Suffolk Downs Redevelopment | East Boston/Revere

Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

kz1000ps said:
...but the actual show never takes itself seriously enough to end up getting caught smelling its own farts
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And that is the other show we proudly quote a lot on this board.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

Whiskey is a check. Pretty sure it's on netflix. I need something until the last season of always sunny is loaded.
Think I'm convinced.

Someone else can smoke that blunt for me I Spose.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

^ It's definitely on Netflix. Just start with the pilot and work your way forward... if you're not hooked by the end of the second episode then feel free to move on.

But also, if you don't like the second episode, which is all about my favorite character in the show, Buster, then I don't think we can be friends. Jussayin'
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

suffolkdowns1104.jpg


Image from Boston Globe op ed by Paul McMorrow, who calls Suffolk Downs the biggest development area in Boston. Last week, he said the same about the Beacon Yards.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/...ffolk-downs/0re5iK8JcSiHdHDm8aOM4I/story.html

If I am not mistaken, those are wetlands in the infield, and which appear to run narrowly southwest of the stables. I believe these are connected to Belle Isle marsh which is immediately east of the MBTA tracks.

http://www.mass.gov/eea/agencies/dcr/massparks/region-north/belle-isle-marsh-reservation.html
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

stellarfun said:
If I am not mistaken, those are wetlands in the infield, and which appear to run narrowly southwest of the stables. I believe these are connected to Belle Isle marsh which is immediately east of the MBTA tracks.

http://www.mass.gov/eea/agencies/dcr/massparks/region-north/belle-isle-marsh-reservation.html
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So turn the infield back into fens, ring it with paths and community gardens and build densely on three sides (along the Blue line, across the stables and at the Grandstand). Surely there's an example we can cite from somewhere we're all familiar with ;-)
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

It's sickening to see the developer vultures swooping over the 30+ acres of wetlands on this property without regard to the impact that a large development will bring. The short term owners of this property shouldn't be rewarded with any zoning or environmental relief at all, at the expense of the greater public good
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

conservation dan said:
It's sickening to see the developer vultures swooping over the 30+ acres of wetlands on this property without regard to the impact that a large development will bring. The short term owners of this property shouldn't be rewarded with any zoning or environmental relief at all, at the expense of the greater public good
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What developers? The track announced last week that they're closing next week. There hasn't been time for any developers to surface.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

Realistically, this plot of land is bigger than Assembly with 2 heavy rail stations and less of a shopping spot (no 93 like Assembly). It should be 10-15k housing and a fair bit of office with the retail and commercial uses to serve the area.

In reality, conservation dan is going to get this think to be a row of townhouses with a 5 story compromise tower overlooking a park.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

If you were to leave the infield open space with water features intact and just develop on the land already built on then I don't see any environment impact that isn't already decades old.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

choo said:
Realistically, this plot of land is bigger than Assembly with 2 heavy rail stations and less of a shopping spot (no 93 like Assembly). It should be 10-15k housing and a fair bit of office with the retail and commercial uses to serve the area.

In reality, conservation dan is going to get this think to be a row of townhouses with a 5 story compromise tower overlooking a park.
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You can describe this site on paper in a way that suggests there should be a forest of 300'-500' buildings here. The reality is that it's an underutilized site surrounded by quiet suburban streets of single family homes, until now isolated from any major regional transportation routes (both the Blue Line and 1A are local-only backwaters).

That's all you're going to get now - more single family homes with a core of 5-story retail and a park. Assembly is different because it functionally has no neighbors that it's not separated from by a river or a wide highway. It can be its own thing. This has to be contextual, and like it or not the context isn't urban. There are ways to bring urbanity into a non-urban context, but it's a middle ground.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

It is not as much wetlands as it is a buried/culverted Sales Creek - a tidal stream. Daylighting the creek would likely be needed to get any permits anyway. The whole parcel is probably filled tidelands anyway and subject to Chapter 91. There will have to be a lot of public accommodation and environmental improvement.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

^Every resident that votes against a substantial development plan (not saying everything needs to be gigantic) to promote more quiet city streets should be forced to sign a waiver that they cannot complain about high housing costs, gentrification or luxury apartments ever again.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

choo said:
^Every resident that votes against a substantial development plan (not saying everything needs to be gigantic) to promote more quiet city streets should be forced to sign a waiver that they cannot complain about high housing costs, gentrification or luxury apartments ever again.
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They'd tell you that it's projects like this that drew enough demand to their section of Eastie and Revere to make all of those things happen in the first place. The Boston city limits aren't a pressure vessel like San Francisco.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

Look at all that concrete and asphalt "wetlands".:rolleyes:


Seriously...two-thirds of the vast acreage in that one photo is just pavement. And we're worrying about whether anything should be put there? The man-made moats (and make no mistake, that's what they are whether any 'native' wetlands in the wholly man-made landfill in that area were re-channeled into them) are a pretty tiny slice of the total land.

I don't see how anything new wouldn't be environmentally worlds better than the 1½ square miles of crumbling asphalt and concrete desert currently sitting there.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

Well, the size of the area looks comparable to beacon hill, which holds ~11000 people with no high rises.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

Surprisingly static. This is 1950.

05_02_010106.jpg


I count one more parcel's worth of infill gas tanks that have gone in in the last 64 years behind what's now Famous Footwear. The school in front of the little league field wasn't built yet. And those ugly-ass apartment blocks on the 1A end of Waldemar weren't completely filled in yet. Otherwise...it's all exactly the same.


The 1935 views from the grand opening are little different except that all the now-blighted parking lots were filled to overflow with cars and the gas tanks weren't there (just blighted-looking brownfields from whatever yuckier industrial was previously razed on that property).
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

Would it be at all feasible to reuse the grandstand portion of Suffolk Downs racetrack and build it into a soccer-specific stadium for the Revs? This is what the Portland Timbers did with a former baseball stadium.

The main portion of the grandstand measures about 200 yards in length, which is roughly the same length as the current crop of MLS stadiums. I've never actually been to Suffolk Downs, but it looks to me from pictures that if you remove the glass from in front of the grandstand it would resemble a lot of old-fashioned English soccer stadiums (and those I have been to...). So maybe re-purpose the SD grandstand as the main grandstand for the stadium and build smaller, open-aired bleachers around the remaining three sides. This would make use of the in-place infrastructure (including the Blue Line) and could presumably be done for less time and money than it would take to build a new stadium from scratch, as well as preserving the historical grandstand building and lending a little history to a soccer team that is lacking in that department. It would also leave the possibility to upgrade the open-aired bleachers to something larger years down the road if soccer's popularity continues to grow in this country. Also, the Suffolk Downs site is so huge that a stadium roughly the size of the grandstand squared would only use up a small fraction of the land, and would provide an "anchor" for further mixed-use development.
 
Re: Suffolk Downs Redevelopment Potential

conservation dan said:
It's sickening to see the developer vultures swooping over the 30+ acres of wetlands on this property without regard to the impact that a large development will bring. The short term owners of this property shouldn't be rewarded with any zoning or environmental relief at all, at the expense of the greater public good
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Holy crap...this is some serious NIMBY hustle. Criticizing developers for their environmentally insenstive development methods before it's even been set out to bid!
 
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