it does introduce a couple of key aspects of the pendulum that is currently swinging toward walkable neighborhoods and tightly-knit urban fabric.

The first aspect is that the suburbs are, generally speaking, already "over-retailed" (i.e., there are already enough outlets of all kinds to serve the needs of the existing population for years to come). As a result, national retail chains of all kinds, including supermarkets, are seeking growth and expansion opportunities in other places, especially urban areas. The second aspect is that national supermarket chains - ranging from prototypical big-boxers like WalMart and Wegmans down to Whole Foods - are experiencing some trepidation and adjustment anxiety as they scale down their standard 100,000 SF+ formats to fit tighter, more centrally-located footprints. The Whole Foods example used is the new location in Jamaica Plain, right next door to God's Country (a.k.a., Roslindale), where they replaced the former "Hi-Lo" foods, a locally-owned outlet that catered especially to that neighborhood's Latino community. Having recently been in that store, I will say that it was a bit different to be in a Whole Foods and not see their typically phenomenal butcher counter out in the open. That said, Whole Foods is certainly no stranger to central Boston locations, as they've been operating near Symphony Hall and in the West End for some time. I'm not too worried that they're going to do OK in JP too.

The article's hand-wringing over how supermarket outfits normally geared to large footprints and suburban parking standards can possibly fit into - gasp - less than 40,000 SF of floor area put me in mind of my own high school days on the East Side of Manhattan. Now, I'll stipulate that New York is an outlier here as it is in many things. But there is little doubt that supermarkets in the big city of broken dreams and shattered romances have survived and thrived for decades in footprints far smaller than 40,000 SF. As a result, there is a part of me that is just astounded to hear people who ought to know better speak about any store that is less than an acre in floor area as if it were a pushcart. Our apartment on 86th Street between 1st Avenue and York Avenue had three supermarkets less than block away -- a D'Agostino's on First Avenue, a Gristede's on York, and a Grand Union across First Avenue on 86th Street. None of these stores had parking and none could have topped 20,000 SF, yet they had everything a supermarket could be reasonably expected to have. If someone really wants to know how to do profitable urban supermarket operations, the smartest thing to do is walk into a D'Agostino's in Manhattan and take notes. It is hardly as exotic as the article makes it sound.

PS Best wishes on a happy and healthy 2012 to everyone from RTUF. LOVE YOUR PLACE!

Blog Post No. 2011-20: Appleton Mills comes back to life...

2011-12-26T17:39:00.000-05:00

...as the Hamilton Canal District's redevelopment gets underway in earnest

Photo 1: Looking from Jackson Street, across the Hamilton Canal bridge.

Photo 2: Looking along Hamilton Canal from the bridge.

Photo 3: Looking back across the Appleton courtyard, toward the underpass
and bridge beyond.

Photo 4: Looking along the new street ("Street D" in the master plan).

Photo 5: Sidewalk with tree yard.

Photo 6: Looking along the Pawtucket Canal,
with former mill wall remnants.

The Location: 219 Jackson Street, Lowell, MA (LINK).

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2011.

The Story: The redevelopment of the Hamilton Canal District in Lowell has been mentioned on this weblog before, albeit somewhat in passing, in the final blog post of 2009 (Blog Post No. 2009-9: Breaking with the early pattern of posts...). There, the focus was on the advance of form-based coding in New England. In this post, we come to praise the resurrection of the Appleton Mills, from its virtual demolition-by-neglect in the years after it closed as a working site for manufacturing - at one point, immediately before construction began, the floors were literally falling in on each other - to the great work done by Trinity Financial and Icon Architecture at the request of the City of Lowell to redevelop the former mill into affordable and artist housing.

Image of the Appleton Mills building (in distance) at the time of groundbreaking in 2009.
Credit: City of Lowell, MA.

As noted in the 2009 post, I worked on behalf of my law firm as the city's special counsel to help produce and ensure the consistency of the form-based code for the Hamilton Canal District with Massachusetts law. To be quite frank, it is tremendously rewarding to see the high quality of the as-restored Appleton Mills residential complex, the first phase of the redevelopment enabled by that code. The new courtyard space and the streetscape of the new street are exactly the kind of thoughtful, detailed, and satisfying exterior spaces that we should look for in every piece of new construction we do as a region and nation.

The master plan below shows that much more is to come, including further residential, commercial, and mixed-use buildings, a new courtyard area that the Appleton Mills reconstruction has already partially completed, a new public square and small park, and a multi-story parking garage with street-facing retail at the ground level. If all goes well, there is even the possibility for something near and dear to your RTUF correspondent's reformed transportation planner's heart: a link from the existing historic trolley system from the city's university and the minor league ballpark through downtown Lowell and the district to the MBTA's Lowell commuter rail station and the city's major bus terminal. The Hamilton Canal District is both a tremendous mixed-use development location on its own, with three intersecting canals and great historic architectural bones, and a critical piece of infill between the heart of Lowell's downtown and the aforementioned commuter rail/regional bus station. We will continue to check in on the district's redevelopment as new phases come on line.

Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: No sketch needed this time. Instead, see below and the illustrative master plan prepared by Icon Architecture for Trinity Financial, their client, and the City of Lowell. The Appleton Mills restoration shown here is actually on two parcels -- marked 6 and 7 on the master plan.

Blog Post No. 2011-19: The Boston Massacre Site Marker finally gets some respect...

2011-11-25T21:20:00.000-05:00

...and we all get a much better intersection at State, Court, Washington, Devonshire, and Congress Streets.

1. Looking toward Dock Square, across the site marker and State St.

2. The restored site marker, indicating the date of the massacre.

3. Looking up Devonshire St., corner of the Old State House at right.

4. Looking from the opposite vantage point, across Congres and down State St.

The Location: State, Court, Washington, Devonshire, and Congress Streets, Boston, MA (Map).

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2011.

The Story: We last focused on the positive influence of thoughtful intersection improvements early last year in discussing Alexander the Great Square in Roslindale, a place admittedly somewhat on the periphery of the city. We're now looking at the very heart of Boston - directly in front of the Old State House (built on the site of the original Town House) at the intersection of five different streets - and near the site of the Boston Massacre, one of the defining moments in the run-up to open hostilities in the American War for Independence. The Wikipedia entry linked here recounts the devolution of a relatively routine encounter in the street into calling out a small contingent of armed troops, to taunts and snowball/rock throwing by the frustrated local citizenry at the symbols of imperial power to the climax of the event - the undisciplined firing of weapons by the provoked soldiers into an unarmed crowd, resulting in the death of 5 Bostonians. It never ceases to amaze me that John Adams led the defendse of the 8 British soldiers who, after an investigation by the colonial authorities, were charged with murder - and managed to get 6 of them (including the corporal in charge, who had never ordered his contingent to fire) acquitted and 2 convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

The site marker's location is somewhat inaccurate - it seems clear from the available record that the incident itself took place in front of the colonial-era custom house, which was down State Street (then King Street), closer to the harbor. But there is no doubt that the recent improvements at this intersection make it both a more fitting setting for the marker (which has itself been given a typically understated old school-Boston upgrade with the date and title information around the outside) and a much better pedestrian environment. I'm not sure when the area took on the God-awful street design that pushed a direct access lane from Congress Street to Devonshire Street within just a couple of feet from the Old State House's corner, though based on the Bromley Atlas plates available online, it was definitely after 1938. That seems about right to me. Most of the really bad street design/traffic engineering in the country took place in the immediate postwar period, when it seems the thought was that everything should be made easier for automobiles, flying cars were just around the corner and we certainly weren't going to be needing much in the way of walkable urban areas - at least at the ground level - in our bright, Jetsons-like future. So, what was the big deal if you isolated the Boston Massacre site marker and utterly stripped it of its context by sticking it in the middle of a pork-chop shaped traffic island? It wasn't long for this world anyway.

Credit: The Boston Globe.

And as is the way with capital improvements, this bad decision-making proved long-lasting. It's been several decades now since Boston embraced its long and storied history as something that was important, worth preserving, and (above all) marketable. Even so, it wasn't until the MBTA decided to renovate State Street station, which underlies much of the intersection, about 5 years ago that the City was able to find the right opportunity to right this particular wrong and give everyone the opportunity to stop and reflect on this historic event without the fear of being run over at any minute. As someone who works in the building that looms, Vader-like, above the Old State House and thus comes through this particular part of Boston quite often, there is no question that this is a great improvement over the old layout, rationalizing the vehicular traffic pattern and expressing a clear preference for the huge volume of pedestrians - both residents and workers in Boston as well as our tourist friends from around the country and the world - who pass through here on a daily basis. It's just another example of small changes that are running in the right direction for a better experience for everyone who comes into contact with this city. More of this please.

RTUF sketch of the restored urban fabric: You'll have to forgive your correspondent for failing to property title the sketch. I've discovered since doing and scanning this sketch that the actual Boston Massacre Memorial is on Boston Common. This is only the site marker. - MJL

Blog Post No. 2011-18: Anthony Flint fairly accurately summarizres the dilemma that is Jane Jacobs...

2011-11-13T20:30:00.001-05:00

...and a challenge for us all

And so, the Jane Jacobs debate continues half a century on. And Anthony Flint makes a point in yesterday's Globe that reveals the running battle over her intellectual and practical legacy that looks more and more like the fight over the remains of a medieval saint than a 20th century author and activist. Your devoted RTUF correspondent has blogged here in the past about the planning and design professions' difficulty in deciding what her impact on the urban scene really was and whether it was good or bad. [For example: the post earlier this year on Frank Gruber's analysis.]

Anthony's latest piece - An urban legacy in need of renewal - brings the debate down to the level of the urban street, where the weapons of extreme skepticism and public involvement that Jacobs used to stop the disastrous, nested policies of urban renewal, "Get Things Done" Robert Moses-ism, untrammeled freeway expansion, and automobile-oriented "urban" planning have been turned, in a kind of twisted irony, on projects such as thoughtful infill developjment designed to advance the urban condition in ways that Jacobs would almost certainly favor. Thus, as Anthony notes, we have been recently treated to the depressing spectacle of women donning Jacobs wigs and glasses to oppose good urban infill in Brooklyn (and your correspondent's birthplace, to boot). Anthony is correct to observe that Jacobs' fundamentally anti-planning approach accordingly lives on, even when the profession is earnestly trying to do the right thing. It is undeniably distressing.

All of that said, I don't think for a second that we need more of the Moses way of doing things to balance out the universe. Being from a city so intimately shaped by the man that you literally can't go more than a couple of miles in any direction before coming across something he built or, more often, destroyed, I can emphatically state that unilateral, bureaucratic planning is best left dead and buried in this country. The real project is to help our fellow citizens be discerning observers and actors in both public and private development efforts. Given how awfully the built environment was treated in this country for more than half a century, it should surprise no one that there is virtually no faith that the next project is going to make things better. The first few rounds of this discussion will feel like a monologue. All we can hope is that eventually the message gets through and we demonstrate, through improved urban fabric, that there really is hope for something better.

Blog Post No. 2011-17: What do you think it would take...

2011-10-22T18:39:00.002-04:00

...to appropriately cap off Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross?

Photo 1: Front facade of the cathedral.

Photo 2: Close view of the lower front facade tower.

Photo 3: A side view of the front facade,
showing the low caps on the towers.

Photo 4: The north side facade at the transept.

Photo 5: View looking south along Washington Street,
with Cathedral High School gym just in front of cathedral.

Photo 6: Plaque on the front facade of the cathedral,
referencing the importance of the building to
newly-arrived Irish immigrants in the mid 19th century.

The Comment: As you can see from the photos, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, although it's been open and in operation since 1875, was never quite "completed" to the design of P.C. Keeley, despite the plaque's statement to the contrary. It is very obviously missing the spires that should rise from the two towers on either side of the front facade. And so, RTUF's question today is as indicated above: What would it take to appropriately cap off those towers? And I mean that question both architecturally and practically. What should they look like -- traditional Gothic spires in the spirit of the original design (shown directly below, and, at least according to the accompanying account, planned to reach 200 and 300 feet in height, respectively), or something more modern? And practically, how would the archdiocese, no longer flush with cash or the level of influence and good will it used to enjoy in Boston, pull it off in the first place?

Source: Boston Illustrated, 1881.

Now, this question occurs to me because I've spent several hours last Saturday and today attending mass at the Cathedral. I have done this not because the Cathedral is convenient to our house in Roslindale or because I'm looking for a new parish. Rather, my son's choir (based from the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School at St. Paul's Church in Cambridge) has sung at masses there the last two weekends. [Regular readers may recall that I blogged about the very flexible courtyard space at St. Paul's church earlier this year in Post No. 2011-2.]

So, I've spent more time there in the last 8 days than I've spent there in the last 14 years of living in the Boston area. Even as a pretty diligent, church-going Catholic, I'm not surprised. The Cathedral, almost since the day of its completion, appears to have occupied something of a disfavored place in the life and self-concept of the Boston archdiocese. This seems partly the result of its location in the South End, which was eclipsed as the most fashionable residential neighborhood in the city shortly after its completion when the filling and construction of the Back Bay got underway in the 1860s. It also seems partly the result of the leadership of the archdiocese's decision to affirmatively achieve the disconnect by decamping for Lake Street on the Brighton-Newton border starting in the 1880s. Under Archbishop Williams, the chancery (the central administrative offices), the archdiocesan seminary, and the archbishop's residence were all located out on the former Stanwood Estate by the turn of the last century, several miles from the place where worship was supposed to be centered. When Boston College, the region's most important Catholic higher educational institution, moved from its former location on Harrison Avenue (also in the South End and not far from the Cathedral) to an assemblage across Commonwealth Avenue from the archdiocese's new compound in the first decade of the 20th century, the relocation of Catholic Boston's power and attention was complete. I'd be curious to know if there is another example anywhere in the Catholic Church -- worldwide -- where the cathedral was so completely abandoned and cut off from the leadership of the diocese. The only thing the leadership appears to have left behind was Cathedral High School (the school gym is seen in Photo 5). And, then in the early 20th century, injury was added to insult as the elevated Orange Line was built down Washington Street, resulting in what Robert Campbell called "A Cathedral Trapped Behind an Iron Fence" in Cityscapes of Boston. So much, then, for the building that was supposed to be the main marker for the fully-arrived Catholic community in Boston.

But the tides against which the Cathedral swam for many decades seem to be receding, at least in some directions. As Campbell noted in Cityscapes, the elevated Orange Line was torn down in the 1980s when the subway was relocated to a new alignment in the Southwest Corridor. The South End has become a far more fashionable and desired urban neighborhood in the last several decades. Washington Street itself has substantially recoverd, as new construction to the north of the Cathedral has filled in major gaps in the urban fabric and the MBTA, City of Boston, and the Commonwealth recently collaborated on a reconstruction of the thoroughfare that improved the streetscape and provided for reserved bus lanes for the Silver Line's southern segment (they're the red-painted lanes seen in Photo 5). The archdiocese itself has undergone a major transformation as a result of several trends over the last half century, including, most significantly, the twin traumas of parish closings/consolidations and the clergy abuse scandal that directly led to selling off most of the old Lake Street complex to Boston College as a way to shore up the archdiocese's finances. The current archbishop and cardinal, Sean O'Malley, now resides next to the Cathedral (a move your faithful correspondent heartily applauds), while the chancery has been moved to suburban office space in Braintree and the seminary remains in Brighton.

Accordingly, a new day has, in many ways, arrived in the archdiocese and we are all -- leadership, clergy, laity -- feeling our way through it. It seems, to at least this observer, that one tremendously important symbol of really starting a new era might be to complete unfinished business with what remains, at least spiritually, the most important building in the archdiocese's built heritage. Why not give the old edifice something new to make it really stand out? Why not figure out a way to have the towers (however conceived) finally reach into the sky the way they were meant? Why not announce that the archdiocese really and truly is back, in and of the City?

Editor's Note: This post has been edited for flow and to correct spelling and punctuation since its original posting. -- MJL

Blog Post No. 2011-16: MGH creates an enhanced front door on Cambridge Street...

2011-10-15T19:43:00.002-04:00

...using a new museum of medical history and innovation as the catalyst.

Photo 1: Looking from across Cambridge Street.

Photo 2: The gap between the Resident Physicians Building.

Photo 3: Looking toward Charles Circle.

The Location: 38 North Grove Street (at Cambridge Street), Boston's West End.

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2011.

The Story: This one kind of came out of nowhere. Your RTUF correspondent prides himself on keeping up to date on what is being built and where here in the Hub. But I didn't notice this until I happened to be walking up Cambridge Street a couple weeks ago. It's an arresting building, quite different from just about everything up and down the street -- all copper sheathing and glass curtain wall with a triangular overhang at the second level. Not a shred of red brick on it. I reckon that only Mass. General could really get away with doing this here, considering that, you know, Mass. General has been around since this part of Boston turned from a portion of the very wet Back Bay/Charles River estuary into dry land. That goes all the way back to 1823, when the Bulfinch Building (designed by perhaps the old town's most beloved architect) was completed eleven years after The General Hospital corporation was created by a special act of the Massachusetts General Court. "MGH" as it is known around Boston needs practically no introduction almost anywhere. It was, in fact, in the so-called "Ether Dome" that the first surgical operation using general anesthetic (in that case, ether) was conducted in 1846 and popularized rapidly, MGH's chief of surgery, John Collins Warren, declaring to those in attendance that "Gentlemen, this is no humbug." And so, it is fitting that MGH should have a museum of medical history and innovation. And it is also fitting that the building should be a bit splashy at this corner, which is really MGH's front door. The extension of the street wall here is incremental - the old resident physicians' building wasn't that far back from the street. But the shielding of the multi-level garage behind is considerably better than before. Combined with the improvements already noted at this weblog to Charles River Plaza and the Saltonstall Building, we can see that Cambridge Street continues on the urban design upswing. A couple more of the gaps filled in and we'll have a real boulevard to be proud of. Patience and appropriately tempered expectations are truly virtues.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: The existing Physicians' Residence building wasn't bad, but it really didn't provide the kind of on-the-street experience that the new building does. And it did precious little to shield the garage structure behind.

Blog Post No. 2011-15: Reflecting on Bryant Park's lofty status and making the case...

2011-09-30T22:04:00.000-04:00

...for Adams Park here in our own Roslindale Square

Greetings RTUF Heroes! For our second-half-of-the-month post, we here in the RTUF command center will begin by reminiscing about the bad old days in Bryant Park. It seems that our friends over at Planetizen are holding an on-line poll for the 100 Top Public Spaces in the U.S. The winners will be announced on October 20. At least as of this posting, you'll see that Bryant Park appears to running in first. That this is so is a stunning reversal of its fortunes of 20+ years ago. Well do I remember working as a young lad at the the big city's Regional Plan Association, which was then at 40th and 6th, and enjoying my lunch in the park on sunny days just a block away despite the drug pushers and assorted undesirable characters. Though far less populated and used than it is now in the flower of its resurgence, even in the late 1980s, you could tell that the park, like much of New York at the time, had great bones and probably had more foot traffic and activity than 95% of the public spaces in the US even in its fallen state. It was somewhat difficult back then to imagine the transformation that the park would undergo, yet it has. And the city is clearly the better for it. In a sense, the more incredible thing is that such a centrally located and well-positioned park -- directly behind the gorgeous McKim Mead & White-designed New York Public Library main branch -- could ever have been allowed to descend to such a lowly level.

And so, dear readers, for what it's worth, I will be nominating Adams Park here in Roslindale as one of the 100 great places in the U.S. I do this not because it is perfect -- it isn't. It could be more pedestrian friendly on its periphery, it suffers from a complicated traffic pattern on the surrounding streets, and it doesn't get all that much spontaneous activity. Instead, what succeeds generally has to be programmed. But there is no question that this place has been the ideal setting for the vastly improved Roslindale Farmers Market for the last several years. The park gets my nod for that alone, but also for the straightforward landscape design, high level of maintenance that the City has kept up over the years, the multiple understated war memorials, and also, you know, as a way of showing a little plain old hometown pride. Herewith, some photos of Adams Park clipped from other places on the web (with credits as indicated):

Credit: West Roxbury Patch.

