Copley Place Expansion and Tower | Back Bay

[Lurker]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Elements will lose connectivity at no fault of your own when moving things around in Revit, especially a curved curtain wall. Floors, walls, and ceilings will disassociate with each other, but that's beside the point and off-topic.

I meant that there's no reason to draw identical floors other than to over-bill and kill trees. It's a waste of time and provides more opportunities for errors in set coordination without even getting into actual construction. There's few things more than I hated professionally besides a set full of useless drawings.

 

[Neimanmarcuswatch]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Opposition to the Wall Street-backed Simon Property Group [SPG]'s plan to build a 47-story skyscraper for the private corporate benefit of the Wall Street-owned Neiman Marcus store in Copley Place seems to be growing among 99 percent of the people who live in the Back Bay, the South End and Boston's other neighborhoods. As one proponent of affordable housing construction in Boston who studied the details of the Wall Street-backed SPG's proposed "Neiman Marcus Tower"/"Winter Garden" Back Bay over-development project, for example, recently wrote:

"There is a growing discontent with the proposal. Only 1.5% of the housing units on site would be affordable. The indoor "wintergarden" that would replace the existing entry plaza would be six feet above the sidewalk. The traffic and pedestrian conflicts on Stuart and Dartmouth Streets increase, with no attention to bicycles or improvement for buses and transit. Access to the shops is constrained. The path to the Southwest Corridor Park would be indecipherable. The above are among my concerns--and they run counter to the puff-pieces you may have seen in the media...."

 

[KentXie]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Opposition to the Wall Street-backed Simon Property Group [SPG]'s plan to build a 47-story skyscraper for the private corporate benefit of the Wall Street-owned Neiman Marcus store in Copley Place seems to be growing among 99 percent of the people who live in the Back Bay, the South End and Boston's other neighborhoods. As one proponent of affordable housing construction in Boston who studied the details of the Wall Street-backed SPG's proposed "Neiman Marcus Tower"/"Winter Garden" Back Bay over-development project, for example, recently wrote:

"There is a growing discontent with the proposal. Only 1.5% of the housing units on site would be affordable. The indoor "wintergarden" that would replace the existing entry plaza would be six feet above the sidewalk. The traffic and pedestrian conflicts on Stuart and Dartmouth Streets increase, with no attention to bicycles or improvement for buses and transit. Access to the shops is constrained. The path to the Southwest Corridor Park would be indecipherable. The above are among my concerns--and they run counter to the puff-pieces you may have seen in the media...."

How about you give us proof that 99 percent of the people who live in Back Bay are opposing this project and maybe we can take your rant seriously?

Also, I believe they would include stairs that will allow access into the winter garden from the sidewalk. It's almost ludicrous that some of you will believe that the developer wouldn't allow some sort of access for pedestrian to use the winter garden.

 

[KentXie]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Opposition to the Wall Street-backed Simon Property Group [SPG]'s plan to build a 47-story skyscraper for the private corporate benefit of the Wall Street-owned Neiman Marcus store in Copley Place seems to be growing among 99 percent of the people who live in the Back Bay, the South End and Boston's other neighborhoods. As one proponent of affordable housing construction in Boston who studied the details of the Wall Street-backed SPG's proposed "Neiman Marcus Tower"/"Winter Garden" Back Bay over-development project, for example, recently wrote:

"There is a growing discontent with the proposal. Only 1.5% of the housing units on site would be affordable. The indoor "wintergarden" that would replace the existing entry plaza would be six feet above the sidewalk. The traffic and pedestrian conflicts on Stuart and Dartmouth Streets increase, with no attention to bicycles or improvement for buses and transit. Access to the shops is constrained. The path to the Southwest Corridor Park would be indecipherable. The above are among my concerns--and they run counter to the puff-pieces you may have seen in the media...."

Do you also wonder why nobody who is educated would takes the activist's complaints seriously? Because these letters of complaint that you guys lodge contains no facts, only assumptions. The traffic and pedestrian conflicts will increase based on what study? If an increase in foot traffic automatically leads to automobile/pedestrian accidents, NYC would have a fatal collision at every single intersection. How will access to the shop be constrained when according to the rendering, a new entrance is built where the existing one is located. The project itself is not responsible for aligning bike lanes and roads. If you want to lodge a complaint about that, you send it to the mayor. Does the writer even know what indecipherable mean? I'm assuming that the writer is claiming that the winter garden will no longer be distinguishable from the Southwest Corridor Park. And....? So what? Most people who use the Southwest Corridor Park do not care about it. People use that corridor to get to one place or another. All of these concerns are absolutely unfounded with no factual data supporting it.

 

[Ron Newman]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

I don't think the Occupy folks will appreciate your attempt to appropriate their rhetoric.

 

[riffgo]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Neimanmarcuswatch is stabbing HIMSELF in the dark, a victim of his own notions.

