West Cambridge / Alewife Area Infill & Small Developments

Charlie_mta said:
Interesting info from you about Arthur D. Little. I'm old enough to remember the amusement park that was on that site prior. Do you remember the Alewife Station site before it was built? There was a Donuts Please restaurant on the site where my dad worked as a cook. Then across Alewife Brook Parkway was the Big Burger. Quite the architecture on that one:
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Anybody else remember the shelter to the left of the Big Burger sign where a MDC cop would sit controlling by hand the traffic lights at rush hour for the Rindge Ave -Parkway intersection ? Today's technology can't even come close to replicating that. I have to believe that would be better than the existing mess.
 
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reno said:
Anybody else remember the shelter to the left of the Big Burger sign where a MDC cop would sit controlling by hand the traffic lights at rush hour for the Rindge Ave -Parkway intersection ? Today's technology can't even come close to replicating that. I have to believe that would be better than the existing mess.
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I do remember that particular one, as well as several others. Those police traffic light control booths were pretty common in major squares as well as MDC parkways.
 
New St. would be quite rightly integrated if the City would just @#$% or get off the pot about putting a Danehy-Rindge linking footbridge over the tracks. Then you've got all sides of the neighborhood tightly integrated by-foot and have all the safe access in the world to Alewife Station, Russell Field, and the paths to that side of the neighborhood. They've been arguing amongst themselves about that link even longer than they have the footbridge north of the parkway linking Cambridgepark and Fawcett St. At least the Cambridgepark-Fawcett bridge very occasionally gets some monied developers barking at them once in awhile; all the resident screaming in the world doesn't seem to do squat to move the needle on un-deadlocking the one south.

Do that and the integration ends up pretty good. New St. isn't this super-isolated outpost anymore. There's more infill residential on Bay State Rd. now, along with the charter school and day-care center at the corner with New. The midday kid traffic is now saturation-level because of those 2 new tenants. The paths around the back end of Danehy have been improved of late to increase the accessibility, the Briston Arms public housing right around the corner on Garden just got a ton of renovation $$$ sunk into them, and there's really only 2 more scuzz parcels on New (Hi-Tech Auto + Sun Auto/Enterprise Rent-a-Car across the street from each other) to flip to make the terraforming more or less complete. It's just always going to be missing the proverbial limb if they can't get a footbridge to Rindge/Russell/Alewife Station to tie the room together. I know...I lived on Walden @ Sherman for 9 years and myself was an occasional user of that makeshift shortcut of: (1) through the speeding killzone Theaters parking lot where cars just swerve around the speedbumps at 45+ with impunity; (2) tipped-over shopping carriage 'step' at the wall; and (3) makeshift dirt path up to the parkway. The fact that so many people are making that insanely dangerous shortcut...and so many of those users being small children...speaks to what a gaping accessibility hole is left by the City's pathological inability to consensus itself on anything regarding the footbridge. Russell and Danehy usage-wise are pretty much appendages of the same body chopped off from each other...one park scratching a usage itch the other one doesn't. On-spec the siting of public housing clustering around each park makes a ton of sense given the natural travel/usage demand that percolates between the parks...but the naturalness of that orientation in turn makes the City's third decade of total inaction on linking them all the more maddening.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
New St. would be quite rightly integrated if the City would just @#$% or get off the pot about putting a Danehy-Rindge linking footbridge over the tracks.
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The footbridge should absolutely be required if this 100 unit low-income development is to be built. Looking at the renders and plan for this building, I see a lot of families with children crammed into a multi-story building on a tight lot with no amenities. The footbridge would enable residents to access the swimming pool on Rindge Ave for one thing, and all the other things you mentioned. I grew up in a public housing development on the other (north) side of the Fitchburg Division RR, and it had plenty of playgrounds on site as well as the Rindge Ave swimming pool right up the street. It also abutted an established residential neighborhood with corner stores, larger stores and churches. By comparison, this new development has none of these things, and the only way to provide some mitigation for that is the footbridge over the railroad. Personally I'm pissed off that this development is even being proposed. I applaud the creation of low-income housing, but how about locating it somewhere that's decent? Or, failing that, at least build a footbridge over the tracks so that the residents can access transit and recreational facilities for their children?
 
Rindge side folks would probably hold out for a Yerxa underpass clone.
 
I knew that address was familiar, I used to work at that evolve fitness. The walk to the red line isnt too bad when you use the short cut, you walk through the parking lot and theres a worn down path up the hill from where everybody cuts across. If theyre going to add more housing in here they should probably create something more permanent. As far as liveability I think its a pretty nice area theres a grocery store right there that you also access from another shortcut by cutting across the old railroad ROW, then theres of course the soccer fields, mamagoos pizza shop is really good, the rail trail is close by. I wouldnt mind living here at all. Theyve also added quite a few residentials on the other side of the road since I worked there so its not so isolated. The rotaries and main road through here definitely create a barrier, but I enjoyed the area a lot for as bad a rep as alewife gets. I knew it was only a matter of time until the gym was sold, hopefully they can redo the huge plazas eventually too and create a better street grid.
 
RandomWalk said:
Rindge side folks would probably hold out for a Yerxa underpass clone.
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The grade doesn't work for an underpass. There's a slight ridge on the Clifton Circle side, and the ROW is about 1-1/2 times as wide here as the Yerxa underpass. The City officially proposed an overpass long, long ago. Then proposed it again. Then proposed it again. Passed up tons of higher-level funding opportunities in the process. They just habitually tie themselves in knots every time it comes up for discussion. The parks-and-housing layout won't ever work correctly until it's in place and they know it, but it's Alewife. Anything touching Alewife is automatic brainworms for planning execution, and guaranteed self-gridlock when City Hall is faced with some make-or-break decision.
 
RandomWalk said:
Rindge side folks would probably hold out for a Yerxa underpass clone.
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I used the Yerxa underpass a lot when I was a kid, and it has problems with being dark and unfriendly. An overpass would be more secure and also not run the risk of being damp or wet.
 
Charlie_mta said:
I used the Yerxa underpass a lot when I was a kid, and it has problems with being dark and unfriendly. An overpass would be more secure and also not run the risk of being damp or wet.
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As any user of the Wellington overpass can testify, you also do not "hang out" in an open-air passage. That gerbil tube is either 1000 degrees or cold&blustery.
 
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As any user of the Wellington overpass can testify, you also do not "hang out" in an open-air passage.
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True, but for me that's mostly about the 2-4 Billion spiders that DO hang out there.
 
It’s a nice area, and remarkable to wander around the area that was earmarked for a mess of highways back in the 60s.
 
Sometimes I look at these brutalist school buildings and think - was this because of Cuban missile crisis? Was a continuous worry about nuclear war somehow always there in the back of architects' minds?
Looking at it now it seems amazing to me that anyone would want to send children to study there...
I mean granted it's poorly maintained etc. but still...
 
Hanover North Cambridge has a very Eastern Europe aesthetic. I can’t complain about the density, though.
 
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