Credit: Yelp.com.

Credit: Roslindale.net.

Credit: Kennedy School of Government website.

Blog Post No. 2011-14: Shedding light on the boiler room...

2011-09-15T21:41:00.001-04:00

...has to be one of the keys to making it at least potentially rentable in today's economy

1 - Looking down Federal to Franklin Street.

2 - Looking from the corner of Franklin and Federal.

3 - Looking up from Federal Street.

The Location: One Federal Street, Boston, MA.

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2011.

The Story: As the economy continues its slow recovery, we have another of those small, incremental changes here, and one that doesn't even rate a RTUF sketch because there is no hole being filled in this time. What we do have, however, is a rather helpful daylighting of what used to be the "boiler room" space at One Federal Street. This 39-story skyscraper was built in 1975 as the headquarters for Shawmut Bank. Back in the day, a headquarters bank building like this filled its lower floors with back office services and gave the upper floors to the executive ranks. When it was built, One Federal didn't even bother giving the first three floors above the lobby atrium windows. Instead, those floors were a solid slab of concrete curtain wall all the way around the block. Working in there must have been a fairly grim existence. Fast forward 36 years, and the back office space is now long gone, as is Shawmut Bank (having been gobbled up by Fleet Bank in the mid-1990s, and FleetBoston (resulting from the merger of Fleet with the First National Bank of Boston) was itself gobbled up by Bank of America in 2004). The kinds of functions that used to occupy floors 5-7 migrated out into the region's suburbs long ago. So, Tishman Speyer, the building's owners, have apparently decided that they aren't going to find anyone willing to take the space unless they give it at least daylight, even if they can't give it soaring views. It's hard to picture this space occupied even in boom times, and we are definitely not in boom times. Hence, in the last several months, up went the scaffolding and out came the concrete, replaced now by three stories of windows. I'm somewhat intrigued by the fact that Tishman doesn't seem to have a tenant signed up for the space they've suddenly greatly improved (landlords don't typically make money by making improvements to space that isn't occupied or about to be occupied by a tenant who will flow some cash). But I thank them anyway for opening up the lower floors of the building. Even though it's not at the street level, replacing the blank walls with windows is a step in the right direction and adds to the streetscape on all four sides of the building.

Blog Post No. 2011-13: Food trucks as a temporary piece of urban fabric...

2011-08-31T21:16:00.002-04:00

...not a bad idea at all

Photo 1: Three food trucks, looking toward Dock Square.

Photo 2: Looking over the trucks toward Faneuil Hall.

Photo 3: Down the stairs toward Dock Square.

Photo 4: Informal outdoor seating and dining.

The Location: Boston City Hall Plaza, above Dock Square.

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2011.

The Story: A short post, here at the end of August and a VERY fine week of weather following the arrival and rapid departure of former Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene. The food trucks have been located here since the spring, but your faithful correspondent only had the inclination and opportunity to visit earlier this month. I had a late lunch at the Clover truck, which was one of the first food trucks to hit the streets here in Boston and has been parked at various locations around the Greenway over the last year. How to animate City Hall Plaza has been a problem for the City since it was first bestowed up on the populace 40 years ago, a topic on which this blogger has commented in the past (See Post No. 2011-6). Relatively isolated portions of the plaza, such as this, have been the most difficult to animate, cut off as they are. That the Mayor's administration has found a way to bring them some life, even on only a seasonal basis, is testament to the level of sustained attention that is now being paid here. There is a part of me that hopes that structural accretion may someday transform these temporary visitors into permanent occupants. Who can say what the future holds? But even if we have activity only for certain months, it is unquestionably an improvement.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: You can file this one under changes at the margins (and much more is needed). RTUF stipulates that 3 food trucks tucked away in what amounts to a corner doesn't make this the Piazza San Marco, but it is decidedly better.

Blog Post No. 2011-12: Boylston Street in the Fenway...

2011-07-15T22:00:00.004-04:00

...it just keeps getting better

This one is another of our media commentaries here at RTUF ("They report it, we give it the once over..."), though this time the media is actually just doing RTUF's work for it. [Thank you, Media!!!] First, it was Russ with the pictures in the last entry, now it's the real estate beat reporter in the relatively recent pages of The Boston Globe talking about the remarkable restoration of the urban fabric along a thoroughfare that as recently as the early part of the last decade felt like a fairly dated and poorly designed suburban strip dropped in the very heart of the city. Not so anymore. In his piece from last Thursday's edition entitled "Fenway facelift continues," Casey Ross traces the two major new developments (plus the Jerry Remy/Guitar Center rehab that has been a huge hit (pun intended)) that have begun to create the active streetscape and walkable development on Boylston Street envisioned in 2004 when the City adopted a new neighborhood zoning article for the area after several years of strategic planning and visioning for the ballpark and its surrounding area. The Globe even includes, dare we say it (!), a RTUF-like little graphic showing how the most recent developments have filled in the street wall and started to make a real, respectable urban boulevard. And like RTUF, they aren't giving the McDonald's site redevelopers any credit until they actually put the building down on the site:..

Sources: BRA, Boston Globe.

Additional comment: In thinking a bit more about this post over the weekend, one additional comment seems in order. The almost-immediate decision made by the Henry/Lucchino ownership group to keep Fenway Park instead of tearing it down and building an imitation next door (as had been proposed by the prior ownership group) has made a huge difference to the neighborhood. Starting in 2003, the ballpark has undergone a series of carefully conceived and brilliantly executed renovations under the leadership of architect Janet Marie Smith that have enlarged the seating capacity from 33,000 to over 39,000 and, simultaneously, given the park a better look and feel. The Wikipedia entry lists them here and I will say for the record that in my opinion the best of them was taking down the windows on what was the .406 Club. I say in there once with a friend from law school and it was one of the more disconnected experiences I've ever had watching a sporting event in person. I mean, the crowd sounds had to be piped in because you were behind this wall of glass, sitting directly above home plate. Fenway Park can and should be many things, but antiseptic is decidedly not one of them. So, instead of enduring the upheaveal of moving the ballpark for little practical gain (and a lot of loss in terms of continuity and authenticity), the neighborhood has seen its most famous asset cared for and polished to look the best it may have ever looked, and Boylston Street just keeps getting better...

Blog Post No. 2011-11: Liberty Wharf is as advertised...

2011-06-30T20:48:00.000-04:00

...no question

The Photos: All credited to Russ Preston.

Photo 1: Looking east, with Legal Harborside 1 to the right.

Photo 2: Looking around the corner of the western building into the harbor.

Photo 3: Legal Harborside from across Northern Avenue.

Photo 4: Detail of the second floor, street side on the western building.

Photo 5: Up close on the streetscape.

Photo 6: One of the few new buildings in the area not clad in pre-cast concrete panels.

Photo 6: Looking between the buildings.

Photo 7: Looking west along the water, back toward downtown Boston.

The Location: Liberty Wharf, 242 Northern Avenue, South Boston Waterfront (aka The Seaport District), Boston, MA (Map)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2010.

The Story: In this case, less is actually more. This location was formerly Jimmy's Harborside. Having never eaten at Jimmy's I can't comment on the food. But there is no question that its demise laid the groundwork for an urban design upgrade of the first order. Compare the pictures above to this:

Certainly iconic. Well known as a Boston tradition. Yet distinctly lacking as it met the street. In its last iteration, the Jimmy's building was a single continuous frontage that gave you almost no sense that Boston Harbor was, you know, just behind it. The new design, from Elkus Manfredi, breaks open the site into 3 structures, wraps the Harborwalk around the water side and lets even those walking by on the street side know that the waterfront is really there. I confess that I hadn't really thought to go check out the location until Brian McGrory wrote a typically worthwhile column in the Boston Globe a week ago on what a success it's turning out to be: "Waterfront hits its stride." With such an endorsement, I made a mental note to see what the fuss was all about the next time an opportunity arose. So when fellow CNUer and urban designer Russ Preston came up from Providence for lunch earlier this week, we went over to Legal Sea Food's new Harborside 1. It was a nice day, if somewhat hazy, so the doors out to the harbor and the boat slips a level down were all wide open. In summer, exactly the way it should be. In the true spirit of RTUF's taking whatever we're given: although RTUF's photo apparatus was deployed, Russ' pictures were just that much better, so that's what we have. We here at RTUF highly recommend a visit yourself if you're here in town or come to visit anytime soon. If the rest of the redeveloped waterfront works this well, we will be lucky indeed.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: RTUF was spared the effort this time as the project architects, Elkus Manfredi, have a handy series of images, including a site plan, here. And Liberty Wharf itself even has a blog, check it out here.

Blog Post No. 2011-10: Block 89, Madison, WI

2011-06-04T16:42:00.000-04:00

Redevelopment requires patience, my friends...

Location: Block 89 (bounded by East Main, South Pinckney, East Doty, and King streets), Madison, Wisconsin

Map and Images: Here and here.

The Story: So, your faithful RTUF correspondent has been out in Madison, WI, for CNU 19 for the last couple of days. It's been fun reconnecting with the NUers from outside of New England (and even a few of my fellow regional denizens). I'm leaving a bit early and so going to miss the "Mano-a-Mano at Monona," a.k.a., the Saturday evening plenary that will close the Congress in which Andres Duany and Charles Waldheim will discuss what New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism. As a quick aside here, I have almost lived up to my promise to read the Landscape Urbanism Reader and give you, RTUF's vast and influential readership, my own personal take on the NU-LU dispute. Loook for that dispatch in the next couple of weeks.

But, to return to the title of this post: we are stepping outside of the Boston focus of the blog today to highlight the great, but painstaking work that was required to turn a piece of once-failing urban fabric in the heart of Madison into a great urban block -- Block 89. I went to a session this morning on financing mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented projects and heard Thomas Neujahr, one of the principals of Urban Land Interests, the project's developer, walk through the project's complex financing and buildout approach, which used a combination of municipal tax increment financing, and a redevelopment district plus patient and carefully considered phasing over a 20-year period, starting in the mid-1980s at pretty much the nadir of downtown-located retail and mixed-use in Madison as well as the country as a whole. His presentation included aerial before and after photos of the block that I will post as soon as I can access the dropbox where the presentation has been uploaded.

Madison, by the way, is a great town. The area between the two lakes and focusing on the State Capitol and the University of Wisconsin's main campus was built out on a plan by John Nolen. The standard grid is broken by 4 radials centered on the capitol building that give the overall layout of the city a dintinctive character and focus. Since today is the opening day for Roslindale Square's seasonal farmer's market, it is worth noting that they have a very massive farmer's market -- the Dane County Farmer's Market -- on Saturdays that goes all the way around the state capitol on 4 sides. It's got to be the one of the biggest markets of its kind in the US, if not the biggest. Some photos here:

Photo 1: Bee stall with vendor and beehive hat.

Photo 2: Picked up some 8-year aged Wisconsin cheddar here.

Photo 3: It's pretty much a one-way loop all the way around.

Photo 4: They close off King from the capitol for a couple blocks. Block 89 is in the background.

Photo 5: This was some kind of a pie or other pastry eating contest featuring younger women in beauty contestant tiaras and sashes. Not sure what the guy with the cheesehead hat was doing.

Blog Post No. 2011-9: More on Jane Jacobs - metropolophilia, people!

2011-05-15T20:52:00.000-04:00

In the spirit of two fine traditions here at RTUF -- Jane Jacobs and media commentary -- I offer up the recent cross-posting of Santa Monica Lookout News columnist Frank Gruber over at the Huffington Post -- Proxy Wars: More on Reconsidering Jane Jacobs. Having not yet read the American Planning Association-published retrospective on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Death and Life of Great American Cities containing the three essays Gruber is criticizing, I will not pass judgment on them myself. I will, however, simply note that I really like Gruber's shorthand for the essential importance of Jacobs and her unique place in urban history in this country. It comes in the context of examining one essayist's attempt to lay the alleged sins of New Urbanism at the feet of Jacobs and vice-versa, but Gruber uses that context to make a much wider point:

What the New Urbanists take from Jane Jacobs is what nearly every other planner or urbanist working today takes from Jacobs regardless in what context they work: a set of pro-urban values. Love of the city.What was revolutionary about Jacobs in 1961, 15 years into a half-century of sprawl, was not that she stood up to Robert Moses, urban renewal and Modernism, but that she proclaimed her love for city life.

Everyone else was saying, "Get Out!" and she was saying "Stay!"

Blog Post No. 2011-8: North Station...

2011-05-14T16:00:00.000-04:00

...now more than just a hallway.

Photo 1: Looking eastward along the row of doorways to the tracks.

Photo 2: Looking from the track doorways toward the entrance to TD Garden.

Photo 3: One of the two train boards.

Photo 4: The eastern end of the concourse.

Location: North Station (Boston), Causeway Street below the TD Garden.

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2007.

The Story: Truly, when we first moved to the Boston area in 1997, North Station had been reduced to just that: a hallway below what was then the Fleet Center. A fairly wide hallway, but a hallway nonetheless. It was a very sad state of affairs considering the rich history of railroad terminals along Causeway Street, at one time serving the multiple lines of four different carriers: the Boston & Maine, Eastern, Boston & Lowell, and Fitchburg railroads. Our friendly rail fanatics who wrote the entry for North Station over at Wikipedia report that the multiple terminals were unified in 1893 with North Union Station (old postcard view here). The old station building lasted all of 35 years before it was torn down to make way for the combined Boston Garden/North Station in 1928.

Photo 5: The old North Station/Boston Garden in 1988. (Credit: MBTA)

As briefly touched upon in Blog Post No. 2011-6, that complex made way for the new building in the mid-1990s that resulted in the hallway treatment for the station and the parking lot out front.

It took the better part of the next decade -- and the reintroduction of intercity passenger rail service with Amtrak's Downeaster to Portland, Maine -- for the powers that be to take pity on the region's north-side railroad passengers and make the savvy improvement that produced what is now known as the Red Auerbach Concourse. In much the same way the Red Sox were painstakingly finding space within the footprint of Fenway Park for improved vastly improved fan concourses, the MBTA and Delaware North (TD Garden's owners) didn't expand the building to create the new space. Instead, they took about 80 feet of unused track and platform area and filled it in with a pretty straightforward concourse complete with expanded concessions (including the obligatory station area watering hole) and not one but two train boards. The Boston Globe published a very helpful diagram at the time the improvement was announced in 2006:

Figure from the Boston Globe in 2006, at the time the expansion was announced.

The expansion project was completed in 2007 and the result is something that looks and feels like a train station, not a hallway. Even so, until the front door on Causeway Street is finally built, North Station will continue to play second fiddle to South Station from an urban fabric standpoint somewhat like present-day Pennsylvania Station suffers in comparison to Grand Central Terminal in New York.

Blog Post No. 2011-7: The last major gap in the Washington Street frontage in Roslindale Square...

2011-04-18T15:24:00.002-04:00

...is filled in...

1 - Looking south along Wasington Street.

2 - Same view, landscape orientation.

3 - Along the north side of the building,
access to off-street parking in the rear.

4 - View along the back facade.

5 - The Washington Street facade.

6 - View of the Washington Street facade showing the library next door.

...and an architectural black box is opened to the general public for the first time ever.

Interior of the former Trolley Power Substation.

Location: 4244 Washington Street, Roslindale, MA.

Year of urban fabric restoration: 2011.

Prior fabric view: Click here to see how this site looked before.

The story: On this day, Patriots' Day 2011, we return to Roslindale Square to see a major tear repaired and a street wall anchored. The specific location this time is 4244 Washington Street, in the block between Cummins Highway and Corinth/Poplar streets. Since your faithful correspondent moved to Roslindale in 2000, this particular address had been home to a dilapidated, underused, and, most recently, completely abandoned filling station and garage/car storage. Even if actively occupied and operated, a gas station use in the standard configuration (pumps out front, building in the middle of the site, two curb-cuts) was wrong for this location. This is a location of great importance that sees a good deal of foot traffic throughout the day. It was in desperate need of a strong, street-facing and -filling building to provide a real sense of enclosure to Adams Park. And in this building, we clearly have it.

One might argue that the massing is a bit boxy and the architecture could be a bit more interesting. But I would urge any such critic to appreciate what this building replaces and the still-constrained economic times we are experiencing. Indeed, this building's development was only made possible by the Social Security Administration's decision to move out of its current location on the same street, just to the north of Cummins Highway, and take a long-term lease at this location. I have not seen or heard anything definitive on users for the balance of the space in the building, including the ground floor storefronts. But for the new CVS further up Washington and prior battles over chain drug stores in the square, I might be tempted to think this made a perfect location for a new CVS or Walgreens. The floorplate would be about the size they seem to require for urban locations. However it pans out, we'll have to see what comes of this new retail space and how it fits into the square's broad mix of going concerns. And we'll also have to see how the finish details look at the ground level. You might note that I took the photos this time well in advance of completion of the building. Though this is not typically the RTUF pattern, this building has been so long-awaited an improvement that, spurred on by the slowly advancing spring weather, I couldn't help myself.

The photos of the new building were taken on the same day as the photo of the interior of the former trolley power substation at the corner of Cummins Highway and Washington Street. I am afraid that my photo is pretty poor and doesn't come close to doing the space justice. Victoria Groves, over at Wicked Local, has a much better photo and a nice write-up of the tour event, which had to be the first time the general public has ever been invited into the space since it was built -- until the late 1960s, it was a working substation owned by the city's transit operators powering trolley lines in southwest Boston, and since then it has been vacant and shuttered. There have been a couple different recent false starts on redevelopment -- the MBTA put the space out to bid early in the 2000s and ended up in a dispute with their selected designee and the BRA's RFP process two years ago yielded proposals that it viewed as non-starters. For what it's worth, we here at RTUF think the minimal-improvements-necessary-to-make-it-useable-event-space approach is the only one that has legs at the moment. The interim designee team of Historic Boston, Inc., and Roslindale Village Main Streets could form an entity to lease the space on a relatively short term basis (say, 3 years, and assuming a cooperative BRA that allows the lease on a nominal basis) and that entity could seek low-cost, even volunteer assistance for the required first round of improvements and then rent it out for events of all kinds. There is tremendous upside potential here. But the key is to get the space back into some kind of productive, community-based use along the lines of what good friend Mike Lydon (as served up by Russ Preston over at Life + Urbanism) calls "Tactical Urbanism."

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: The new building quite clearly fills this site's frontage far better than the former gas/service station building that was set back from the street, had two very wide curb-cuts and was a general drag on the vitality of this busy block.

Blog Post No. 2011-6: Archstone Avenir starts the ball rolling on Causeway Street...

2011-04-03T20:34:00.002-04:00

...and we have hope for more to come

1 - Information on the now-departed elevated Green Line.

Photo 2 - Looking down Haverhill Street, back toward
downtown (with Custom House Tower in background).

Photo 3 - Looking up Haverhill Street toward TD Garden.

Photo 4 - From Valenti Way, looking across the corner at Canal Street.

Photo 5 - Looking up Canal Street (Avenir on the right).

Photo 6 - Looking from Canal Street down Valenti Way.

Photo 7 - Up close and along the Canal Street facade.

Photo 8 - Main residential entrance on Canal Street.

Photo 9 - Looking east down Causeway Street toward the North End.

Photo 10 - Looking across Causeway Street to the parking lot and TD Garden.

Photo 11 - CVS/Pharmacy to be first occupant of ground floor retail space.

Photo 12 - Looking down Haverhill Street with the next development parcel across the street.

Location: 89 Canal Street, Boston, MA.

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2009.

