Beacon Hill Civic Association sues to stop installation of sidewalk ramps

Is it even safe for people in wheelchairs to be in such a hilly area?

How many of the buildings in the area are ADA compliant?
 
Kahta said:
Is it even safe for people in wheelchairs to be in such a hilly area?

How many of the buildings in the area are ADA compliant?
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None. But that makes it even more important to have accessible sidewalks door-to-door when handicapped people do live there, do need to get there, and do have a tougher time getting up the stairs.


Of course, the sidewalks are going to be shit as long as the Architectural Commission mandates that *ONLY* wire-cut bricks can be used on the sidewalks. Not machine-pressed where the gaps actually fit together. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to allow seamless bricks across the street from MGH. They still block it the whole length of Charles.

Credit where credit's due...that's actually how they did make bricks in the 17th century. With fucking hand tools slicing through wet clay in not-quite uniform shapes. Bravo...one example of genuine historical accuracy. The urban tactical assault strollers out in force on those sidewalks and double-parked Range Rovers near the Myrtle St. Playground...not quite so period-accurate. :rolleyes:
 
Hard to see this as other than a problem of obsessive first world one percenters, detached from Joe Average reality, living in shiny, gilded bubbles.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
None. But that makes it even more important to have accessible sidewalks door-to-door when handicapped people do live there, do need to get there, and do have a tougher time getting up the stairs.
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There are actually quite a few handicapped people living in the neighborhood - all of the former school buildings have been converted into affordable housing specifically for the elderly and/or handicapped. Nobody is going to comfortably roll a wheelchair up a grade like Revere street, but there are still quite a few people with disabilities living on the shallower streets.

Speaking as a resident of Beacon Hill, the BHCA and most of the other people who attend public meetings and claim to speak for the neighborhood can get fucked when it comes to transportation and urbanism issues. They look and lead lives very different from the majority of the people who live here, but they are the people with the time and inclination to actually show up to meetings.

If BHCA or someone else is willing to pay the premium right now to get something more than yellow tactile strips and concrete ramps then great. Having raised crosswalks would be great from a universal design perspective, since they are more accessible than ramps and have a side benefit of slowing traffic bombing down the hill and improving crosswalk visibility. But the city is right to be lighting a fire under their ass by starting work on the yellow/concrete stuff, since getting even that level of accessibility installed right now is better than waiting years for the infrastructure fairy to put in raised crosswalks.
 
Scipio said:
Speaking as a resident of Beacon Hill, the BHCA and most of the other people who attend public meetings and claim to speak for the neighborhood can get fucked when it comes to transportation and urbanism issues. They look and lead lives very different from the majority of the people who live here, but they are the people with the time and inclination to actually show up to meetings.
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I feel like you could change out "Beacon Hill" and "BHCA" for pretty much any neighborhood and any neighborhood civic association and this would be true.

Am I correct in assuming this associations came into their "power" as a result of the big top-down planning of the mid 1900s? Do we think the pendulum will ever swing the other way? Not to discourage public participation but to empower our professional planners?
 
MBTAddict said:
I feel like you could change out "Beacon Hill" and "BHCA" for pretty much any neighborhood and any neighborhood civic association and this would be true.

Am I correct in assuming this associations came into their "power" as a result of the big top-down planning of the mid 1900s? Do we think the pendulum will ever swing the other way? Not to discourage public participation but to empower our professional planners?
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I actually think the community associations got their power because of the "great work" of the professional planners in the urban renewal period.

Too bad the West End didn't have a powerful community association in the late 50's!
 
If I'm remembering my history correctly, Flynn set them up (or at least empowered them) when he was mayor.
 
It's important to note the origins of the Beacon Hill Civic Association:
"The Beacon Hill Civic Association was formed in 1922, largely at the prompting of political activist and “life-long crusader for good government” Marian Nichols, a feisty ‘street fighter’ who organized neighbors and stormed City Hall to protest the city’s decision to pave the brick sidewalks."​

Those sidewalks have a lot of symbolic meaning to residents of Beacon Hill.
 
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There has been a lot of inaccurate or incomplete reporting on this issue. The one thing that seems to get lost a lot is that in all the other historic neighborhoods with brick sidewalks the city is putting red/brick colored pads instead of the yellow ones that they use on the all-concrete sidewalks elsewhere. The city plans to do the same in Beacon Hill.
 
Granite, they seriously want granite for the warning panel. Are you serious right now? What a bunch of rich entitled jerks.
 
In their defense, Cambridge uses cast stone (in both red and "granite" grey), as well as rusting steel. It looks fantastic, and feels more durable than the plastic Boston is insisting on (which bubbles up and breaks, I've seen/felt this quite a few times). IIRC, the BHCA offered to pay for the difference in material costs. But the city wants no part it.

Tearing up what was already done at Charles Circle is beyond stupid though. First of all that intersection is already an unhistoric aesthetic disaster, if anything the ramps are making it look better. Second, its already installed. The neighborhood association is rightfully distancing themselves from this loon.
 
davem said:
In their defense, Cambridge uses cast stone (in both red and "granite" grey), as well as rusting steel. It looks fantastic, and feels more durable than the plastic Boston is insisting on (which bubbles up and breaks, I've seen/felt this quite a few times). IIRC, the BHCA offered to pay for the difference in material costs. But the city wants no part it.

