Cambridge Infill and Small Developments
- Thread starter kz1000ps
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It's actually the same development. If you look at the renderings posted at the site, the new buildings extend all the way to 2nd St. They just are building it in two phases. This corner of the site had a late-60s or (more probably) early 70s bank-building-turned-sheriffs-office on it that they were using as a sales office until the fall.
Ron Newman
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is this the former Haviland candy factory?
If zoning accomplished what it should be intended to do, it would forbid that convenience store's relationship to its property, to its neighbors, and to the corner --along with its parking lot.kz1000ps said:this is just north of Broadway and Columbia St.. 4/26
As it is, it promotes fringe city. Too much of Cambridge is like this.
Ron Newman
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I agree -- but that is primarily a gas station, not a convenience store. I don't know of any good way to make a gas station friendly to its neighbors or to pedestrians. (The one at Prospect and Hampshire is even worse, since it is much higher volume.)
^ Then you need to go to Italy for a little instruction. Or google up some city gas stations in Italy. Hint: that hotel or apartment building on Memorial Drive has (or used to have) a step in the right direction.Ron Newman said:
Manhattan has quite a few: curbside gas pumps outside an old multi-story parking garage.
Ron Newman
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is this where the Constellation Center is supposed to be built?
kz1000ps
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No, that's two blocks to the west. Speaking of Constellation Center, I believe the Cambridge zoning board will be reviewing a change in land use for this project (commercial to cultural) some time this month. But shouldn't this have been done back in 2002 or 2003, when it was originally proposed?
L
lndscpr
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ablarc said:
i am sure that the nimby's have addressed that already
Hope that's not how long it takes for something to get to the top of the board's agenda.kz1000ps said:
But the real question is: why does this require a rezoning? At one time zoning was graduated from least noxious to most noxious --residential, institutional, office, commercial, industrial-- and you could build less noxious uses in zones that also allowed more noxious uses --but not the reverse.
Thus you could build residences, churches, stores, or offices in a zone that also allowed factories, while you could build anything at all but a factory in a commercial zone; you could build an institution in institutional, commercial or office zones ...
You get the idea: zoning merely prohibited the plainly undesirable in an area, instead of dictating the use.
Truth is, no one really has the wisdom to mandate the use --not planners, not citizens, not zoning boards. To do so requires second-guessing the market, seeing far into the future, having an all-encompassing and devastatingly brilliant artistic vision, and being free of corruption.
When the time comes that humans are so perfected that they can function at such a level, there will be no further use for zoning.
(Maybe they're afraid someone will propose a museum of eroticism or a burlesque theatre... But if the zoning's changed, won't they have carte blanche to do that anyway?)