Boston 2024

c_combat said:
I don't know, but it's gotta go. Fossil fuels will be over with this century anyway.
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Well it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Unless you have an energy source to replace it immediately.
 
I'm going to take a quick dive off the deep end if you don't mind...

How bout this, a VERTICAL Olympic village. a massive tower to house all the crap, minus the Olympic stadium (because even in my crazy fantasy I couldn't fit that in a tower). Stuff everything else in a tower, the Olympic village, aquatic center, media crap, and whatever else I'm forgetting. After the games the housing becomes condos, the media space remains as studios to support Boston's growing media presence, and the pools and crap become public places. And the best part of all, the tower itself could be the Olympic flame. Your mind is blown right?

Everyone's on board right? Good. Make it work. I'm looking at you architects & engineers
 
c_combat said:
I know you're not trying to be offensive, but my roomates and I were able to heat our apartment this last month on Olympic joy alone. Pure Sochi Olympic joy, and it stayed a pretty comfortable 75 degrees.

But foreals, the real estate seems too valuable for what it is used as now. Considering a long term outlook on the city's growth and all.. It would make Chelsea smell better too.

But I am also a militant objector to big oil and fossil fuels in general.
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My rents heat their home with two wood burning stoves. Hot water and electricity comes from solar. Most days the meter runs backwards. This works great in the country, where they have all of two neighbors, lots of fallen trees, and generous amounts of south facing sun. Even though the stoves burn really, really clean, they still belch smoke when they start up cold, and consume a massive amount of wood. (The wood also has to be cured properly, which takes up a ton of space and time.) Their method would never work in the city.

Here you've got solar hot water, or electric heat. Solar is great as a suppliment, but it won't work as an end all. Right now, most of our electricity comes from coal, which is wayyy worse than natural gas. Its going to be a really long time before something comes on the market to heat without burning something.


Anyway, if your goal is reusing industrial land and cleaning up chelsea, I would look to the tank farms along eastern ave, and the ex-rag district. The eastern ave tank farms are small enough that they may be able to be moved, and there is much more TOD potential since the silver line is on its way through there right now, and it is surrounded by existing residential. The rag district/mystic mall historically had an actual street grid that could be reestablished, and a lot of the uses there could be relocated. Together, they form a space about as large as the CNG/produce/recycling terminal, with much better access to existing Chelsea and transit that is in the works.
 
Another problem with the Everett industrial area being made the center of a Boston Olympics is that the Olympic Stadium is required to be within the municipal boundaries of the host city.

rinserepeat said:
Has anyone discussed the south bay shopping center as a potential site for a stadium and/or other large structure? it's right next to a T stop and interstate - and it's a very underutilized site.
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I think I proposed this location for the site of the Olympic Stadium, Athlete's Village, and Aquatics Center earlier in the thread. I think its one of the top locations for something like this, although Beacon Park is probably the best.
 
Can there be multiple "host cities" to get around that requirement? Such as, hypothetically, Boston-Cambridge or Minneapolis-St Paul or San Francisco-Oakland?
 
Just annex the land wherever the stadium would be. :)
 
datadyne007 said:
I believe all the stores there are high volume/top performers and very difficult to move out. Perhaps if Tremont Crossing happens, some could relocate their big boxes there and start to vacate South Bay Center.
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Entirely different shopping occasions-- no one wants to buy things that are hard to carry and bring them on the T.
 
Kahta said:
Entirely different shopping occasions-- no one wants to buy things that are hard to carry and bring them on the T.
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Tremont Crossing has a freaking MASSIVE parking garage component to it (due to the fact that a large portion of the program is actually big box retail).
 
what is Tremont Crossing? This is the first place I've seen that name. (Sorry for the temporary thread derail)
 
Ron Newman said:
what is Tremont Crossing? This is the first place I've seen that name. (Sorry for the temporary thread derail)
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So as not to derail it further, here's the link: http://www.archboston.org/community/showthread.php?t=4177&highlight=Tremont+Crossing&page=2

There's the original render on page 1 of that thread, but in post #37 a link to the new DPIR which features a height increase/slight redesign is posted.

