Dorchester Infill and Small Developments

Dorchester is great but it does have its have it's rough spots. As a native of Dorchester I think Dorchester's problem is that it doesnt have enough cultural attractions as well as jobs. If you look at Dorchester they have maybe one or two hotels and maybe two or three corporations,(Example, Boston Globe) I live in the Fields corner area of Dorchester and they have some of the most beautiful houses in Boston. I love my part of the city I just thinks it needs a major shift in how people look at it. For example if you take Brooklyn in New York it is one of the roughest places in New York,But it is overshadowed by The jobs,there cultural attractions(museums) etc.
 
Savin Hill is a part of the ashmont grill, urban pioneer, phenomenon. Much of the Melville/Wellesley Park area has also been bought up by the same type of people. That said, Melville and Wellesley Park are a relative island in the midst of decay. Lower Mills, Adams Square and Ashmont have been stable and did not succumb to the same downward spiral of decay as so much of Dorchester.
 
sidewalks said:
Savin Hill is a part of the ashmont grill, urban pioneer, phenomenon. Much of the Melville/Wellesley Park area has also been bought up by the same type of people. That said, Melville and Wellesley Park are a relative island in the midst of decay. Lower Mills, Adams Square and Ashmont have been stable and did not succumb to the same downward spiral of decay as so much of Dorchester.
Click to expand...

This is the same holier than thou crap that gets posted on this site. Ashmont has been Ashmont since the 1880's. Wellesley Park has been Wellesley Park since the 1880's. Savin Hill has always been a great area, especially over the bridge. They are neighborhoods or streets that have better designed housing stock with better land use controls than the surrounding areas, thus a more upwardly mobile people have always been attracted to these streets.

There were still Fitzgeralds living on Rundel Park when I was a kid. The Howard's (Better off real estate developers from the 1920's to the 1950's) still lived at the top of Ashmont Street when I was a kid. Melville Ave. has been a very desirable place to live for generations. There are no "urban pioneers", just the same type of people replacing the people 30-35 years ago who came from outside, bought up big victorian houses and then gloated "Isn't It Great. I get the same house that I would get in Avon Hill or Newton Center at half the cost". Yes the Ashmont Grill was rebuilt, yes dbar took the place of an Irish bar but the fact remains that the type of people buying these houses are the same, if maybe not as wealthy as the people they are replacing.

Dorchester was built up for the most part over a 40 year time frame after annexation with victorian developments such as Ashmont, Jones Hill, Wellesley Park, and Paisley Park being built up with the intent of making Dorchester akin to Wellesley. (Don't laugh - The Hunnewells of Needham married into the Welles family of Dorchester and then broke off the northern part of Needham as a real estate development, i.e Wellesley after subdividing what is now Welles Avenue and the westerly side of Dorchester Avenue around Ashmont).

What happened was an almost insatiable demand for suburban housing that took place before the Panic of 1893. Lots that were to have grand victorian style houses became more vaulable as 4,000 to 5,000 square foot lots for three deckers. Excellent transportation links sealed the deal. Inexpensive yet sturdy housing got built alongside pockets of more "genteel" housing. Working class and middle class Jews came from the North End to the Blue Hill Avenue corridor, Irish came from the South End and South Boston to the areas east of Washington Street. The Jews left in the 1940's to the 1970's. (Read Death of An American Jewish Community). The Irish for the most part slowly bled out but many neighborhoods such as Neponset, Savin Hill, Adams Corner, Cedar Grove, and Lower Mills are still attracting Irish and other immigrants and many people I grew up with still live there or have come back from the suburbs.

I have seen this "isn't great I'm living in Dorchester and it is so much better than where I lived before" stuff in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Let see how it goes as the Vietnamese population gets wealthier and their kids move on leaving more three deckers to be snapped up by investors. Will Dorchester go the way of JP or will it go the way of Roxbury? Let's see if the so called urban pioneers make it through the next demographic change.
 
Thanks for some much-needed historical perspective.

I do wonder why Uphams Corner is so commercially dowdy when it is surrounded by lovely homes.
 
How is that holier than thou? In any event, you're saying that 'urban pioneers' have populated Wellesley Park and Melville Park since the 1960s? Perhaps that's true. Having driven through the streets over the years and attended a few of the walking tours/house tours of the neighborhoods, I've gotten the sense that these areas were following a familiar pattern of gentrification in which a significant gay population snaps up beautiful old real estate at cut rate prices followed by the arrival of trendy bistros and restaurants. Go up and down Dorchester Avenue and you'll see a lot of the old dives replaced by martini bar style renovations. It seems to me they are catering to a new clientele.
 
Ron, what lovely homes are you alluding to around Uphams? I'm not disagreeing, but would like to know the streets to check out on my own...
 
I recall Monadnock Street (where a friend used to live) being quite nice.
 
sidewalks said:
How is that holier than thou? In any event, you're saying that 'urban pioneers' have populated Wellesley Park and Melville Park since the 1960s? Perhaps that's true. Having driven through the streets over the years and attended a few of the walking tours/house tours of the neighborhoods, I've gotten the sense that these areas were following a familiar pattern of gentrification in which a significant gay population snaps up beautiful old real estate at cut rate prices followed by the arrival of trendy bistros and restaurants. Go up and down Dorchester Avenue and you'll see a lot of the old dives replaced by martini bar style renovations. It seems to me they are catering to a new clientele.
Click to expand...

Hate to quote Rush Limbaugh but you seem to have a drive by sense of the neighborhood. Dives? yes, except dbar wasn't a dive before it was replaced. The bar before it was the bar before dbar was a dive.

I think you are missing the point. There has always been stable areas of the neighborhood. It just didn't happen that some early 1970's Oberlin grads decided to move to Beaumont Street and spread pixie dust over everything and "make it better." It was already "better."

