Blog Post No. 2013-2: Launching the Substation Redevelopment

Photo credit: historicbostonblog.org.

NOW, this is how you do two things: FIRST, design a context-sensitive, mixed-use redevelopment project in the heart of Roslindale Square; and SECOND, run a community meeting rolling out and setting the tone for public review of said project.

Loyal and active members of RTUF Nation will recall that less than a week ago, this weblog did a brief update piece on recent developments in Roslindale Square (a.k.a., God's Country). Included in that update was a reference to a then impending community meeting in which RVMS, Historic Boston, and Peregrine Development, their for-profit joint venture partner, would present the design for a proposed redevelopment of the combined MBTA Substation and Higgins Funeral Home site at the southeast corner of Washington Street and Cummins Highway. Well, that meeting happened at the Knights of Columbus last Wednesday and it was impressive in both the ways described above.

The proposed project (you can access it here) is about as responsible, in the very best sense of the word, urban design behavior as you're going to find out there. The existing Higgins funeral home structure comes down and the substation is renovated for a signature restaurant space. In place of the funeral home, we have a wrap-around 41-unit apartment building with ground floor office on the Washington Street frontage and liner residential units on the Cummins Street frontage that hide the parking behind. The design on each frontage appropriately differs. On Washington Street, it's a more commercial feeling, flat-roofed building. On Cummins, the building reads more as a larger, gabled residential building, similar to a number of such buildings around the intersection of Cummins and Florence just up the street. I am particularly fond of the way the designers have found a way to pull the ground level of the new building back slightly from both Washington Street (which unfortunately has no on-street parking in this block) and the substation to create a small courtyard with a handful of tables that will provide outdoor seating for the ultimate restaurant tenant. It's just one indication of the high level of skill and care that has gone into this design. Yours truly could readily imagine himself seated at a table sipping a finely crafted IPA from Substation Brewing Company on a crisp evening come fall 2014.

Of course, this being the real world, there are non-trivial issues to be surmounted, including driving the parking ratio down further (it's close to 1-to-1 on the residentail units, which really isn't necessary for as transit- and desination-rich a site as this) and dealing with the floor height of the ground level residentail units on Cummins. Probably the most significant challenge will be coming to a mutually satisfactory arrangement with the neighboring Roslindale Congregational Church, which runs a day care and pre-school in their adjacent complex in addition to their worship activities and multiple community-oriented events. The church building is a handsome, late 19th century edifice in the Romanesque-Shingle Style and listed on the National Register. Anyone with half a brain, and the collective redevelopment team and their designers clearly have more than that, would want to be sensitive to that adjacency and seek in good faith to address the church's concerns about shadow, traffic, parking and construction-period impacts. That appears to be happening already.

Of course, addressing those concerns in an overall context of strong community support for the project would be a plus, and...you guessed it, that's what we had last Wednesday. To describe the meeting as a love-fest would perhaps be slight, but really only slight, hyperbole. The speakers, who included your humble correspondent, were overwhelmingly in favor of the project and even those speakers who expressed concerns did so in a manner suggesting that they understood the value of the project and wanted only to make sure that certain issues were properly considered and addressed. I can honestly say that I was very surprised at the uniformity of support, which, upon reflection, stems most likely from 3 sources:

1. The long-standing community good will and trust that Roslindale Village Main Streets has engendered through its almost 30 years of advocacy for the Square, including its most recent major achievement, the phenomenally successful farmers market;
2. The manifest skill of the meeting's organizers (you know who you are, but you especially include Steve Gag, board president of RVMS); and
3. The worthiness of the design.

These are listed in their relative order of priority. You get nowhere without community trust, and in Roslindale, as in Boston generally, you have to pay your dues by putting in the time. When it comes to development issues, there is a LOT of distrust. Then, even if you have trust in your corner, you can mismanage it. And finally, you can blow your first two indispensible advantages with an awful design. None of that is happening, so we can look forward with at least somewhat justifiable confidence to the not-too-distant day when the substation is finally brought back to life and Roslindale sees another piece of its urban fabric restored.

Blog Post No. 2013-1: Updates on Roslindale Square

First of all, happy 2013 to the members of RTUF Nation! It has been a busy January for your faithful correspondent, so this month's post is coming later than is typical, though it may be followed quickly by an update to this update.

