BCEC expansion | Seaport

^ Also last night too. My Facebook feed is abnormally full of pix of my friends on the glowing swings last night. The place looked packed. A real win for the area.
 
I'm (genuinely) glad people are getting a kick out of this....but calling it the 'lawn' seems like the perfect indictment for the entire Seaport experience....
 
CSTH said:
I'm (genuinely) glad people are getting a kick out of this....but calling it the 'lawn' seems like the perfect indictment for the entire Seaport experience....
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Uh, they call it that because it makes it sound hip. "Some Dead Guy Park" doesn't catch the 20-somethings' attention in quite the same way as "the Lawn." It isn't a fuck up, it's genius.
 
It's also an enormously successful example of an urban lawn. It's properly programmed and thus has tons of activity. I think the fact that the side of a convention center is activated this well makes it a national model for programming spaces beside venues that typically end up as wastelands.

A city doesn't need urban lawns on every block, but they are welcomed amenities when strategically and sparingly placed.
 
Amazing what can be done with what is seemingly a bottomless budget.
 
Meh, maybe so. Clearly I'm just getting old.






In my day we just got drunk on the stoop.
 
JohnAKeith said:
Amazing what can be done with what is seemingly a bottomless budget.
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I say good for the Convention Center! From everything I've read, The Lawn on D is a huge success, people love it. Isn't that a good thing? So it costs money to maintain and provide activity, would you rather see an empty lot, overgrown with weeds, surrounded by a chain-linked fence? I see this as a good business investment for the Convention Center, great for the immediate neighbors, and fun for everyone else who loves spending time there.
 
atlantaden said:
I say good for the Convention Center! From everything I've read, The Lawn on D is a huge success, people love it. Isn't that a good thing? So it costs money to maintain and provide activity, would you rather see an empty lot, overgrown with weeds, surrounded by a chain-linked fence? I see this as a good business investment for the Convention Center, great for the immediate neighbors, and fun for everyone else who loves spending time there.
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Exactly. If you want a nice urban environment, you need to invest some money in nice things.
 
atlantaden said:
I say good for the Convention Center! From everything I've read, The Lawn on D is a huge success, people love it. Isn't that a good thing? So it costs money to maintain and provide activity, would you rather see an empty lot, overgrown with weeds, surrounded by a chain-linked fence? I see this as a good business investment for the Convention Center, great for the immediate neighbors, and fun for everyone else who loves spending time there.
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Yeah this is still bothering me.

You're presenting a false choice, obviously. I'd rather see a genuine urban environment. Spending public money to activate the featureless perimeter of a giant shoebox is a neat trick, but it's not a sustainable strategy for a successful neighborhood.

Look, I love drinking outside as much as the next guy, especially in a park on a nice day, but if a bunch of 25 year olds want to drink near some swing sets they should just brown bag it on their own dime like the rest of us have since the beginning of time.

If the goal is to activate the area around the convention center, then the only way to do it is with pedestrian friendly streets with ground level retail. Same for every other windswept dead zone in the city, from government center to Barry's corner.

***EDIT: I should have said "if the goal is to *sustainably* activate", echoing the first paragraph - sorry for the lack of precision...****

Otherwise you're just building a bunch of half-assed amusement parks, no different in spirit than when Fiesta Shows sets up shop in the parking lot of the Woburn cinemas for two weeks every summer ('an enormously successful example of a parking lot next to highway, and a national model for activating suburban parking infrastructure?')

...I'm not trying to be a curmudgeon...I'm just insisting on respecting the city ....sorry that it requires coming across as an a-hole...(but yeah seriously I love fun!)



If you want a nice urban environment .... you have to permit, design, build, populate, and maintain a nice urban environment.
 
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CSTH said:
If the goal is to activate the area around the convention center, then the only way to do it is with pedestrian friendly streets with ground level retail. Same for every other windswept dead zone in the city, from government center to Barry's corner.
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This is absolutely false. An urban lawn is a perfectly fine way to activate an area not currently slated for development. Every inch of an urban area does not have to be covered in buildings, nor does every inch of that fabric need to be covered in ground level retail.

