This time, for once, not what McMorrow said... (Blog Post No. 2013-9)

In another of our series on what's happening in coverage of the urban fabric in local media ("they write about it, we give it the once over"), I come today to disagree with the generally very sound Paul McMorrow and his recent opinion piece in the Boston Globe advocating for the demolition of Boston City Hall and its sale as a development site for one or more high-rise towers to punctuate the High Spine's end in downtown west (the last bit about the High Spine is my reading into what Paul is saying). The piece can be found here - Boston City Hall Should Be Torn Down - and while it's as well written as usual, it's just not doing it for your correspondent.

I will stipulate that the building is an affront in almost every way (though it's thankfully not a high-rise itself). But the real problem with City Hall from the perspective of living and working and just being in this, our fair city, is its total lack of urban conviviality, its open hostility in the way in which it meets everything around it. Faithful members of RTUF Nation may recall that yours truly blogged about this issue some time ago in A response and a concern, and what I said then goes quadruple after reading the arguments offered by David Friedman, my fellow Bostonian living up the road in Jamaica Plain who happens, not without importance for the discussion there and here, to be a professor emeritus of architectural history at MIT, in his letter to the editors of the Globe in response to the article ("An American Classic"). Maybe he's more than just a "casual observer," but the good professor's letter merely proves, if there remained any meaningful doubt, the building's defenders are largely, if not exclusively, object building fetishists with virtually no regard for the consequences of foisting what amounts to an oversized modernist sculpture on a critically important urban location. And I quite frankly can't see that opening up the atrium at the middle of the building solves any of the problems with the building that matter to me.

All of that said, I'm not with Paul on tearing the building down. I may have been born and raised in New York and I am very comfortable with tall buildings, but I don't see big height as critical at this location. I'd rather see the city make a real go at opening up the building to the adjacent plaza and, as importantly, Congress Street and filling in the broad array of dead spaces on its perimeter before we decide to tear it down and go somewhere else.

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. 2012-5: Urban design roundup -- Reclaiming the Esplanade (and its broader implications) and Exploring the urban design-public health nexus

In yet another installment of our continuing series of commentaries on commentaries in the media ("They report it, we give it the once-over..."), your friends at RTUF offer the following:

1. Paul McMorrow in today's Boston Globe: A chance to reclaim the Esplanade. Taking the opportunity presented by the non-profit Esplanade Association's recent release of "Esplanade 2020" (their long-range planning proposal for reinvigorating the Boston shore of the Charles River Basin), McMorrow speaks emphatically to the need to roll back some of the more stunningly bad public infrastructure decisions of the last half century, especially the transmogrification of Storrow Drive from a simple park road into an interstate wanna-be and the blight that is the Bowker Overpass connecting Storrow to the Fenway, which casts a critical part of the Commonwealth Avenue mall and the mouth of the Muddy River into perpetual shadow. The piece is well worth a read. Bottom line: knowing what we know today, we have to seize every chance we are offered to reconstruct and renovate our infrastructure in a way that supoprts, instead of degrades, the urban fabric. Get out there, and get to it.

2. Jane Brody in the New York Times over the last three weeks, starting with: Communities learn the good life can be a killer. Wth her typical combination of seeing the problem broadly, researching it carefully, and then making it personal, Ms. Brody walks through the personal/public health aspects of some of the very issues we here at RTUF have been highlighting in this first installment, and then the subsequent pieces Making city streets safer and Advice from a 70 year-old cyclist. There is undeniably a link between how we organize, deign, and construct our built environment and public health. In a sense, automobile-oriented suburban development was a massive national experiment on the health effects of removing virtually every opportunity for incidential physical activity from our lives. And the results of the experiment are not promising, especially (though by no means exclusively) increased obesity rates and elevated risk factors for the suite of diseases  that come with it. Successfully and convincinlgy linking a public policy issue to public and personal health has proven to be a winning strategy on many issues. On this basis, the prospects for moving the needle even further in the urban design conversation seem to keep getting better. I haven't caught it yet, but the PBS documentary on "Designing Healthy Communities" looks like it'll be well worth watching. RTUF Note: In the interest of full disclosure, readers should be aware that I spent 11 years of my life living a few doors up the street from Ms. Brody, her husband Richard Enguist, and her twin boys Erik and Lorin, in Brooklyn.

3. RTUF Milestone Announcement: We surpassed 5,000 visitors earlier today. Many thanks to RTUF Nation for visiting from time to time and, even, when the mood hits you, commenting.

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