Now, with the formalities out of the way, here's the latest urban fabric news from God's Country (a.k.a, Roslindale Square):

"Traffic" Sculpture Installed

So, it took almost 3 years, but the public art that I referenced in a truly vintage April 2010 post about Alexander the Great Square's almost pitch-perfect traffic improvements has finally arrived. You can see photos of the installation last month here at Wicked Local, and you can view a video from the sculptor here: George Greenmayer Video. RTUF management has a policy against commenting on art and architectural style, but I will say that I am fond of it and it can certainly stay. Public art is, in and of itself, a powerful statement about a community's respect for itself.

Substation Redevelopment Proposal

Meanwhile, redevelpment of the former trolley substation that is, for all intents and purposes and despite its derelict state, the architectural heart of Roslindale Square, looks poised to take a very major step foward toward reality, though much changed in focus since last it crossed the old radar screen. Instead of the stand-alone substation, done on a shoe-string as a kind of event-space-in-the-raw, we are now looking at a much more substantial project and project site that now includes redevelopment of the adjacent F.J. Higgins Funeral Home on Washington Street, with the attendant parking lot that wraps around the substation onto Cummins Highway. To say that the mixed-use project now proposed is right up your correspondent's alley would be an understatement. How the urban design responds to this site, which is critically important for the square, will be a very big deal. That design will presumably be available at the upcoming community meeting, and I'll do a follow up then.

Blog Post No. 2012-18: In which we finally visit the High Line

The Photos:



Photo 1: Looking east across W. 23rd Street.

 

Photo 2: View northeast with Empire State Building in background.



Photo 3: Looking north along the High Line from W. 23rd Street.

Photo 4: View southwest toward Hudson River.

Photo 5: View south from around W. 23rd Street.



Photo 6: Detail of water fountain. Sticker: "Out of service for winter season."



Photo 7: View north along 10th Avenue.

 

Photo 8: Terroir Cafe near W. 16th Street.


The Location: The High Line, between Gansevoort Street and West 23rd Street, 9th and 10th Avenues, New York, NY. Map here.


The Story: And so, to close out the year, we return to New York and the signature product of landscape urbanism, American-style: the High Line. Though I remain a sceptic of LU, you may consider me a fan of this particular piece of urban fabric restoration and you can put this in the category of "by their fruits shall you know them, urbanism-wise." When a project works, and the High Line unquestionably does, you give credit where credit is due. All at once, this former elevated freight railroad line on Manhattan's lower west wide is a piece of industrial art, a pedestrian travel corridor, and a promenade. The level of attention to detail and curatorship is extraordinarily high. Even putting aside the multiple pieces of contemporary art that have been installed along the route, the entire High Line itself is given great care in all of its details. Thus, to take just one example, the sticker on the water fountain in photo 6. I can assure you as a native New Yorker, that I have never seen a public water fountain in the city provide any information whatsoever, let alone accurate information as to why it is not presently in service.

I would also put this in the urban revivication category alluded to in the recent post about the Islanders moving to the borough of Kings. According to the Friends of the High Line website, the High Line was originally built above old surface tracks serving the West Side waterfront in the 1930s as a means of eliminating grade crossings and the attendant hazards of frieght trains running down active urban avenues. However, with the demise of shipping from the Hudson River piers in Manhattan and the rise of trucking in the 1950s and 1960s, the facility rapidly declined in use and all train service was eventually ended by 1980. Thus, the High Line stood as a symbol of industrial decline for over 20 years, becoming a target of efforts to completely demolish it and eliminate the easement rights it embodied so the space could be privatized. In other words, the High Line had no future, which should sound familiar, since around that time the conventional wisdom was that all of urban America, as a concept and as a group of places, had little to no future itself. I exaggerate only slightly.

It took a railroad enthusiast with the quixotic and ultimately unsuccessful notion of restoring rail service to save the High Line early on until a small, but determined group of citizens joined together and saw in it an opportunity to create a unique urban amenity. Thus, a structure left for dead and surely seen as a symbol of blight and decay was transformed into something that adds to its surrounding neighborhood and has become a focus for new investment, even to the point where the Whitney Museum of American Art is expanding with a new, Renzo Piano-designed building directly adjacent to the southern terminus of the High Line at Gansevoort Street. From any perspective, the High Line is a remarkable achievement for its organizers working through Friends of the High Line, the City of New York (which remains the structure's owner), and for James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the LU designers who were chosen to bring the High Line to life. The High Line's take-away, perhaps, is that people who care about their own cities, towns, and neighborhoods and what happens in them might do well to contemplate what they presently see as physical negatives -- abandoned buildings, structures, and areas -- and consider them as opportunities to enhance their surroundings. Yes, we're looking at you, Old Northern Avenue Bridge in Boston...