Tearing up what was already done at Charles Circle is beyond stupid though. First of all that intersection is already an unhistoric aesthetic disaster, if anything the ramps are making it look better. Second, its already installed. The neighborhood association is rightfully distancing themselves from this loon.
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It's also the state this time, not the spat with the city. MassDOT has jurisdiction of the immediate Circle because Route 3 clips it. He's protesting a decision where they were already asked and gave approval for the concrete + red plastic!
 
I noticed this out of the corner of my eye and did a skidding 180 while riding around today. Lo and behold, Boston does have rusting-steel tactile strips. Allston library:

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These would contrast just fine with brick in Beacon Hill. Really, they should be the standard everywhere, since the material has been proven to be durable for every other thing implanted into the sidewalk.
 
Yeah I don't agree with the crazies that want solid gold tactile strips or whatever, but as someone who lives in Beacon Hill I can definitely see where they are coming from in terms of preserving the feel and aesthetics of the community. Most permanent residents in BH spend an inordinate amount of time with flower planters, small landscaping projects, tiding up their sidewalk, etc. The condition of the sidewalks is obviously pretty bad in most places, but I still think that the whole neighborhood would look bad with concrete and plastic corners, especially considering how many there are in such a small area.

I like the idea of rusted steel - just embed them into the existing sidewalks and call it a day.
 
Galactic said:
Yeah I don't agree with the crazies that want solid gold tactile strips or whatever, but as someone who lives in Beacon Hill I can definitely see where they are coming from in terms of preserving the feel and aesthetics of the community. Most permanent residents in BH spend an inordinate amount of time with flower planters, small landscaping projects, tiding up their sidewalk, etc. The condition of the sidewalks is obviously pretty bad in most places, but I still think that the whole neighborhood would look bad with concrete and plastic corners, especially considering how many there are in such a small area.

I like the idea of rusted steel - just embed them into the existing sidewalks and call it a day.
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Oh, please.

Charles Circle used to look like this prior to the big Charles MGH station rebuild and associated streetscaping that wrapped just 7 years ago:

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Concrete and asphalt sidewalks. Disgusting-ass 1960's cobrahead light fixtures giving off blood-draining dim green glow. Curb cuts galore for driveway parking. And a much higher-speed rotary before the streetscaping narrowed the corners and implemented a modicum of traffic calming.




MassHighway installed the sidewalk bricks, installed the period lighting, installed the brick traffic islands, installed the granite curbing, eliminated the curb cuts. It is 10 times more "aesthetic" than it was a decade ago.

And yet the BHCA is still bitching at them for using machine-pressed bricks in front of a hospital instead of lumpy wire-cut bricks sliced by hand tools. A decade retroactive. And now conveniently forgetting that the state went through the whole process of seeking their approval for the choice of tactile strip materials and color contrast...which they willingly approved.




This was not some lone nut losing his cool and threatening the Secretary of Transportation. You saw the article...the BHCA Board of Directors chair said out of one side of her mouth that she has no insight into his e-mails, then one sentence later expressed shock at how the ramps "took everyone by surprise", then when confronted about her knowledge of the e-mails gave the most weaselly non-denial denial not-not never maybe not condoning such action. Well...how the fuck did it take everyone by surprise when you're the chair of the board who signed off on those materials??? The state provided the paper trail.

And second, this has nothing to do with any of the ongoing controversy over the ramps on city streets. Or Marty Walsh acting like an ass. Charles Circle is state-maintained...the only piece of road touching Beacon Hill that is state-maintained. And the state went to lengths the city didn't to seek their approval well in advance of the installations. And now they're making the same exact legal threats against the state.

Bullshit. They have no ground to stand on expanding this war like that. And all the online comments on this news story, or in UHub, waxing a partial-or-better defense of this behavior have been totally dishonest drawing false equivalences between the Walsh-vs.-BHCA cripple fight and these brand new accusations against the state directly contradicted by a paper trail and state-level pols responding like actual mature adults. To "understand where they're coming from" means FIRST raking these clowns over the coals about why they are wasting everyone's time making threats against officials who have their approval signatures on file. And apparently doing it for collateral damage in an argument against completely unrelated people (as if...what...Davey is going to respond to a direct legal threat on his turf by phoning up Walsh and telling him to be a man on his wholly unrelated turf???).




No, I'm sorry. Wake up and smell who's representing your neighborhood. These are not the actions of persons intending to reach a productive compromise in which some other entity meets them halfway on a viable solution. These are persons who want to watch the world burn. If residents really do care about this enough to put in "inordinate amount of time" on neighborhood aesthetics, perhaps they should hold their designated civic mouthpieces to the same standard first? The BHCA is clearly interested in something much different than honoring the hard beautification work of the neighborhood's residents with the disproportionate energy being expended into threats, intimidation, projection, deflection, and dick-swinging contests with whatever pols lack enough self-control to oblige them.

Understand that the neighborhood's ability to get favorable action first and foremost depends on who they are delegating the power of representation to. They are delegating that representation to a bunch of psychopaths. This stopped being about tactile strip colors and brick aesthetics once they brought the state into this. Now it's just psychopaths acting out as psychopaths. It doesn't become about aesthetics or establishing a basis for "understanding where they're coming from" again until the neighborhood takes it upon themselves to rein in the psychopaths purporting to represent their interests. So...how much does this issue really matter to the neighborhood to translate into action reining in the psychopaths? Or is this all about tacit approval to watch the world burn?
 
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