The Story: So, here we are on Causeway Street, at the top of the Bulfinch Triangle, the area between the West End and the North End of Boston that once comprised the tidal Mill Pond and was filled in the early 19th century according to a plan developed by Charles Bulfinch. This new residential/retail building, developed by Trinity Financial (of Carruth and Washington-Beech fame, see Blog Post Nos. 2010-20 and 2009-10) and now owned and operated by Archstone-Smith, is the first of a series of mixed-use buildings that will fill in the gap just north of the Greenway and create a strong street wall on the south side of Causeway Street: Simpson Housing will be developing Parcel 1 (directly across Haverhill Street and appearing likely to start construction this spring/summer) and Trinity Financial (there they are again) has just recently been designated as the developer to move forward with a long-stalled project on Parcels 2A/2B (to the south of Parcel 1).

Once again this is a massive improvement from the old elevated Central Artery that was bulldozed through the heart of downtown in the 1950s and was finally submerged over the course of the last decade through the Central Artery/Third Tunnel (widely dubbed the Big Dig), not to mention the submerging of the old elevated portion of the Green Line that went on around the same time (more on that below). Avenir's retail has been relatively slow to fill up -- the CVS/Pharmacy shown in Photo 11 is the first of the ground floor retail spaces to be occupied almost 2 years after the building saw its first residential tenants -- but that has had more to do with the overall economy than the design of the building or its location. As the recovery takes hold in earnest and more residents arrive with the foregoing two buildings as well as the redevelopment of Lovejoy Wharf to the northeast, the ground floor space should eventually be occupied and active street frontages established. It will still take some time, but it will come.

Now, to return to the Green Line: This north-south corridor is essentially where the Green Line used to emerge from the downtown tunnel that starts west of Kenmore Square. After Haymarket Station, the trolley rose out of the ground heading north, turned sharply at Causeway Street, and then bent again around what is now the O'Neill Federal Buidling and crossed the Charles River near the Museum of Science. That same basic routing has been maintained, but it is now entirely underground until emerging just before Science Park Station. Avenir sits on top of the reconfigured North Station platforms of the Green and Orange lines that resulted. The result is a sun-strewn Causeway Street after nearly a century of living in the shadows of the elevated train structure and the Central Artery itself.

Of course, the other relatively recent makeover that occurred here was in the demolition of the old North Station/Boston Garden, which fronted directly on Causeway Street, and its replacement with what is now named the "TD Garden" (having been initially known as the Fleet Center), which sits behind a surface parking lot. Having been in the old Boston Garden myself a few times, I will attest that it was a cramped and highly idiosyncratic arena with many partial and fully blocked views because of its supporting columns. That said, if you had a seat with a good sight line, you had much more than that: you had a phenomenal, up-close-on-the-action view of the game. I mean, you were on top of the players and the action like no place else. The new building is decent, but the character of the old place was essentially irreplaceable. Now, if only that parking lot that sits between the new garden and Causeway Street could be filled in with an appropriate front door for the arena and the train station below...

Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric:

Blog Post No. 2011-5: The Circus Is Back in Town...

2011-03-17T00:00:00.002-04:00

...and Government Center finally gets the right kind of measured treatment

The Big Apple Circus folks were back in full force today, setting up and getting ready to put
on the show at City Hall Plaza.

Faithful readers may recall that this humble little weblog posted about City Hall Plaza last year here, pointing how well the Big Apple Circus fit the place and suggesting it might be a good model for rotating temporary uses in lieu of the big splash approach to fixing what ails our own version of Siena's central piazza. So, as the photo suggests, the circus is now back in town, and we have news today of what I view as a solid set of incremental steps and proposals to be rolled out in a manageable succession that, when done, should result in a much better seat for our municipal government. In "After many false starts, a new City Hall Plaza plan," the Boston Globe's Casey Ross lays out the progression of steps that the City has managed to stitch together. Take a look and judge for yourself if the City is on the right track here. For my money, the highlights are smoothing the transition from Cambridge Street to Congress Street, replacing the truly hideous bunker that is the Government Center T station headhouse and thinking intelligently about how to break up the superblock. Whether they stick with all of the tree planting they're showing is anyone's guess, but the slide show is well worth looking at, if only for the incredible range of images and thinking about a single place over the last half century. Fasincating.

Bottom line: I think we can all support the notion that if Kairos Shen does half as well with City Hall Plaza as Janet Marie Smith did with Fenway Park -- that is to, incremental changes year on year that result in a much improved ensemble almost without anyone noticing it -- we'll be truly thankful.

Blog Post No. 2011-4: CNU NEW ENGLAND, INC. NOTICE and AGENDA for 2011 Members Meeting

2011-03-11T08:43:00.001-05:00

Notice of Meeting:

2011 ANNUAL MEETING OF THE MEMBERS OF CNU NEW ENGLAND

Pursuant to Article III, Section 7 of the By-Laws of CNU New England, all Members in good standing of CNU New England are hereby given notice that the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Members of CNU New England shall take place as follows:

DATE: March 17, 2011
TIME: 5:30 pm
LOCATION: Bar, 254 Crown Street, New Haven, CT

Draft Agenda:

Agenda for 2011 Annual Meeting of Members

I. Attendance and Quorum Check
II. Call to Order
III. Presentation of Annual Financial Report
IV. Annual Report for 2010 and Outlook for 2011
V. Election of Directors and Officers

NOTE: The Board of Directors is comprised of twenty-seven (27) individual Members, each serving staggered three (3)-year terms (except for the Student Member, who serves for a one (1)-year term) including those Directors holding the offices of President, Vice President, Treasurer and Clerk as well as twenty-three (23) At-Large Directors, drawn from the membership generally, but including at least one (1) member from each of the region’s states.
The Executive Committee of the Board of Directors nominates the following slate of candidates for the open positions of members of the Board of Directors and Officers of CNU/NE:

Proposed Slate for Open Board PositionsNo./Name/Term Length (expires in)

1 Dean Amadon* 2 years (2013)
2 Robin Bergstrom* 3 years (2014)
3 Rick Chellman* 2 years (2013)
4 Bill Dennis* 3 years (2014)
5 Beth Della Valle* 2 years (2013)
6 David Dixon* 3 years (2014)
7 Jonathan Ford* 2 years (2013)
8 Norman Garrick 3 years (2014)
9 Lucy Gibson* 3 years (2014)
10 Philip Langdon 2 years (2013)
11 Matt Lawlor* 2 years (2013)
12 Ben Morton* 3 years (2014)
13 Patrick Pinnell* 3 years (2014)
14 Donald Powers* 2 years (2013)
15 Marian Pressley* 3 years (2014)
16 Keith Rand 1 year (2012) (Student Director)
17 Kathryn Schulte* 3 years (2014)
18 Stephanie Zurek* 2 years (2013)
* - Continuing member.

Proposed Slate of Officers

Position/Name

President/Russell Preston
Vice President/Stephanie Zurek
Treasurer/Matt Lawlor
Clerk/Robin Bergstrom

Officers hold their positions for one (1) year, until the next Annual Meeting of the Members.

VI. Other Business
VII. Adjournment

Blog Post No. 2011-3: Four Green Fields at One Boston Place...

2011-02-28T18:10:00.000-05:00

Because really incremental improvements are sometimes worth looking at if the baseline was really bad.

(1)

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(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

Photos: Taken with my new Droid Incredible by HTC (yes, I know it's already a couple of steps behind the newest-latest, but that's how it's done here at RTUF) smart phone, so the pix aren't quite as nice as they could be: (1) Looking at the front of the public house from the sidewalk on Washington Street; (2) A bit longer view, from across Washington Street; (3) The edge of the pub and the main building entrance for One Boston Place (aka, 201 Washington Street); (4) Looking toward the end of Washington Street, with the Ames Building and the Washington Place pedestrian mall and the Old State House; (5) Main entrance from across Washington Street; and (6) A view up Court Street with the Court Street entrance and the Boston School Committee building beyond.

Location: One Boston Place (201 Washington Street), Boston, MA.

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2011.

The Story: So, in the interest of full disclosure, this is where your faithful RTUF correspondent works (not in the pub, but in the building above). This building -- which I refer to as the "big black building with the black box on top across the street from the Old State House" whenever asked -- had to, in its original configuration, have been one of the most uninviting buildings anywhere in Boston. Designed by Pietro Brulleschi and developed by Cabot Cabot & Forbes as the new headquarters for The Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company in 1970, the old street level exterior resembled nothing so much as a crypt or a bunker. It was one forbidding building, let me tell you, and it sent out the message that no one need come near it who didn't have some serious business to transact inside. The buidling entrances on both Washington and Court streets were set within low-slung, horizontal brown granite blocks with no canopies and almost no way to see inside the building and afterthought planters and benches on the residual space between the building and street on both sides. Bad, bad, bad, and especially so considering that the Old State House across Washington Street has a rich history as the oldest public building in Boston, the seat of the old colonial government, the new state's seat of government until Bulfinch's New State House was built on Beacon Hill in the early 19th century, and the site of the Boston Massacre in March of 1771.

Perhaps the acquisition of The Boston Company by Mellon and Mellon's merger with BNY in the 1990s and early 2000s led to a renewed look at the buidling and its potential to draw tenants on its own as the headquarters footprint was reduced. Whatever the cause, in the early 2000s, the building's owners started a program of making the ground level more transparent and comfortable (hence the glass walls and canopy) and improving the public space between the building and the adjoining streets. The final step in that rethinking and reimagining is the restaurant space simply by putting windows where formerly there were blank walls and seeding a patio where none was really considered before. This part of the plan has finally borne fruit in the opening of Four Green Fields, an Irish pub and restaurant, just this month. So far, the pub is drwaing crowds and come spring and summer after this classic New England winter, it seems reasonable to expect patio seating in what is a shady spot given its northeast exposure. With the restoration of the Ames Buidling at the end of Washington Street and the installation of a decidedly upscale patio area there, it is fair to say that this end of Washington Street hasn't had so much to recommend it to the casual visitor in a long, long time.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: The hatched area here is the street level extension of the building outside of the footprint of the office tower above. We'll report back in the spring/summer on whether the patio scene actually develops.

FINAL RTUF Note: Over the weekend, we went over the 2,000 visit mark! Many thanks to everyone out there in RTUF Nation who has come and taken a look and, even better, commented. - MJL

Blog Post No. 2011-2: Flexible outdoor space (is it a parking lot? a courtyard? a mid-block passage? YES!!!)...

2011-02-06T22:57:00.000-05:00

...and the Globe discusses some seriously "inside urban design" stuff

Item 1: One space, well designed for many purposes -- These are images from "Across-the-River" from God's Acre (Roslindale, to the unitiated) over in Cambridge, in this case a passageway between Mt. Auburn Street and Arrow Street near Harvard Square. This particular passageway runs between St. Paul's church (on the left in photo 1, background in photo 2, and on the right in photo 4) and the Harvard Catholic Student Center/Boston Archdiocesan Choir School (on the right in photo 1, background in photo 3, and on the left in photo 4). The archway connects the student center/school and the church and provides handicapped access via an elevator as well as an excellent architectural feature. Now, you may ask me: "Say, RTUF Guy, what were you doing in Cambridge? Don't you live in God's Acre (aka Roslindale), on the other side of the Charles River?" To which I would answer, if the question were posed, "Yes, I know, but my son now goes to school at St. Paul's and we are spending A LOT OF TIME to the north of the river, and I'm finding it not so bad over there." Truly, Harvard Square has a lot to offer, with many new buildings having been added over the last couple of decades that may be worth a post or two in the coming months. Of course, some really, really bad buildings were allowed to creep in over the course of the immediate post-war decades (including, but by no means limited to, the Holyoke Center). But overall, the area remains one of the region's great urban places and one that -- the recession having knocked out more than a couple of the national chains that had flooded the square in the last decade -- seems to be returning to its roots.

But to return to the passageway between Mount Auburn and Arrow, it's all of the things described in the title to this post -- a parking lot, a courtyard, a mid-block passageway -- and it's an aesthetically pleasing thing as well. Not an easy effect to achieve. Of course, use of shade trees to mark the spaces helps and the opportunity to be located next to as dignified a building as St. Paul's church doesn't hurt either. In a city where off-street parking is at an absolute premium, it might have been possible to gain an extra parking space on each side without the trees. But the overall space would be much less than it is. A small place that performs remarkably well.

Item 2: It's out in the open now. So, at last year's CNU in Atlanta, Andres Duany's "big idea" presentation focused on the threat posed by "Landscape Urbanism." I'll stipulate right now that I haven't read the Landscape Urbanism literature and so am NOT up on the substantive arguments at stake and whether Landscape Urbanism is as much of a wolf in green sheep's clothing as Duany seems to believe. But I will say that I am impressed that the donnybrook between "LU" and "NU" made it into the general circulation press with an article in last Sunday's Boston Globe: "Green building. Are cities the best place to live?Are suburbs OK? A fight grows in urban planning, with Harvard at the center." It appears that, for what it's worth, the LUers have taken over the Harvard Graduate School of Design and MIT and are, in the views of New Urbanists, coopting the use of the word "urbanism" in a way that is, shall we say, not helpful (to grossly simplify). Again, leaving aside the substantive dispute between Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism, the piece, penned by Leon Neyfakh, has one factual whopper and one ironic twist, as follows:

Factual Whopper: The very first paragraph of the piece declares that New Urbanism "originated in the 1970s and has enjoyed decades as the dominant force in American city planning..." Now, I've been paying attention to these issues since the mid-1980s, actually went through a city planning masters program in the early 1990s, and have stayed in the field since then. I must assure you, dear RTUF readers, that I am not entirely sure that New Urbanism is even today the "dominant force" in planning circles, let alone enjoying "decades" of dominance. Rather, New Urbanism has been principally a movement of practitioners, largely shut out of the academy and only very recently enjoying a modicum of grudging acceptance at places like the Harvard GSD and MIT. To declare otherwise is a misreading of the record, though perhaps one that allows Landscape Urbanism to be presented to unsuspecting readers as the real upstart rebels against the powers that be. Totally inaccurate. If anything, Landscape Urbanism appears to be the established academy's response to the perceived threat of New Urbanism, not the other way around.

Ironic Twist: That New Urbanism, a movement that undeniably began with greenfield development at suburban densities, should now be presented as exemplary champions of the central city and high urban density qualifies as an ironic twist in this observer's book. Especially so when those who are attacking that supposed "city-first" orientation are the ones who for a long, long time claimed that New Urbanism had nothing to do with or say to urban conditions and was merely the "New Suburbanism." Ultimately, claiming that one group favors the city over the suburb or vice-versa is of only limited utility. New Urbanism is not about getting rid of all suburbs or buidling high and dense in all locations. Rather, for New Urbanists the ultimate question is whether development occurring at various densities and in various contexts in a region is promoting "the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy." In short, whether we're building sprawl or something better. Apologizing for sprawl is not, my friends, going to cut it, no matter how you couch it.

The running dispute, as described by the Globe article, is now in the process of being virally spread through the vast echo-chamber of the intertubes (including here, of course). So, one of the Globe's own blogs "The Angle" has picked it up, along with, among others, Joe Urban on the CNU.org website, where it's been announced that Charles Waldheim, champion of Landscape Urbanism, will debate Duany on the topic at CNU 19 in Madison in early June. A fellow blogspot poster at "Landscape+Urbanism" posted on Friday about the article and urges those involved on both sides of the debate to get to know what the other is talking about before racing to a conclusion. Good advice, that, and worth doing regardless of what's being discussed. Having stipulated at the start that I haven't dug into the material sufficiently to really take part, I'll be trying to remedy that going forward, especially since GSD and MIT are right here in Boston, though they are, you know, north of the Charles and all.

Blog Post No. 2011-1: 131 Dartmouth helps smooth the transition of the High Spine into the South End...

2011-01-13T22:08:00.001-05:00

...and gives us an opportunity to consider again how Boston dodged a potentially very damaging freeway bullet

Photos: Quite frankly, RTUF is having trouble manipulating photos on our "new" apple computer, and so unable to get the order quite right with the pix, but (1) view across Dartmouth Street with Back Bay Station to the left; (2) looking from Clarendon Street; (2a) context shot of Back Bay Station from Clarendon Street; (3) closer-in view of the office entrance; (4) another view across Dartmouth Street, but this time showing how the building steps down toward the South End; (4a) decent view of the lower volume of the building and how well it reads as a South End row; and (5) another view of the office entrance.

Location: 131 Dartmouth Street, Boston (South End), MA.

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2002

The Story: Before we get down to business, hope everyone out there in RTUF Nation had safe and happy holidays and is off to a great start for 2011! Given the lack of posts, you can guess that December was rather hectic. But now we're back and ready for another year of fun as we scan Boston's built landscape for signs of improvement.

Today, whether because of the colossal expense, the sheer engineering feat its construction represented, or the tragic death of Milena DelValle in 2006 when a chunk of the tunnel ceiling fell onto the car she was traveling in, most everyone is familiar with the Central Artery/Third Tunnel project, better known as the "Big Dig." That mega-project submerged the former elevated Central Artery highway that separated downtown Boston from the North End and the waterfront and built a new, third tunnel under Boston Harbor from South Boston to Logan Airport. As a general rule, most are glad that one of the worst violations of the city's urban fabric has been repaired despite the costs. But few today likely remember that the Central Artery was originally intended to be only one link in a network of inner-city highway links including the Inner Belt, the Northwest Expressway, the Northeast Expressway, and, most importantly for this entry's discussion, the Southwest Expressway.

As described at the foregoing link, the route for that expressway evolved over time, but it was ultimately planned to run north-northeast from where I-95 currently ends in Canton through the Boston neighborhoods of Hyde Park, Roslindale, Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, and the South End roughly along the alignment of the then-New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad mainline to link up with the Inner Belt/I-695, which was intended to run in a semi-circle through Somerville, Cambridge, Brookline, and the South End, connecting to I-93 at both ends. Plans for the Southwest Expressway and essentially the entire inner-city network were abandoned during the Freeway Revolt of the late 1960s/early 1970s. And let me tell you, as a resident of Roslindale: that decision is largely responsible for Roslindale's "Can't get there from here" sense of being largely and happily off the map, at least as far as the regional highway system goes. Had the Southwest Expressway been built, we might have had better auto access but the blocks adjoining the freeway on either side would have been permanently blighted. Roslindale Square's excellent overall transit service -- commuter rail station in the middle and multiple bus lines converging on the one-mile section of Washington Street leading north to Forest Hills station on the Orange Line -- more than compensates for the lack of highway access. It's a feature, not a bug, in my view.

Now, by the time the plug on new limited access highways inside Route 128 was finally pulled, significant, but not complete, land takings and even clearance had occurred along substantial portions of the proposed route, especially in Jamaica Plain and Roxbury. The funds originally designated for the Southwest Expressway were then re-deployed to relocate the southern end of the MBTA's Orange Line from its elevated route down Washington Street to a new alignment within a "Southwest Corridor" linear park stretching from Forest Hills into Back Bay Station. And so, a new Back Bay Station was conceived as part of the project and opened in 1987. Designed by Kallman, McKinney and Wood, the station recalls the prior stations on the location with its multiple archways and central arched space, but has plenty of exposed structural concrete representing the late 20th century and the wave of investment in Boston's public transit system that swept across the region in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the rejection of interstate largesse.

Land takings and clearance around Back Bay Station were extensive, both for the expressway and as part of the South End Urban Renewal Plan pursued by the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Across Dartmouth Street, citizen activism in the late 1960s over cleared but unused land resulted in the Tent City protest and ultimately the Tent City mixed-use/mixed-income project. The land directly abutting the station between Dartmouth and Clarendon Streets to the south/east was never part of the eminent domain takings, but the former row buildings and 3-story parking garage were ultimately cleared and then took until 2002 to finally fill back in with (and now we get to it) the 131 Dartmouth Street building featured in the photos. The building, designed by Somerville's Arrowstreet Architects, does about as good a job as can be imagined in fitting a new, 12-story mixed-used structure onto a fairly constrained site. The architecture is informed by the South End and its historic brick row houses, but it never devolves into kitschiness and presents extremely well at the street level. And of course, it's the very edge of the High Spine (see Blog Post No. 2009-8), so the medium height the building and the way it steps down toward the lower rise South End helps the transition from the higher parts of the spine a couple of blocks to the north.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: You can see just how well the building fills out its site in this sketch. It really does exactly what it needs to do in as closely knit an area as the South End.

