Welcoming Roche Brothers to DTX...

...in which we contemplate the turning of yet another tide

Photo 1: Exterior view, down Summer Street toward Washington.

Photo 2: Front view, with outdoor seating in foreground.

Photo 3: Interior on street level (prepared foods).

Photo 4: Lower level, looking back to escalator.

Photo 5: Lower level, main supermarket floor.

Photo 6: Exit to MBTA Concourse at lower level.

Photo 7: On the MBTA Concourse, facing toward entrance.

The Location: The proverbial walkable "Main & Main" of Boston - Downtown Crossing. Specifically at Winter, Summer, and Washington streets, in the Daniel Burnham-designed building that was the flagship store for Filene's for several decades.

The Story: It is here that Roche Brothers, a well-respected, locally-owned, and thoroughly mainstream suburban supermarket chain has decided to enter the urban market with a 25,000 sf store at a highly visible and attention-grabbing location. And make no mistake, this is a departure for Roche Brothers. They were founded in Roslindale (a.k.a, God's Country) in the early 1950s and never ventured any closer to the regional core, opting instead to spread into the western suburbs and eventually north and south of town (even going to the Cape for one of their locations). In the process, they left their original Roslindale Square location (leaving a hole that wasn't plugged until the community rose up to create the Village Market in the late 1990s) and have been headquartered for many years in Wellesley. A glance at their location map (which needs to be updated to show the new store) shows clearly how suburban their footprint is. Until now, the only store they have had within the city limits of Boston is in West Roxbury, the last neighborhood you reach before you hit the suburbs in Dedham. The pictures below the location map tell the story as eloquently as this weblog ever could: The WR store is somewhat walkable/bikeable (I've done both myself), but the full roster is, without exception, much larger and far more auto-served than DTX. In that sense, this is a little bit like the "One of these things is not like the others" segments on Sesame Street. Roche Brothers DTX is the outlier, without doubt.

And so, we come to the thought that this post is intended to provoke. What would bring conventional, suburban Roche Brothers down to the epicenter of the urban core? Clearly, it's the turning tide that is sweeping the area, including the massive residential/retail tower going up next to this location, as well as the Hayward Place building, Millennium Ritz-Carlton, 45 Province, restoration of the Opera House, Paramount, and Modern theaters The list could go on. There's a residential neighborhood taking shape in a part of town that hasn't been that way for more than a century. Now, Roche Brothers are good guys -- particularly to their old hometown of Roslindale/West Roxbury, where they have funded all kinds of community facilities out of a strong sense of corporate citizenship. But they didn't need to come to DTX to demonstrate that. No, they're coming to DTX for the money, because the market is clearly ramping up downtown, and a supermarket here just makes sense. I think it's safe to predict that the sales per square foot at this location are going to be the highest in their portfolio and will more than make up for the learning curve they're going to endure in learning how to efficiently supply and operate a store this "small" at this location. Time will tell, but your humble blogspondent will testify that this location was very, very busy each time I've visited it in the last few days, whether midday or in the evening. I don't see them regretting this decision.

Post Script -- The final photo shows a fairly lifeless exterior to the MBTA concourse entrance/exit. Much more can be done here, possibly including some exterior merchandise or table/chair combinations to create some activity. Vibrancy below ground is part of the equation here, even if only to call attention to the fact that retail activity has returned in a big way to the basement of the Filene's building.

Post Post Script -- It is also clearly time to rethink DTX as a pedestrian zone. The portion shown in Photo 1 works incredibly well, as does the Winter Street block. The rest, not so much. Seems like one solution would be to let motor vehicles back in, all times of the day, BUT at a very low, heavily enforced speed, say 10 or 15 mph to show that shared streets can work.

Blog Post No. 2015-5.

Blog Post No. 2012-10: Sacred Heart Parish takes care of its physical assets...

...both sacred and profane

The Photos:

Photo 1: One of the church's interior stations of the cross, recently restored.

Photo 2: The restored exterior niche statue.

Photo 3: The repaired slate roof.

Photo 4: The re-sided rectory.

The Location: 169 Cummins Highway, Roslindale, MA (MAP)

Years of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2007-2012.

The Story: We're in Roslindale again, this time at Sacred Heart Parish. For those keeping score at home, we are also back to restorative actions similar to the May entry about Community Boating down on the Charles River. In this case, Sacred Heart has undertaken a series of repairs and renovations over a five-year period under the heading of "Project Slate." [You can see the pre-existing general exterior condition of the church and rectory in the google streetview available at the map link above.] The fundraising campaign kicked off in 2006, and in relatively short order, the necessary funds were gathered. Construction then began, first with, you guessed it, a new slate roof over the entire church building, followed by repainting of the interior of the upper church (like most urban Catholic churches built in the massive wave of European immigration of the second half of the 19th century, the church has both an upper church and a lower church which in an earlier era held multiple Sunday masses each), repointing the exterior brick work and the main exterior stairway, and re-siding of the rectory. After some additional fundraising and patience, the stations of the cross were also completely restored (after two were initially restored early on).

One relatively unheralded change was the removal of the old, badly-stained and unfortunate-looking plexiglass that covered the niche statue of Jesus with the Sacred Heart. As you can see in photo 2, that statue is now back in the open air with the heart itself painted red as is most common. Why and when the statue was encased in plexiglass is not known to your correspondent. But I will say that the removal of the plexiglass is one of those relatively small but highly symbolic events that cumulatively add up to an urban fabric that is functioning and telling its participants that there is confidence in the durability and significance of its various components. The restoration of the stations of the cross is another such action that means more than simply putting gold leaf where it belongs (though as you can see from Photo 1, it's an impressive piece of work). Again, I don't know why and when these stations were painted entirely white (which was their state just before the recent restoration). Yet they were, a poor decision whose reversal required raising relatively substantial funds just to have stations that express the artist's original intent. It's a cliche, I admit, but the cumulative urban fabric effect of Project Slate is greater than the sum of its parts.

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

...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. 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. 2010-9: 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).