Assembly Square Infill and Small Developments | Somerville

cjbski said:
The prices are not low. I went in for a few items, all of which were higher than they would have been at Target or Walmart.

This particular location is disgusting. Kmart can't go out of business fast enough. Target should close their location and move here to Assembly.
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I guess it depends on what you're buying.
 
cjbski said:
The prices are not low. I went in for a few items, all of which were higher than they would have been at Target or Walmart.

This particular location is disgusting. Kmart can't go out of business fast enough. Target should close their location and move here to Assembly.
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I know this would be smart for Target, but please no! One of the major pros for the current Somerville Target is its abundance of parking :)
 
The next round of retail openings were announced for Assembly Row.

Andy Husbands' The Smoke Shop BBQ
AROW Express (convenience store)
Bath & Body Works | White Barn
Burlington
Capital One Café (now open)
Carmen's Trattoria & Italian Pub
CycleBar (a fitness studio in FITRow)
Lucky Strike Social
MidiCi, the Neapolitan Pizza Company (now open)
Polo Ralph Lauren Factory Store

Also announced was the opening of the Marriott Autograph collection hotel and Assembly Line Park.

https://patch.com/massachusetts/somerville/somervilles-assembly-row-whats-coming-2018
 
^^^Thanks for letting us know that they finally updated Google Earth! I have been waiting for them to add Millennium Tower, Nashua Street Residences, and all the other new stuff! 1 Dalton is up to about 15 floors so it's probably the summer scene.
 
Maps was just updated for apple I just noticed earlier today too when I was looking at a link Orudania posted. The skyline was extremely dated and it was pretty annoying, but now it has everything so you get the 3d view of all of the new projects. It was pretty cool being able to look at how everything fits in and has filled in so many parcels vs before when nothing had been added. Seeing Millennium tower was great to see.
 
It looks to me like the buildings are for the most part completely or at the least mostly structurally independent of the garages which would allow for the garages to be torn down and replaced more easily. For example the tallest residential building has part of the steel frame extending down past the garage completely independent of it. My guess would be that in the future they may replace some of these garages once they have used up the space on the rest of the site. Does anyone know if it was the developers choice to include this much parking or was it because of city parking regulations?
 
I'm not too upset at the amount of parking they built in. It's in oversupply for now, but look at all those surface lots waiting to be developed. If they just keep the home depot and build out everything else in the next cycle this would be beyond a runaway success.

I understand the Assembly might have some sentimental value for some but I'd be fine with seeing it go too, or transformed in a significant way.
 
Instead of even having stilts they should have continued the facade to ground level and built condos and retail along that side just like they did on the other side on foley st. Theres also a road there, great river rd, people are going to be driving there so why completely ignore that entire street that just happens to also face the water? They did come sooo close though and I think it came out pretty good for what it is so far. Theres a pretty good amount left to go too like the seaport so itlll get better. Unfortunately though you cant change that waterfront view.
 
I honestly think the towers in the original render look pretty good...classy. Theyre definitely inspired by art deco but more of a subtle modern take on something youd expect on low rise developments outside the cities core.


 
Lets go on a lil tourski of what they did a bang(bus)*cough... bang em up job on and what they could have done a little better and still can.


Right:

The way the small brick buildings make up the street wall and the mid rise building is behind it makes it look like there was an existing street fabric/street wall already, and they fit the mid rise building in behind it later on. A little bit like the way the littlest bar is built around. It has that effect although these are all new buildings.



When looking at it from the front (when finished) it will look like this has always been here and the mid rise was added later like the way that cities organically grow over time.



This building across the street looks good with its dark masonry and bump out windows.



This is just one example and the majority of Assembly row is done very well. Im just posting this as something to contrast what Im showing below against. They did it very right above, and below they could have done a much better job.


Now where it gets weird. They have a road (Great River Road) that goes along the back side of the garage next to the train tracks. For some reason they left it completely blank, with ugly slanted garage floors, and stilts for the tower above it.

What they should have done is what they did on Foley st. and put condos on the outside face of the garage.

