Avenir

And couldn't be any deeper because that's where the Green Line el incline was.
 
singbat said:
and, wouldn't it be nice to see a layered street scape that pulled back and up from something as intimate, laid back and main street as what this row was a few years back. wasn't "cute" as much as coffee, shave, bar, and haberdashery. why should that conflict with density and an urban scale?

i'm all for the land owner doing whatever makes a legal buck, but aesthetically there was an interesting base that was unlike pretty much anywhere else in the downtown -- they could have leveraged that.
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A seductive and unrealistic vision.
 
ablarc said:
singbat said:
and, wouldn't it be nice to see a layered street scape that pulled back and up from something as intimate, laid back and main street as what this row was a few years back. wasn't "cute" as much as coffee, shave, bar, and haberdashery. why should that conflict with density and an urban scale?

i'm all for the land owner doing whatever makes a legal buck, but aesthetically there was an interesting base that was unlike pretty much anywhere else in the downtown -- they could have leveraged that.
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A seductive and unrealistic vision.
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thanks, i think, for the seductive part. you saying things about unrealistic is the pot calling the kettle black... :)

czsz said:
The one story building had limited use because it lacked depth, and it seriously crowded the sidewalk too. It didn't help that the owner mandated uniform awnings and filled it with offices rather than shops. I can't even remember when there was a time its contents had any positive effect on the neighborhood.
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i'm not a huge fan of advocating for development on parking lots first, or otherwise treating individual landowners as if they were just dipping their choice of meat out of a common pot. (though I'm also pretty often guilty of lusting after parking lot removal, etc. in my heart, to mis-paraphrase Carter).

however, the 25-foot deep thing is a paper tiger. you wouldn't keep the depth when redeveloping the site, even if you decided to keep some of the character and scale of the current occupant.

and I can remember when there were things other than offices in that strip -- and I'm not yet gray.

all things considered it isn't worthy of a slot on the historic register, though...
 
Exiting the South Station bus terminal yesterday, I noticed one place where Boston could use such a shallow building, actually - the spit of land between the bus garage and Atlantic Avenue, where the ever pro-urban DoT elected to plant mulligans covered in shrubbery. So bizarre for a street otherwise lined with 10+ story buildings...
 
That might be too shallow even for the Canal Street one-story. Also, I think the SST project includes an expansion of the bus terminal, which is apparently at or over capacity already.
 
25 ft deep commercial buildings won't work in Boston, since there isn't demand. The economy hasn't been doing well in Boston for this decade, and there just isn't a store that could fit in that small a space because there aren't much home grown stores in Boston. It would work in China though, there's so much retail there, so much demand, in every street, first floor retail under apartments, every size, millions of independent stores, and a few foreign and domestic chains (Gome, WalMart, Carrefour, GouBuLi, The Home World-chinese supermarket like Carrefour).
 
^ There are a ton of business's in the North End, the South End, the Back Bay, and Beacon Hill that would love to have a 25ft deep commercial space.
 
singbat said:
thanks, i think, for the seductive part. you saying things about unrealistic is the pot calling the kettle black... :)
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Didn't mean to get your goat. To clarify: I like your proposal. I don't think it's unrealistic. I think the development community would think it was unrealistic. I think the development community is unrealistic.
 
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is it possible to put a building over those terrible north station skylights? That section is just nasty and a disaster.
 
if Delaware North ever get around to building there, they will subsume that subway entrance.
 
Not the ones in the picture, only the one accross Causeway next to the Garden.
 
All of the Bulfinch Triangle blocks have been designated for development, so I expect those new buildings to subsume all of the other station entrances.
 
Are those pilings or something? It looks like Stonehenge.
 
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