My question is on the sexual nature of gentrification? A lot of houses on Carruth Street and Alban Street were bought in the 1970's by people who weren't gay. In the 1980's the filthiest house on my street was owned by a gay couple who lived in a high rise on Revere Beach. Is The Ledge a gay bar? It is a trendy place, but not necessarily a gay place. Common Grounds let a lot of gay people know that their lifestyle contradicted the owners lifestyle, though it was "trendy" right up until that point. I think it is great that places are being fixed up but it isn't a just a gay only or gay majority movement. A lot of South Boston was snapped up in the 1990's and renovated with newer bars and restaurants going in, yet I don't see the Human Rights Campaign relocating their offices to East Broadway.
 
Mt. Bowdoin Green (closer to Four Corners) is an amazingly adorable residential square with different architectural types present: Brookline-style walkups with courtyards, Victorian mansions, and even gingerbread houses. It's worth a streetview stroll around the Green.
 
How about the Blarney Stone and the Harp and Bard? And yes, the bar before Dbar was similar to those places. My point is that certain Dorchester neighborhoods have seen 'reinvestment and rebirth'. I would also argue that this phenomenon increased in area and scale over the last decade. The result has been restaurants and bars that cater to the new clientele. I didn't say the bars were gay. And while gays aren't the only 'urban pioneers' who gentrify neighborhoods, they certainly have had a profound impact on many of the neighborhoods that have been gentrified over the past three decades (South End, Bay Village, JP, Savin Hill, Melville Park).

The Ledge and the common ground are in Lower Mills, which, as I said, has always been stable.
 
Ron Newman said:
I do wonder why Uphams Corner is so commercially dowdy when it is surrounded by lovely homes.
Click to expand...

West of the commuter rail is Detroit level urban prairie - even with the new Dudley Village development. Anybody want to give a quick history lesson on what happened there? I can guess...

PS. the updated street view shows construction has begun on the huge landscraping Kroc Center, on the parcel bounded by Dudley, Burgess St, and Clifton St. Seems like a good thing for the community, and way better than Detroit.

PPS. I found this rendering. It looks way way better than one I recall seeing a while ago (which looked barely 1.5 stories). Let's hope its this one.

kroccenterweb.jpg
 
It kind of makes sense that gay men would be a decent percentage of the initial gentrifying wave.
They tend to not have kids (huge factor when deciding to move into a rough area).
Cities (small area) are more gay friendly than suburbs (imense area) so once one neighborhood is at capcity you have to expand into other areas
Two dudes can get more done than a husband wife combo (in gerneral).
And really where ever they go they still experience some flak ( which is lame) so maybe it's just like saying fuck it lets live here.
 
Dorchester's biggest problem is a branding problem.

We are talking about a part of the city that is larger than:

- South Boston
- South End
- Back Bay
- Beacon Hill
- North End
- Chinatown
- The Fenway
... and Charlestown

Combined.

The problem is the "Dorchester" brand name is tainted. On the news, they don't say "A shooting in Boston's Bowdoin neighborhood" - they say "A shooting in Dorchester's Bowdoin neighborhood"

Personally, I think the "Dorchester" name doesn't mean anything anymore. The City of Dorchester no longer exists and as part of Boston, each section should go by its own name - the way the rest of Boston does. There is no singular Dorchester identity because Dorchester is just too big for that - the housing stock is so different from section to section, as is the geography and the demographics.
 
sidewalks said:
Savin Hill is a part of the ashmont grill, urban pioneer, phenomenon. Much of the Melville/Wellesley Park area has also been bought up by the same type of people. That said, Melville and Wellesley Park are a relative island in the midst of decay. Lower Mills, Adams Square and Ashmont have been stable and did not succumb to the same downward spiral of decay as so much of Dorchester.
Click to expand...

Savin Hill has always been an area of long-time residents, with a lot city employees choosing to live there. To say that it has the same type of people as Melville Ave and Wellesley Park is wrong.
 
Ron Newman said:
I do wonder why Uphams Corner is so commercially dowdy when it is surrounded by lovely homes.
Click to expand...

Parking is one issue, and the fact that Jones Hill walks to the red line at Savin Hill is another. The traffic flow, both vehicular and pedestrian, is all wrong. When multiple streetcar lines went through Uphams Corner, it made a lot more sense as a commercial hub. It also doesn't help that one major corner is taken up by a burying ground.
 
JohnCostello said:
Hate to quote Rush Limbaugh but you seem to have a drive by sense of the neighborhood. Dives? yes, except dbar wasn't a dive before it was replaced. The bar before it was the bar before dbar was a dive.

I think you are missing the point. There has always been stable areas of the neighborhood. It just didn't happen that some early 1970's Oberlin grads decided to move to Beaumont Street and spread pixie dust over everything and "make it better." It was already "better."

My question is on the sexual nature of gentrification? A lot of houses on Carruth Street and Alban Street were bought in the 1970's by people who weren't gay. In the 1980's the filthiest house on my street was owned by a gay couple who lived in a high rise on Revere Beach. Is The Ledge a gay bar? It is a trendy place, but not necessarily a gay place. Common Grounds let a lot of gay people know that their lifestyle contradicted the owners lifestyle, though it was "trendy" right up until that point. I think it is great that places are being fixed up but it isn't a just a gay only or gay majority movement. A lot of South Boston was snapped up in the 1990's and renovated with newer bars and restaurants going in, yet I don't see the Human Rights Campaign relocating their offices to East Broadway.
Click to expand...

I don't recall anyone stating that Dorchester has been gentrified due to a majority gay population moving in. In fact, it's not gentrified.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top