Maxwell's Green | Magoun Square | Somerville

At first I thought this was part of that MaxPak development (or whatever it's called) but I think this is different.
 
a630 said:
Not sure if this already has a thread

http://boston.curbed.com/archives/2...ment-is-in-somervilles-newest-yoga-studio.php
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Here's some additional material from the Herald:
http://bostonherald.com/business/re..._big_transit_bets/srvc=business&position=also

Hubs of transportation
Developers making big transit bets
By Jennifer Athas
Friday, March 2, 2012 - Updated 13 hours ago

As the Bay State makes its way out of the housing slump, developments are starting to take shape everywhere.

Gone are the days of sprawling “McMansions” — now developers are focusing on transit-oriented developments.....

Andre Leroux, executive director of the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance, a coalition that supports compact, transit-oriented, walkable, bicycle-friendly land use, including neighborhood schools, complete streets, and mixed-use development with a range of housing choices and prices.

“We see a huge demand around Greater Boston. We’re working in communities from Winchester to Lawrence that are all working to develop vibrant urban villages around public transportation,” Leroux said. “An overwhelming number of people want to live in these types of places, and communities that don’t create them are less competitive for residents and jobs.”
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Note -- McMansions are still alive and doing quite well in Lexington just off of Mass Ave. -- a newly constructed McMansion -- built on the lot formerly occupied by a Post WWII expanded Cape -- went on the market for $1M and sold in less than 2 weeks. It is right across the stret from another one done just 2 years ago which had previously set the record for the neighborhood at $950k. Two other Mcmansions are under construction at this time within a two football field radius of my house. Interestingly, all 4 are within a 5 minute walk of a 2X per hour (at rush hour) T bus
 
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Maxwell's Green is the new name for the MaxPak development.
 
Isn't that site heavily contaminated?
 
this is how i imagine the naming process went down...

"hey guys, Maxwell is going to build apartments on an old brown field that we had to do all sorts of clean up on. what should we name it so no one knows the site was once contaminated"
"How about Maxwell's Green?"
"... perfect."
 
Actually, the new development name is simply a variation on the name of one of the companies (MaxPak) that formerly occupied the site.
 
Walked over to this project yesterday and was pleasently surprised at the progress. Six of the townhouse are already completed and occupied.
Attached is a copy of the site plan. Scrolling right are 15 shots of the site. I was walking from the NE corner to the NW corner.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/beelinebos/6856766960/in/photostream/
Sorry, but old habits are hard to break.
 
4.jpg


The architecture isn't offensive and it'll make a newly transit-accessible area denser, but I can't get over this suburban garden apartment-style layout. It seems like it won't do much in terms of building up proper blocks but will be a sort of self contained, superblock-esque pod.
 
Agreed. Unfortunately the layout seems to be very inward-facing. Though I don't know the area so maybe there's a reason for that.
 
It's a triangular site without much of a street grid to connect to. One side of the triangle is the Lowell commuter rail (and future Green Line). Another side is an abandoned railroad right-of-way which will become an extension of the Community Path and a major pedestrian entrance to the development. At Lowell Street (a vertex of the triangle) they are adding a street connection that never existed before.

An alternative would have been to build more one, two, and three-family houses like the residential area immediately to the west, but the result would have been far fewer housing units.
 
Why couldn't they have extended streets into the site though rather than the amorphous superblock arrangement proposed, though?
 
They only really could have extended Clyde St and Warwick St through the site to meet Lowell St at an intersection. The way it's situated though, there aren't a lot of ways to logistically bring a grid into the site without bridging over the right-of-way, which wouldn't have left room for this size of a development.
 
I was at the old MaxPack site years ago. It is really out of the way and as Ron said surrounded on two sides by railroads. The design does the best it can with the very limiting space.
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
They only really could have extended Clyde St and Warwick St through the site to meet Lowell St at an intersection
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And that's more or less what they're doing, except that gates will prevent cars from driving straight through. The east side of the development will be accessed from Lowell Street; the west side, from (narrow) Clyde and Warwick streets. Pedestrians and bikes will of course be able to cross straight through the development.

Dividing and distributing the car traffic this way was the only way the development could be made acceptable to the surrounding neighborhood. Even if that weren't true, I doubt that either the developer or the future residents of Maxwell's Green would have welcomed through traffic.
 
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BussesAin'tTrains said:
They only really could have extended Clyde St and Warwick St through the site to meet Lowell St at an intersection. The way it's situated though, there aren't a lot of ways to logistically bring a grid into the site without bridging over the right-of-way, which wouldn't have left room for this size of a development.
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Bus.a.T --- Some of you seem to be really skitzoid at times - forgot the meds?

On one hand you don't like superblocks so you want street grids on the other hand you don't like traffic such as on O'Brien Highway (err Blvd)

Well in the real world there is room for both an active grid (whether Cartesian or not is not germane to this discussion) and quiet residential backwaters.

The fundamental fact of human nature is that kids like playing outdoors on grassy meadows, sidewalks, parking lots, dusty fields, wooded glades, sandy beaches, boulders. and yes streets -- and for the most part they don't do much to distinguish one from the other. Parents for the most part would like the kids to play near to the house and not be a maneuver field for traffic. Hence a lot of families like living on cull-de-sac, or in developments relatively poorly connected to the grid.

Even in a late-19th early 20th century urban development such as East Cambridge there was an informal dichotomy between the quiet residential streets such as where my father's sister lived, and the commercial streets such as Cambridge Street. While there might not have been a neighborhood playground, or even much in the way of yards for the kids from the "3-deckers" on the numbered streets and the small connector streets -- a lot of kids living down toward Lechemere played stick-ball on the side streets.

No-one is intentionally going to build neighborhoods full of "3-deckers" where the kids have to play in the street -- but there is still an attraction to living in a place where the kids could play in the street. By definition -- such a street can only peripherally be part of and hence can only be loosely connected to the typical modern urban street grid full of cars, metro-cars, motorcycles, scooters, bikes, Seqways, etc., as well as the much bigger but less frequent buses, trucks, vans, etc.
 
^ Has my post history indicated that I believe any of those things? Whether I do or not, in this post I was just answering czsz.
 
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