BHA Charlestown/Bunker Hill Redevelopment | Charlestown

Status
Not open for further replies.
datadyne007 said:
Freaking awesome although way too much green space.
Click to expand...

Low income units generally come with kids, who need green space to play in. When I grew up in the Jefferson Park housing project in North Cambridge, there was plenty of green space and playgrounds to accommodate the massive number of resident kids.

Too many of the newer low income/Section 8 apartment complexes have insufficient open space for children.
 
Charlie_mta said:
Low income units generally come with kids, who need green space to play in. When I grew up in the Jefferson Park housing project in North Cambridge, there was plenty of green space and playgrounds to accommodate the massive number of resident kids.

Too many of the newer low income/Section 8 apartment complexes have insufficient open space for children.
Click to expand...

? That's what the courtyards I suggested (& you cut out of my quote) would be for. That's how it works in Europe.

The interior courtyards are safer too because only residents can access them & random people from the street can't wander in as easily as if the courtyards were wide open to the streets like they are proposing here. It's both practical for safety concerns & enhances the urban environment by providing true street frontage.
 
Last edited:
the problem with the green space is that too much of it faces public streets on BOTH side of a street providing no streetscape. The extension of Concord St with the mirrored green spaces means there would be no residential units on this block between Bunker Hill and Medford.
The extension of Lincoln St is better with 1 side having building frontage and 1 side green space.
The 1st floor of these buildings should be townhouses with exterior doors onto the street (like the rest of the neighborhood), not into a hallway.
 
Wow, this is big. REAL BIG. Hopefully they're not shooting to high, here. There is some awesome potential here. If played right, it'd be like Assembly Row but with public housing layered in.
 
This is not assembly row...not even close...if anything this is harbor point on a much larger scale.
 
Please, please, next up, Lenox St. projects. They have already started on the Whittier St. project, (at least planning wise). There is still a lot to iron out here in Charlestown, but it seems the approach has been proven sound ($1 Billion by a private developer seems to indicate that). And after that, please, Cathedral.
 
This is similar to the housing project near Maverick in East Boston that they turned into mixed income housing about 10 years ago. It really helped to improve that neighborhood.
 
Last edited:
Data, I wonder if some of the blocks are not big enough to support building on all four sides. If the developer wants the structure wide enough to double stack all four sides he may end up with postage stamp courtyards inside.
 
617 said:
This is not assembly row...not even close...if anything this is harbor point on a much larger scale.
Click to expand...

Does Harbor Point even have any retail, let alone ground floor street-fronting retail?
 
BostonUrbEx said:
Does Harbor Point even have any retail, let alone ground floor street-fronting retail?
Click to expand...

Harbor point is separated from the rest of the street grid and is fairly isolated from the rest of the city. It does not have any retail, it's a 1980s style development before large mixed use projects became the norm.

This project is exciting because it integrates well with the rest of Charlestown. While new buildings will never look the same as old construction this project as rendered does a great job.
 
BKNA said:
PNF filed
http://www.bostonredevelopmentautho...roject-filings/one-charlestown-pnf-2016-09-27
Click to expand...

This. Is. Beautiful.

Gorgeous facades, wonderfully varied. Retail where it counts. Open Space (to satisfy the fetishists) where it's actually pertinent and contextual. 2,200 new residential units (wow) in addition to what it's replacing.

This is much more exciting to me than developments like Assembly. Here, I feel like the urban environment is actually being reclaimed, upgraded, and modernized across an entire failed "renewal" zone. Bring it on. (Also, does this herald a final victory for the yuppies in the Charlestown culture wars?)
 
Weeeeeee...

GM1YW6ph.png

YSDM8jHh.png

8XZUmTTh.png

lWxWj11h.png

o95q6Nhh.png

x4xOFAAh.png

2GAaXz3h.png

AgVjHT9h.png

GakdzI3h.png

BmBZ3lPh.png

TapECZ6h.png

ipZ3Ivjh.png

bS8KWw8h.png

YVy2Cfkh.png

ybMvaOJh.png

D4xmM8uh.png

WtousZLh.png

mTA8LWOh.png

CrBt37Hh.png

mPzMiUNh.png

ziiII3Gh.png

6Jq9Ir1h.png

hDxhKM0h.png

2PZvKvMh.png

i3hkt4Yh.png

sxkaqBOh.png

1MWmTjnh.png
 
As currently proposed, this is some of the best new architecture in the Boston area! Will probably get VE'd down to crap facades, but right now it's some impressive stuff from Stantec. Visually, the facades of the massive buildings help read as different buildings of varying width from the different treatments that meet the ground. Each building actually looks like a collection of buildings. That is a very good thing when you are building at this scale.
 
Holy shit that's dope. But that is also dense. Transit it going to be a bigger issue than it already was.
 
Scipio said:
Off topic, but how do you do these huge pdf to internet-friendly screenshot grabs? I do print screen->paste->crop->upload, there has to be a better way.
Click to expand...

Download PDF.
Open in Bluebeam (my firm has a Bluebeam license, I used to do it in Acrobat before we got Bluebeam).
Go through the EPNF, write down page numbers/ranges for images I want.
Extract pages 55, 58-60, 71-93, etc.
Save new extracted PDF.
Save as PNG. (That saves each page as a PNG)
Upload to Imgur.
 
Build it yesterday. This is one of the more exciting projects lurking in the background.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
Holy shit that's dope. But that is also dense. Transit it going to be a bigger issue than it already was.
Click to expand...

It's on the 89 and 93, and it doesn't get much more frequent than that.

What's badly needed are 60-footers out of Charlestown Garage to increase capacity on all those key routes. That's only possible if the T proceeeds with its Bus Facilities Strategic Plan that would build a very large Wellington facility on the parking lot, trading the parking capacity to a vertical garage on the KISS 108 parcel. Wellington then becomes the 60-footer capable garage expanding the Everett-Charlestown "super campus", and supplies the extra equipment for any Charlestown-, Fellsway-, or Lynn-originating routes. Today's equipment pool is flat in number with only a couple garages capable of serving 60-footers, so Wellington's the first pivot move for outright capacity expansion above-and-beyond tweaking/streamlining ops.


Other than that, maybe a new Medford St.-hugging route. That's not nearly as congested as street as Bunker Hill. For neighborhood quality-of-life, however, they really need to let Massport revisit the Charlestown Haul Road proposal, which extends Terminal St. west to Sullivan, absorbing the Schraffts driveway. That gets all the Autoport/Moran Terminal trucks off Medford St. Unfortunately the misinformation campaign against that relatively minor project got the NIMBY's to torpedo it in public comment a couple years ago and Massport to withdraw the haul road proposal. This is going to be a problem for the new dev because those big rigs and autorack trucks exiting the terminal are at peak disruptiveness on Medford right on the block in front of these parcels.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top