Assembly Square Infill and Small Developments | Somerville

Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

The Back Bay was an entire neighborhoods worth of the wealthiest of the wealthy building their private mansions in a location that was more or less the sticks of it's day. I think the chances of replicating that today would be slim.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

The back bay literally took hundreds of years to get to its current form. It is a good standard for other developments to strive for. But i think realistically, if you sold this property off in small parcels to local people, it would look a lot more like East Somerville and Charlestown then the back bay. The Back bay had wealth and access. And even though it is still wealthy, many of those former mansions are now university buildings or small apartments behind the grand facades.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

Officejab said:
From the project's facebook page http://www.facebook.com/AssemblyRow?fref=ts

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They are royally blowing a great opportunity to build a new esplanade on the Mystic here. I see that plaza and fountain and can't understand why its cut off from the river by brush and scraggly trees, unless they don't own up to the rivers edge? Imagine that curved path instead as a body of water with a lagoon. Other then that I think its better than what I had hoped for, I'm not going to complain. I really hope its a success and they blow up the adjacent big boxes for more of this.

Ron Newman said:
Depends on whether the developer plans to keep all of it, or gradually sell it off piecemeal after it's developed.
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THIS.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

The river's edge is owned by DCR. The developer and DCR plan to improve the park so that it is, indeed, an 'esplanade'. There was some land swapping between the developer and DCR a couple of years ago, to enable this.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

This will be a great place for gamblers and conventioneers to visit once Everett's resort casino opens.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

Only if some sort of pedestrian crossing connects the casino to the Gateway Plaza (also in Everett, across the commuter rail tracks) and then to Assembly Square (across the Mystic River). We on the Somerville Bicycle Committee have been advocating for such a connection; perhaps it can be demanded in exchange for approving the casino?
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

Can you cross the dam (Foley Street -- Mystic View Road) on foot or bike?
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

Some more, and a larger version.

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Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

Whatever the positives of the pedestrian experience, and it looks to have some real potential, the architecture is mostly....awful. Earlier renderings promised some decent modernism with only a bit of historicist shlock here and there. These renderings threaten the reverse, wholesale PoMo dreck with only spots of contemporary design. Sad.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

No, there is no pedestrian access across the Amelia Earhart Dam. We've asked about it on the Somerville Bicycle Committee, and were told that the locks are often kept open for hours at a time for flood control, unlike the Charles River Dam which opens only for boat traffic. The Earhart dam wasn't really designed for this kind of access, as both sides of it were heavily industrial when it was built.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

It's like they're trying to build a small Midwest city from scratch -- a sort of insta-Davenport, Iowa -- and assuming it'll have the pedestrian life of Sienna or Zurich because it has a residential component and a subway station. It's a good thing overall, but if we had an ArchBoston Award for "least like its rendering" (which we should!) I'm betting it'd win big.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

Hard to believe 12 (more?) years of planning effort went into this. Poor Somerville. A golden opportunity to show what they could accomplish and a provincial lifestyle center on steroids is the best they can manage. Yes there's some density and urbanism but not enough for a critical mass. The car will still be king here.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

^ What should Somerville have done to prevent that? It's already ToD with the new Orange station. It's designed to be walkable and bikeable. Short of barring autos altogether how could the city have designed it so that it's not flooded with cars? New T stop or no, this is a very auto-centric part of town.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

^This project did not happen in a vacuum. It is the end result of infinite decisions and counterdecisions and the will or lack of will of the parties involved. The lower rise buildings could easily have been twice as tall. The taller ones could easily have gone substantially higher too. That would have been much more real TOD as opposed to the token density of what is to be built. A suburban urbanism will result because the leadership to produce something better wasn't there. The leadership to begin to say no to the car was not there.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