Blog Post No. 2010-22: Robert Campbell writes about the MFA's new wing...

2010-11-30T22:06:00.004-05:00

...and RTUF likes what it hears and has already seen over there in recent years

Regular RTUFers may recall (OK, if you're like me, maybe you don't actually recall anything unless you write it down someplace or you're specifically reminded) that I wrote a little bit about the series of initial, relatively subtle but still urban design-influential changes going on over at the Museum of Fine Arts back in July (Update to Blog Post No. 2010-14). That, of course, was while the museum's new wing -- showcasing its Art of the Americas collection -- was still under construction. That wing is now complete and open to the public. In true celebration, at least from this blogger's perspective, we have Robert Campbell's return to the pages of the Boston Globe in a too-brief but typically insightful review of the wing's architecture from a week ago Saturday in a piece entitled "A wing that works." Soon enough, I'll take myself over to the MFA and be able to write back on whether the interior galleries and other spaces deserve the high praise that Robert gives them. For now, though, putting aside his verdict that the exterior doesn't really do much, I'd like to focus on two points from his piece, the first relatively minor, the second a big deal for RTUF given our focus here on urban design:

FIRST, the subtitle of the article is

"The beauty of the MFA's expansion is how it showcases the art without calling attention to itself."

And in this, Robert is exactly on the money, contrasting the design by Foster + Partners with Gehry's splashy Bilbao Guggenheim, which is posited as the start of "starchitects" around the globe drawing more attention to museum buildings than the works of art they are meant to house and display. Of course, being from New York, and this is my relatively minor point, I would go back to Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the original Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue in New York as a mid-20th century example of that precise phenomenon. Who thought that a museum could look like a giant toilet bowl?! How novel! How interesting! How disorienting to try to look at art on a spiraling, slanted walkway! How different from everything around it! Exactly right and an example of the phenomenon of a Modernist building's essentially anti-urban character being saved by the incredibly strong urban fabric all around it. The Guggenheim in New York is definitely an icon. Does it provide a comfortable and fitting home for the art it's meant to house and display? I've been there a number of times. I'm not convinced, even with the high-rise tower completed several years ago completing Wright's original design.

SECOND, Robert is at his best in the piece when talks about how the new wing represents the culmination of the MFA's now long-running effort to undo some pretty awful building access and layout decisions from the last quarter of the last century:

Finally, for the first time in my experience, it's now possible to figure out where you are in the MFA. Since the opening of the museum's West Wing in 1981, designed by noted architect I.M. Pei, that's been almost impossible. Most visitors entered through the Pei wing at the extreme end of the museum and quickly got lost in what seemed to be disorder.

The first thing Foster + Partners did was study the floor plan of the original MFA of 1909, by architect Guy Lowell. Lowell's plan, like much traditional architecture, was based on the human body. You entered at the head, and the building wings spread out symmetrically to the left and right like arms. It's a kind of order we grasp intuitively.

Foster has restored that old order. The Pei entry will be now used only for bus groups. The rest of us will again enter the museum at its center, either from the Fenway or from Huntington Avenue. A spine of visitor services — ticketing, tourist shop, information — now connects those two entrances.

To help you further with your wayfinding, openings between galleries tend to be lined up with one another, creating long vistas you can look or walk down. It’s an effect that was called Parade Rooms in an earlier era. The vistas let you see one part of the museum from another. They lace everything together visually. Often, for further legibility, the curators and architects site an especially bold or famous artwork at the termination of a vista.

I fully agree with Robert's comment that the old way of entering the museum at the extreme end of one side was a conceptually sub-par experience for every single visitor forced to endure it. The contrast with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York -- with its grand staircase and entrance hall welcoming visitors and giving them an immediate point of reference -- could not have been more obvious. A link here to the MFA's new floor plans would be useful in seeing what Robert means in terms of the museum's access points and layout now being much more intuitive than before. Similarly, the below RTUF sketch tries to highlight the exterior changes at work here -- the original entrances facing on Huntington Avenue and The Fenway have been reopened and re-emphasized, the parking lot entrance has, as Robert describes, been de-emphasized and is now only to be used for groups, and Forsyth Way is getting a much needed facelift now that the museum is more open to that side of its exterior.

Much of the credit obviously goes to Foster + Partners and their local team members, CBT, for getting the precise vision, execution, and details right. But I think substantial credit also needs to go to Malcolm Rogers, who has been the museum's director for the last decade-and-a-half. I will plead total ignorance on his stewardship of the museum's collections and whether he is a tyrant or a genius, or perhaps both. There is no denying, however, that it has been on his watch that the MFA has raised the funds, spent the design effort, and made the physical changes both small and large that have opened the MFA to the broader community -- both physically and symbolically -- in a way that it arguably has never been. This is a point recently made in, of all places, the Boston Phoenix, which featured an extensive cover article by Greg Cook entitled "OMFG: The new MFA " and a spot-on editorial about Rogers headlined "Mister Rogers: The MFA's Impresario." The Phoenix's editors say of the new wing and Rogers:

In the most expansive sense, the Art of the Americas Wing, while self-contained, operates in service to the larger MFA. It provides the well-established collections with room to breath properly and re-establishes a harmonious flow among the staggering number of older galleries.

The idea of service is the glue that binds Rogers's 16-year tenure. In the past, the MFA was run as something of a private preserve that just happened to be open to the public.

The degree to which this was true may have varied from department to department, but the old MFA was a collection of fiefdoms that only appeared to operate in concert the farther away you viewed it.

Rogers, with varying degrees of skill and success, has managed to recast the MFA into a multi-disciplinary whole dedicated to internal growth and institutional survival by serving the public.

Wherever the truth lies in Rogers's role in brining the museum's staff and collections to a new level, there can be no doubting that the MFA is a much better piece of the urban fabric today than it has been in a long, long time, perhaps ever.

UPDATE (23 Dec 2010): Good friend and fellow runner Professor Matt Noonan called me out recently for writing about something that I hadn't gone and seen (at least not in its finished state), so herewith are some pictures of the exterior of the new wing that your faithful RTUF correspondent took very recently. Once the holiday craziness dies down, we'll actually go inside and let you know what we think of the interior.

A note on the photos: They run effectively in order from the Huntington Avenue facade around Forsyth Way and onto the Fenway, ending up looking at the West Wing across the surface parking lot referred to above.

UPDATE (24 Jan 2011): Well, over the weekend, we finally got a look inside the new wing and see how the museum works in its new, expanded form. Put simply, everything Robert Campbell said was true. The MFA works and makes much more sense now. The new galleries do a great job of showcasing the MFA's strengths in American art, and showing, by the dearth of space given over to South and Central America, where it needs improvement. I recall that Campbell was not entirely sure how well the new main space would work: I think it works just fine. I don't know whether it really needs more art work to be placed in it to give it more interest. You can see that one end is held up quite well by the former exterior of the original museum, and at least in mid-winter, you can see the (snow-covered) greenery on either side. Ending with some photos of that space:

Blog Post No. 2010-21: Seizing the presently available opportunity to continue the campaign to bring the Pru out to meet its neighbors...

2010-11-15T19:50:00.005-05:00

...in the Back Bay and South End

A rendering of Avalon Exeter viewed from Boylston Street over the Lord & Taylor building (credit: Boston Properties, Elkus Manfredi).

Ted Siefer, a Boston Globe correspondent who's been writing recently on a wide variety of home and real estate-related topics as well as producing content for The Phoenix and WBUR, did a fine job in Saturday's paper in describing how a current development proposal does both in "Apartment building ready to rise". AvalonBay Communities is predicting construction start on Avalon Exeter, a 28-story rental apartment building located on the Prudential Center complex (MAP) that straddles the border of the Back Bay and the South End, in the spring of next year.

Multifamily development, especially in a rental market like Boston's with its high built-in demand, high rental rates, and low vacancy with little new product coming online, is the current conventional wisdom's financing fair-haired child. Almost nothing else is moving forward right now in a meaningful way -- certainly not general office given the employment situation, not ownership residential given the continued inability of that market to find a positive direction several years into the subprimte/foreclosure meltdown, and also not retail development given continued softness in the consumer economy (though there are some isolated bright spots). No, ladies and gentlemen, the smart money right now and for the foreseeable future is on multifamily rental and that counts as our "presently available opportunity" for today's post.

Which brings us to the "bring the Pru out to meet the neighbors" part of the post. That's the way the design of the new tower and, equally as importantly, its location continues the multi-year effort by the owner of the overall Prudentail Center complex -- Boston Properties -- to fill in the exterior edges of the massive complex and make it act more like a piece of the urban fabric in this critical urban location, rather than a sealed-off enclave behind vacuous and little used open spaces. This trend was cited in one of the first posts on this blog -- No. 2009-3 just over a year ago -- about the Mandarin Oriental building on Boylston Street and how it had quite elegantly filled in a gap in the Pru's exterior on Boylston Street. Boston Properties has been doing that all over the place -- with the curving Belvedere residential building on that street's frontage, the office tower at 111 Huntington Avenue (famous for its crown, reportedly the brain-child of the Mayor himself), new one- and two-story connections along Huntington Avenue itself with a relocated and upgraded Shaw's supermarket, and a more open design to the Lord & Taylor store on Boylston Street.

All of these changes have made the Pru a far better neighbor than it has ever been, and Boston Properties has a plan approved already to fill in the last big gap on Boylston with an office building dubbed "888 Boylston." The office market being what it is, it may be some time before that building moves forward. But, as noted above, the multifamily rental market is still going well and AvalonBay, having taken over ownership and management of the pricey but frankly urban design-deficient residential towers at the Pru, is now finally ready to break ground on a residential building that will fill in the exterior gap on the east, along Exeter Street between Huntington and Boylston. The rendering in the article doesn't have much detail but it does seem to show the new building creating a strong street edge and ground-level uses on Exeter. And below, some context...

In order: 888 Boylston Street (the proposed office tower further up Boylston (credit: Boston Properties)), 1960s-vintage postcard showing the under-construction Prudential as object building resting on its low-slung podium (credit unavailable), the residential towers on the eastern end of the site as originally built (note the surrounding plaza space (credit: Boston Properties)), the curving Belvidere residential building that encloses the Belvedere-Dalton Street frontage (credit noted).

Blog Post No. 2010-20: The Carruth makes Ashmont Station feel more...

2010-10-30T17:21:00.000-04:00

...like a place, not just space to get through

The location: 1908 Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester, MA at Ashmont Station (near Peabody Square) (MAP).

The photos: (1) The flat-iron view of the building, from the north, along Dorchester Avenue; (2) Closer-up view of the entrance, showing the coffee shop, outdoor seating, and a planter/fountain feature on the left; (3) Dorchester Avenue streetscape (wide sidewalk, substantial street trees); (4) A view back north from inside the relocated busway toward Peabody Square; (5) View across the busway to the "back side" of the building; and (6) the cornerstone.

Year of urban fabric restoration: 2008 (see cornerstone).

The Story: It is a sad, unmistakable fact that the second half of the 20th century in the United States was, from a pedestrian-oriented urban design perspective, one long, virtually uniform nightmare for our urban places. With a thorough-ness and focus that could only be called admirable but for its outcome, we designed practically every inch of our built environment with one and only one goal in mind: to make it easier to travel around by single-occupant motor vehicle. We widened our streets. We eliminated on-street parking. We bulldozed entire city blocks to make way for surface parking in urban cores. We rammed interstate highways -- roads designed for the uninterrupted movement of goods through rural open spaces at high speeds -- through our downtowns and neighborhoods. And, in one of the sadder ironies of all, we surrounded many of our existing and, to the extent we built any, new transit facilities with surface parking lots and beefed-up auto access whenever possible. The idea there being that nearly everyone would access our transit systems by getting into their cars, driving to the station, parking, and then boarding a train.

Over the last 2 decades or so, we have begun to reverse all of these trends in the field of transportation. And one of the most visible signs of that reversal has been the rise of "Transit-Oriented Development," which is essentially the idea that transit facilities represent substantial public investments that can promote walkability and compact, land-efficient development if we plan and zone the areas around stations to accommodate that development. In short: Don't surround new or existing train stations with surface parking -- surround them with buildings and, if you think you really need them, parking garages that fit into the desired pattern of development. With a great many of the new or expanded systems around the U.S., this is simply common sense. I'm thinking most obviously of the fantastic work done in Portland, OR, and Charlotte, NC, with the station area planning around their new light rail transit systems, but this kind of thinking has been in play for new systems and extensions all around the country. Advance planning to ensure TODs around new stations instead of parking lots is well underway for the Green Line extension from Lechmere through Somerville and for the proposed South Coast Rail Project to Fall River and New Bedford.

But in a region like Boston, with a mature transit system and strong existing patterns of development, we have a huge range of opportunities to go back and retrofit existing station areas that were inappropriately forced into serving the car. Prime existing examples include Woodland on the D Branch of the Green Line in Newton and Station Landing on the Orange Line in Medford. TODs on the drawing boards, but stalled by the economy, include the massive NorthPoint development in East Cambridge adjacent to Lechmere Station, Westwood Station adjacent to the Route 128 Station in Westwood, and Waterfront Square at Revere Beach, adjacent to Wonderland Station. [DISCLAIMER: Your RTUF correspondent represents the developer of the last named project in his day job.] The Carruth building, erected at Ashmont Station in Dorchester through a public-private partnership between Trinity Financial and the MBTA, is an example of doing TOD perfectly in an already well-urbanized setting. The new building forms the missing street wall on Dorchester Avenue at Ashmont Station, just to the south of Peabody Square. In a neighborhood as large and as racially, ethnically, and socio-economically mixed as Dorchester, Peabody Square is never going to turn into Wellesley Square, and that's more than OK. For the foreseeable future, it will remain a melting pot, and The Carruth represents another ingredient to go along with other newcomers like Ashmont Grill, identified on the google map along Talbot Avenue. With its mix of market-rate homeownership and affordable rental units (42 and 74, respectively) above 10,000 square feet of retail including a Wainwright Bank branch, a coffee shop (my personal favorite local chain - Flatblack), the office for the local main streets organization, and Tavola, a new Mediterranean cuisine restaurant, the project is a virtual microcosm of the surrounding neighborhood within itself. As usual with Trinity and Icon Architects (their designers), the details are right on. I am especially partial to the flatiron view of the building. As faithful RTUF Nation citizens know, I am a New Yorker and one of my favorite buildings is the Flatiron Building in Madison Square. I have always been particularly impressed at how the building carried the shape of its constrained site so high into the air. The Carruth achieves the same iconic status here. It seems destined to be a symbol of the area for years to come.

The RTUF Sketch: The Carruth artfully bridges the space between the Dorchester Avenue street frontage and Ashmont Station itself.

Blog Post No. 2010-18: Vote No on Question 2

2010-09-30T21:33:00.004-04:00

Stepping out of RTUF's general attempt to be neutral (or at least appear neutral) in all things...

In my day job, I recently helped organize and moderated a panel at a continuing legal education program at the Boston Bar Association regarding Question 2 on this year's Massachusetts fall election ballot. If passed by the voters on November 2nd, Question 2 would repeal Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 40B, Sections 20-23, variously known as the "Anti-Snob Zoning Act," "the Affordable Housing Law," the "Comprehensive Permit Act," or simply and somewhat misleadingly (since there are clearly many other sections within the chapter) "Chapter 40B." Boiled down, the law, which entered its existence in 1969 (the same year as your correspodent's own birth), does essentially 3 things:

1. Establishes an affordable housing "fair share" target of 10% for each and every city and town in the Commonwealth.
2. Provides that projects including at least 20-25% of their units as qualifying "affordable units" proposed in a city or town that is below the fair share target may seek a "Comprehensive Permit" from the local Zoning Board of Appeals that consolidates multiple local permits in a single decision and may override local zoning and other regulations.
3. Allows a Comprehensive Permit applicant to seek relief from an adverse local ZBA decision in the Housing Appeals Committee, a special state administrative forum that strongly favors approval of proposed projects.

I won't go into all of the back-and-forth on Chapter 40B's original intent, its somewhat checkered recent past, or the literally hundreds of previous legislative proposals for its repeal or radical revision over the decades. Suffice it to say here that Chapter 40B has been quite effective at delivering substantial numbers of mixed-income projects all across the Commonwealth's suburban communities. Suffice it here to also say that it has also evolved into virtually the only mechanism for getting any multi-family or even small lot residential development done in those communities. Quite simply: Chapter 40B or the threat of a proposed project "going" Chapter 40B has been the only way to build anything other than large-lot single-family developments in those same communities.

All of that being the case, and the Commonwealth facing a housing affordability challenge that hasn't been significantly lessened in the recent Great Recession (because we've lost less value in comparison to other regions of the country), the argument can and has been made that Chapter 40B's survival is more critical now than ever. And even if one were to accept the argument that Chapter 40B is too blunt an instrument -- what with its single fair share housing target and meat axe approach to overriding local regulation -- to survive in this more enlightened age, you still have the problem of what you're going to do to achieve the same affordable housing goals. Jon Witten, the Duxbury attorney who is the prime legal mover among repeal proponents, has advocated in print (and at the above-mentioned CLE) that we can achieve the same ends as Chapter 40B with a rational, comprehensive planning and zoning system, something we currently lack in Massachusetts as a statewide matter. Now, far be it from RTUF to denigrate planning, but there are plenty of places with comprehensive planning and zoning systems that still have housing affordability issues. But even if one accepts that argument, it is still true that approving Question 2 would only achieve the first part of the bargain -- doing away with the exsiting law. Until Question 2's proponents can come up with a second part of the bargain -- a workable system to achieve the same ends -- and are willing to pair it on the ballot with repeal so that they are unalterably linked, you may rest assured that this Massachusetts voter will be voting no.

DISCLAIMER: This blog post represents the author's own opinion and not the opinion of the Boston Bar Association or any other private, non-profit, or public entity with whom the author is associated or by whom the author is employed.

Blog Post No. 2010-17: One Charles finally fills out Park Square

2010-09-13T05:45:00.001-04:00

Over thirty years after the area's urban renewal plan was adopted

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The location: One Charles Street South, Boston, MA -- in the vicinity of Park Square/Park Plaza, a block from Boston Common and the Public Garden (Map link here).

The photos: Moving clockwise around the building: (1) view from Columbus Avenue/Park Plaza; (2) cornerstone (credit going to Handel Architects for the building's design); (3) , (4), & (5) the Charles Street South facade; (6) rounding the corner onto Stuart; (7) Stuart Street facade; and (8) the Eliot Street/Park Square alley between the building and the Motormart Garage.

Year of urban fabric restoration: 2004 (see cornerstore in Photo 2).

The Story: So, yes, RTUF Nation, we're back after the August hiatus. We did have a refreshingly hot and dry summer this year, so the opportunities to get out of town and enjoy the weather were more attractive and more often taken than in the recent past. I am especially thinking of last year's "Lost Summer" in which June was an utter wreck and July and August didn't do nearly enough to make up for it. If you add the increased running-around to the fact that the pace of business in the part of my life that pays the bills showed some signs of real life last month, you're left with precious little time to do blog postings.

In any event, we're back now with a prime example of urban fabric restoration in one of downtown Boston's most critical areas: Park Square/Park Plaza. Our subject this month is the 17-story combined retail/residential building known as One Charles, located in the block bounded by Charles Street South, Park Plaza, Stuart Street, and the Park Square/Eliot Street alley. As discussed in the blog entry from last year regarding the rear addition at the Four Seasons Hotel (Blog Post No. 2009-7, "The Back of the Four Seasons Hotel: Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference (The first in a series...)"), the broader area around One Charles, taking in the Heritage on the Garden building, the Four Seasons Hotel, and the State Transportation Building across Charles Street South (affectionately known as the "Big Brick Building"), has been redeveloped over a 30+ year span under the auspices of the Park Plaza Urban Renewal Plan.

