Dock Square Parking Garage | 20 Clinton Street | Downtown

Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

shmessy said:
"Looming over"???? Are SHADOWS now going to be an issue for "Poor Quincy Market"? Will it affect the fish and fowl there (the ones that aren't baked or grilled)? Will it put an immediate stop to the tanning enjoyed by millions of sun worshippers who flock there each year to lie on the cobblestones? Honestly, the Custom House and 3 other towers on the other side of QM from this landscraper are larger loomers.

The comment about the mid air views of the renders are ponderous also. Seems like most projects have those.

The parking garage is going nowhere. This is a great development to camouflage it. I agree with some of the other posters who curbed my enthusiasm by pointing out the greater danger is VE for this project.
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The garage is due north of QM, how are shadows going to be an issue? Am I missing something?
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

shmessy said:
"Looming over"???? Are SHADOWS now going to be an issue for "Poor Quincy Market"? Will it affect the fish and fowl there (the ones that aren't baked or grilled)? Will it put an immediate stop to the tanning enjoyed by millions of sun worshippers who flock there each year to lie on the cobblestones? Honestly, the Custom House and 3 other towers on the other side of QM from this landscraper are larger loomers.

The comment about the mid air views of the renders are ponderous also. Seems like most projects have those.

The parking garage is going nowhere. This is a great development to camouflage it. I agree with some of the other posters who curbed my enthusiasm by pointing out the greater danger is VE for this project.
Click to expand...

Shadows aren't an issue in this case, those will go on the Greenway and the Blackstone Block. It just seems like an easy fix, if you want this height, to flip it to the North Street side. North is a wider street so the height is more appropriate there and has less of a visual impact on one of our chief tourist attractions. And yes, there are other tall buildings near Quincy Market but that's no reason to keep adding more (although this one is certainly looking better than the ones on the other side.

Of course most projects have mid air renderings, they look great and are easy to manipulate. But they don't give us any really useful info about how the building works in the city. Certainly this parking garage is awful but a lot of what is awful about it isn't really fixed by the proposal--the relationship to the sidewalk remains awful. This is a great site in a great location on the Greenway. The proposal is interesting but, I think based on what we see here, lacks some nuance. I'd love to see something really forward thinking but this is about preserving a good money maker.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

estyle said:
Shadows aren't an issue in this case, those will go on the Greenway and the Blackstone Block. It just seems like an easy fix, if you want this height, to flip it to the North Street side. North is a wider street so the height is more appropriate there and has less of a visual impact on one of our chief tourist attractions. And yes, there are other tall buildings near Quincy Market but that's no reason to keep adding more (although this one is certainly looking better than the ones on the other side.
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Totally agree, but I think the reason the highest portion is over the SE/Southern section of the garage is because the current elevator bank is located there. I may be wrong, but it must be more cost effective to extend an existing elevator core than to build a new one from the ground up 17/18 floors in the NW corner of the site.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

shmessy said:
+1. The city should prioritize that EVERY garage should be retro-covered and have retail soften up the ground level where possible. It would very much improve the urban fabric.
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City better kick in some loot. Most of those above grade garages are considered open, so do not have sprinkler systems.
Big cost to add all that.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

Its only a short stretch to walk by and it will be interesting. It would be nice but not every single thing you walk by is going to be retail. That might even get redundant.





Plus this will pretty much make up for it next door.
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Even though the garage is another one of those crappy slanted floor designs it wouldn't really matter for retail. It looks like theres a floor below the first floor if you look around the right corner of the garage, so Im not sure if thats why they chose not to. You would have to not only cut out the side of the garage but then build a floor and walls that aren't on flat ground. They would be up in the air so there would need to be some type of steel frame for the retail. 1 or 2 shops would be fine, but I bet to recoup cost there would have to be a few. Either way if it doesn't happen its not the biggest deal as its a garage you have to walk by right now anyways, so this will be an improvement.
 