Here is Foley st. Theres a garage behind these brick buildings.
https://postimages.org/

Heres the other end of Foley st.



Now you can see where it transfers from the brick building to expose the garage:



You can still kind of see it but now you see how it has just turned into a huge hulking garage facing towards the water that people on the other side have to look at.



The stilts for the building above that they could have brought the facade to ground level and blended it in between brick condos that they could have built here.


At the beginning of Great River rd. you would have to build the condos inside the garage or knock some of it back, but further down you even have open space in front of the garage where you could fit some more buildings.



Finally at the other end of the garage it wraps back around and turns back into masonry buildings on the street wall.



As you can see in the pic above there is still room in front of these buildings to add some condos/street level retail to the back side of the garage. At the other end I think they should try to put some in the garage or last resort knock some of the garage back like the Govt Ctr garage and build some condos there. At street level yea you would have train tracks across the st. but who cares theres already a road there might as well make it usable, then above that you have elevation where you could see over the tracks and have a view of the river and casino etc... across the river.
https://postimages.org/

Here you can see how the garages fit into the picture and the river is also across the street. You can also walk under the train tracks under the bridge and they could even build a park over here. They could also build a pedestrian bridge at the end of Foley st. over the tracks if need be.
 
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There is still surface lots across the street and available space in the Assembly area. I don't think they'll start demolishing parts of the garage any time soon. Maybe we can start talking about that after the strip mall, 5 middlesex, the additional couple of parcels, and even the Circuit City/Home Depot area is built up. But that's not the foreseeable future that's far in the future. I feel like we'll have self driving cars by that time eliminating the need for parking in urban centers.
 
falcon42 said:
That park is DCR/MBTA land, so nothing could have been done to it.
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It is time to start doing some clever land swaps and track bridging to un-isolate stranded DCR parcels. I woul include even 99 year leasing--Arthur D Little leased DCR parkland near Alewife, it is not impossible.
 
But that's not the foreseeable future that's far in the future. I feel like we'll have self driving cars by that time eliminating the need for parking in urban centers.
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Interesting you note that! Assembly/Sommervile/Boston was one of the few cities chosen by Audi for their research on autonomous driving and parking in cities. There's some pretty interesting concepts in here, but nothing we haven't seen before.

tysmith95 said:
There is still surface lots across the street and available space in the Assembly area.
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While we're on the topic of designing-a-better-Assembly-Square, I recently went on a trip to the Silicon Valley area with a few friends, and we found ourselves in Santana Row. The second we stepped foot out of the garage, the first comment one of them (untrained/somewhat-enthused in architecture/urban planning) made was "this is Assembly but everything is done much better here." I myself, (an untrained-yet-avid-architecture/planning-enthusiast) agreed. They've done almost everything right they could there, apart from parking/auto centric design, which is an issue for the entire valley, not Santana Row itself. They could also include a larger mix of retail at different price levels, but that's a discussion for somewhere else (please not here).

Here's what, IMO, they do much better than Assembly.
  • The human scale is much better there
  • They fully embraced pedestrian streets
  • Open-space is well-put together
  • Different, high-quality architectural styles between buildings, but still cohesive
  • Classical design, but still contemporary

Some (not mine) pictures:
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^this road is shared use!

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EEIvOVL.jpg


I'm normally one that pushes for higher density around Boston, but I'd suggest we decrease the scale of the buildings for any future development near Assembly or on the surface lots/remaining lots. Maybe you can build up the scale as it approaches 93, but Santana Row (SR) generally has 5-7 story buildings, with no taller sections. It feels more comfortable. The newest sections of Assembly, especially the Partners and new residential buildings, have a very imposing feeling. It feels too big, relative to SR, for what the designers intended the space be used for, as if they're trying to achieve both an outdoor-shopping-district-feel and big-city-feel at the same time. I don't think they can succeed in both simultaneously.

In essence, the designers should aim for a more refined version of the first few new buildings they put up, with a focus on human scaled design.
 
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