Fenway Center (One Kenmore) | Turnpike Parcel 7, Beacon Street | Fenway

9/1
Noche y dia
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Where is that Sal's pizza located? I don't remember a location near this project.
 
There seemed to be a lot of action at the site last night as I drove through/under on the pike.
 
As long as this thread has been bumped, anybody know the timetable when we should see the tower start rising?
 
BosDevelop said:
Where is that Sal's pizza located? I don't remember a location near this project.
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Yeah funny, I don't ever recall eating here or even seeing it or noticing it, and I used to spend a lot of time around here.
 
Patrick Winn said:
Article I stumbled on today: https://www.boston.com/?post_type=post&p=26668550
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The byline of this article is,
'The Fenway District is the foundation of a new life sciences hub in the City of Boston and will reconnect Kenmore Square with Longwood Medical and Academic Area.'
It's interesting and sort of sad that there is this mentality and assumption that every single thing that exists anywhere in any city that's not the epitome of enlightened urbanism is a product of some unenlightened (auto-centric) decision made in the recent past that undid some idealized earlier paradise. People forget that the idealized past (pre-car) had plenty of shittiness to go around. Urban poverty, wealth inequality, seriously dangerous industries with awful pollutants right in the middle of city's (like on the Roxbury Canal)... and some areas that were just undeveloped wastelands. The area between LMA and Kenmore was such a wasteland: first it was a swamp, then it was filled in, and it never was developed into anything other than some piecemeal buildings of light industry in the first half of the 20th century (when of course there was also no such thing as the LMA, the LMA being mostly a mix of residences in Roxbury and undeveloped parcels speckled with institutional buildings). Therefore, nothing is being "reconnected" here; rather, the two areas are being connected for the very first time. I know many people read stuff like this and feel it's a ridiculous diatribe making a mountain out of molehill, but little things like this byline reveal the deeper workings of collective psychology and embedded assumptions. They are clues to how people think of the past and the present. And in contemporary urbanism circles (which are pretty much reflective of contemporary liberal circles' ways of thinking more generally), there is a collective romanticization of the past prior to the 1900s, and a an antipathy to the recent past circa 1920s-1970s. While it is true that the era of the car destroyed much that was good, the urbanism of the past also had many problems. We shouldn't be so quick to simply assume that every great project that knits two areas together is "re-knitting" as opposed to knitting for the very first time.
 
People tend to view Pike air rights projects as restoring connections, but what they forget, is that before the Pike, these neighborhoods were severed by the railroad for 100 years, and before that, many of them did not exist, which is why the rail road could be built in the first place. So no, I don't think it's wrong to point that out, or that pre-car cities actually sucked pretty badly. But just the same, every step that does stitch together previously blocked connections when done in the 21st century can be very good for urbanism.
 
HenryAlan said:
People tend to view Pike air rights projects as restoring connections, but what they forget, is that before the Pike, these neighborhoods were severed by the railroad for 100 years, and before that, many of them did not exist, which is why the rail road could be built in the first place. So no, I don't think it's wrong to point that out, or that pre-car cities actually sucked pretty badly. But just the same, every step that does stitch together previously blocked connections when done in the 21st century can be very good for urbanism.
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Does anyone know if there's a thread for 725 Beacon? It's going to be a 22 story tower which should be really prominent in that area. Surprised there isn't more discussion about it on here.
 
FK4 said:
and some areas that were just undeveloped wastelands. The area between LMA and Kenmore was such a wasteland: first it was a swamp, then it was filled in, and it never was developed into anything other than some piecemeal buildings of light industry in the first half of the 20th century (when of course there was also no such thing as the LMA, the LMA being mostly a mix of residences in Roxbury and undeveloped parcels speckled with institutional buildings).
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I don’t think this is true.

The MFA, Isabella Stuart Museum, Simmons, Emmanuel, Boston Latin, Winsor, and Harvard Medical all date to the 1900s or 1910s. Furthermore, the park through the Fens was laid out by Olmsted as early as 1887.

The filling in of the river to make a parking lot and construction of the big mass of roads especially where Brookline meets Boylston occurred in the 1950s.

Here’s a nice write up:
www.emeraldnecklace.org

Muddy River Restoration - The Emerald Necklace Conservancy

www.emeraldnecklace.org www.emeraldnecklace.org
 
Blackbird said:
I don’t think this is true.

The MFA, Isabella Stuart Museum, Simmons, Emmanuel, Boston Latin, Winsor, and Harvard Medical all date to the 1900s or 1910s. Furthermore, the park through the Fens was laid out by Olmsted as early as 1887.

The filling in of the river to make a parking lot and construction of the big mass of roads especially where Brookline meets Boylston occurred in the 1950s.

Here’s a nice write up:
www.emeraldnecklace.org

Muddy River Restoration - The Emerald Necklace Conservancy

www.emeraldnecklace.org www.emeraldnecklace.org
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You’re referring to The Fenway and the handful of institutional development that occurred along Huntington Ave and the Forsyth Gate to the Fenway. I’m talking about Brookline Ave. Yes, the Necklace cut across it but the rest of Brookline Ave was always underdeveloped. Up through the 1940s there was a mess of rail yards just behind it and the Sears building; the development that did exist was industrial and there were huge undeveloped lots.

Much of Boylston St remained undeveloped as well. Those parking lots and fast food places did not replace any elegant walkups. The Fenway neighborhood was built out but the triangle between Brookline and Boylston was not… for a couple reasons, with one being the rail yards and the other simply being that there came a point when the rapid expansion in Boston stagnated and some areas just never got fully filled in.

And, if you look at old photos of the Harvard Medical area down to the Fenway, some angles look great, but many look strange. Because you had several (admittedly beautiful) institutional buildings constructed, but the area didn’t fill in. There were big chunks of undeveloped land all across what’s now the LMA, including right at Longwood & Brookline. Check out mapjunction.com, lots of great satellite and maps. The point is, Kenmore to LMA on Brookline Ave was never a walk anyone would’ve wanted to make.

One thing I did notice tho that I’ve never noticed before is that it wasn’t just the parking lot over the Muddy River that changed. If you look at the 1938 satellite view, the only road connections at Sears are Riverway the Riverway intersecting Brookline and Boylston, and then Park Drive on the far side of the river headed to Beacon. There’s no connection between Riverway and Park Drive on the north side of the parcel. It’s too bad because it’s that intersection that really poisons the area, despite the improvements to the day lighted parcel.
 
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