Blog Post Script: The walk from 23rd Street down to the end of the High Line in the West Village gave your correspondent the opportunity to stop by and snap a photo in front of 555 Hudson Street, the house immortalized by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.



Photo 9: In front of 555 Hudson Street.



Blog Post No. 2012-17: What McMorrow said about the Financial District in Boston

Regular readers of this weblog may have noticed that I link to Paul McMorrow stories from time to time. And for good reason - he's focusing on many of the issues near and dear to our hearts here at RTUF and he's always a good read. His recent piece in Boston Magazine is another example of why that's the case. It's called The Empty Quarter: Boston's Financial District is hollowing out. That's a big problem - but it may also be an opportunity. I encourage you to read the whole piece as I suspect that the shifts in demand for office space that McMorrow describes may also be happening elsewhere in the US. I think I have it right when I say that McMorrow seems to suggest that one part of the emerging solution is to convert much of what became Class B or Class A- office space when the new towers were built -- the smaller existing office buildings built principally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- to apartments and condominiums. Those buildings are better configured with smaller floor plates that allow conversion to residential much more easily. The other part seems to be to re-brand the boiler room-style lower floors of the major office towers of the 1970s and 1980s, which are structurally ill-suited to residential use, as tech/start-up office space. You may recall that this was the topic of a blog post last year in Blog Post No. 2011-14: Shedding light on the boiler room...has to be one of the keys to making it at least potentially rentable in today's economy. Paul believes such space is well-suited to the open office configurations preferred by those companies and approximate the layouts, if not the aesthetics, of the old industrial space in places like East Cambridge and Fort Point Channel that have been the preferred locations for those companies. How it all shakes out remains to be seen, but it does seem clear that change is coming even to the Financial District.

Blog Post No. 2012-16: First the Nets, now the Islanders!?!

Your faithful RTUF correspondent blogged earlier this year (in Post No. 2012-6) about the resurrection of Brooklyn's railroading heart with the recent reconstruction of the LIRR Atlantic Terminal at Atlantic and Flatbush avenues. At the time, because it was a relatively brief post, I merely touched on two major themes that, at least to me, the new building represented: first, that Brooklyn was very definitely doing very well, and second, that this performance was particularly sweet vindication for me because as a kid, it was quite simply accepted fact that places like Brooklyn (where I was, you know, born and then growing up) simply had no future.

Well, the first major theme just received another substantial boost with the announcement a couple of days ago that the NHL's New York Islanders will move from their antiquated arena on Long Island in Uniondale to the Barclays Center. Barclays is, of course, where the relocated Brooklyn Nets will be playing their first regular season game very soon.


Photo source: wikipedia.


According to the linked Bloomberg piece, the move is set for the 2015-2016 season, assuming the NHL someday ends the lockout and actually starts playing hockey games again. Putting that aside, for those of you keeping score at home, the deeper sports story here is that both of the pro teams that started playing at the Nassau Coliseum -- ABA New York Nets of Dr. J fame, and the New York Islanders -- in the early 1970s are now going to be reunited in Brooklyn, of all places. Call it fate.

Now, the Islanders aren't just any team to me. They were quite simply my hockey team as a young lad and my God they were good. During their glory years of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the team was replete with the likes of Denis Potvin (whom Ranger fans still jeered wtih "Potvin Sucks" more than a decade after he retired), Bryan Trottier, Mike Bossy, Bobby Nystrom, Clark Gillies, Billy Smith, and Butch Goring, just to name a few, they won 4 (!) Stanley Cups in a row and played some of the most exciting, balanced team hockey the league has ever seen. Since then, it's been a long, painful and effectively permanent descent to the basement for the Isles. A descent punctuated, at least in my mind, with the criminal, after-the-whistle hit that virtually talent-free Washington Capitals enforcer Dale Hunter put on Pierre Turgeon after Turgeon's goal clinched the 1993 Wales conference semifinal series for the Islanders. Psychologically, Hunter didn't just crumple Turgeon, he injured the whole franchise. Whether the move to a new arena will be the thing that shakes the Islanders out of their doldrums and makes them competitive agian remains to be seen. There's at least some hope that it will lead to a brighter future.

The second theme, the one about sweet vindication and the phoenix-like revivication of the County of Kings, is also boosted by the imminent coming of the Islanders. As is well known, the borough's beloved Dodgers decamped for Los Angeles in 1958, leaving behind a deeply distraught and embittered fan base that I can still remember as deeply distraught and embittered as a young child, more than a decade later. Even though the Mets had been bestowed upon the region and had success in 1969 and again in 1973, everyone knew, deep down, that soul-less Shea Stadium (an armpit the day it opened) was hardly a replacement for the intimate Ebbets Field and an expansion team was no match for the blood, sweat and tears Brooklyn had put into the Dodgers. Branch Rickey deserved immense credit and a place in the Hall of Fame for integrating major league baseball by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947. But what Rickey and Walter O'Malley did to their host city a decade later was undeniably devastating.

