Riverside Development | 333 Grove Street | Newton

This looks good. They should scale it up and improve bike/ped connections to neighboring areas
 
A fake New England village including fake mill buildings! Will the fake buildings have fake distressed finishes to give them a fake 150 year old appearance? 5 or whatever acres of PoMo asscrack. I will never cease to be amazed by the bottomless appetite for these kinds of themed, phony frauds. The modern search for authenticity has warped into an embrace of the grotesquely false.
 
Brad Plaid said:
A fake New England village including fake mill buildings! Will the fake buildings have fake distressed finishes to give them a fake 150 year old appearance? 5 or whatever acres of PoMo asscrack. I will never cease to be amazed by the bottomless appetite for these kinds of themed, phony frauds. The modern search for authenticity has warped into an embrace of the grotesquely false.
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Yeah, well, not everyone likes brutalism either, dude.
 
HalcyonEra said:
Contrary to popular belief, not all companies want to go into Boston/Cambridge. The 128 office market is booming and space is scare. This is right off 128 and at the end of the green line for reverse commuters. Offices make a ton of sense at this location and they do not severely drain city resources as the daily occupants are mostly in and out while adding commercial tax revenue to Newton's base.
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Riverside Center is probably the nicest building in the immediate area and that seemed like it had space available last I was there. I have to think the uglier office space in like Waltham on Wyman Street have to have decent vacancy rates at this point.

The Green Line doesn't mean much given how far it is out. I would say single digit percent max used it at Riverside Center. It's pretty much entirely cars.
 
Brad Plaid said:
A fake New England village including fake mill buildings! Will the fake buildings have fake distressed finishes to give them a fake 150 year old appearance? .
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i wish they'd done this at 110 Broad, 121 Portland St, 198 Hanover St, and Quaker Lane. i wish they'd do it at 55 India St and the new Haymarket Hotel. in 60 years, we'll be gone and no one will know the difference, much less care.

For the same reason you want to put offices in Suffolk Downs to take advantage of empty rail cars, you can justify putting some here.
 
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Can anyone answer my question as to who the new owner is? No longer Normandy?
 
Bergeron37 said:
Can anyone answer my question as to who the new owner is? No longer Normandy?
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It's not Normandy - I know that for sure. The scuttlebutt was that Northland bought it. Same people doing the Marshalls Plaza development on Needham St.
 
Wow. This is pretty awesome Actual urbanism/street walls/classical proportions. Materials will be key but looks pretty great to me.

I mean, in my mind I was imagining a prudential center on 128 kind of complex for that site, but, ill take this.
 
odurandina said:
Globe says maybe....
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business...ween-places/2s1DhUxdOc7jjormn7pz2J/story.html
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The Globe Site in Dorchester is much closer to the core than Riverside is. It's like 50ish minutes from Park to Riverside for instance.

Like, I noticed that Riverside Center did manage to get TechTarget (the anchor tenant) to renew their lease. Especially since the workers there did seem to skew pretty young... I bet they got a really good deal to stay.

The funny thing is that the previous tenant there, Macromedia/Adobe, left for a giant building they bought in 2008 in Waltham which they then unloaded for a $20M loss in 2013.
 
Equilibria said:
It's not Normandy - I know that for sure. The scuttlebutt was that Northland bought it. Same people doing the Marshalls Plaza development on Needham St.
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Appears to be Mark Development based on this article: https://www.bostonglobe.com/busines...Xi4J7k21lK/amp.html?__twitter_impression=true


"Korff’s ambitions for the city don’t end in West Newton Square. He has a bigger project in mind, on the vast MBTA parking lot at the Green Line’s Riverside terminal on the city’s western edge. Korff has taken over the project as lead developer and envisions as much as 1.5 million square feet of housing, offices, shops, and hotel rooms — more than double what was previously planned."
 
Brad Plaid said:
The modern search for authenticity has warped into an embrace of the grotesquely false.
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Well, I've recently put the boots to authenticity in another thread, so why not dip my toe in here...

In matters of aesthetics, Brad and I are relatively simpatico, but based only on the renderings, I find it hard to hate this scheme. I know these buildings lack the academic rigor of Louis Kahn's "re-imagining" of the industrial buildings in Philadelphia (albeit in Bangladesh), or Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood's reconstituted Richardsonian gestures for Hauser Hall at Harvard Business School.

Post-Modernism and Historicism are best when the materials and finishes are of the highest quality, so I'm still on the fence a bit. I guess I appreciate the architects' sense of gravitas, going for old mills and shoe-factories instead of the flimsy Hardie-Plank Hermitages that sprout up like poison mushrooms across New England. These faux-ctory buildings are miles ahead of fast casual rubbish.
 
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For those who are interested:

https://village14.com/2018/09/25/le...-station-project-this-thursday/#axzz5SCxV7PAh

Mark Development is holding a meeting this Thursday, Sept 27 at 7 p.m. in the cafeteria at Newton North about its proposed transit-oriented development at Riverside Station. The proposed project includes new office space, a new hotel, affordable housing, shops and community space.
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Riverside-2-2018.jpg
 
I would love to come out to that meeting, but can't because of school. If someone does go, please be sure to report back.
 
This stretch of 128/95 needs to be addressed. You have the on-ramp from route 16 dumping traffic onto 128/95 and those trying to cut over to get off at Grove Street. It would be nice if they could widen this stretch so that the Grove street exit is earlier, have a fly-over ramp for 16 and the lane for the Grove Street exit goes underneath it.
 
mass88 said:
This stretch of 128/95 needs to be addressed. You have the on-ramp from route 16 dumping traffic onto 128/95 and those trying to cut over to get off at Grove Street. It would be nice if they could widen this stretch so that the Grove street exit is earlier, have a fly-over ramp for 16 and the lane for the Grove Street exit goes underneath it.
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I've never seen this be much of a problem in practice. What IS a problem is people confusing the Grove St. and I-90 exits, then not realizing they can simply go across Grove and back down. They swerve, they cross the painted area, and I've seen people stop and throw it in reverse on the shoulder.

In all honesty, is there a set of exits anywhere on 128 that doesn't need some sort of rebuild? I'd put 16/Grove behind 3 and 20/117 on that list, at least.

kingofsheeba said:
Wow. Modeling this after West Hartford doesn't scream red flags at all.
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That was one example. Do you get red flags from Assembly or Bethesda? A lot of the aesthetic actually seems based on the Atlanta development, which is a bit weird now that I Google it. Big, urban-ish, but in the middle of nowhere.
 
Equilibria said:
That was one example. Do you get red flags from Assembly or Bethesda? A lot of the aesthetic actually seems based on the Atlanta development, which is a bit weird now that I Google it. Big, urban-ish, but in the middle of nowhere.
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Never heard of Post Riverside until today, very typical of many new Atlanta area developments, nothing more than a large apartment/condo development. Beautiful, car-centrick, near nothing walkable. But, did you check the prices of their apartments??? Even close into town, within a few miles of Midtown Atlanta, there are beautiful townhome communities scatttered everywhere, many are now transit oriented, walkable to stores, retail, and very very affordable compared to Boston prices. It's, I believe, due to County government with still plenty of available land, unlike Boston Metro with each town it's own fiefdom, closely guarding it's borders. But I get it, each town has a unique character, which many fear development will change. But many of the towns, even if the development is beautiful and in character with the town, resist.
 
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