That plan was just one of many urban renewal plans adopted by the Boston Redevelopment Authority in the 1960s and 1970s across much of central Boston, stretching from as far west as the Fenway neighobrhood all the way to the waterfront. As is well known, urban renewal plans from that era in Boston and elsewhere in the U.S. were not without controversy and many, many lessons learned. That it took several decades to fill out the central redevelopment area is also emblematic of the long timeframes involved in urban redevelopment, even in an effort as successful overall the Park Plaza plan. It is helpful for everyone typically involved in major urban redevelopment efforts to bear that timeframe in mind: patience and an ability not to lose focus over the long haul are the keys to ultimate success. And One Charles is an excellent example of the positive results that are possible if those two ingredients are present. It fills its block out to the very edges, as required in such an urban setting. Even so, however, and despite the building's height, it does not feel imposing. To me, the pass-through continuation of Eliot Street at the ground level (you can see the entrance from Charles Street in Photo 3) and the way the building pays close attention to the Park Plaza/Charles Street intersection and the visual axis along Columbus Avenue are just a few of the details that allow the building to read as a careful insertion into the urban fabric rather than something that was helicoptered in and intended to obliterate everything below and ignore everything around.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: One Charles fits its site virtually perfectly.

Blog Post No. 2010-16: Three July Things

2010-07-31T17:08:00.002-04:00

They report it, we give it the once over...

As much of the Boston region prepares to enter the August hiatus, we here at RTUF are far from asleep at the wheel. We are continuing to scour the print and intertube-based media for spicy tidbits of information related to the urban fabric here in the Hub. In the last third of this, the month of birthdays (my daughter's, my brother's, Harry Potter's), we have indeed had some exciting news:

First up: We here at RTUF thought a good temporary location for the Boston Public Market while it continued its Odysseus-like search for a permanent home was City Hall Plaza, but they have finally found their proverbial Ithaca in the first floor of the combined retail-office-garage building on Greenway Parcel 7. This is the building on Congress Street sandwiched between the Government Center Garage and the Blackstone Block near Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market. The news reported in the Globe this week indicates that the commonwealth has finally done the right thing and designated them as the tentative tenant of that space, subject to release of about $4 Million in state bond funds (of the total $10 Million allocated) and gap fundraising to the tune of approximately $3 Million. Congratulations BPMA! Raise those funds and get open as soon as possible!

Next: Restoration work on the Longfellow Bridge, aka the "Salt and Pepper" bridge, that links Cambridge Street in Boston with Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge and has the Red Line running down the middle, is finally about to start this fall. As reported, again, in the Globe, the first phase will be principally exploratory with actual construction work to start in the spring. That phasing is helping put off the decision on final configuration of the restored bridge, about which there appears to be lively debate. There are multiple stakeholders here, including public entities -- the cities themselves, MassDOT, which has charge of the bridge itself, and the MBTA -- and private actors in including MGH, Mass Eye and Ear, and bicycle and walking advocacy organizations. To my mind, the most compelling vision is from WalkBoston, which is pushing for a road diet that would result in one fewer vehicular traffic lane in each direction than is currently the case. If that happens, the bridge would have the potential to become a prime strolling and viewing venue -- and its views of the Esplanade, Charles River Basin and downtown are truly inspring -- on a par with some of the world's great urban bridges. There are of course countervailing concerns about where the traffic could be expected to go and what would happen to emergency vehicles trying to reach MGH and MEEI if the single inbound lane were blocked or full of traffic. As a former transportation planner, this is going to be a fascinating debate. We'll follow it and let you know how it turns out.

And finally: Going back to my hometown where another transportation-related debate has been brewing in the Bronx over the Tri-State Transportation Campaign's long-running effort to get the elevated Sheridan Expressway demolished and replaced with a boulevard. The poster child for this kind of an effort is the former Embarcadero Freeway along the waterfront in San Francisco, which was condemned after the Loma Prieta Earthquake 20 years ago and replaced with a bouelvard instead of a new highway. The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago that a recent NYSDOT study had concluded that traffic that would have been on the Sheridan would end up on local roads if it were removed. I can't say that's really surprising, but the Times reports that it's a "blow" to removal proponents. We'll have to stay tuned.

Blog Post No. 2010-15: The Liberty Tree Building

2010-07-21T23:09:00.001-04:00

Ably Restored and Contributing Again

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Location: The Liberty Tree Building, 630 Wasington Street (at Boylston/Essex Streets), Boston, MA

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 1998

Photos: (1) Looking from the corner diagonally across Washington Street; (2) Same vantage point, but looking down the Essex Street facade of the building; (3) View of the upper stories; (4) the Liberty Tree plaque on the Washington Street facade of the building; (5) Longer view of the Washington Street facade; (6) Point of contact between the Liberty Tree Building and Archstone Boston Common building; and (7) Liberty Tree memorial across Washington Street from the building.

The Story: This is another building that Campbell/Vanderwarker covered in Cityscapes of Boston, chronicling its decline in the second half of the last century. When they wrote in 1992, the building was at perhaps its lowest ebb, with the upper stories and much of the ground floor boarded up, windows filled with cinder block, and the building highly deteriorated. The Combat Zone, which had dictated the building's use for the 20+ years before that point, was rapidly shrinking and the area was poised for a new wave of development seeking to capitalize on the very close proximity of Boston Common a block away and the Orange Line below. The restored Liberty Tree Building, tenanted by a relocated state Registry of Motor Vehicles office and the ubiquitous Dunkin' Donuts franchise, arrived almost simultaneously with the Millennium Partners development diagonally across Washington Street. That development, which produced a new multi-screen movie theater with its main entrance on Tremont Street facing the Common as well as additional high-end retail, a new Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and luxury condominiums, truly changed the face of this stretch of downtown Boston. Immediately on its heels came the building that is now Archstone Boston Common, which abuts the Liberty Tree Building in Photo 6. From my non-architect's perspective, the restoration to the Liberty Tree Building was ably done. The big RMV sign references in its style and location the old-style building facade signs that were a hallmark of Boston's commercial districts around the turn of the last century. There is a quiet dignity in the rhythm of the facade's windows and storefronts. The building looks better now than it has for at least a half century if not more.

As for the Liberty Tree itself, the Wikipedia treatment here hits the main points. The tree was around this location, on the southern end of the Town of Boston in the 1760s. Orange Street has now become Washington Street and the tree, chopped down by the British in 1775 when things really started heating up, is remembered in the facade plaque of the building as well as the memorial on the other side of Washington. One of the things I love about Boston is this kind of embedded history. There are just layers upon layers of meaning. To give just one example, I mentioned the Orange Line above. That subway line, in this area originally developed simply as the Washington Street subway, was given the name the Orange Line by the MBTA, our regional transit authority, in the early 1960s because the name of the street had originally been Orange Street. In closing:

Liberty 1776

Law and Order

Sons of Liberty 1766

Independence of Their Country 1776

RTUF Public Service Announcement: Between this post and last, we have now hit over 1,000 visits to the blog. Many thanks to everyone who has taken a look! - MJL

Blog Post No. 2010-14: Thinking about Adams Park...

2010-07-10T20:54:00.017-04:00

as July passes the 1/3rd mark

Of Farmers Markets, EBTs, and Bounty Bucks.

Like an increasing number of neighborhoods in Boston, Roslindale has a weekend farmers market in the summer and fall dubbed, logically enough, the Roslindale Farmers Market. Today was hot and humid in Roslindale. But that didn't keep a good crowd from turning out, which is a story that has a couple of interesting angles.

When we first moved here in 2000, the market was located on the lower parking lot directly adjacent to the MBTA's Roslindale Village commuter rail station. For whatever reason, the market never seemed to be worth visiting at that location. Too few vendors, too little action going on. A couple of years ago, the market moved into Adams Park, the small park at the center of Roslindale Square. Though I do worry about the wear and tear on the park, especially in a relatively hot and dry summer as this one has been so far, that change in venue has really worked wonders. We now have multiple, high quality farm stands to choose from, a handful of local merchants putting out their own small-scale operations (I especially appreciate Fornax Bakery's stand), and entertainment. [This weekend's band was a surf-sound group called The Beachcombovers. Not bad at all. ] And the attendance at the market seems to be increasing year-on-year. Certainly some of the crowd is drawn by the quality of the produce, local sourcing, etc. It's also a location with much greater visibility and dignity than the MBTA parking lot.

I also firmly believe that the City of Boston's assistance starting in the last two years to the farm stands in being able to offer Electronic Benefit Transfers or EBTs, which permit debit card-like expenditure of federal supplemental nutrition assistance program dollars, has made a world of difference. Because, let's face it, the goods at farmers markets are often priced higher than similar goods in conventional grocery stores (particularly in a state like Massachusetts, where the remaining farming is relatively small-scale), they can sometimes feel like preserves of the conscientious but well-heeled. Not so since EBTs started being accommodated. And even less so with the City's newest program, called Boston Bounty Bucks, launched in partnership with the Food Project. For EBT customers, Bounty Bucks provides a 50% match on the first $20 expended participating farmers markets around town. When I attended the official opening of the Dewey Square Farmers Market near South Station a couple of weeks ago, I tried to get Paul McMorrow, of Banker & Tradesman, Boston Globe, and Harbor Garage article series fame, interested in the story. So far to no avail. But I still think it's potentially a great story, and could be a follow-up to the piece that appeared in yesterday's Globe about urban agriculture and the Food Project's greenhouse in the Dudley Triangle ("Boston ploughs stimulus money into urban farms"). I think a look at the numbers would show a jump in purchases by low and middle-income households at farmers markets where EBTs and Bounty Bucks are offered. In other words, the Roslindale Farmers Market now looks and feels like all of Roslindale is in on the action. And that's a very good thing.

UDPATE and RTUF ADVISORY: Two items I read in the paper (the Globe, of course) this morning seem worth mention. First, an opinion piece by Michael Harmon ("Main Street model revitalizes Roslindale") points out the great success that Roslindale Village Main Street has been since its inception in the mid-1980s. Everything in the piece is true about the small-scale changes that have made the Square a turnaround success, though much more could be said about the details. In any event, we do have a functioning neighborhood center to be proud of, and the 2200-person average attendance number quoted for the Farmers Market sounds on target. Second, this week's entry in the Brainiac column ("MFA 1, Gardner 0") speaks to a recent subtle improvement in the urban fabric I've had in mind to blog about: the reopening of the Museum of Fine Arts' Fenway entrance back in 2008. The reopening of that entrance, along with the increase in emphasis on the Huntington Avenue entrance, construction of a new visitors' center in the center of the museum's main building, and the de-emphasis and eventual closure of the entrance on Museum Road (located behind a surface parking lot), were among the first tangible fruits of the museum's broader expansion project under the direction of Foster + Partners. Apparently, Charles Birnbaum from the Cultural Landscape Foundation also agrees that reopening the Fenway entrance was a good idea, representing the reconnection of the institution to the historic park it faces. Not having been able to see the Renzo Piano design of the Gardner Museum's expansion plan in much detail, I can't say whether I agree that it loses something important in its connection to the Fens. If others have opinions, I'd love to hear in them in the comment section.

Please note that, in addition to the above update, this entry was also further edited after its initial publication. -- MJL

Blog Post No. 2010-13: Washington Beech in the News & Reconsidering Jane Jacobs' Legacy

2010-06-30T22:49:00.012-04:00

It's the last day of the month, a time when, by long-standing tradition, we here at RTUF survey the popular press and put our 2 cents out there about an interesting article or articles. Tonight, we have two:

1. Washington Beech ribbon-cutting makes the Globe. The completion of the first phase of the redevelopment of the former Washington Beech barracks-style public housing project into a contributing swath of the urban fabric, which I discussed in a post earlier this year (Blog Post No. 2010-9: Washington Beech is just the latest in a line...), was formally celebrated at a ribbon-cutting yesterday. It appears, according to the Boston Globe's Jennifer McKim ("Ailing Roslindale block gets a new life"), that, among many, Mayor Menino, Governor Patrick, and Sandra Henriquez, the former head of the Boston Housing Authority now turned Undersecretary at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, were in attendance and spoke. The article discusses not only the redevelopment itself, but also Ms. Henriquez's discussion of HUD's current legislative proposal to dramatically expand public housing authorities' flexibility in financing such projects by permitting mortgage financing.

2. Reconsidering Jane Jacobs' Legacy. Or at least a part of it. My father gave me a heads-up today about an article from yesterday's Wall Street Journal that does a decent job of identifying one clearly mixed blessing of Jacobs' influence on the structure of urban policy and public involvement in decision-making over the last half-century. Written by Andrew Manshel, identified as the executive vice president of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation in Queens (NY), and titled "Enough with Jane Jacobs Already," the article's main focus is the City of New York's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, which sounds essentially like the kind of development project impact review and mitigation process that is required in many large cities (and even some smaller ones) around the country. Here in Boston, this kind of project review is enshrined in Article 80 of the Zoning Code.

Manshel is clearly no fan of this kind of process, viewing it as producing, at the end, a "valueless document...crafted mainly to foil any lawsuits by opponents of development claiming that the process fell short of legal requirements for completeness." He urges New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration to take a hard look at ULURP as it undertakes municipal charter reform because, in Manshel's words, "a better balance needs to be struck between considered judgment and citizen participation." As someone who has been there and been directly involved in what Manshel describes, I have to say that you'd be hard-pressed to find a thoughtful participant in the typical process who doesn't think it could use some improvement. Overall, the pendulum does seem to have swung too far in favor of those who oppose projects and want to stop development based on a narrow perception of what is in their and the public's interest. How to address that concern and promote better, more predictable, and more efficient decision-making is one of the great challenges of urban policy in the early 21st century. To the extent that Jacobs' success in promoting broad public involvement has now become calcified and an impediment to improving and thoughtfully expanding our built environment, it's a critique worth making. And if Manshel had stopped there, I wouldn't have all that much to disagree with.

But Manshel then takes the opportunity to take a few direct shots at Jacobs' overall influence on urban development and planning, based largely on what she said in her seminal work from the early 1960s: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. He perceives her ideas to be too influential and too unexamined among the professionals charged with administering our system, the developers at ULI and the architects and planners coming out of our academic institutions. In this context, it is worth remembering that Jacobs was smart, dynamic, and influential, but not a trained professional in urban planning or architecture. She started out as a journalist and was essentially a generalist in her approach to problems and her proposed solutions to them. And she was not kind in her writing to the academics and professional technicians of the time. There is accordingly an irony in having a book like Death and Life attaining such widespread influence in academic and professional circles. Manshel also sees it as misguided and limiting. Jacobs was often wrong, he says, and turning her every utterance about urban life into gospel is a mistake. Again, not a bad thing to remember and entirely consistent with one of my own pet sayings: "Everyone (and I do mean everyone) is a mixed bag."

Yet the examples that Manshel offers of her mistakes are not clear-cut and themselves reveal a disregard for inconvenient facts. Lincoln Center may be a success and not the failure that Jacobs predicted, but I'm not sure it's responsible for revitalizing the neighborhood around it. It came at great cost in terms of displacement and in my view it's largely the surrounding neighborhood's ability to feed vitality into the site that saved it. Lincoln Center on its own would be pretty lifeless. The West Village may now be fully gentrified and hardly resembling the mixed-income paradigm that Jacobs described from the late 1950s, but claiming that such gentrification falls directly out of "policies she advocated" that "blocked real-estate development" overstates the case as well. A city like New York may well have failed to build enough new housing to keep prices in check over the last half century in part because of NIMBYs empowered by the public involvement structure that Jacobs inspired. But as one of the article's commenters notes, gentrification in a place like the West Village is also about a specific lack of supply of great neighborhoods, not just housing in general.

And then comes Manshel's climactic declaration: We should all pay less attention to Jacobs' "overblown pronouncements and unprovable theories" and more attention to the work of William H. Whyte, which Manshel describes as "finely-grained thinking" about the design of public spaces. Like another commenter to the story, I've never thought of Jacobs and Whyte as being opposed to each other or somehow mutually exclusive in their approach to what makes a successful and satisfying urban place. Overall, then, I'm a bit at a loss as to why Jacobs has to be denigrated as a crackpot and Whyte held up as the shining example of right thinking in order to make a valid point about reforming the development project review and public involvement process. This kind of gratuitous critique, not at all necessary to further Manshel's point, makes me wonder about motivation and context and broader implications. The debate over urban development is clearly still a live one. Recently, we've seen an attempt to rehabilitate Robert Moses 30+ years after The Power Broker. In my opinion, Alan Ehrenhalt's 2007 piece in Governing ("The Power Broker Reconsidered") was a thoughtful consideration of that boomlet. It now appears that one of his chief late-career opponents is being targeted. Wherever this is headed, we can only hope it isn't intended to put us back into the days of condemning and clearing entire neighborhoods, punching interstate highways through our urban cores, and building towers in lifeless parks.

Blog Post No. 2010-12: Residential infill done perfectly...

2010-06-23T23:35:00.001-04:00

...and not so perfectly

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Locations: 16 Fairview Street and 26 Mendum Street, Roslindale, MA

Years of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2001 and 1956

Photos: (1) Looking up Fairview Street, showing the adjacent house and 16 Fairview; (2) A closer uphill view of the house at 16 Fairview, the driveway, and entrance; (3) Front view, with entrance, wrap-around porch, and front facade; (4) Looking back down Fairview; (5) Scale comparison shot for 26 Mendum Street (it's the little yellow house on the right, partially hidden by the street tree); (6) Broader view of 26 Mendum.

The Story: You can actually see the rear of 16 Fairview from my backyard. It was built just a year after we moved to the Peters Hill section of Roslindale. I've met the resident builder-owner -- Bill Re -- a few times and most recently seen him at the site of a residential rehab project he's doing around the corner on Symmes Street. My poor photos, taken late in the day last week, really don't do his house justice. It is about as perfect a job of doing residential infill as you're likely to find anywhere. The scale of the house is right, it sits up on the street, and it has great detailing in a Victorian style without being overbearing. Every time I walk by this house, I especially appreciate the strong statement made by the wrap-around porch. Porches are ubiquitous in Roslindale, as in many other former streetcar suburbs built in Boston around the turn of the last century. But getting a porch right is not easy. Too often, the porches on new houses are too shallow to be usable, ending up as little more than appliques that are sort of nice to look at (unless you realize they're too shallow to fulfill their supposed purpose). The architects here were Vozzella Design Group, a Roslindale outfit with offices near the Forest Hills MBTA station. They are to be commended for a job very well done.

I am aware that Vozzella designed the house because I checked out the City's online building permit information for the property as part of a very small research experiment that produced the precise results I thought it would. Given how absolutely right-on this house is, how it is scaled and located like every other house on the street, how well it agrees with its surroundings and practically proves the point that you can in fact build new houses that work just as well aesthetically as old ones, the uninitiated might think that the process for approval of this house was easy. All Bill Re had to do was walk down to the Boston Inspectional Services Department with Vozzella Design's plans in hand, pay the appropriate fee, and pull a building permit to make his neighborhood a better place, right? Alas, my friends, that was not the case here. And it is not the case in the vast majority of American cities and towns, even to this day. You see, the City's zoning for Roslindale as it existed in 2000-2001 outlawed this kind of house. Yes, Bill could build a single-family house here, but it had to abide by the dimensional requirements for the City's old, 1950s-era R-.5 (Residential -- 0.5 ratio between the floor area of the house and the area of the lot) zoning district. So, in order to build this pitch-perfect piece of infill, Bll had to obtain relief from a variety of dimensional standards that screamed "Levittown!" not "Roslindale," among them: too-narrow side yards, too little street frontage, too small a lot, too-shallow rear yard, etc. Bill therefore found himself in a several month-long process run through the City's Board of Appeal that, ultimately, let him do the right thing. Roslindale's zoning has, in the last few years, been rewritten and brought into line with the more recently-adopted standards governing the City's other neighborhoods. I confess that I haven't checked to see whether this house would still require relief under the new provisions, but I hope it wouldn't.