Ron Newman said:
Only if some sort of pedestrian crossing connects the casino to the Gateway Plaza (also in Everett, across the commuter rail tracks) and then to Assembly Square (across the Mystic River). We on the Somerville Bicycle Committee have been advocating for such a connection; perhaps it can be demanded in exchange for approving the casino?
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Probably the best you're going to get is when the Route 16 bridge over the tracks and the old Mystic draw are replaced with all-new spans. I haven't seen renderings of what MassDOT is designing or know if it's even all the way through final design yet, but there's no way they can totally replace those without substantial improvements to ped access on those currently terrifyingly narrow sidewalks. The connectivity could be improved somewhat in very roundabout fashion if the new bridges got ultra-wide sidewalks with tall barriers between the road, maybe striping a bike lane on the sidewalk (since the road will still have no shoulders) with plastic peg barriers separating peds from bikes:
-- Offset wide sidewalks along the road between Station Landing and Gateway Ctr. so it's grass-buffered, and install a properly safe crosswalk at the Wellington turnouts.
-- A more direct connection to the Mystic reservation paths on the Gateway side, and real crosswalks at the rotary.
-- A proper duck-under to Rivers Edge Drive with the widened bridge serving up real sidewalks underneath.
-- Better Bike to the Sea access if they did a small path extension from its Prescott St. terminus to a Gateway/Mystic path connection underneath 16 at Everett Jct.


For the Somerville side then you'd need to do the long overdue deed of busting 28 on the Mystic bridge down to 4 lanes, moving those sidewalk jersey barriers to substantially widen the sidewalks, and striping a real bike lane on a widened road shoulder.


It's not the same as a proper Assembly-to-Everett crossing, but I don't think you're getting that until some Urban Ring configuration is built 30 years in the future that doubles up the Eastern Route bridge and offers a sidewalk next to the tracks direct-connecting to Gateway and Bike to the Sea. The roundabout option is always going to be a pain, but with the 16 bridges getting a full teardown/rebuild the parkways don't have to be so nihilistically anti-ped. There's enough grassy knolls around the horn to do some useful stuff tied to the critically improved bridges.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

The replacement 16 bridges are definitely going to have better, ADA-compliant sidewalks, and I thought they were also supposed to have shoulders (which could double as de-facto bike lanes)? One of the new bridges will also allow the River's Edge path to be extended under 16 to connect to the new path behind Wellington Station.

I welcome these improvements, but they don't do much for Somerville-Everett pedestrian connectivity.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

Ron Newman said:
The replacement 16 bridges are definitely going to have better, ADA-compliant sidewalks, and I thought they were also supposed to have shoulders (which could double as de-facto bike lanes)? One of the new bridges will also allow the River's Edge path to be extended under 16 to connect to the new path behind Wellington Station.

I welcome these improvements, but they don't do much for Somerville-Everett pedestrian connectivity.
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I've heard that...and they're supposed to be pretty far along in design. Just can't find a single lick about it online. Mystic draw is going to a fixed span because it hasn't opened in decades, which means they could potentially widen it the full footprint of the control tower.

The other option...which like improving 16/28 is very roundabout, is connecting the Assembly paths to Sullivan: http://goo.gl/maps/Bmx1F. Path already cul-de-sacs on the south side of the Eastern Route bridge, so the MBTA Charlestown garage is the only blocker for getting to Alford St. They're probably not gonna like the idea for security reasons, but if you took this weedy patch and repurposed into a river walk separated by a tall fence it would do the job. 99 isn't exactly ped-friendly, but it does have the shoulders for a striped bike lane.


Not a lot of attractive direct options, but de-suckifying the parkways around the horn in each direction leaves very little in the way of actual path construction/amenities required to string together a tolerable bike or walking trip.
 
Re: Assembly Square Redevelopment

Ron Newman said:
What and where is Mystic Draw?
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The Rt 16 bridge. I think it's the only movable span on the Mystic other than Rt 99/Alford St.

Speaking of 99.... WHEN will that bridge be complete?! Numerous times I've gone by and seen just one construction worker. Pretty sure its the same guy every time. What the hell?
 
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