Agreed; these conceptual designs ostensibly provide pedestrian cut-throughs and get rid off all the surface level cars and chain link-fenced off area. I am 100% with everyone who wants this whole block blasted into smaller chunks, but in the mean time the new block porosity and elimination of surface parking zones would make a huge difference vs. what's there today.
When I say "white people" in this way, I say it as many people in my and younger generations do, as a cultural label, which is to say, "annoying, entitled yuppy culture". Which, while perhaps bound to elicit some triggered responses on a forum like this and therefore ill-advised, is also pretty accurate when it comes to Boston, more than most northeastern cities. No, not everything is about race, as I posted yesterday in another thread, and sorry to speak idiosyncratically when people are so aggrieved out there, but the very fact that out of every point I made, you felt the need to be triggered by and respond to this one clause, well…
Even without Bowdoin, you're a quarter-mile from Charles MGH (the new far-end headhouse), North Station, and Haymarket depending on exactly how you draw the route.
Haymarket will “feel” even closer, too, once all the construction is done—the apparent distance tends to diverge from reality the more urbanism encloses a path to a given destination.
Good luck getting the DMH police to do anything…
Yeah, and I think that stop spacing is too far for a downtown segment of a subway. The Orange Line, for example, works well with ~1/4 miles stop spacing between North Station and Tufts. If Bowdoin is removed on the Blue Line, the gap between Government Center and MGH will be more than double that distance. The area around Bowdoin/Staniford is already really dense with jobs and residences. That density increases if parts of Hurley get redeveloped. It's also really dense with other important resources that lots of people need to sporadically get to, like government services (at Hurley) or medical services (at the east end of the giant MGH campus). And the shorter stop spacing is important on the train in our downtown where we don't (and maybe can't) run busses to catch shorter trips or help people the last few blocks.
www.lmp.com
The website you found them on notes their client was Quaker Lane Capital, which was one of the respondents to the original RFP that went out. As noted above, Quaker Lane was not the winning proposal. Leggat McCall was, which has the shorter larger buildings by NBBJ proposed.
Neither of these was earlier or later than the other; they are both from the RFP/pre-award stage. It is highly unlikely that Leggat builds that stubby lab here, given market conditions. I would love to see this get re-proposed as more residential. In fact, I don't think we've seen any design revisions from them since the RFP stage, so here's to hoping whatever comes next is better.
Also, bear in mind that the entire idea of selling and redeveloping the SSC was a late-stage Baker Administration project. The Healey Administration may just kill it, the same as the Baker Administration killed the Transportation Building sale and MassDOT relocation that Deval Patrick floated in his last months in office.