I brought up Tremont Crossing because it's really the only opportunity for some of the big boxes in South Bay Center to leave, thus freeing SBC for development.
 
Ron Newman said:
Can there be multiple "host cities" to get around that requirement? Such as, hypothetically, Boston-Cambridge or Minneapolis-St Paul or San Francisco-Oakland?
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The IOC hates joint bids, so the USOC would never choose a joint bid to submit and even if they did that bid would probably lose first round. Right now there is a trend in the Winter Games of having two sites for a games, a central city and a mountain village, but that is more due to the limited options for the Winter Games because of rising costs, climate change, and the 800m slope requirement.

However, Boston still has one or two options for an Olympic Stadium within its own borders so I think its a moot point for now.
 
How did the Sydney bid work? Sydney is 40 municipal governments across the urban area. We're all Olympic venues and all coordinatin of the bid really just in the (very small) City proper?
 
Shepard said:
How did the Sydney bid work? Sydney is 40 municipal governments across the urban area. We're all Olympic venues and all coordinatin of the bid really just in the (very small) City proper?
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Australian municipalities work differently than American ones. The Sydney Olympic Park is located in a "Local Government Area" which constitutes and "Official Suburb" of Sydney - with "Local Government Area" being a conflation of the American concepts of city/town and county. In any case, it is decidedly not in the Sydney city limits.

I've never heard of this requirement for the stadium, btw.
 
c_combat said:
But I am also a militant objector to big oil and fossil fuels in general.
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Really, that wasn't obvious.

In the 1850s, steam locomotives were only a century away from being obsolete. Should the railroads have just scrapped all those locomotives?

You can't redesign a city (or, well, anything) based on what is going to be obsolete a century from now. And you especially can't expect a city to endorse an Olympic bid on those grounds. And even more can you not expect a city to do that within 10 years.

Boston needs to have some industrial component there, particularly one that helps supply some serious energy needs. And its not just evil fossil fuels in Chelsea. Much of that area is taken up by distribution facilities for a variety of different goods. Oh, and much of those evil fossil fuels in Chelsea are natural gas, which are pretty much the cleanest thing you're going to get until we figure out fusion (or a politically palatable form of fission).

Any Olympic bid should be based in reality and not blind bias.
 
Equilibria said:
Australian municipalities work differently than American ones. The Sydney Olympic Park is located in a "Local Government Area" which constitutes and "Official Suburb" of Sydney - with "Local Government Area" being a conflation of the American concepts of city/town and county. In any case, it is decidedly not in the Sydney city limits.

I've never heard of this requirement for the stadium, btw.
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I'd like a source on that requirement, if we're going to take it seriously, or observe that the MBTA district or even the coalition that puts together the bid simply have a regional component.
 
DominusNovus said:
Really, that wasn't obvious.

In the 1850s, steam locomotives were only a century away from being obsolete. Should the railroads have just scrapped all those locomotives?

You can't redesign a city (or, well, anything) based on what is going to be obsolete a century from now. And you especially can't expect a city to endorse an Olympic bid on those grounds. And even more can you not expect a city to do that within 10 years.

Boston needs to have some industrial component there, particularly one that helps supply some serious energy needs. And its not just evil fossil fuels in Chelsea. Much of that area is taken up by distribution facilities for a variety of different goods. Oh, and much of those evil fossil fuels in Chelsea are natural gas, which are pretty much the cleanest thing you're going to get until we figure out fusion (or a politically palatable form of fission).

Any Olympic bid should be based in reality and not blind bias.
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Yea, I hear that..

Since this is the crazy pitches thread I figure this idea fits in with that theme.

The reason I think this would be a suitable spot for such a big complex such as an Olympic one, is that it's location would be easily annexed (solving the host city having the stadium within its borders). And most importantly, having the potential transit connectivity given that the T would expand and modernize with the notion of hosting such an event as the Olympics.