 

[itchy]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

"Wall Street-backed"?! The horror! They actually are open to investment garnered through public markets! Any Joe Schmo can simply invest his money in Simon or Nieman Marcus whenever he wants! Disgusting!

Ned Part II, if you're such a crusader for public accountability (which you seem to be less than you seem to be someone so worried about his view that he's willing to destroy hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in a new building and all of the jobs and rent-lowering additional housing supply that it would entail, not to mention the benefits that would accrue to the city's skyline and streetlife), wouldn't you feel that a company traded on "Wall Street" (i.e., a public market), with the accounting standards and openness to any individual's money that that entails would be preferable to having a privately owned company that can be less open about its finances and plans?

 

[BostonUrbEx]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Privately financed housing! THE HORROR! Let's publicly fund commie superblocks which provide no urbanity!

99%!!!!

 

[albertmw]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

West Springfield St. In the SE checking in with a strong vote of support.

Take the '99%' baloni and cram it.

 

[HenryAlan]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Wall Street funding = owned by the 99%. That's much better than private equity financing. Ned, you're rather poorly done mimicry is entertaining, but serves only to demonstrate that you not only don't understand the development needs of the city, but also don't understand what OWS is about.

 

[Lurker]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

I'm a South End resident 100% for this project. And unlike the many freeloading residents of Tent City, which when it was built didn't seem to give a shit about dumping shadows on MY NEIGHBORHOOD, I pay taxes to support municipal services. Don't give me this shit about 1% exploiting the 99% regarding this project. It's hard to exploit people that never produced nor contributed anything in the first place.

 

[datadyne007]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

"The path to the Southwest Corridor Park would be indecipherable."

Simon themselves have committed to upgrading the SWCP.

 

[MBTAddict]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

One more South End resident checking in with 100% support for this project.

It's the right spot, right size, and right time. I feel like you can't want Boston to grow and thrive as a city if you oppose projects like this. I love people like this who shoot themselves in the foot by trying to stop these projects then complaining about how expensive the rest of the city is.

 

[whighlander]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Ron,

I've had similar problems between Stuart and St. James on Clarendon, as well as on St. James heading into the square. I can't find the information on this, but I've read previously that some of this would actually be mitigated by adding a few more towers. The problem is uninterrupted, high speed wind hitting the Hancock and then shooting straight down to street level. A few more towers would break up that wind a bit more, before it plunges downward.

I don't know if the above is true, like I said I can't find it at the moment, and it may well have just been some Internet loud mouth. But it makes sense to me. The other thing that makes sense, is that it is so bad now (as we've both experienced) that it probably couldn't get worse.

Henry -- re wind and towers:

The answer is that without reasonable scale physical models and a wind tunnel one really doesn't know for sure

Even the much vaunted computer models running on supercomputers are iffy because they only model what they know how to model -- which sounds trite but is actually quite profound.

Models of any kind (math or physical) are just approximations of reality and as they say the "devil is in the details" -- what gets left out to enable ese of computation, simplicity in constructiion, etc., may be the very thing which determines the critical behavior. This is escpecially true when non-linear interactions (e.g. resonances) play a major role.

The above as a caveat --- there are some general observations:

1) winds get stronger as you get higher for both obstruction and friction reasons -- in Boston Hancock Tower top winds are significantly faster than at ground level
2) straight, flat surfaces with no significant roughness -- e.g. glass curtain walls are very low friction conductors of wind from high elevations to the ground level
3) at ground level the venturi effect is pronounced -- i.e. winds forced to flow through narrow appertures speed up significantly
4) wide open plazas hemmed in by tall buildings with only a few narrow appertures a ground level are particualrly bad -- i.e. the John Hancock Tower in wide open Copley Square is legendary for ground level wind effects
5) step-back stuructures tend to ameliorate all of the above

the correlary to the above is that it looks as if the Copley Place tower will probably not make things worse in Copley Square for pedestrians

 

[whighlander]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Opposition to the Wall Street-backed Simon Property Group [SPG]'s plan to build a 47-story skyscraper for the private corporate benefit of the Wall Street-owned Neiman Marcus store in Copley Place seems to be growing among 99 percent of the people who live in the Back Bay, the South End and Boston's other neighborhoods..."

Nemo ... There is not one thing which I can think of other than let's vote for free money that would elicit the support of 99% of the public.

In point of fact the whole 99% versus 1% rhetoric is just intelectual masturrbation -- nothing involving people and their behavior is easily characterized by simple statistics associated with the norma distribution ("bell shape curve") -- even though it is commonly used for economics, plotics, etc. Consider that since approximately 1/2 of the population is male and 1/2 is female -- the average member of the population is ?