Put another way, the zoning code of the 1950s was built for some bizarre parallel universe version of Roslindale (and much of the rest of Boston's neighborhoods) that would someday become, well, pretty much entirely like the house at 26 Mendum Street, shown in the last 2 photos and also on Peters Hill, a few more blocks up the hill on the last street before the Arboretum itself. I'm picking on 26 Mendum in particular because friend and ace realtor Linda Burnett (a.k.a., "Roslinda") lives in this house, takes great care of it, and has agreed that it's OK for me to show it as a counter-example to Bill Re's house. In short, Linda is happy, as a realtor, to own the ugliest house on a great block. And it really is. It isn't a total disaster, but it is out of scale with every other house on Mendum Street, which are generally 2 1/2 to 3 stories in height with steep roof pitches, generous floor-to-ceiling heights, and deep porches. This house, perhaps not surprisingly, was actually built in 1956 according to the City's records. You can immediately imagine that the house would be perfectly acceptable in a neighborhood of similar houses (Levittown again). But here, given the character of the street and the surrounding neighborhood, it's a missed opportunity that is nearing its 55th anniversary. And yes, you guessed it, this house did not require any relief from the zoning code's provisions back in the 1950s. Perverse is perhaps too strong a word to use to describe the effect of the woefully-misapplied zoning code that Roslindale once had. But it would be accurate.

Blog Post No. 2010-11: Words to live by...

2010-06-07T22:30:00.002-04:00

if you want to actually get something done (First in a continuing series)

Saturday's Boston Globe carried a story by correspondent Robert Preer entitled "Not even a whisper against this wind farm." Preer's piece is about a proposed wind farm in the town of Wareham that, unlike the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound and another major wind farm proposal at Brodie Mountain in Berkshire County, is moving through the state's environmental review process with a minimum of controversy and appears headed toward construction commencement this year. Now, the narrative here is a bit odd, as you can tell from the headline alone. It's almost as if the Globe can't believe that a wind farm proposal of any magnitude can actually get through the approval process without the usual circus of NIMBYs (both reasonable and unreasonable), climate change critics, and general naysayers. Obvious substantive differences that distinghish the Wareham project, dubbed the "Bog Wind Power Cooperative," from a project like Cape Wind include size (8 turbines for Bog Wind vs. 130 turbines for Cape Wind, lessening the visual impact), location (inland in Wareham instead of offshore in Nantucket Sound, near major highways and power lines), and immediate, deeply invested local project supporters (in the cranberry farm owners where the turbines will be located (hence the "bog" and "cooperative" elements of the project name) as opposed to Cape Wind's federal waters location).

All of the foregoing is true, but I want to focus on what I believe is an absolute MONEY quote from Glen Berkowitz, the president of Beaufort Windpower, the Boston-based company that is leading the project. This quote reveals what may be the real difference maker between Bog Wind and projects like them that seem to move quickly through the review process and the many, many other projects that hit huge snags and erupt in disastrous controversy. Says Berkowitz, about halfway through the article:

"We want to design, permit, and build the project in a way that creates public trust."

Don't we all want this? Don't developers want this? Don't project neighbors want this? Don't elected officials and municipal staff want this? Don't environmental advocates want this? Doesn't the public at large want this?

Yet, this seldom happens. Initially, the public attitude is almost always going to be one of distrust and suspicion. Everyone thinks they've seen this show before -- the greedy developer will screw the local townspeople and move on to their next opportunity to do the same someplace else. To a greater extent than we realize, we've been programmed to believe that any physical change in our community will make it worse -- more development necessarily means more traffic, more noise, more environmental degradation, and more people. And, of course, given most of what we've built over the last 60+ years in this country, project opponents aren't necessarily wrong. That said, it takes massive quantities of patience, belief in what you're doing, and confidence to not be put off by the inevitable first reaction and keep working in an open and inclusive way that (hopefully) gives everyone time and space to come to terms with something new and different. It looks like Glen Berkowitz may have substantial measures of all three traits. For that, he is to be saluted and he is therefore our first RTUF Words to Live By if You Want to Actually Get Something Done awardee. Thank you, Glen.

Blog Post No. 2010-10: And this too restores the urban fabric:

2010-05-31T21:44:00.001-04:00

Renovation of the Brewer Fountain is finally complete!

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The Photos: (1) and (2): Set-up shots, looking roughly northeast from the Common toward downtown; (3) Looking at the fountain and then across Tremont Street to St. Paul's Cathedral (the classical building with fronting colonnade); (4), (5), and (6): Close-ups of the lower and upper groups of statues; and (7) Looking from Tremont Street back up the hill toward the State House (golden domed building in the background).

Location: The Brewer Fountain, Boston Common, near the intersection of Park, Winter, and Tremont Streets, Boston, MA. MAP.

The Story: So, the Globe ran a very good story on this the other day. That would be the day after the day that the fountain was turned back on after an extensive renovation over the last almost 12 months brought this gem of a fountain back to life. As the article describes, the fountain was inoperable for the last several years, and has been restored with a combination of city, federal, and privately-raised funds. This piece of news points up a fact of life in late 20th century/early 21st century America, and a critical truth about urban life.

First, the fact: The fountain's stature as the oldest fountain on the Common was not enough to save it from such dramatic neglect that it stopped working altogether in 2003 and became so deteriorated in the years that followed that its restoration apparently became, in the end, an urgent matter needed to keep it from being a total loss. This kind of neglect of critical public infrastructure, from fountains to bridges to transit systems, from water mains to sewers and just about everything that we have inherited from prior generations as our built inheritance, is epidemic. Public budgets are always too thin to maintain everything, and politics are always such that building new things and having ribbon cutting ceremonies will almost always win out over the boring tasks that keep the things we have already in a good state of repair. Of course, it costs more overall to let those things wear down to such an extent that they require massive repair and restoration. But that is the way of it.

Second, the truth: The urban fabric most certainly includes major public amenities like the Brewer Fountain. That the fountain is now working again and playing its role in beautifying and enhancing a hugely important location in Boston -- right on the Common, near one of the busiest stations on the MBTA, just down the hill from the State House -- is more important to the city's sense of well-being and fulfillment than might at first seem the case. Broken fountains are like broken windows, in a sense. When anyone -- a resident of Boston, a visitor from elsewhere in the Commonwealth, someone from out-of-state or from another country -- sees a fountain this beautiful and obviously important not working, there is a sense that the city is not capable of taking care of its own, that it lacks capacity, that is not working. On the other hand, when it is working, one gets the impression that the city is just the opposite: a place where things work, that cares about keeping its iconic places in good shape, that is putting its best foot forward. Come check it out next time you're in town...

Blog Post No. 2010-9: Washington Beech is just the latest in a line...

2010-05-17T09:45:00.001-04:00

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...of HOPE VI redevelopments here in Boston

Location: 4560 Washington Street, Roslindale, MA (Boston Housing Authority's Washington-Beech project, currently undergoing redevelopment) (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2010-2012

The Photos: In order, taking a walk through the first phase of the redevelopment, from a new Beechland Street and along the backs of the attached town houses (Photos 1 and 2), up along a new Beechland Circle past the town houses and row houses toward Washington Street (Photos 3 and 4), looking down Washington Street toward downtown Boston with the large multi-family building on the right (Photo 5), then from across Washington Street back toward the site (Photo 6), an internal street and sidewalk area detail shot (Photo 7), and finishing with two photos from the intersection of Beechland Circle and Beechland Street looking up toward Beech Street (Photo 8) and toward Washington Street (Photo 9).

The Story: By now, the story of how the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has funded the redevelopment of hundreds of distressed public housing projects across the county is almost as well known as the distress of those properties to begin with. Almost, but not quite. I'm sure most can easily name one or two of the truly horrific public housing projects such as Cabrini-Green in Chicago that became poster children for everything that was wrong with urban America in the 1970s and 1980s. That list at one time included Columbia Point in Boston, which was one of the first public housing project redevelopments in the late 1980s.

HUD's HOPE VI program (the acronym stands for "Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere") emerged in the early 1990s as part of the department's response to the report of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing. The report put the capstone on 30 years of withering, across-the-board criticism of public housing projects in the U.S. as generally dead-end disasters designed, constructed, and under-maintained in a manner that ultimately maximized alienation and separation from the broader community through super-blocks, high-rise construction that offered a twist on the Corbusian "Tower in the Park," and a lack of "defensible space." Among that report's major recommendations was prioritizing the redevelopment of the most distressed public housing projects into mixed-income, mixed housing-type neighborhoods that would reconnect with their surrounding communities both socio-economically and physically.

The physical, urban design component of HOPE VI has always been viewed as integral to the program, reflecting the significant influence of the Congress for the New Urbanism on HUD policy under the Clinton Administration. That administration's first HUD secretary, Henry Cisneros, was hismelf a signatory to the Charter of the New Urbanism in 1996. The guidelines for the HOPE VI program sent strong signals that HUD was serious about the urban design elements of each redevelopment. By and large and even as the HOPE VI program was put on life support by the second Bush Administration, that has meant that HOPE VI redevelopments fit much better with their surrounding communities. In fact, it's often a bit difficult to tell that they are even publicly-assisted housing. In Boston, HOPE VI redevelopments have included Mission-Main in Jamaica Plain, Orchard Gardens in Roxbury, and Maverick Gardens in East Boston. These redevelopments share an important feature with Washington-Beech: they were all done by the Boston Housing Authority with the help of Trinity Financial, a local developer that has also completed HOPE VI projects in Connecticut (Quinnipiac Terrace) and Rhode Island (Newport Heights).

As can be seen from the photos and the images below, Washington Beech is a true HOPE VI redevelopment from an urban design standpoint. It has mixed unit types in a variety of building types -- apartment building, row house, and attached town-house -- that respect and contribute to the surrounding and internal street network. The street network provides for real streets with curbs and sidewalks, on-street parking, and other elements that reflect a serious commitment to the public realm. The redevelopment also provides a centrally-located and publicly-accessible park space in the playground and basketball court.

All of this is to be contrasted with what existed here for the prior 50+ years: bare utilitarian brick structures located in a pattern that suggested a military encampment far more than a residential community. No real attention was paid to the street and the buildings were all surrounded almost uniformly by asphalt. Photos 6, 7, and 9 provide some particular points of comparison between old and new. Among them, I think Photo 7's depiction of the new sidewalk, curbing, street lights against the essentially undifferentiated treatment of the street on the opposite side is most instructive. And to take it a step further, it should not be surprising to see a dumpster facing into the street between the two older buildings on the right. In the old pattern, there really was no front, back or side to any of the buildings. They simply floated in an asphalt pond that meant it didn't really matter where you put something like a dumpster. In the new design, each buidling and therefore each set of units has clearly defined front (on the street), side, and back sides, providing an understandable logic for the location of entrances, utilities, and services (such as trash and general household storage). To say that the redeveloped Washington Beech will fit into the surrounding neighborhood far better than its predecessor is merely to state the obvious.

As can also be seen in the photos, the first phase is nearly complete and RTUF understands a ribbon-cutting will be held at the site on Saturday, June 29 at 11 am. Subsequent phases will fill in the rest of the overall site plan over the next 2 years.

RTUF sketch of the restored urban fabric: No hand-sketches this time. Instead, a link to the City of Boston's Assessing Department database for the pre-redevelopment configuration here, and an image provided by Trinity Financial (with credit to Icon Architecture), of the redevelopment's overall site plan (with Washington Street located at the top of the plan).

Blog Post No. 2010-8: Three Things...

2010-05-07T21:55:00.000-04:00

Really in no particular order

Ok, maybe some order:

1. More on City Hall Plaza. As a follow-up to the last post regarding Boston City Hall Plaza, Kara Wilbur forwarded me a link to a Providence Journal blog piece by Martin Brussat from yesterday entitled "Boston City Hall Plaza as it ought to be." The vision there, by Robert Helfand, is certainly arresting and presents a far more tightly-woven street network through the plaza than we now have. For instance, it brings Hanover Street up the hill from its current terminus at Congress Street all the way to Cambridge Street, restores Brattle Street around the Sears Crescent, and creates a new cross-street that does a little eyebrow around what is apparently a new Boston City Hall built in a full-throttle classical style. In addition to the new City Hall, we have a central fountain, a campanile, a low-rise replacement for what is now the JFK Federal Building, and a row of new buildings along the Congress Street frontage now occupied by the existing City Hall. There's even a new apparently classically-inspired version of the Government Center MBTA station headhouse. I confess to liking the vision a lot and wanting to sit on the edge of the fountain and watch what might be happening in the plaza. I also confess to thinking that the vision veers dangerously close to the intentional amnesia of those who brought us the current plaza. The vision would be a massive departure from the present and the last almost 50 years making it almost seem like it never happened. As my post suggested, I'm not convinced we need to go quite that far to see some progress and get a better plaza.

2. Performance art + urban planning. Russ Preston's blog -- Life + Urbanism -- recently linked to a really interesting exercise in performance art plus urban planning down in Dallas. Texas. The idea was to simulate a pedestrian-oriented set of buildings and streetscape on a one-block stretch of what is now, by the look of things, a fairly auto-oriented street in the city's Oak Cliff section. The original intent was to use "crowdsourced placemaking" to create a fun, rewarding place -- a "Better Block" -- over a single weekend and for just a $1,000 up front. There's a lot packed into what is shown on the videos, blog posts, and online news articles that are linked together at the Bike Friendly Oak Cliff site. Impressive stuff. I especially like the way the blogger at Bike Friendly Oak Cliff refers to his fellow travelers as "BFOCers." Seriously, though, guerrilla urbanism has a place in the toolkit, no doubt.

3. And on it goes. I'm really not sure what to make of the extremely public way that developer Don Chiofaro is taking on the Mayor over height limits and development potential on the Greenway here in Boston. I mean, I thought the multiple-article frontal assault through the pages of the Boston Globe was a bold enough move. But when you call a press conference, as Chiofaro did late last month, for the express purpose of calling out someone who is now in his 5th term as the Mayor of Boston and really isn't that old, you're playing with fire. Maybe the thinking is that the Mayor is eventually going to be gone and Chiofaro plans on being around when that happens. Maybe he thinks his relationship with the Mayor can't get worse, and so he's got nothing to lose. Who knows? It's certainly a different way of going about things. We here at RTUF will keep our friends around this great country of ours updated as this continues to unfold.

Blog Post No. 2010-7: For City Hall Plaza, maybe continuously rotating temporary uses makes sense...

2010-04-23T23:05:00.001-04:00

1 2

3 4

...at least for now

Location: Government Center (formerly Scollay Square, and today alternatively called Boston City Hall Square or City Hall Plaza), Boston, MA. (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: Ongoing (April 2010).

The Photos: Taken on Patriots' Day 2010, looking northwest along the side of City Hall, then coming into the plaza and looking north and northeast at the Big Apple Circus tent.

The Story: So, we took the kids to the Big Apple Circus on City Hall Plaza last Friday night. We had a great time at a show of almost 2 hours in length, featuring the return of Bello Nock and a number of classic circus acts such as juggling, acrobatics, and (my personal favorite, especially now since we have a rescue puppy of our own) a dog act featuring (you guessed it) rescue dogs. Really fun stuff for the whole family.

But this entry is not about the circus itself, fun though it was. It's about the temporary life and activity and yes, restoration of the urban fabric, that can occur when even something as simple as a circus with a tent is brought onto City Hall Plaza. A plaza which has ripened into perhaps the most underperforming centrally-located public space in Boston, if not all of New England and if not the country. I mean, it's really bad, especially considering its proximity to so much great urban fabric and activity. I touched a bit on the plaza in the post about Boston's "mid-century modern" buildings a few weeks ago. It is truly of a piece with the failed buildings with whom it entered our cityscape in the mid-1960s. Most of the time it is a wind-swept, shade-less, inhospitable no-man's land that people hurry through to get from a dreadful MBTA headhouse for the Government Center Station

[especially when compared to what it replaced

(CREDIT: http://www.bambinomusical.com/)]

to everything that surrounds the plaza -- Boston City Hall itself, Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market across Congress Street, the Old State House around the corner at the intersection of Court and Washington, the state government complex up the hill, and the federal government's buildings on the north side of the plaza. When you think of the number of people who go around and through it on a daily basis, it's something of a twisted accomplishment that the space is so dead.

This failed state of affairs at the very center of the city has not gone entirely unnoticed, especially in the last 10 to 15 years. Proposals have been floated and special task forces created to improve the plaza itself and make the buildings around it work better. After extensive discussion and effort from some of the city's most talented and influential citizens, there has been relatively little to show. Physically, all that has happened is the construction of a series of benches and small balconies along the Cambridge Street frontage with vertical, flagpole-like lighting elements (see photo 4, above). The only obvious programmatic progress has been a seasonal farmers' market that sets up just along that Cambridge Street frontage on certain weekdays in the summer. Most recently, the Boston Globe ran a piece about a design contest for ideas to better integrate City Hall itself into the urban fabric. The proposals highlighted are interesting and I do like the way the winning entry opens up the Congress Street side of the building and introduces a cafe at the lower plaza level.

Far be it from this blog to criticize incremental changes and developments like these. Yet the fact remains that chipping away at the edges is not doing enough to change the plaza's sub-par dynamic. To do that, something needs to be happening in the middle of the plaza on a consistent basis. Now, since the Patriots, Red Sox, and Celtics have all won titles in their respective professional leagues this decade, there have been 6 victory parades (the City likes to call them "Rolling Rallies") that have wound past and sometimes ended at City Hall Plaza, so that's brought some crowds onto the plaza. And the City has set up a few major events, sometimes for extended periods, on the plaza in the past several years. These have included not only the Big Apple Circus but also the Holiday Village that used to be at Jordan Marsh (then Macy's) at Downtown Crossing, and is now residing at one of Jordan's Furniture's suburban locations. These are good events, but relatively few and far between. So...a humble suggestion to the City, which may already be going in this direction...how about a simple, set schedule of extended engagements on City Hall Plaza for temporary uses that encourage people to come and spend some time and even spend some money in the very middle of town? Maybe the Big Apple Circus could be more firmly established as the rite of early spring, while late spring, summer and early fall could feature the existing farmers' market combined with the fledging Boston Public Market, which has been casting around for a home for the last few years, and seems always just a step away, but never quite there? They've most recently been in Dewey Square on two days a week during the summer. Despite the great foot traffic generated by its proximity to South Station and the need for the Greenway to have worthwhile programming, that location is really challenged, surrounded on 3 sides by multi-lane, one-way streets and on the fourth side by a utility building for the Big Dig. They can do better. Bring them to City Hall Plaza for an extended run in the middle of the year, get them to operate on more days, maybe even allow them to put up a temporary structure or two, and we'd really be talking. Once we're at the tail end of the fall harvest and the market is closed down, maybe we could have a temporary fair with rides and the like to lead us into winter. And then, who knows, the plaza hunkers down like the rest of us during the coldest part of the year and waits for the clowns, horses, acrobats, jugglers, Bello, Grandma, and the rest of the circus to come again in March?

RTUF Note: This post was edited after its original publication. - MJL

Blog Post No. 2010-6: Streets and intersections are meaningful public spaces...

2010-04-15T23:15:00.004-04:00

...not traffic sewers

Location: The intersection of Belgrade Avenue, Corinth Street, and Robert Street in Roslindale, a.k.a, Eagan Square, a.k.a. Alexander the Great Square (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2007

Photos: Clockwise around the intersection, showing the view up Belgrade Avenue back toward the turn at South Street, then the Corinth Street islands, up Belgrade toward Walworth Street, then across and back down Belgrade.

The Story: I said at the end of my last post that this blog has a soft spot for incremental change, and here's an absolutely prime example at the neighborhood scale. We're back again in Roslindale Square, at its southwestern gateway, just after the point at which Robert Street comes under the MBTA Needham Line trestle and meets Belgrade Avenue and Corinth Street. This intersection has a veteran's memorial name of Eagan Square, but there's a second, more recent designation as Alexander the Great Square. That's a nod to the community's still strong Greek presence, as evidenced by Alexander the Great Park, which has a bust of the great man at its center.