And as Brooklyn and the entire city itself entered into a painful decline over the ensuing quarter century, including, without in any way implying limitation, such joyous events as two major blackouts, the Son of Sam murder spree, municipal bankruptcy, the mayoralty of Abe Beame, the Westway debacle, the loss of a million residents, and the rise of Donald Trump, it was hard to deny what many were saying: that our best days were behind us (I seem to recall a New York magazine article that even pinpointed 1946 as the city's best year, period -- thank you New York magazine!), and the future was elsewhere. Turns out the future was in Brooklyn all along, with its growing population, two major sports franchises, state-of-the-art arena, newly-rebuilt train station, and perhaps the greatest per-capita hippitude of all stripes on the planet, led by a troika of moguls from 3 very different worlds - hip hop, real estate, and precious metals. Go figure.

Blog Post No. 2012-15: Something like this (though maybe not exactly this)...

...is what your correspondent meant about Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross:

Photo 1: Existing facade of St. Paul's Cathedral, Tremont Street, Boston. Note
the blank, unfinished pediment above the columns. Copied from Architecture Boston website.

Photo 2: Selected finishing design by Philadelphia-based artist Andrew Lipski, based on the whorl of the Nautilus shell. Copied from Architecture Boston website.

Photo 3: Night view of Lipski's design. Copied from Architecture Boston website.

So, you may argue with the aesthetics and, if you have a viewpoint on the subject, the question of whether the pediment of a religious building should convey an expressly religious message directly tied to the congregation that meets within, or if an essentially aesthetic or natural subject's depiction is can itself be a subtle appeal to the existence of a deity that is the root of such beauty and order. But there is no doubt that the Epicopal Church in Massachusetts is sending a message to the broader community that it is still alive and kicking by spending considerable time and energy on presenting a new, finished face to its surroundings. The location at stake here is critical as well. St. Paul's Cathedral is located on Tremont Street, across the street from Boston Common, in the heart of the Downtown Crossing area of Boston, facing up the lower part of Beacon Hill toward the State House. A map to help RTUF Nation orient itself is here.

The decision to go with this design, made by St. Paul's with the help of MassArt, was made back in March. But it only recently came to your correspondent's attention. The essential story, which can be found on  WBUR's website, is similar in its broad outlines to the story with the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, at which we here at RTUF took a gander last year around this time. St. Paul's original builders apparently had intended for the pediment to include a sculptural depiction of St. Paul preaching to Herod Agrippa II of Judea. When funds ran short during construction in 1819, the pediment sculpture was dropped and the space where it was supposed to go has remained blank for the last 190+ years. Why fill the pediment in now? Ostensibly, it's a way of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the designation of the building as the Episcopal diocese's cathedral church. As Dean Jep Streit indicates in the WBUR story, though, the diocese is trying to do more with their decision and send a message of continuing relevancy and vitality.

Now, as to the aesthetics themselves, Bostonians have long been active in historic preservation and the architectural community's reaction was at least mixed, if not tending toward critical, at the outset, as you can see from the commentary on the Boston Society of Architects' website here and on Universal Hub. And the reasons are many why that kind of a discussion would be warranted. The design of the church is an early and excellent example of Greek Revival architecture. The architects of St. Paul's were Alexander Parris and Solomon Willard, between them responsible for two of Boston's major landmarks: Quincy Market (Parris) and the Bunker Hill Monument (Willard). The interior of the church was redesigned around its hundredth anniversary by  Ralph Adams Cram, a well-known proponent of Gothic Revival architecture whose designs include the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. You'll see that there's a bit of referencing of the "Saint John the Divine Approach" in the BSA comments, where there's some hand-wringing over the failure to complete the original design in stone sculpture, much like the way the completion of the massive Saint John's has been pursued using traditional masonry methods eschewing modern methods. St. Paul's has obviously taken a different approach with the selection of the Nautilus pediment.