Otherwise you're just building a bunch of half-assed amusement parks, no different in spirit than when Fiesta Shows sets up shop in the parking lot of the Woburn cinemas for two weeks every summer ('a national model for activating suburban parking infrastructure')
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You just invalidated your own argument by comparing apples to oranges. The Lawn on D is not a temporary gimmick that lasts 2 weeks, nor is Woburn part of an urban core. Come back when you have a better comparison.
 
I have to disagree. If we can spend a bunch of tax dollars on building, rebuilding, and maintaining playgrounds for kids, which are closed after dusk (and generally frowned on to drink or trespass in if you don't have a kid), then we can use sudo-public money to build ONE damn playground for adults.

I like swings too, probably more than most kids.
 
davem said:
ONE damn playground for adults.

I like swings too, probably more than most kids.
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This is an important point. The Seaport is largely being marketed toward young professionals (whether people like it or not) fresh out of playing beer pong with their bros in college. Giving them a place to hang out and "be a kid" brings some urban life to what amounts to a rather cold and uninviting pedestrian area marred by highway ramps, huge roads, and a massive convention center.
 
CSTH said:
Yeah this is still bothering me.

You're presenting a false choice, obviously. I'd rather see a genuine urban environment. Spending public money to activate the featureless perimeter of a giant shoebox is a neat trick, but it's not a sustainable strategy for a successful neighborhood.

Look, I love drinking outside as much as the next guy, especially in a park on a nice day, but if a bunch of 25 year olds want to drink near some swing sets they should just brown bag it on their own dime like the rest of us have since the beginning of time.

If the goal is to activate the area around the convention center, then the only way to do it is with pedestrian friendly streets with ground level retail. Same for every other windswept dead zone in the city, from government center to Barry's corner.

Otherwise you're just building a bunch of half-assed amusement parks, no different in spirit than when Fiesta Shows sets up shop in the parking lot of the Woburn cinemas for two weeks every summer ('an enormously successful example of a parking lot next to highway, and a national model for activating suburban parking infrastructure?')

...I'm not trying to be a curmudgeon...I'm just insisting on respecting the city ....sorry that it requires coming across as an a-hole...(but yeah seriously I love fun!)



If you want a nice urban environment .... you have to permit, design, build, populate, and maintain a nice urban environment.
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CSTH -- you have revisionist history/? view of urban and urbanity

Remember that successful cities are more than just "pedestrian friendly streets with ground level retail" -- yes, you need some of those

But you also need:
  • nice family friendly residential streets
  • places where people work whose work environment is not necessarily pedestrian friendly -- e.g. factoriories with lots of loading docks, etc.
  • places where people work not conducive to ground level retail -- e.g. a working port
  • places where the infrastructure of the city is exposed -- e.g. power plants, sewage plants
  • parks and spots to just stop and sit or toss a frisbee
  • great institutions and their desire for a campus e.g. universities, mfa
  • etc.

part of the Seaport / Innovation District was, is and is likely to continue to be the type of place where casual strolling and window shopping is not the order of the day
 
datadyne007 said:
Come back when you have a better comparison.
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Main_Street_USA_of_Disneyland_Paris.jpg
 
davem said:
I have to disagree. If we can spend a bunch of tax dollars on building, rebuilding, and maintaining playgrounds for kids, which are closed after dusk (and generally frowned on to drink or trespass in if you don't have a kid), then we can use sudo-public money to build ONE damn playground for adults.

I like swings too, probably more than most kids.
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Great point! Apparently a bunch of people on my Facebook feed agree.
 
whighlander said:
Remember that successful cities are more than just "pedestrian friendly streets with ground level retail" -- yes, you need some of those

But you also need:
  • nice family friendly residential streets
  • places where people work whose work environment is not necessarily pedestrian friendly -- e.g. factoriories with lots of loading docks, etc.
  • places where people work not conducive to ground level retail -- e.g. a working port
  • places where the infrastructure of the city is exposed -- e.g. power plants, sewage plants
  • parks and spots to just stop and sit or toss a frisbee
  • great institutions and there desire for a campus e.g. universities, mfa
  • etc.
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I agree with you fully, and I acknowledge that all this wasn't laid out in my previous post.

