Fenway Center (One Kenmore) | Turnpike Parcel 7, Beacon Street | Fenway

One downside to the project:

By decking over the pike near to Fenway Park it kills the potential for another Legendary Homerun -- the Turnpoke
Ostensibly a ball rocketed out of the park near to the light towers bounded onto the pavement and then leaped over the low fence to the Turnpike. That part while a bit of a stretch is conceivable:
  • Hanley Ramirez hit the longest home run in the era of ball tracking technology at 469 ft on to Landsdown St. in 2017
  • Ted Williams 1946 Big Fly hit the hat on a fan 502 feet from homeplate in the Righfield seats [ Section 42, Row 37, Seat 21 ] @ an altitude of 30 ft above the plate -- so the potential flight of the ball could have been 535 ft.
In 1975 Jim Rice hit a homerun just to the left of center field that was said to have traveled the 515 ft from home plate to the Turnpike. The legend continues that the ball landed in the bed of a pickup truck and was discovered when the truck was stopped by Canadian Customs [according to Peter Gammons of the Boston Globe].

Well in any case with the Pike decked over the ball might end up bouncing on Landsdown Street and possibly ending up on Newbury St. -- but Canada -- Not going to have a chance anymore. 😭
 
Parcel 7 is not in fair territory, it's on the wrong side of Brookline Ave. for it to be the landing site for any home runs. As a man of history, you will surely recall that the Red Sox swapped Rosenthal the development rights to Parcel 7 in exchange for the Lansdowne garage where Rosenthal's Stop Handgun Violence billboard used to live. They didn't want him building anything there that could sprout up over the Green Monster, so they gave him the rights they owned next to the train station instead. IIRC, this also made the Red Sox the designated developer for Pike air rights all the way from Brookline Ave. to Charlesgate West. Maybe they deck it someday, but given what the ownership group has and hasn't done with their considerable holdings in the neighborhood in their first 18 years, I personally would be surprised to see a decking proposal between Lansdowne and Newbury anytime in the next 18 years. Like a Harvard or an MIT, the Red Sox can afford to think in decades or even centuries.

(Also, Gammons has said that Carlos Pena once hit one at Northeastern's field that landed in Mike Dukakis's yard, which would have been two streets from the outfield fence and about 900 feet from home plate, and to the opposite field for Pena if that all wasn't enough. I love Gammons like a second dad, but the word "legend" isn't doing nearly enough work as it should be up there.)
 
whighlander said:
One downside to the project:

By decking over the pike near to Fenway Park it kills the potential for another Legendary Homerun -- the Turnpoke
Click to expand...

This isn't that uncommon...Manny did it twice and Xander has done it once.
 
IMG_2127 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_2128 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_2131 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

West bound by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

West bound and East bound by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

East bound stairs by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_2139 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_2140 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_2168 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_2174 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_2173 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_2170 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

From the top level of the target.

IMG_2177 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr
 
Agree

Oh wow I hadnt realized that the bigger building has its cladding, I thought it still had the tyvek layer. Hmm. Ill hold off judgement till its finished up. I do like the shorter one.

I actually think we can learn a lot from this. Phase 1 without capping the pike, still really feels much more complete than I would have thought. I think part of it is how the street is diagonal, but regardless its a massive improvement. The pike is now muuuch more hidden than before, it seems as though building mid rises right up to the edge of the pike hides the gash pretty well. It seems to create a kind of visual illusion and the gash isnt actually that wide so it ends up not being that bad. Although covering the pike is absolutely the end goal, I think before then building right up to its edge on both sides actually goes a pretty long way in the mean time.

-Id love to see another greenway on the gash after hancock garage to the 93 interchange. I think thatd be a massive help to the city with both roads completed on either side to take strain off stuart st, plus some great bike lanes could go in, along with a nice linear park. I think they should create a plan for this that can then be followed as each new dev goes in.
 
Last edited:
I appreciate this as an infill project (the more pike and highway we can cover up, the better). But the design has only gotten more and more generic and awkward. The little corner fins look VE'd to hell. Such a timid design element that doesn't add much to the building overall.

Really really not a fan of the metal panels on the smaller block either. Just sort of a hodgepodge of opaque, glass, and white accents(why tho?). The current trend in developer architecture seems to be randomizing window placements. Doesn't work here imo.
 
4ECA498E-19B9-4B06-9C5B-E5A16F19B111.jpeg
199FF246-20D0-45D3-AC32-5894DFB114FB.jpeg
 
IMG_4055 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_4068 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_4059 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

Outbound stairs to Beacon on the right. Inbound stairs to Beacon on the left, behind the blue light.

IMG_4062 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_4061 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_4066 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_4065 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_4081 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_4083 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_4071 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_4057 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr

IMG_4072 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr
 
The shorter one looks like a lego building thrown together by a kid who ran out of brown bricks part way through.
 
It's not fair to judge an unfinished building. But thus far I can say this: I was hoping for something more thoughtful - not from the architect, from the client. I had expected, was looking forward to, an exciting urban addition to an evolving part of our city after his years of toil to get this off the ground. Who knows? Maybe I'll change my mind when it's completed. But the lego reference seems to me a good one, and I can't imagine that's what he intended.
 
What I find really sad is that the pictures inside the Lansdowne Commuter Rail Station are more visually interesting than the building up above.

Although they do share a drab brown and gray color pallete.
 
I was looking back at the most recent BCDC presentation, specifically the concept drawings and models on pages 12-14, and I finally understand what they were trying to do with the structures design. They began with thinking of it as a "bookshelf" of vertical masses leaning on each other and a "mountain" of varying height peaks, but the most successful versions that the current rendition was based off of were all leaning masses with tons of dynamism kind of based of the speeding cars on the highway below. this architectural mass seeming to race down the highway makes since with the sort of fractured looks of the two other structures that are under construction as it was kind of pushing them out of the way. Unfortunately the movement in the design and even the large massing towards the front that steps back got edited out and now we are left to ponder why the remaining design details are there. Even just a few minor tweaks of how the building massing works I think could bring back this concept and make the whole area more cohesive and reintroduce an underlying concept to the space.
 
BeeLine said:
IMG_4061 by Bos Beeline, on Flickr
Click to expand...

Why oh why oh WHY did they do this?? You're looking at the ingress/egress from Beacon Street to the Lansdowne platform. Beacon Street is not behind you in the photo, it's in front of you, above where those new emergency exit signs are located. That means that people hurrying to catch a train - and fine, I'll admit it, I'm projecting here - will have to bang two hairpin turns (because doors won't be open this far back on the platform) in order to board. The stairs to the outbound platform are oriented correctly, and are exactly where they were before construction began. What the hell were they thinking with this? The only people coming from the direction in which these stairs are oriented are 1) already on the same level as the train and will never use these stairs to access the station, or 2) possibly occupants of the buildings themselves, depending on where the buildings' egresses are located. If that's the case, and they were allowed to flip these stairs around for their own benefit and at the expense of everyone else who used them before, or wait, maybe just because it was convenient for their design plan?!?!?, then I'm so furious that I'm about to lose the ability to type in real words TOO LATE FJFIWL C UFKSLXKCKEJSKVTNEWKCCK CDOCK KXKSN
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top