More importantly everyone automatically thinks in terms of normal distributions -- where about 68% of values are within one standard deviation σ away from the mean; about 95% of the values lie within two standard deviations; and about 99.7% are within three standard deviations. In reality so-called heavy-tailed or fat-tailed distributions such as log-normal, Weibull, etc. are more representative of most observations. In such distributions the concept of variance or standard-deviation is not mthematically relevant. The probability of some event in the far tail (e.g. traditonally taken as 6σ in a normal ditribution or one occurance in about 500 M) is many hundreds or more time greater than in the normal distribution.

In any event thankfuly -- in the U.S. we seem to always have the few in million (approximatly 5 σ for the normal distribution) in the population --- the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. --- who have the initiative to use their abilities and their opportunities to create the opportunities for the rest of us (99.999%) to have a better life, and to just perhaps succeed welll enough to become one of the 1%

 

[JohnAKeith]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Writing a letter is a pretty easy thing to do. Do it! Sample letter is on the Patch site.

http://backbay.patch.com/articles/l...for-neiman-marcus-residential-tower-by-oct-31

From the Back Bay Association:

You may have followed the news that Simon Property Group plans to expand Neiman Marcus and build a new residential tower, the tallest residential tower in Boston! There has been an extensive community process reviewing the project, and for more information click here!

The "comment period" for the project will end on October 31st. I have attached a draft letter (see attached PDF) and hope you will take a minute to send a letter in support to the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

There will be many "voices" weighing in about this expansion, and I encourage all of our members to consider sending a letter in support of this project. This is an important project that will lead to economic development in the Back Bay. Please email a copy to me.

Best regards and thank you so much, in advance.

Meg Mainzer-Cohen
President
Back Bay Association
www.bostonbackbay.com

More info, here: http://bostonredevelopmentauthority...nitsIndividual.asp?action=ViewInit&InitID=132

 

[KentXie]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

For my English writing project, I'm required to write a letter. I was considering about writing the anti-shadow laws but I can definitely switch to this. I forgot if we actually send it out but if I do a good job on it, I would definitely send it to the Boston Globe or something.

 

[kz1000ps]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Opposition to the Wall Street-backed Simon Property Group [SPG]'s plan to build a 47-story skyscraper for the private corporate benefit of the Wall Street-owned Neiman Marcus store in Copley Place seems to be growing among 99 percent of the people who live in the Back Bay, the South End and Boston's other neighborhoods. As one proponent of affordable housing construction in Boston who studied the details of the Wall Street-backed SPG's proposed "Neiman Marcus Tower"/"Winter Garden" Back Bay over-development project, for example, recently wrote:

"There is a growing discontent with the proposal. Only 1.5% of the housing units on site would be affordable. The indoor "wintergarden" that would replace the existing entry plaza would be six feet above the sidewalk. The traffic and pedestrian conflicts on Stuart and Dartmouth Streets increase, with no attention to bicycles or improvement for buses and transit. Access to the shops is constrained. The path to the Southwest Corridor Park would be indecipherable. The above are among my concerns--and they run counter to the puff-pieces you may have seen in the media...."

Neimanmarcuswatch, you are being refuted point for point here, and yet all you do is write these drive-by postings. Either engage in the discussion or shut the fuck up.

 

[KentXie]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

BostonUrbEx may have heard more, but during the presentation part they didn't mention anything about LEED certification.

HOWEVER

I think this'll be the greenest large-scale building in the Back Bay based on a number of things they mentioned:
- Gigantic Green Roof on top of the mechanical floors above retail component.
- rain water collected will be filtered and pumped back into the Back Bay groundwater supply
- renovations to existing neiman marcus and ground floor retail will ultimately make Copley Place mall more energy efficient.
- all glass facade on all sides and even street-level will maximize sun exposure immensely, reducing need for daily energy use
- most accessible destination in the commonwealth to every possible mode of transportation (except the airport), so far less automotive trips than expected for building of comparable height or square footage
- 10 zip cars for use in garage
- bicycle storage for all residents
- Hubway station out front

Also, it sounds like SIMON has big plans for giving the SW Corridor Park an arguably overdue facelift between Dartmouth and Harcourt Streets. They want to plant better vegetation and more of it, get rid of weeds, properly shield the MBTA vents in the park by Dartmouth Street, and {BEST PART} they want to implement some sort of high profile public art feature at the gateway for the park. Fountain, sculpture, LED blocks--they're setting aside a quarter million dollars or something in that ballpark for public art displays and they'll be looking for a committee of local experts to select the most appropriate display.

Hi dshoost. I was wondering if you have a source for these amenities, like an official pdf or something like that or know of it. I'm planning to write a letter to Boston Globe regarding this development as part of my Advance Writing in the Disciplines class.

 

[datadyne007]

Re: Copley Place plan calls for condo tower

Hi dshoost. I was wondering if you have a source for these amenities, like an official pdf or something like that or know of it. I'm planning to write a letter to Boston Globe regarding this development as part of my Advance Writing in the Disciplines class.

He went to the meeting.