Of course all of those things are part of a successful city. But I'm trying to emphasize that the way those things relate to each other is very important too, and the way they together create (or limit) the possibilities for citizenship and authentic community is absolutely essential.

Look - when I said that calling it a 'lawn' is emblematic of what's wrong with the Seaport, I had two things in mind: the Place, and the Programming.

As for the place - its lipstick on a white elephant, no less than are the MiracleGro moats that insulate the McManions of Medfield and Burlington. As a 'place', it is a buffer and an ornament. I agree that it is a very, very nice example of an ornamental buffer - kudos! - but I'm frustrated that a buffer is required at all. i.e. why should the convention center be as hostile to the human-scale environment as a factory or a power plant (or a McMansion)? I know that they *usually* are faceless boxes, but I'm asserting that they dont *have to be* and further that this one *should not be*. And of course while we all admire the manicuring on the new lawn, the 'front porch' continues to discharge visitors into a vast gaping Nothing.

rail1.jpg


...Now, if any of you wants to argue that if the white elephant is there anyway so we might as well make it look pretty, then fine...but that complacency comes at a cost.

Which is where the Programming comes in

whighlander said:
part of the Seaport / Innovation District was, is and is likely to continue to be the type of place where casual strolling and window shopping is not the order of the day
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If there ever will besuch a place in the Seaport, it will have security guards, the doors will be locked at night, and spontaneous, non-monetized acts of culture and community will be prohibited, because your Seaport is a dense, mixed use suburban subdivision and the function of the Lawn is to keep it that way. Transparently, all the 'programming', including the beer and the swings, exists entirely to serve as an event-driven PR platform for the BCEC. Its stated purpose was to buy a little support from fun-loving 20-somethings and other local constituents, so the BCEC could grease the skids for the Expansion Plan ... i.e. move the blank walls a little closer to where people live, and put that parking box out front too while they were at it (with an assist from Massport). I recognize that things have changed post-Baker, but that just raises the stakes without changing the game. That doesn't mean it's not a fun time, but its like watching the Super Bowl for the commercials - It's hard NOT to enjoy it, but the fact remains that you're complicit in your own manipulation.

This quotation in the Globe article announcing all the scheduled fun (back in January) is the essence of what i think is rotten here:

link

One idea is to simulate — and update — a familiar childhood scene for professionals who remember winters gone by when they used to answer a knock on the door to find a neighborhood friend asking for help building a snowman.

As adults this winter, they can expect to get the same invitation via Twitter from their friends at the convention center. On days when a blizzard blankets the city, the @lawnond Twitter account will beckon its roughly 2,000 followers to frolic in the snow.

There will be snowball fights, cocoa, and probably a food truck or two. The kid next door never brought a restaurant on wheels, now, did he?

“We want to have little pop-ups when there’s lots of snow,” Rooney said. “It’s sort of re-creating those days when you were a kid going out to play in the snow.”
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Who needs neighborhoods, friends, and/or spontaneous communal action when you have @lawnond?

Place and programming, place and programming... I want to be clear, I'm not saying that the Lawn is not *nice* or not *fun* and maybe not even *not worth the money*...what I am saying is that it's emblematic of the Seaport's evolution as an anti-public suburb with no soul.

In a nutshell: The difference between a simulated (their word!) community and an authentic community is the difference between an amusement park and a real city....Long live the motherfucking MegaPlex!
 
CSTH said:
if a bunch of 25 year olds want to drink near some swing sets they should just brown bag it on their own dime like the rest of us have since the beginning of time.
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Why? This sounds sad. :(

I'm failing to understand how a public place where a bunch of people are having a bunch of fun is a bad thing.
 
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