Charles River Park | West End

atlantaden said:
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The Vesta was 100 percent leased by the end of the year and broke a record for the highest priced rental space in Boston.

"It far exceeded our expectations," Reilly said. The speedy leasing of the units added an additional $600,000 to the bottom line, he said.
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This is what I was talking about on another thread - branding and positioning of real estate works. And why wouldn't it? It works for any other product or service that is for sale. Commercial real estate as an industry has been slow to embrace this, but the bigger fish in the sea like Equity have figured it out. I think product naming and product branding is just as cool and creative of an art as architecture itself.

And Van, as for tearing down Charles River Park and restarting from scratch, I'm totally for it! But I think the success of these new buildings means that won't be happening any time soon.
 
That was itchy who said that, I wouldn't go that far only because I know if we tore it down all we would build in its place is the same thing. We still haven't figured out how to build neighborhoods yet.
 
Battery Park City is a pretty nice neighborhood of highrises, open space, ground floor retail including cafe's, restaurants, a grocery store, day care. Like all Manhattan, very expensive but hey, CRP's right up there in price as well.
 
BPC is hardly the worst place on earth, but it's the most sterilized, dull part of New York. I've lived in New York for nearly a year and have never gone there for anything beyond the one or two trips I made there to check it out, nor do I know anyone who has ever had reason to go there. Comparing CRP to the West End -- or a newer, real neighborhood that could be built there today -- is like comparing BPC to SoHo or the West Village. And to its credit, at least BPC has commercial use, whereas (to my knowledge) CRP is like a good oldies station: all residential, all the time.
 
CRP has plenty of commercial, but of course not enough. There's doctor's offices on the ground floor of most buildings, a grocery store and nail salon in the middle, and a Jewish synagogue. That said, there's not much room for improvement unless if they build a commercial strip in the middle, and imagine the howls of complaints from neighbors (tons of old people who just complain about everything).
 
I wouldn't that single small grocery store "plenty of commercial". (The rest of the uses you cite are not commercial.)
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
We still haven't figured out how to build neighborhoods yet.
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Nothing to figure out; more or less straight replication would do the trick.

God knows, there's plenty of good example lying around in all those old neighborhoods we like so much.

But you have to take your lessons seriously.

And lay off the theories.

(Especially the ones that start with "But that was then and this is now." The old ones are still the best and the price folks are willing to pay for a Beacon Hill townhouse reflects it.)
 
Itchy, Van mentioned that we haven't figured out how to build neighborhoods yet (I assumed he was talking new, built from scratch, urban neighborhoods) and I used Battery Park City as an example of what I thought was a good example of a fairly new, planned urban neighborhood complete with retail, restaurants, commercial space, businesses, schools and some of the most beautiful, well-kept urban parklands/walkways that I have ever seen! I was stunned at how absolutely beautiful these spaces were. I'm including the website of the various BPC parklands and I'm sure that a very nice day could be made of visiting these different urban spaces all within blocks of eachother finishing up with a nice dinner at one of the non-chain restaurants that overlook the Hudson.

http://www.bpcparks.org/bpcp/home/index.php
 
I've been through BPC many times and although it is nice, I'd take a townhouse in the Village, a brownstone in Brooklyn, or even a duplex in Queens over it any day.

Housing and retail do not make a neighborhood, people who are invested in their surroundings do. The buildings there and in CRP, I would argue, do not do this, especially when they are being marketed to rich YUPies with no kids.
 
Atlantaden, BPC isn't a wretched place by any means. But it sort of feels like a zombie village to me. Whenever I've been there -- again, I've only ever been there out of curiosity, not because I've ever gone there for any specific reason -- it's been desolate, with the wind sweeping through the huge, rambling lawns and public spaces and with few people out on foot.

It's a complex of massive, passable buildings with parks interspersed generously throughout to make it more pleasant. But the parks draw your eyes toward the metze-metze-ness of the buildings in the absence of any real, unbroken street wall to distract or engage you. Buildings are often weird-looking, but a good street wall distracts you from them and you temporarily stop thinking, "How strange we humans are to have these massive piles of bricks and asbestos suspended in the ether like this."

I don't know if this is due to the the area's lawns, its scale or something else, but I've never known anyone to have any reason to go there -- it's a dead zone in the city, devoid of the restaurants and bars that most NY neighborhoods are filled with. That blandness and the girth of the buildings make it one of the more boring parts of New York (or certainly Manhattan); a bit like Wayland on steroids: Huge living environments surrounded by some grass or mulch, a few bushes or maybe a tree/hedge sculpture. In short, it has many suburban aspects and is missing many urban ones.

I'm sorry to keep coming back to Berlin, but I think that city does something right in many of its new neighborhoods. The architecture (especially the new buildings) in much of the city is merely sufficient, but like Ablarc has said, the design of the buildings is secondary if you get the planning principles down well. Densely packed 4-story buildings, even if they're hardly showstoppers, can create a much more vibrant community than buildings that house 2,000 people and a rooftop deck but are surrounded by grass moats.
 