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Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

JANAM said:
The garage is due north of QM, how are shadows going to be an issue? Am I missing something?
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I was being facetious how a poster wrote that the project "totally looms over poor Quincy Market". I was illustrating how the arguments against this project seem contrived. It would be a huge win upgrading an eyesore garage in the middle of the city.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

SeamusMcFly said:
City better kick in some loot. Most of those above grade garages are considered open, so do not have sprinkler systems.
Big cost to add all that.
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Not the city. The developer........if they want the city's approval for the project.

L-E-V-E-R-A-G-E.

Marty should start throwing his weight around with the developers. They are desperate to build in Boston these days.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

I hope this one falls through the cracks. Let it miss this development cycle, and then in 10 years time when autonomous vehicles have greatly reduced the demand for parking the business case for keeping the garage will be gone. At that point, someone can build one structure or a collection of structures at this site that activate all sides of the parcel.

Putting this up as designed would mean that one of the foot-trafficked parcels in all of Boston is 90% blank walls for many years to come.

And let's hope that when something is constructed here, the top is far more articulated than what's proposed. As I believe datadyne was saying, something need not be tall to be looming. Putting a landscaper on top of a seven story building makes for a much claustrophobic streetscape than a thin tower of any height.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

This thing should have been torn down with the highway.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

BeeLine said:
Totally agree, but I think the reason the highest portion is over the SE/Southern section of the garage is because the current elevator bank is located there. I may be wrong, but it must be more cost effective to extend an existing elevator core than to build a new one from the ground up 17/18 floors in the NW corner of the site.
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They have to be installing new elevator shafts from the ground/lobby to the residence levels. No way you'd have luxury residential and public parking share elevators.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

Despite what people think about the city, the need for some large scale parking garages are a reality. How it's clad and what happens on the ground level can be up for discussion and debated, sure.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

mdd said:
Despite what people think about the city, the need for some large scale parking garages are a reality.
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Source?

I was just in Paris and I cant recall seeing a single stand-alone parking garage
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

mdd said:
Despite what people think about the city, the need for some large scale parking garages are a reality. How it's clad and what happens on the ground level can be up for discussion and debated, sure.
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Yeah, but bury them.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

jass said:
Source?

I was just in Paris and I cant recall seeing a single stand-alone parking garage
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mdd is right, though. Boston DOES need parking garages - - because of Boston's own transit planning stupidity. Boston (and all American cities) are stupidly enslaved to the car. Autonomous pods can't come soon enough to save Americans from their own automobile fetish.(I'm not anti-automobile for suburbanites and rural residents - - just in cities).

1) Most people in Paris don't own a car.
2) There are no inexplicable rail gaps between Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon or Gare St Lazare and Gare Montparnasse like there is between North and South Stations.

Paris is transit smart. Boston is transit dumb.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

Someone please explain to me what terrible consequences would occur if this garage were gone.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

Justin7 said:
Someone please explain to me what terrible consequences would occur if this garage were gone.
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The owners of the garage would make less money. In this case, I also don't think they'd be able to build high enough on the site to offset the costs of burying the garage.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

Justin7 said:
Someone please explain to me what terrible consequences would occur if this garage were gone.
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Plaque buildup in arteries cause heart attacks and death.

Until we develop autonomous blood cells/platelets, etc. (pods), we will need storage points in centralized/wastefully inefficient areas of cities.

Transit is more important than big buildings. With all due respect to Odurandina, building skyscrapers without more efficientr transit is simply building a house of cards. If we don't develop new means, enjoy all the new and larger and uglier parking garages to come.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

People should pay market rate for parking. Traffic is caused by underpriced or free street parking much of the time. If a developer can make more money building housing instead of garages, it's the height of insanity to argue we need to preserve the garage.
 
Re: Dock Square Parking Garage, 20 Clinton Street

curcuas said:
People should pay market rate for parking. Traffic is caused by underpriced or free street parking much of the time. If a developer can make more money building housing instead of garages, it's the height of insanity to argue we need to preserve the garage.
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Above ground parking in the urban core is a gross underutilization of a very valuable commodity -- space -- which we have little of in Boston.
 
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