In the final analysis, count me with the group who see the pediment design as worth at least a try, if not entirely appropriate. Remember that the church design is itself Greek Revival, a design aesthetic that initially had absolutely no intrinsic Christian meaning (being, you know, pre-Christian by several centuries). The artist, Donald Lipski, ably and with obvious seriousness described his design idea and meaning as follows (I am quoting in full from his own blog, which can be found here):

St. Paul’s is a house of Prayer for all People.  Carl Jung saw the spiral as the archetypal symbol of cosmic force, focusing both inward and outward.  The spiral occurred to me because it speaks to all people.  We see it in most every culture, from primitive rock carvings to the scroll of the Torah. It’s a ubiquitous form in nature—from the motion of subatomic particles to the vastness of galaxies.

The church itself gets its Greek proportions from the golden rectangle, which generates the Fibinacci spiral.  This is how the idea first came to me.  I visited the church in November, and in the Commons came upon a woman making a spiral in the leaves, and walking it back and forth like a labyrinth.  This was like a divine sign.

I’ve based it on a slice from the shell of the Chambered Nautilus, one of the Earth’s oldest creatures.  The Nautilus each year outgrows its chamber and builds a new one, which is a beautiful metaphor for spiritual growth.  Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote his great poem, The Chambered Nautilus, reflecting on just this.  He called the nautilus “The Ship of Pearl”, and I have made this the title of the sculpture.  

Here is the last stanza:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

I plan to make it look like the stone tracery on Gothic churches.  St. Paul’s was once a prominent building, but as tall office buildings have grown up around it, it has lost its impact.  Folks have felt that it looks like a bank.  I think this will change that.  I expect it will be a new and welcome landmark on Tremont St.

-Donald Lipski

How inspiring would it be if your correspondent's own Archdiocese of Boston could find within itself the resolve to finish the vertical elements of its massive Roxbury Puddingstone edifice, designed by P.C. Keely, perhaps the most prolific church architect of them all?

Blop Post No. 2012-14: What would possess us to outlaw...

...long-standing and generally satisfying built environments?

That's a question that's always begged when you see a graphic like this one, which my friend and fellow panelist Ted Brovitz included in a presentation at this past Thursday's Southern New England APA regional conference in Hartford:

Figure: Conformity/Non-conformity Map for Merrick Neighborhood,
West Springfield, MA. Credit: Ted Brovitz, Howard/Stein-Hudson.

The neighborhood shown here is the Merrick section of West Springfield, Massachusetts, which Ted described in his presentation as a typical turn-of-the-last-century mill neighborhood wedged between railroad yards on the west and the Connecticut River on the east. A substantial swath of the neighborhood was leveled by a tornado that swept through this and other parts of western Mass. a year ago last June. In addition to the tragedy of losing everything to the storm, the event also seems to have been a kind of "regulatory revelation" to the Town and the neighborhood's residents, who suddenly discovered the meaning of the image shown above.

Properties that are colored reddish-brown are non-conforming (i.e., they are currently in violation) of the minimum lot size requirement for their location as set forth in the West Springfield Zoning By-Law. Properties that are colored blue are conforming for lot size and properties that have been left white do not have sufficient information to establish whether they are conforming or non-conforming. In other words, the approximately 80-85% of the map shown in reddish-brown could not be legally rebuilt after being damaged by the tornado because the lots were too small. Without the changes to the zoning rules that Howard/Stein-Hudson has been helping the Town sort through, the owners of those properties would, in many cases, have to obtain zoning relief (possibly including variances, which would, according to the extremely strict standard in the state's zoning act, be both improperly granted and legally indefensible in virtually all cases) just to build what was there before the tornado. In other words, the Merrick neighborhood as it has stood for 100 years was quite simply outlawed by local regulation. Sounds kind of crazy, doesn't it?

Well, it isn't, at least if you understand the basic thrust of the vast majority of the zoning ordinances and by-laws that control development in our country. Put simply, almost all of these regulatory enactments were first adopted more than 50 years ago and were then premised indiscriminately and with almost no meaningful planning on auto-oriented suburban residential and commercial development. Neighborhoods like Merrick, with houses and business built in a traditional, pre-automobile form, close to the street and in a relatively tight pattern, were given the equivalent of death sentences by zoning. Whenever and however they finally succumbed, as the neighborhood ultimately did to the tornado, they simply weren't going to be allowed to come back. Luckily for Merrick (if anything in this episode can be called lucky), their calamity came after the discussion of this phenomenon has become widespread and well-understood and no longer tolerated without question. New Urbanists have long tried to raise consciousness about this issue, warning anyone who would listen that beloved places like Nantucket or Alexandria or [pick your favorite neighborhood] could not be built under today's zoning codes and were just one natural disaster away from extinction. The work in Merrick indicates that these warnings have finally made an impact.