Until this intersection took its current form about 3 years ago, it was one of the very worst in the neighborhood, from the perspective of both cars and pedestrians. As a driver, it was hard to know who exactly had the right-of-way and the massive expanse of pavement without much definition left it hard to know exactly where the travel lanes were supposed to be. As a pedestrian, it felt like a free-fire zone: far too wide, with poorly located crosswalks that just left you hanging out there.

The new configuration, shown in the pictures and in my sketch below, is far, far better. The two tiny islands have been widened and extended. The cross-walks are now manageable in length. The main construction material for the islands is brick, with granite curbing. The two largest elements have green space within them. A public art installation is reportedly awaiting Boston Civic Design Commission approval and could be installed this year. The traffic pattern is clear, with well-defined through and turning lanes. The cars now know where to go, and so do the people. Everyone is being paid some attention.

I am embarrassed to say that, even though this is just blocks from my house and we lived here well before the intersection was reconfigured, I have no idea who exactly is responsible for making this happen. Responsibility for the intersection lies with the Boston Transportation Department, so ultimately it had to be their project. But I don't know who in the community advocated for the change. Whoever that person is, they deserve heartfelt thanks. And BTD is to be commended for implementing a design that is a far cry from what has been done to our streets and intersections for too much of the last 60+ years.

Which brings us to the teachable moment portion of this post. It is a sad fact that, on the whole, our country decided in the post-war period to delegate virtually complete control over our streets to traffic engineers whose sole goal was to move more vehicles at higher speeds all the time, everywhere. Streets and travel lanes were widened. Private property was taken to facilitate that widening. Sidewalk widths were reduced or sidewalks totally eliminated. Off-street parking was reduced or banned outright. Pedestrian street crossing times were reduced and vehicle signal phasing increased. And the design of most of what was actually built was wholly unsatisfactory or just plain ugly. In short, far too many streets -- the connective tissue that make up the vast majority of our public realm -- were radically impoverished, turned from places that people could enjoy spending time in to places to be avoided at all costs. In the words of more than one commentator, those streets had simply become "traffic sewers." All of this is to say nothing of the federal interstate construction boom of the 1950s-1970s, that plowed through and gutted too many urban neighborhoods to mention them all by name. Being from Brooklyn, all you have to say to me is "Sunset Park" and I immediately think of the Gowanus Expressway, an elevated highway built in the early 1940s that cut that neighborhood in two and separated it from the water. Perhaps the best piece of writing on the phenomenon of interstate highway construction in urban areas is Robert Caro's chapter on "One Mile" of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in The Power Broker, his seminal biography on Robert Moses. Worth reading again even if you've read the book before.

I am overstating the point slightly here. Not every traffic engineer wanted to pave over paradise or obliterate urban neighborhoods, and not every street was turned into a high-speed nightmare. Plenty of great neighborhood streets, as well as parkways and urban boulevards survived. A lot of that was the result of an active citizenry -- Jane Jacobs being probably the most famous active citizen given her well-publicized fights with Moses over Washington Square Park and the Lower Manhattan Expressway [for an excellent treatment of that dynamic, check out Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses, reviewed in the New York Times here] -- that fought the freeway revolt in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some of it was the sheer amount of good urban fabric that our country has been blessed with. There simply wasn't enough time and money while the game was really on to screw up everything. Over the last 20 years, the pendulum has swung strongly back toward treating our streets like valuable, critically important shared spaces. It is no coincidence that form-based coders devote a lot of time and energy to the design of the streets and related open spaces that become the framework for new neighborhoods. If you want to a satisfying built environment, you need to have the streets and the buildings working together. If either component fails to behave, the place you want will not happen. Great strides have been made, to the point where my observation is that resistance to more complete streets often comes from a public distrustful of change in general and of professional traffic engineers, urban designers, and planners in particular, not from those professions themselves. The new Alexander the Great Square shows that the end result is well worth overcoming whatever obstacles are encountered along the way.

RTUF sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: It's a little hard to tell just how much of an improvement the current configuration really lis. There was just way more car-reserved pavement at this intersection than remotely made sense.

RTUF Note: This post has been modified after initial publishing to correct certain typos and grammatical errors and to add photos of the detail of the new traffic islands and of the bust of Alexander the Great that is located in the adjoining park. -- ML

Blog Post No. 2010-5: Whither the Greenway...

2010-03-31T22:53:00.001-04:00

or getting the buildings to pay attention now that a park has shown up

Those who know me at all quickly learn that one of the things I enjoy doing in my spare time is running. I've been running with much the same group of guys (and occasionally gals) out of the West Roxbury YMCA for the better part of the last decade. We typically leave the Y at about 5:25 am on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, year-round, year-in, year-out. One of the group's stalwarts is a hard-core conservative by the name of Frank Galvin. And one of Frank's stock-in-trade caricatures of me (decidedly a political and social liberal) is that I take all of my news directly from the Boston Globe. Not to prove Frank right, but....

In urban planning and development as in geometry, one piece of data is a point, two constitute a vector or a trend, and three create a plane or pattern. Ladies and gentlemen, the Boston Globe is clearly trying to show us a pattern about development on the Greenway and one current development proposal in particular:

First, Joan Vennochi's regular opinion piece on Sunday ("Shadow on the Greenway") highlighted recently-released information on likely guidelines for future development along the Greenway and posited that the Mayor's conventional wisdom-based reputation for micro-managing development was muddying the waters on those guidelines. Vennochi pointed particularly to the increasingly public dispute over developer Don Chiofaro's proposal for relatively tall buildings to replace the Harbor Garage site near the New England Aquarium as an example of the downside of the Mayor's attention to this kind of detail.

Second, Paul McMorrow, usually of Banker & Tradesman, had an opinion piece in Monday's Globe about the Greenway. Entitled "Something Beautiful," McMorrow's piece raises the entirely reasonable concern that the battle for restoring Boston's waterfront/downtown urban fabric may still be lost, even after spending close to $15 Billion and topping off the submerged facility with plenty of green, if the parkland is not provided with good, strong, "active edges" on the facing streets. McMorrow then goes on to focus on the Harbor Garage and 3 other Grenway-adjacent public garages and the difficulty of redeveloping those cash flow-generating structures without a big upside in terms of height and intensity of use. McMorrow's piece ends with a plea for public-private partnership on these sites that will lead, he hopes, to creative solutions.

Third, and finally, this morning's column from Brian McGrory -- "First, build compromise" -- returns yet again to the theme of the Harbor Garage with a full-on he-said/he-said write-up over the personal dimension of the relationship between the Mayor and Don Chiofaro. McGrory closes with his own solution: if Chiofaro's tallest building is proposed at 625 feet and the new height guidelines are showing a 200-foot height limit, then the parties should just split the difference and agree to a height limit of 410 feet (right in the middle) so we can all move on.

Did you notice the pattern too?

Now, don't get me wrong. This is juicy stuff for those of us who follow urban design and development issues closely. And the issues at stake -- height, density, shadows, the future of the Greenway as a central element in Boston's downtown justifying the very substantial public investment -- are real. The Greenway absolutely needs to be more than just greenspace that people drive by and don't really use. That would be tragic and a massive wasted opportunity for the City. It would also be a mistake to permit new buildings to shadow the Greenway to such an extent that the parkland really became inhospitable and unused.

But we shouldn't miss the street-and-sidewalk level for the tall buildings here, either. However the height issues are resolved for the Harbor Garage site and all of the other sites adjacent and near to the Greenway within the study area, let's don't lose sight of the urbanistcally complete (dare I say it?) form-based approach that the BRA and their consultants are taking on the overall Greenway District Planning Study. I encourage everyone to look at the full series of presentations (link here) and see how much more is being considered and weighed through that process. There's more going on than building heights. From this blogger's viewpoint, whatever your opinion about building height and shadows, the new development scenarios are taking the right approach at the level of the street and the sidewalk: the intent is to fill in edges and activate key frontages with retail and other uses that are likely to have the greatest impact on activity on the Greenway, without resorting to mega-projects and super-blocks. One look at the reality today, however, shows that this is going to be a lengthy effort requiring an abundance of patience.

When the former elevated Central Artery was built, some of the existing buildings directly adjacent to the highway were literally cut in half and all buildings were forced to turn away. Subsequent buildings largely followed this pattern. Now that the viaduct is gone and has been replaced by the Greenway, it will still take time to reorient the buildings and open them up to what is now a real amenity. To some extent, this process is already underway. When the sun was shining late last week, I snapped a few photos of some examples of this gathering phenomenon, arranged in order from OK to better to really working well:

The photos:

On the left, the landward side of the Marriott Long Whart hotel, where Tia's has put outdoor seating on the Greenway side and a couple of tourist-service storefronts provide some life.

In the middle, at the foot of State Street, an old mercantile building's blank facade has been punched through with windows and balconies. Note the still-blank facade of the lower building.

On the right, new storefronts and streetscape in the block between Hanover and Salem streets, blessed with a location directly adjacent to the North End.

This blog has a clear preference for the small, incremental changes to the urban fabric that repair it piece by piece. While the public debate over height on the Greenway is resolved, here's hoping that these building-by-building improvements continue. And let's also hope that the final guidelines for the Greenway and ultimately any new zoning regulations will find ways to encourage these kinds of changes too. As they occur, RTUF will be cheering them on.

RTUF Follow-up (Posted April 11, 2010): Dan Wasserman, the Boston Globe's excellent editorial cartoonist, makes light of the back-and-forth regarding the Harbor Garage proposal and the Greenway in this morning's editorial page: "Greenway showdown."

Blog Post No. 2010-4: Dudley Village extends efforts to right the triangle

2010-03-12T20:59:00.000-05:00

Three decades into its revitalization, the Dudley Triangle reaches almost to its eastern limit.

Location: Dudley Street, between East Cottage Street and Burgess Street, Roxbury/Dorchester Line in Boston, MA.

Year of Urban Faric Restoration: 2007-2008.

Photos: Walking more or less west to east along Dudley Street for a three-block stretch, demonstrating just how well the new stuctures fit in with the existing urban fabric here.

The Story: The new structures in these photos are the collection of 5 buildings that comprise Dudley Village, a 50-unit affordable rental apartments with approximately 6,260 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor, located on the border between the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester along Dudley Street. In the 5th photo, the building under construction is the new Salvation Army Corps Center, a major new community center donated to the City by the Salvation Army through the generosity of the Kroc Family Foundation. Just beyond the Corps Center is the Uphams Corner stop on the MBTA's Fairmount Commuter Rail Line. Yes, careful reader, we've got ourselves a bona fide TOD (transit-oriented development) here.

A local non-profit community development corporation -- Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation (DBEDC) -- led development of the project, which is located on land controlled by a community land trust -- Dudley Neighbors Incorporated (DNI). DNI and its affiliated organization -- Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) -- grew out of a grassroots response to the massive abandonment and deconstruction of the Dudley Triangle in Roxbury (the area principally bounded by Blue Hill Avenue on the west, Dudley Street on the north, the Fairmount Commuter Rail Line on the east, and Quincy Street on the south) in the 1950s and 1960s. Founded in the early 1980s, DNI/DSNI straddles the worlds of community land trusts, community organizing, and planning/development. It is the principal entity that has led the neighborhood back from the brink over the last 25 years. It is also the entity that led the process to arrive at the "Urban Village" plan for the Dudley Triangle in 2000 that provided the basis for Dudley Village. DBEDC is more of a traditional community development corporation, founded in 1979 and now a flagship of Boston's CDC world. DBEDC's service area stretches to the east of the Dudley Village development into Uphams Corner and North Dorchester. Over its 30 years, it has developed over 900 units of affordable housing and 164,000 square feet of commercial space.

Over the last five years, DBEDC, along with its CDC partners at Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation, Mattapan Community Development Corporation, and Southwest Boston Community Development Corporation [FULL RTUF Disclosure: I have been a board member of the last organization for the last 9 years], has been advocating as the Fairmount Collaborative for new stops and increased service on the MBTA's Fairmount Commuter Rail Line. The Fairmount line is the only commuter rail line that runs entirely within Boston's city limits, but it was largely forgotten, left with few stops and poor service for the last several decades. The line happens to make those few steps in some of the poorest, most transit-dependent neighborhoods in the city. Enter community organizers at the Four Corners Action Coalition and their fellow community groups as well as the CDC members of the Collaborative, who have been enormously successful in banding together to focus energy and political will on the Fairmount line's issues. The first of 4 new approved stations is under construction now, and the second is in design. Another part of the Collaborative's strategy has been to position member CDCs to acquire site control of key parcels near the existing and new stations on the line now, before the new stations and service come on line. Dudley Village fits squarely within that strategy. Here's hoping all of the new developments that come after -- sponsored by the Collaborative's CDCs or by private developers -- fit as well into the urban fabric as does Dudley Village.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: You can see from the sketch that the project essentially restores more than 2 blocks of street wall on the northeastern side of Dudley Street. Very nice work.

Blog Post No. 2010-3: A Response and a Concern

2010-02-19T23:30:00.005-05:00

Or, by Their Fruits Shall You Know Them (Urban Design-wise, That Is...)

Last month, the Boston Globe ran two stories on the metropolitan region's mid-20th Century legacy of large-scale concrete buildings. The first was a Sunday Arts & Entertainment section piece on January 3 by Robert Campbell entitled "The beauty of concrete." The second, by Sarah Schweitzer, appeared on January 24 in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine under the headline of "In Praise of Ugly Buildings." Both articles have a kind of "man-bites-dog" quality to them. (I mean, who thinks concrete buildings are beautiful, or that ugly buildings deserve praise?) Indeed, both articles posit that, despite the generally negative view that most people have of Boston's mid-20th Century concrete buildings, given their age, their relative level of endangerment, and the advent of new, relatively young cheerleaders for these buildings, the time has come to reconsider their place in the area's architectural heritage and even accept them as and for what they are. I've been pondering whether and how best to respond. Here goes:

Before getting underway, I'd like to stipulate that I'm going to cherry pick a bit by focusing on the two least-liked buildings in the bunch -- Boston City Hall at Government Center and the State Services Center on the superblock bounded by Staniford, Merrimack, New Chardon, and Cambridge Streets (both in the brutalist style) -- but I believe the argument I lay out here holds for other modernist buildings as well.

First of all, it is essential to understand the historical background for these two buildings to really understand what it means to defend them today and state, as is done in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine article, that "past sins must be forgiven and...the buildings...recognized for thier own history -- that of ushering Boston into the 20th century." The reference to "past sins" is a slight and somewhat opaque nod to the urban renewal-era origins of these buildings: both the State Services Center and Boston City Hall are part of the larger Government Center Urban Renewal Area that condemned and razed Scollay Square in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Scollay Square was, at the time, much past its prime and serving as the city's main red light district. In other words, a rather inviting target for urban renewal, at a time when the urban renewal movement was at its height and wrecking balls were swinging in many places. The most notorious urban renewal project was in the West End, where the entire neighborhood was leveled to make way for Le Corbusier-style towers in the park.

Before and After: The first photo is the pre-demolition West End in the 1950s. The second photo is the West End as it appeared in 1960.

All of this destruction and reconstruction, so the story goes, was a critical sign of the birth of the "New Boston" as the city shrugged off its decrepit, overly conservative past and reached out for a new and brighter future at mid-century. Suffice it to say, not everyone agrees with that narrative.

Fast forward to 2006, when Boston Mayor Thomas Menino first raised the possibility of moving city hall to the redeveloping South Boston Waterfront and selling off (read: demolishing) the existing Boston City Hall for private redevelopment to fund the move. The cratering of the commercial real estate market has put that initiative on hold, but the Mayor's mere suggestion was enough to galvanize the previously marginalized supporters of the city's concrete legacy. Thus, Ms. Schweitzer's article quotes extensively from a recent reappraisal from the Boston Landmarks Commission of the architectural value of several of Boston's major modernist concrete buildings, including not only Boston City Hall and the State Services Center but the JFK Federal Building (also at Government Center), 133 Federal Street (which was targeted a couple of years ago for a new ultra-high rise), and the St. Anthony Shrine on Arch Street as well. It appears, based on the article's quotations from the study, that the BLC may be considering landmarking some or all of these buildings. They are said to be "architectural treasures" that have been affected over the years by the public's "widespread lack of understanding, appreciation, and context for buildings of this period." Those presumably really in the know -- the president of the New England chapter of DOCODOMO (an international organization based in Barcelona and devoted to the preservation of modernist architecture), two architects who co-curated an exhibit on Boston's mid-20th century buildings at the pinkcomma gallery in the South End, and a professor of architecture at Boston University -- are then quoted by Ms. Schweizer asserting that "[t]o just say they are ugly is a cop-out" and declaring them "large-scale works of public sculpture."

Sorry, but saying these buildings are ugly is not a cop-out, it's merely stating the truth. And to call them "large-scale works of public sculpture" is the most revealing statement made in either article. It is a peculiarly modernist idea that buildings should be conceived principally as massive art installations as opposed to, say, parts of the city's urban fabric. This orientation largely explains why modernist buildings such as these are almost uniformly unsuccessful when built in urban settings. They are generally intended to be viewed in isolation as art objects, even if they aren't actually so located and even, unlike, say a Jackson Pollock painting, where people are forced to do more than just look at them in a gallery, but actually have to live, work with, and pass by them on a regular basis. As they say in the computer programming world, the fact that these buildings look out of place is a feature, not a bug.

So, like most of the general public, I do not like either the State Services Center or Boston City Hall. All of the foregoing said, though, I am not terribly interested in their specific architectural stylings, how ugly they are, or even how they look on the skyline. Rather, my main concern is how they interact at ground level with people, adjacent streets, and their surrounding built environment.

"By their [urban design] fruits shall you know them."

Viewed through this lens, we have got some bad fruit, people. The State Services Center and Boston City Hall represent acutely impaired parts of the urban fabric that cry out for substantial improvement. To demonstrate what I mean, herewith photos showing both buildings from angles that were not shown in the Globe articles:

First, two photos from the Congress Street frontage of Boston City Hall, the first showing the massive bunker-like brick wall that turns a complete blind face to the street and Dock Square, the Samuel Adams statue, and Faneuil Hall across the way, and the second showing the blocked-off stairway shown in side view in the first photo. The third photo is of the side of the building that faces across the narrow part of City Hall Plaza toward the low-rise portion of the JFK Federal Building.

In order, a section of the Merrimack Street frontage, the pulled-back corner at Merrimack and Staniford Street (fenced off and occupied by parked cars), and the completely door-less facade on Cambridge Street.

This is where the prospect of the BLC possibly landmarking these buildings goes from merely interesting to take on aspects of potentially genuine tragedy. From an urban fabric/urban design standpoint, it is hard to find two more hostile, more badly-behaved buildings in Boston. They are in desperate need of serious, thorough intervention that will open their dull, alienating frontages up to the life of the street and the city they, for better or worse, inhabit. Before the BLC landmarks these buildings, consideration needs to be given to how much more difficult their badly-needed retrofit will become after that occurs.

Ultimately, then, by all means, argue the relative merits of these buildings, their styles and their place in the architectural history of the city. And maintain, preserve, and even systematically improve these buildings' performance. From a sustainability perspective, their replacement would require much more energy than their revitalization -- arguing strongly for leaving them where they are. But let's be careful before we unintentionally saddle ourselves with obviously dead streetscapes and torn urban fabric for too many more generations.

[RTUF Note: This entry has been revised since its original posting.]

Blog Post No. 2010-2: 45 Province Helps Re-Civilize Its Block

2010-02-07T11:44:00.030-05:00

Dignifying a historical echo while losing a bit of local color

Location: 45 Province Street, Boston, MA

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2009

Photos: Taking a walk around the block, starting at the corner of School Street and Province Street, then up School, left into Chapman Place to the rear alley behind the new building, around the corner onto Bosworth Street, down the Province House steps, and finally around the front of the building, stopping for a second at the former site of the Littlest Bar (the small, multi-paned facade at ground level with the red trim).