Well put, itchy. It's like a city only at a suburban scale. Instead of McMansions there are skyscrapers. It is also a fortress, security like crazy. I bike past it regularly and there is nothing interesting about it, other than it's own oddity perhaps.
 
Wow! You guys are tough! My partner's sister/husband live in BPC and after a day walking around Manhattan doing the city stuff it was nice to get back to BPC. A dose of suburbia smack in the city (totally agree that a major flaw is, like CRP, isolated from the rest of the city) does have a huge attraction to many people depending on their situation. Each time we visited...many times, days at a time, families with kids were everywhere..tons of people were along the Hudson esplanade, their restaurants were busy. Like you, if given the choice, I'd choose the South End, Back Bay/Fens, Chelsea, the Village, etc. over BPC or CRP, but again, a dose of suburbia with intown living is very compelling. And those parks and the Hudson Esplanade...among the most beautiful urban parks I've ever visited/walked...and is definitely a destination. However, Itchy, does a city neighborhood in itself, need to be a destination, in order to be a successful urban neighborhood? And how about location? Ablarc looks to Beacon Hill as an example of a successful urban neighborhood but how much of it's success is due to location, location, location! There seem to be so many factors (and perceptions) as to what is a successful city neighborhood. Frankly, Beacon Hill would be down the list of neighborhoods I'd choose if I were to live in Boston...with the South End, North End, Back Bay, Fens, Bulfinch area clearly ahead of Beacon Hill.
 
itchy said:
Many European cities that were decimated by WWII have done this, especially in Germany. Berlin in particular has done this in the last 10 years after the capital moved back from Bonn. There is precedent -- and there have been great success stories (especially in the non-Sony Center/Potsdamer Platz parts of Berlin, where modern, dense and very urban environments are being built today). Calling CRP "the Places at West End" or whatever is not a success story.
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Any good places online to view Berlin's redevelopment projects?
 
Ron Newman said:
I wouldn't that single small grocery store "plenty of commercial". (The rest of the uses you cite are not commercial.)
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The north side of Cambridge St is in the West End, as is Staniford St. When you count all of that stuff, there's plenty of retail. Its just not in middle of the neighborhood.

One could argue the point that "retail on the outside" is the height of suburban planning, but then again not every street in the North End, South End, Back Bay, or Beacon Hill has retail in it. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the majority of streets in those neighborhoods have either zero retail or are predominantly residential. I'm not going to pull a Ned and claim that I've read any scientific studies proving that, but I think you'd all agree with me on that point.

I think, when it comes down to it, people are harsh on this area because of what it stands for and not because of what it actually is. The West End has rich yuppies? Guess what, so do Beacon Hill, the Back Bay, etc., all neighborhoods that get held up as examples of great neighborhoods. The West End looks too nice? The next time I hear someone make the "Urban Grit" argument, they better be putting their money where their mouth is and be living in Chelsea or Roxbury. You can make these strawman arguments all you want, but the fact of the matter is, the reason the majority of people hate the West End is simply because it's the West End, and people are supposed to hate it.

That being said, I'm sure as hell not moving there!
 
I'm not arguing that the parks and open space isn't nice, I'm arguing that it doesn't feel like a city neighborhood. It looks like one but it really isn't. The only thing we've taken from the design principles of urban renewal is that the buildings need to look nicer.

You could argue that the West Side Highway cuts it off from the rest of the city (which it does) but that doesn't mean it can't have a lively Main St (which it doesn't).
 
But the question is, why exactly doesn't it, "feel like a city"? What I'm saying is, if your argument is that "it isn't gritty" or "it's filled with yuppies," then you're making a pretty flimsy argument. Also, if you're going to make the argument that there's not enough retail, then you're over estimating the amount of retail in other successful urban neighborhoods and under estimating the amount of retail in the West End. What it comes down to is, what are the ramifications of "towers in a park"? You could say, "Brasilia," but the West End is hardly Brasilia.
 
If you walk from Teele Square to Davis Square in Somerville, you'll see more retail than exists in the entire West End. (I'm including restaurants in "retail".)

Or, if you want to compare only to other places in Boston, try walking South and Centre streets in JP, from Forest Hills to Green Street.
 
I think I get what people are objecting to with Charles River Park. I feel the same way, for these reasons

- Not dense enough
- Feels private, even though it's not
- Lack of street "grid" makes connections through the area difficult
- Lack of retail

Basically, it's an insult to its location. It's suburban in form and isolates itself from everything around it. I wouldn't care if poor people or rich people lived there. It's a poor use of land and is designed to keep people out. It hurts the connectivity of the city.
 
Lack of streets means that the area is a big blank space on maps, both printed and online. There are quite pleasant walkways through it, but nobody knows how to find them unless they live there.
 
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