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

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

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...

...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...

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:

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...

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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...

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.