Extend the Rose Kennedy Greenway

[bbfen]

Refer to what I posted in Post #14.

It's possible, but supercolumn design is extremely expensive and offers no incentive for the developer to go upwards AT HEIGHTS BOSTON WILL TOLERATE. Anyone developing directly over the Pike would want to keep the building as low and wide as possible in order to turn a profit on the project.

fixed

 

[Riverside]

Refer to what I posted in Post #14.

It's possible, but supercolumn design is extremely expensive and offers no incentive for the developer to go upwards. Anyone developing directly over the Pike would want to keep the building as low and wide as possible in order to turn a profit on the project.

Thanks.

It certainly sounds like very little is lost by covering up the Pike, other than the money it would cost to do so. At the very least, it would make things more walkable.

BostonUrbEx and czsz, I don't understand why this is such a bad idea. Care to elaborate?

 

[datadyne007]

BostonUrbEx and czsz, I don't understand why this is such a bad idea. Care to elaborate?

They live in a dream world where architectural reality, structural limitations, etc don't exist. An open plot is an open plot and needs a supertall tower regardless of if the plot is on solid ground, landfill, or over a major highway.

 

[omaja]

Anyone have a sense of how much money it would cost to deck the Pike for development on the scale of row houses? I could see a few blocks of that knitting together the areas north and south of the Pike, but not sure if a very baseline decking project would be cost prohibitive for something like that.

 

[davem]

Anyone have a sense of how much money it would cost to deck the Pike for development on the scale of row houses? I could see a few blocks of that knitting together the areas north and south of the Pike, but not sure if a very baseline decking project would be cost prohibitive for something like that.

I always thought the city should do something like this, akin to when they filled the back bay because it was an eyesore (it also smelled like an open sewer and bred disease, but I digress). Pay to deck over the pike and sell small plots of the concrete pad to build 4-12 story buildings on. Sell the plots at the rate of normal land and have some tax that goes to maintaining the deck. You would loose money at first but it would get rid of the canyon, probably lead to decreased road maintenance (plowing, salt, etc) and taxes over time would pay for the investment.

This is kind of the idea behind my proposal, the city pays to build the new road but it opens up developable land people actually WANT to build on. Both ways would work.

 

[czsz]

Here's another way to think about what Dave has drawn up. There's much less incentive to build up/higher when the project is solely air rights. Structural design with supercolumns is incredibly expensive and carries huge liabilities. If I was a developer, I would not want to go up. I'd want to satisfy the program and keep the building as low to the ground as possible. By creating a boulevard down the air rights parcels and leaving development on firm ground, there is a much greater potential that developers will want to build higher, denser development. Maybe even you could put a light rail trolley down it or something.

Huh? Yes, you would need to make a profit above and beyond normal to fund the supercolumns, and one way to do so is building tall. Wasn't this one of the cruxes of the whole Columbus Center debate?

My initial reaction was based on the idea that we'd be extending the Greenway, with all its urban design problems, not building a boulevard or proposing some other means of promoting air rights development. I'm not sure whether, trafficwise, a boulevard is a necessary or good idea here. I certainly don't see why we need four lanes of street in an area that seems to get along well without this road. Why not superwide sidewalks for street cafes instead? Or even a different arrangement, a series of squares that still allows the frontage buildings to be anchored on terra firma.

 

[Riverside]

My initial reaction was based on the idea that we'd be extending the Greenway, with all its urban design problems, not building a boulevard or proposing some other means of promoting air rights development. I'm not sure whether, trafficwise, a boulevard is a necessary or good idea here. I certainly don't see why we need four lanes of street in an area that seems to get along well without this road. Why not superwide sidewalks for street cafes instead? Or even a different arrangement, a series of squares that still allows the frontage buildings to be anchored on terra firma.

Thanks for the clarification. I had assumed that you disliked the whole notion of covering up the MassPike entirely, which didn't really make sense to me. But I can understand ambivalence about the Greenway. (Though I must admit ignorance of the particulars of its urban design problems.)

I really like the idea of superwide sidewalks, though. Could be like Downtown Crossing, but more open. (Place Jacques-Cartier in Montréal springs to mind.) I do think, though, that you wouldn't want a place like that to feel like a sea of concrete. You'd want some greenery somewhere in there.

 

[davem]

I'm not sure whether, trafficwise, a boulevard is a necessary or good idea here. I certainly don't see why we need four lanes of street in an area that seems to get along well without this road. Why not superwide sidewalks for street cafes instead? Or even a different arrangement, a series of squares that still allows the frontage buildings to be anchored on terra firma.

The boulevard is replacing the combined 5 lanes of Herald St and Marginal Road with 4 lanes with 7' bike lanes. The sidewalks are also 25' wide, 3' wider than the travel lanes. I created a square at Chandler Street. The bump outs at every corner could also accommodate extra street furniture.

 

[czsz]

(Though I must admit ignorance of the particulars of its urban design problems.)

Too wide to be an intimate linear park like Commonwealth Avenue, too narrow to be a real park from which you can hide away from the city, built through parts of the city where there's not enough demand for it to be animated, without having made space for additional buildings to facilitate that animation, bounded by wide and highwaylike surface roads, chopped up by ramps...I'm sure I'm missing stuff here.

