Fenway Infill and Small Developments

Thanks for the close-in shot's, BeeLine.

I drive by this every day. The blandness doesn't bother me because it obeys the rules of the street. But what's the deal with the HardiePlank clapboards? Awful!
 
Yeah, that looks awesome! I'm a bit nervous though that those damn reeds will eventually just choke this place out, too.
 
BostonUrbEx said:
Yeah, that looks awesome! I'm a bit nervous though that those damn reeds will eventually just choke this place out, too.
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Vegetation Control 101. City of Cambridge has mastered this concept on relatively modest budget at Fresh Pond Reservoir with the multi-stage hillside renewal going on to stabilize the soil against runoff. First step was clearing all out all the invasive vegetation and planting native species to hold the soil before the invaders could mount a new attack. It's a jarring contrast between the remediated areas on three-quarters of the path circuit and the outlook hill vs. remaining non-remediated area on the Huron side (which is project-dependent on Watertown Greenway final design + land prep before they can do that last hillside).

The only hard work involved is actually removing the invaders, re-grading the hillside soil so it can support new plantings, and cleaning out the silt muck in the water where the invaders destroyed the riverbank soil. The actual remediation planting and recovery fencing (which usually stays up for 2 years until things set themselves) is cheap. You just have to draw up a comprehensive plan and stick to it, something DCR has never done well at all. This daylighting is awesome, but they're attacking the Muddy restoration in too-small chunks, and waiting for funding instead of loading up for bear to do an adjacent segment the season after one segment is remediated. You can't control re-invasion of species that aren't supposed to be there by waiting 7 years to attack the next 2 acres across the street. Water flow is still going to be anemic, hindering the replanting, and those damn reeds and weeds are just going to blow seeds right across the street and start crowding out everything all over again before they start on the next segment.

Bureaucracy is the Charles/Muddy Basin system's enemy. This stuff gets funded like road projects with every acre having to annually fight its way off the unfunded mandate list and onto the TIP. It should have its phases funded up-front as five-year/five-season plans like that clear out very wide buffers of renewed land by the end of the 5-year phase before tackling the next segment. The Fresh Pond model and multi-year progression of is the well-researched strategy that DCR and other towns need to study for proper remediation of watersheds and river/streambanks.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
remaining non-remediated area on the Huron side (which is project-dependent on Watertown Greenway final design + land prep before they can do that last hillside).
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A bit off-topic for this thread, but there is some activity going on at Fresh Pond on the Huron side. No idea what they are doing, just ran into it being partially closed when trying to run there last Saturday morning.
 
This should be the model for rowhouse creep into the tripple neighborhoods.

Fantastic project!!
 
Agreed, every triple decker that is knocked down, burns down (happening a lot this summer), or destroyed by some other means should be replaced by something along these lines.
 
stick n move said:
Agreed, every triple decker that is knocked down, burns down (happening a lot this summer), or destroyed by some other means should be replaced by something along these lines.
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just with more apartments. I think there are only 9 here. At non-ultra luxe sizes, there'd probably be twice as many on this site
 
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