Assembly Square Infill and Small Developments | Somerville

^^you mean to tell me the bloomin onion ISN'T Australian food???
 
fattony said:
Its not about not "liking" the place, per se. And it isn't really a question of if the food tastes good or is good for you or any of that. They are an Australian "themed" restaurant without any Australian food nor even Australian people in their hokey commercials. They don't even try and it is embarrassing. Outback is one of the most egregious examples (though there are plenty of others) of strip-mall suburb sanitized homogenized cultural bankruptcy. I grew up thinking the food at Taco Bell and Chili's was Mexican food and I grew up in Florida surrounded by Mexicans.
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None of that has anything to do with why Outback Steakhouse shouldn't open in Assembly Row...
 
Even if it never gets replaced, it doesn't matter. It's not as though Outback is displacing some long-time beloved local joint in Davis or Union. It's filling a brand new empty storefront in Assembly Row. If it does well it should stay, if it doesn't it shouldn't. Simple as that.
 
^^^ Agreed.

It being a free country, city retail/dining is made most vibrant by maximizing exchanges between willing sellers and willing buyers, and generally raising the odds of such happy exchanges. Passing judgement on any one business or its customers doesn't help.

The only way to prove you know better is to open your own restaurant and have drain Outback empty. Other than that, the most you can say is that you'll always walk 30' farther to the next storefront.

In other words, the market--the best guesses of many entrepreneurs free to try and fail will decide what food or goods are optimal @ Assembly, not our value judgments.

Complete streets, lively walking, and a human scale are about all you can claim as "right" vs the strip mall being wrong --because strip retail actually have been tried and found wanting.
 
Correct. Strip malls themselves are god awful and the opposite of urban design as well as the height of auto centric design.

The stores in those strip malls aren't the problem. They are there because that's what has been made available and they can be profitable in them. Take them from the strip and put them in a ground floor retail storefront in a dense urban setting, doesn't bring the evils of the strip mall with them. Just their goods and services that meet the needs of some of those dwellers in said dense urban setting.
 
Outback would be fine in Everett's Gateway Center. It would be a great addition to the Meadow Glen Mall in Medford or Twin City Plaza in Somerville, but Assembly Row is not like those places.

Young professionals will pay $3k per month to live in an apartment (or even higher rents to rent commercial space) with a pretty good river view and T access. They'll admit to the guilty pleasure of preferring to shop at J. Crew and Saks and Banana Republic factory outlets rather than spending double on boutique shops on Newbury. They'll stuff their faces at JP Licks and Legal Seafood and Starbucks and Burger Dive.

But they won't eat at Outback. And they'll be embarrassed an Outback is in their development, even though they know it is the definition of a first-world problem.

Because Outback is definitively not cool. And I'd argue this all comes down to cool factor.

Just about everything else in Assembly is cool. Legoland, big friggin movie theater that serves alcohol, mass transit, water access for kayaking and jogging, on a bike path that goes for miles, 14,000 Facebook fans, SHIPPING CONTAINERS with LOCAL BEER!!!! I mean, hello!

The badness of an Outback in Assembly has nothing to do with the objective quality and authenticity of the food or whether any of you like it. It has nothing to do with whether yuppies and hipsters who shun it while cherishing Starbucks are hypocrites. It all comes down to marketing and demographics.

People will pay premium for cool, even if it is prefabricated cool, which Assembly most certainly is. Dilute the cool factor and it hurts everyone else's business.
 
^ I agree. But the people driving down from the north shore, or taking the orange line from malden or driving in from new hampshire to go to a movie or legoland and do some outlet shopping will see all the yuppies in the local chains and walk into outback. Outback will do fine. Other restaurants will do fine. Assembly will continue to grow.
 
^My thought as well. (American) tourists and shoppers from the burbs will eat there. The residents will be happy they aren't mobbing the rest of the restaurants.
 
And back to that happy mix I mentioned a couple days back on this exact subject.
 
any body catch this image?

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That's a lot of high rise commercial, which I guess is what Somerville really wants to help with their tax base. The one large residential building kjdonovan posted renderings of is fairly prominent as well. Found on the Boston subreddit here;

http://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/2dx20c/future_phases_of_assembly_row/
 
Haven't seen that one before. The space where the shipping containers will be (beige block west of the pink hotel) is...some color that's not in the key. At least that's my read of it.
 
meddlepal said:
I wish more of that commercial was residential.
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Commercial can more easily afford/justify the super-premium of being on the innermost ring abutting the T, so it is natural that they crowd out other uses in the first and second blocks from the T. The same dynamic has had a similar effect at Davis, Harvard Sq, Central, Kendall, and most CBD stations.

Residential will do just fine mixing in to the next "ring" of uses when it comes time start developing the surface parking.
 
meddlepal said:
I wish more of that commercial was residential.
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Yeah but what the City really wants is commercial - they need it to sure up their tax base. I wouldn't necessarily want less commercial here, but I would like to see some of the residential go a bit higher.
 
Is anything currently being built in this area? Has the Partners Building started?
 
DZH22 said:
Is anything currently being built in this area? Has the Partners Building started?
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Dirt was being moved around on the Partners site this morning. Past articles indicated project managers wanted to start construction this month.
 
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