The Story: Where to start with this patch of Boston? I think I'll start with an excerpt from the treatment that Campbell and Vanderwarker gave to Province Court, the alley on the opposite side of Province Street, in Cityscapes of Boston (pages 158 and 159). [RTUF NOTE: Photo taken from the same vantage point in 2010 has been added as the last photo above. - ML] There, Robert said of the multi-storied garage that occupied this site from the mid-1950s until just a couple of years ago:

This car warehouse is the faceless Metropolitan Garage (1956), which may soon be demolished if a proposed redevelopment goes forward [RTUF NOTE: 45 Province is that ultimate redevelopment, some 17 years after Campbell wrote in 1992.] Regardless of whether it lives or dies, the Metropolitan's lesson is clear. Garages in the city are useful, but they shouldn't be allowed to kill the life of the street by occupying, as this one does, large areas along the sidewalk. Walking past so much dead frontage is like crossing a no man's land. It is empty, risky, and dull. Garages on commercial streets should be tucked out of sight beneath, above, or behind a continuous sidewalk frontage of other uses with interesting windows and doors, the architectural metaphors of human presence. Garages should also be designed with flat floors and enough ceiling room to enable them to be convertible -- like other buildings -- to different uses in the future.

Robert was right in so many different ways about that building. It was ugly, remarkably tall for a building used solely for a garage, and dead to the street in an aggressive, zombie-like way. Enough buildings like this, and you can kill even a city as tightly-knit as Boston. Despite its flat floors, it was not reused. Instead, it was totally demolished to make way for the building seen in the photos that I took this last week.

Even if you're not enitrely comfortable with the height of the new building (I personally am comfortable with the height, being, as I have stated in a prior post, from New York), it is a vast improvement over the former garage and parking lot that used to occupy this location. The residential condominiums rise above ground floor retail, a residential lobby announced by an expansive curving glass canopy, and off-street parking access/egress that is shielded for the most part by strategic landscaping and column placement. Following Robert Campbell's dictum, all of the building's 290+ parking spaces are located below grade beneath the building. One of the retail spaces appears to be reserved for a restaurant, with a side terrace (seen in the third photo, above) that looks like it will be a good place to perch come springtime. I especially like the careful treatment of Chapman Place at the rear of the building (cobblestones and granite curbing along the full length), how the building's main volumes are varied just enough to avoid a canyon effect, and the way the building fills in the entire block. All in all, 45 Province gives the surrounding streets a series of strong edges to work with.

Now for the historic echo and the lost piece of local color. The historic echo is the staircase leading up from the sidewalk on Province Street to the level of Bosworth Street above. This staircase is all that is left of the Province House, a mansion built by a wealthy Boston merchant in the 17th century that was made the official residence of the royal governors of the Massachusetts Province starting in 1716. After the Revolution, the Commonwealth found little use for the building once the seat of state government moved from what is now the Old State House to the Charles Bulfinch-designed (new) State House on Beacon Hill. So, in 1811 the structure was conveyed to the fledgling Massachusetts General Hospital as part of its endowment. After a century of income-generating commercial use for the hospital, the site was sold and the building was then demolished by the new owners in 1922. A plaque commemorating the location's rich history is located to the left of the base of the stairs. I think it fair to say that 45 Province re-civilizes this location -- an interesting concept considering it is located in the historic heart of a historic city, yet still true considering the garage structure it replaced.

We also now have another echo with the vestigial facade of the former Littlest Bar. Michael Levenson's Boston Globe piece lamenting the pub's demise can be read here. In summary, the pub was open for about 60 years, from the end of the Second World War until construction started on 45 Province a few years ago. It truly was the kind of place, as Levenson says, where half a dozen patrons could make it feel crowded. The Littlest did survive in altered form, relocating a few blocks away to Broad Street in a larger, ground-level space that just can't match what it had here. I don't challenge the notion that a strong piece of local color was lost here. But the city gained back a more extensive and functioning urban street frontage, and that has a value of its own.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: To say that this building neatly fills in a tear in the urban fabric that was crying out for restoration is an understatement. It does what was needed in this part of town.

RTUF NOTE: This post was modified after its initial publication to correct certain errors, improve readability, and add the photo of Providence Court. -- ML

Blog Post No. 2010-1: Staples strikes GOLD in Roslindale Square

2010-01-15T23:00:00.007-05:00

Admittedly, it remains a fairly big box, but still...

Location: 4165 Washington Street, Roslindale, MA

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2008

Photos: Just the 1, posted by Chris D. to yelp.com, a business rating site, looking north along Washington Street, with Roslindale Square behind you. (NOTE: I am having camera difficulty and so am relying on a web-obtained photo for this entry. I should be back with my own pix next post. - ML)

The Story: We're back in Roslindale Square, near your faithful correspondent's modest accommodations in God's favorite streetcar suburb. And we're looking here at the "new" Staples, completed in 2008 and given its LEED-NC "Gold" rating last fall. Staples helps to anchor the northern entrance to the business district. Although the graphic below indicates that the urban fabric restoration here isn't dramatic, the progress here is still meaningful. For as long as we had lived in Roslindale (since 2000), this location had been home to a shuttered Ashmont Discount store. [Still visible if you go to Google maps and use the streetview feature here.] For those who may not be entirely up on your local, now-departed Boston home improvement store chains, Ashmont Discount was one. This particular location evidently went down the tubes in the late 1990s when Home Depot opened a location a couple of miles away in West Roxbury. So, there it sat, vacant and without any activity for several years, even after the former Roslindale Pub site immediately to the north (you unfortunately can't see it in the photo, but you can see it on the Google maps link if you pan north) was redeveloped into a three-story mixed-use building about 5 years ago. In any event, the real estate market finally got around to this site in 2007, when Staples took the plunge and moved forward with this location. I will confess that I was among those in the community who thought a drug store/pharmacy was a better fit for the location. But Roslindale Village Main Streets did a good job of canvassing the community and finding out that, given the high number of self-employed folks in the area, an office supply and services store was in demand and would work at this site. Staples apparently agreed.

So, we have under examination a single-level, single-use, fairly large box. And I know some of my fellow New Urbanistas may be wondering what's worth talking about? To them, I say, be a bit more patient and a bit more generous. The Ashmont Discount building that this Staples has replaced was a ramshackle, hulking, unwelcoming presence with a facade of split-face concrete block and virtually no windows. Put simply: it was grim and needed to go. The Staples building shown here is a world away in terms of design and integration into its surroundings. It reaches a good deal closer across the side parking lot toward the Dunkin' Donuts than the previous structure. [Brief aside: That DD represents a lost opportunity. Like every DD here in Boston, it's VERY busy and generates a lot of pedestrian as well as vehicular activity. You can see how it used to look in the Google maps view. They did eliminate the pull-in parking directly off the street and replace it with a landscaped front yard, which clearly goes in the plus column in terms of both traffic management and pedestrian safety. Yet the pedestrian experience here would have been made truly good by moving the building up to the street as part of the construction project that resulted in the Staples. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.]

As I indicated above, this building was awarded LEED-NC Gold status in 2008. LEED stands for the "Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design" program developed and administered by the United States Green Building Council. The LEED rating system is the most widely-used green building rating system in the U.S. and has been at the forefront of moving the architecture, real estate, and construction industries toward sustainable design. LEED started by rating new construction or "NC" earlier this decade and then rating other types of contexts (core and shell, new homes, existing buildings, etc.). More information on LEED and its multi-faceted rating system can be found here. I'll close this post by making an observation related to LEED as demonstrated by this project: The LEED system is a valuable tool, but has had its blind spots. LEED uses a scorecard and point system to determine eligibility for certification, and at what level (Certified, Silver, Gold, or Platinum). It has been wildly successful and done enormous good in improving the spread of high performance design and building. That said, sometimes points can be "racked up" for relatively minor elements -- such as bike racks, which were installed here -- that have a marginal impact on a building's total sustainability profile. Another blind spot has been LEED's too-tight focus on building envelopes and immediate sites. What good, some say, is a new LEED-certified building out in the woods separated from everything else if everyone needs to drive there? In such a case, wouldn't the increased emissions from all of the driving to the site by its users offset whatever benefits there may be from the green building components? LEED has been trying to answer this question, most prominently in recent years by working with the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Natural Resources Defense Council to produce the LEED-ND component of the system, which looks at sustainability at a broader regional, neighborhood, and even block scale and tries to reward transit-oriented, infill, and contiguous development locations with higher points. The growth of LEED-ND has been slowed somewhat by the severe downturn in the real estate development market over the last 18 months, which immediately followed its release in pilot format. Going forward, it'll be worth watching to see whether LEED-ND matches the success of LEED's other rating categories.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: Fairly self-explanatory. Parenthetically, you can see most of the Greater Roslindale Medical and Dental Center, featured in Blog Post NO. 2009-2, in the lower left of the graphic.

NOTE: This post was revised after its initial posting. - ML

Post No. 2009-9: Breaking with the early pattern for posts here on RTUF...

2009-12-31T08:55:00.002-05:00

Form-Based Codes (Finally) Gaining Traction in New England?

And so, dear readers, we take our leave of 2009 and look ahead to 2010 with encouraging regional news on the Form-Based Codes (FBC) front. In fairly rapid succession over the last 3 months of the year, we have seen 3 new FBCs adopted in 3 different New England states:

First, on October 22, Jamestown (Rhode Island) adopted a SmartCode^-based FBC for its core village area.
Then, on December 7, Hamden (Connecticut) adopted a town-wide FBC, also based on the SmartCode.
Finally, on December 9, Dover (New Hampshire) adopted a Transect-based FBC to replace its existing downtown mixed-use district.

When combined with the 3 FBCs already adopted in Massachusetts -- for the Hamilton Canal District in Lowell*, the Buzzards Bay downtown area in Bourne, and the SouthField project in Weymouth-Abington-Rockland -- these new codes leave Vermont and Maine as the last two New England states without at least one FBC in place.

Curious about what exactly a FBC or Form-Based Code might be? And why someone concerned about urban design and creating better places might want to look into this relatively new form of development regulation? The Form-Based Codes Institute (visit them at: http://www.formbasedcodes.org/) has a comprehensive definition occupying its own page on FBCI's website that is available for initial reading. I'm hereby encouraging discussion in the comments section of this post if anyone wants to explore the concept further.

Here let it be said that FBCs are intended to regulate both private and public development in a way that produces desired built environments or urban forms such as residential neighborhoods, village centers, main street districts, suburban and urban downtowns, while simultaneously permitting and even encouraging mixing of uses (e.g., residential or office above retail) as essential to creating those desirable places. FBCs are best understood in contrast with conventional zoning, which is geared to regulating the private use of land as the first priority, typically by separating uses from each other into homogeneous districts (residential, retail, office, industrial, warehouse, etc.), pushing buildings back from the street and each other through setbacks and buffering requirements, and deferring to advisory design guidelines or design/development review processes to determine how and in what structures those uses will occupy the land. For FBCs, enjoyable places and a strong urban fabric are intended regulatory outcomes. For conventional zoning, such outcomes are often incidental or, in the worst cases, made more difficult to achieve.

For more information on the adopted NE FBCs:

SouthField (MA) -- Zoning and Subdivision (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4)

Bourne (MA) -- Zoning Overlay

Lowell (MA) -- Zoning and Subdivision (Four pdfs starting with "Final HCD Form Based Code...")

Jamestown (RI) -- Zoning Text and Map (Article 11 provides the bulk of the new FBC provisions)

Hamden (CT) -- Zoning Text and Map

Dover (NH) -- Excerpted Zoning Text and Embedded Regulating Plan (pardon the multiple jpgs):

^ - The SmartCode is a model FBC made available for adaptation to local conditions and legal requirements by the Center for Applied Transect Studies at http://www.smartcodecentral.org. The SmartCode uses the Transect as its framework for regulation.
* - My firm was retained by the City of Lowell to provide legal assistance in the drafting and adoption of the Hamilton Canal District FBC and, along with my firm colleagues, I was personally involved in providing that assistance.

Blog Post No. 2009-8: The W Hotel Boston (100 Stuart Street)

2009-12-07T06:30:00.001-05:00

And now for something completely different...

Location: 100 Stuart Street, Boston, MA (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2009

The Photos: Walking along Stuart Street, from the corner at Tremont Street toward Charles Street.

The Story: Finally completed and opened just a couple of months ago, the W Hotel Boston substantially changes the dynamic at the corner of Tremont and Stuart streets in the heart of Boston's theater district. The Charles Playhouse is down Warrenton Street, the Wang and Wilbur theaters are across Tremont Street, the Shubert's right next door, the Emerson Majestic is a block up Tremont, and the Colonial is up and around the corner on Boylston Street. Most recently, art house cinema returned to Boston at the Stuart Street Playhouse two blocks over. Despite its central location, for at least as long as I've lived in Boston (since 1997), this site was the archetypal urban fabric no-no: a surface parking lot occupying a full city block at a key downtown intersection.

The architecture here is uncompromisingly modernist in style, though the building's placement on its site suggests its designers were more than happy to come out and meet the street directly with lots of ground floor activity and transparency. Of course, this is a fairly tight urban site with no space to waste anyway. While the building is a clear departure from much of what's around it, there has been little open hostility to its ultimate arrival, especially given its overall height and facades that proceed directly to the buidling's full height without any stepping back.

This may be a good point at which to discuss Boston's "High Spine." As with so many things having to do with architecture, urban design, and planning in Boston, Robert Campbell recently (in 2006) covered this topic in the Boston Globe (link here) elegantly and with an eye toward what is truly important about it, especially its accordance with Boston's "basic DNA" as a craggy peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow neck, even if the original Boston Neck was a bit more to the south and east. Here let it be said that the High Spine has, since its endorsement in 1961 by the Boston Society of Architets' Committee on Civic Design, provided a remarkably durable and understandable conceptual framework for where tall buildings outside of the city's Financial District should be located. That is, in a "High Spine" stretching from the area around Kenmore Square on the west, running eastward on a line through the Prudential Center, Copley Square, and Park Plaza (thereby threading the needle between the Back Bay and the South End atop the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension, the MBTA Orange and Green lines, and the main Amtrak/Commuter Rail corridor). Major and easily recognizable peaks on the High Spine today include the Prudential building itself and the "old" (the one with the weather beacon on top) and "new" (designd by I.M. Pei) Hancock towers, but there are many less lofty peaks along the length of the spine, including the Millennium Center development from earlier this decade and, now, the W Hotel. It may well be that the location of this new building along the High Spine explains why, at least at this point (several years after its approvals were obtained), its realization has caused little angst among the populace. All in all, it's a welcome addition to the urban ensemble.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: I'm pretty sure that the dimesions on the building's notch along the Tremont Street side are not accurate, but you get the general idea.

Blog Post No. 2009-7: The Back of the Four Seasons Hotel

2009-11-14T19:05:00.004-05:00

Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference (The first in a series...)

Location: 200 Boylston Street, Boston, MA (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2006

The Photos: In and around the intersection of Columbus Avenue, Charles Street, and St. James Avenue, at the rear of the Four Seasons Hotel, showing the two-story addition done as part of the extensive renovation of the hotel.

The Story: Completed in 1985, the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston was one of the first hotels developed with luxury condominiums in the same building that can make use of the hotel's services. Needless to say, a success and a model much copied elsewhere. Given the hotel's location -- across Boylston Street from the Public Garden and Boston Common, blocks from Boston's high-end shopping districts along Back Bay's Newbury Street and in the Copley Plaza -- it's hard to remember that the development project was actually pursued under the auspices of the Park Plaza Urban Renewal Plan. The area to the rear of the hotel, Boston's Park Plaza area, was the principal area to which the city's red light district migrated after the early 1960s urban renewal-motivated demolition of the old Scollay Square to make way for Government Center. With the adoption and implementation of the Park Plaza plan in the 1970s and 1980s, the remaining adult entertainment uses moved on to the Combat Zone a few blocks to the east. Getting back to the Four Seasons itself, its Boylston Street frontage worked well from the beginning, being drawn up to the wide sidewalks of the major street and activating the edge with entrances and high visibility into the hotel's ground floor through a permeable facade. But the St. James Avenue frontage was less fortunate. Particularly at the irregular intersection of St. James, Charles, and Columbus, the building was drawn far back from Columbus, leaving a no-man's land that was little used. There were also no ground floor entrances or uses that could bring life to the street. When the hotel decided it was time for a complete top-to-bottom overhaul of its guest rooms, they also took the felicitous step of filling in the dead zone that had been left at this intersection, inserting a curving two-story wing that includes a high-end furniture store at the ground level and meeting areas and function space above. This may seem like a fairly small, incremental improvement, but when teamed with the much-improved retail uses on the ground floor of the 1920s-era Motormart Garage and the One Charles residential building across St. James (RTUF will get to that in a later post) and the smart treatment of the smaller and more usable public space (now dubbed the Bristol Courtyard) that remains, it clearly works as a sum greater than its parts. And I'm an incrementalist at heart anyway.

[Rev. November 16, 2009] RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: See below. I'm clearly not an architect, but you get a sense of the sensitivity of the change here and how it helps frame up and channel the view along Columbus Avenue into the Common.

Blog Post No. 2009-6: New Feature

2009-11-13T20:33:00.000-05:00

RTUF is adding a new feature to our posts: hand-drawn sketches showing the urban fabric restoration in plan view, starting with Blog Post No. 2009-1 on the Saltonstall Building. The feature will be added on a rolling basis to prior posts and will be included in all posts going forward. We hope this added feature is helpful. -- ML

Blog Post No. 2009-5: Charles River Plaza

2009-11-06T20:30:00.022-05:00

The Evolution of an Urban Shopping Center

Address: Charles River Plaza, 175 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA (MAP)

Year(s) of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2003/2008

The Photos: Walking up Cambridge Street from Massachusetts General Hospital heading toward the Harrison Gray Otis House and Old West Church.

The Story: For a period starting in the 1960s up and through the early 2000s, Charles River Plaza behaved much like a garden-variety suburban strip center dropped into the heart of a major city. A supermarket, some smaller stores (including a pharmacy and bank), and a movie theater (closed in the early 1990s) were arranged in an L shape facing the corner of Cambridge Street and Blossom Street in Boston's West End (whose demolition to pave the way for urban renewal in the late 1950s/early 1960s is a story all its own) with below-grade and surface parking entered from Cambridge Street and a mid-rise hotel at the corner itself. The early 2000s redevelopment of the center, completed in 2003, added new building area on top of the former movie theater space to create a mid-rise office building and also infilled a new 5-story addition along the Cambridge Street frontage with office space above and retail stores below. All of the office space was taken by nearby Massachusetts General Hospital as clinical and medical office space for its doctors and staff. The surface parking level atop the garage structure remains and is generally hidden from the Cambridge Street frontage. So, instead of walking past a blank parking structure wall and street level garage roof parking, you walk by retail stores and a building that does a much better job of enclosing an important and historic street. As with the Saltonstall Building described in Post No. 2009-1 of this blog, the reconstruction of the streetscape along Cambridge Street that was completed in 2008 was long and drawn-out. But the end result is a very substantial improvement over what existed before and works well with the evolution of Charles River Plaza.

[Rev. November 18, 2009] RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: See below. The filled in portion is effectively a full block along this portion of Cambridge Street.

Blog Post No. 2009-4: Houston, we have a Follower!

2009-11-03T09:02:00.004-05:00

RTUF is pleased to announce that our good friend Darlene Wynne has, as of yesterday, become this blog's first Follower! [To be totally precise, Darlene is our first and only Follower, but we hope that changes very soon.] For those of you who don't know Darlene, she is a planner and New Urbanista of the first order. Indeed, Darlene was one of the founders and major motivating players of the New England Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism for several years. Although she now lives and works in the Philadephia area, her efforts in this region have not been forgotten. Thanks for signing on Darlene! -- ML