I suppose the crazy part is really the idea of relocating such important modern infrastructure, especially now. What my imagination carries me towards is a vision that the Olympics could be in Boston, but probably not for a decade or two, or three because transit really does need to be fixed before it Boston could accommodate the movement of so many people. Shit, it's struggling to do so with just its residents on weekdays...

So considering it might be something decades away, the movement toward renewable energy production will probably have increased and gained more momentum *hopefully, and energy could be sought to be produced elsewhere, on not-so-valuable real estate that could be utilized for something much enjoyable than what it is now.

Not to mention it would help mitigate the pollution in the Mystic river and it could be used more recreationally.

Distribution facilities are an easy build, not much difficult engineering would be required to relocate them to more becoming real estate as well.

And why would you not plan for the coming decades? It would be shameful if urban planners didn't consider what sorts of future social trends that will occur and how to build the city around those constraints. If they considered the impacts of a car-dominated society in the 50s and 60s, we wouldn't be where we are now trying to reverse the effects of urban renewal and suburbanization, but they didn't consider the future, or at least they got it very wrong.

So this being in the crazy pitches thread: yes, I think the Olympic park should go there in Everett. Because it might not be that crazy of an idea in the not-to-distant future.
 
My bad, this is totally not the crazy pitches thread. O well, whatevs...
 
c_combat said:
Distribution facilities are an easy build, not much difficult engineering would be required to relocate them to more becoming real estate as well.
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By relocating the recycling/produce/gasoline/whateverelseisthere distribution facilities out of an area so close to the city center, there will likely be a net increase in pollution due to more miles needed to be traveled by delivery trucks. Not to mention traffic/wear and tear on the routes they will not have to take.

There are also the insane cleanup costs of that site, which has been really heavy polluting industrial for the past 200 years or more. In all likelyhood there is more toxic sludge than soil under all that asphalt. For any Olympics, it would be the taxpayers paying to clean it up, something I'm not comfortable with when there are much less disgusting sites that could be fixed.

In a century when the seaport, southie, eastie, roxy, dot, allston, somerville, the other two industrial parts of chelsea are fully built out AND we have a real way to heat houses that's not burning dinosaurs, then it might make sense to look at moving whats contained on this site. Until then, its 'best and greatest use' is industrial.
 
c_combat said:
Distribution facilities are an easy build, not much difficult engineering would be required to relocate them to more becoming real estate as well.

And why would you not plan for the coming decades? It would be shameful if urban planners didn't consider what sorts of future social trends that will occur and how to build the city around those constraints. If they considered the impacts of a car-dominated society in the 50s and 60s, we wouldn't be where we are now trying to reverse the effects of urban renewal and suburbanization, but they didn't consider the future, or at least they got it very wrong.
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- Boston, despite its growth into a finance/education/medical/innovation hub, is still a major port. As such, its industrial facilities are structured to be near the water. Just pull up that industrial site on google maps, and you'll see (unless google updates their satellite photos soon after I post this) a pretty sizable ship docked there. So, any relocation of such facilities would need to have easy access both to the customer base in Boston and a suitable harbor. I'm not seeing any suitable locations, other than razing parts of Southie, Quincy, or Hingham.

- Planning for the coming decades is good, yes. But you're suggesting planning for the coming centuries, at the expense of the coming decades. The car-orientated culture (that is not just of the 1950s/60s) is not to blame for the problems with urban renewal. We could have easily had a vibrant car culture and vibrant, growing, cities at the same time, but too many people with too many grand visions for each decided to re-engineer the entire urban fabric in the process (it occurs to me that, as the GIs fled to the suburbs and 'White Flight' happened, we could have seen something similar to the development of the North End across the entire country, with poorer urbanites buying up depressed housing stock and improving their condition, rather than being shuttled around into projects by the Robert Moses's of the world).

- Finally, the main issue is that, while that location would eventually be a good place for something more 'urban' than an industrial park, that time is not now, nor is it 2024, and such a suggestion would only serve to hinder an Olympic Bid.
 
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