My preference was always that it be a sequence of squares -- at the most popular sections (North End, Chinatown, maybe a couple others) and then the rest privately developed. I'm sure the air rights issues would not be as much of a deterrent to development in this part of town. Or the city could have built supercolumns while it was putting in the depressed artery, though too late for that now. Alternatively, some kind of narrower boulevard-like arrangement as proposed here, with new surface development on either side, might have worked better.

I really like the idea of superwide sidewalks, though. Could be like Downtown Crossing, but more open. (Place Jacques-Cartier in Montréal springs to mind.) I do think, though, that you wouldn't want a place like that to feel like a sea of concrete. You'd want some greenery somewhere in there.

I was thinking Champs-Elysees or "Super Newbury Street". The way it looks now in the drawings actually reminds me of Avenue McGill College in Montreal, which isn't too bad, but I'm thinking maybe eliminate traffic lanes for even larger terrasses:

 

[AmericanFolkLegend]

Huh? Yes, you would need to make a profit above and beyond normal to fund the supercolumns, and one way to do so is building tall. Wasn't this one of the cruxes of the whole Columbus Center debate?

CZSZ is right. Data is wrong.
Both the Hancock and the Pru are built on end bearing piles (i.e., caissons drilled all the way down into bedrock). One is air rights. One is not. The added cost of air rights involves the logistical nightmare of building a deck over the pike with running traffic underneath it. There's no difference in the size of the "supercolumns" that Data references as long as you can drill your caissons along the column lines of the finished product.
You get around the increased cost by either paying less for the air rights or building more density. Columbus Center was whittled down to a product that had less density than Copley but was still getting sued over being "too dense". THat's what killed it.

 

[BostonUrbEx]

getting sued over being "too dense"

'murica! Land of the free!

 

[Riverside]

Too wide to be an intimate linear park like Commonwealth Avenue, too narrow to be a real park from which you can hide away from the city, built through parts of the city where there's not enough demand for it to be animated, without having made space for additional buildings to facilitate that animation, bounded by wide and highwaylike surface roads, chopped up by ramps...I'm sure I'm missing stuff here.

Cool, thanks. That all makes sense. I do have to say, though, as dysfunctional as it is, at the very least it's not another eye sore in the middle of the city. Given the choice between leaving the Pike as is and putting another dysfunctional Greenway in, I think I'd rather have the Greenway (though ideally done in a way, of course, that doesn't necessarily preclude future, better development).

Wasn't there going to be some fancy museum on the Greenway too? And it died because of the recession?

I was thinking Champs-Elysees or "Super Newbury Street". The way it looks now in the drawings actually reminds me of Avenue McGill College in Montreal, which isn't too bad, but I'm thinking maybe eliminate traffic lanes for even larger terrasses:

Yeah, I like that idea. Funny, I've been a lot of places in Montreal, but I haven't spent much time on Avenue McGill. From the looks of the picture, that'd probably be because stuff is more expensive there.

I might be able to find this elsewhere, but I might as well ask: how much traffic really uses Atlantic and Purchase along the Greenway? How (un)feasible would it be to close one of those streets and replace it with a pedestrian-and-trolleys-only zone? You could make it all cutesy and use PCCs if you wanted, and run service between North Station and South Station/Kneeland Street. That would make the "island park" more accessible and would make it feel less like a surface highway in the middle of the city.

 

[choo]

I like the idea of having it be a simple road deck with rezoned plots on the side. Thinking of it as extending the greenway is the wrong approach however. It should just be a nice boulevard accommodate a new east and west Pike exit at the end. Sidewalks should be wide, a separated bike lane, and some lanes for cars. It should be an efficient and nice road, surrounded by sizeable buildings on either side. Finance it with some tax free bonds, and when you upzone (a master plan that should be stuck to unlike fort point) make the cooridor along it be a BID. All the "mitigation" should go to paying off the taxpayers costs for decking in. No pocket parks or affordable housing units that will be built in west roxbury, keep it focused. If done right, I think this would be the most practical and efficient way to cover the scar.

Any idea on how much a deck capable of just traffic not buildings would cost (I assume you would need ventilation built too)?

 

[czsz]

Wasn't there going to be some fancy museum on the Greenway too? And it died because of the recession?

There were going to be a bunch, one on each ramp parcel. They wouldn't have been a perfect solution to the ramp parcels, really (since these required awkward layouts and horrible sidewalk interaction with the surface streets) and some of them were just pie in the sky, recession or otherwise. Boston only has so much philanthropic money sitting around for museums, and the city's economy isn't growing so fast that it will suddenly have a pile of cash laying around for more anytime soon; it would take some superheroic fundraising to bring about 3-4 new ones and somehow maintain them in addition to existing cultural institutions.

 

[Beton Brut]

The idea of gifting the ramp parcels to tenuously funded non-profits without a capital campaign to finance prompt construction when the Greenway was nearing completion is era-defining incompetence on the part of MassHighway. If those parcels had been auctioned to commercial developers (endowing the future care of the Greenway), something might have been built by now (generating tax and improving the public realm).

 

[George_Apley]

Simply extending the Greenway like the OP suggested wouldn't work very well I don't think... I'm LOVING davem's proposal though. Knit the South End right into the city in a way it hasn't ever been in modern times.

 

[underground]

I'm LOVING davem's proposal though. Knit the South End right into the city in a way it hasn't ever been in modern times.

That corner of the city really is a dead end. You're right in the middle of Chinatown, the South End, and Southie, but you'd never know it because it's a complete dead zone. Hopefully the work on the South End side (Ink Block, etc) will start to knit everything back together.