Bumpy ride almost over
By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Columnist | March 18, 2009
Could it really be?
Over at Kenmore Square, it looks an awful lot like the MBTA's renovation project - an epic undertaking that dragged on so long it seemed like the city would be submerged by rising seas before its completion - is near an end.
Last summer, Charlie O'Reilly, the MBTA's design and construction manager, promised the place would be "substantially complete" by April, and end up costing $47.3 million. I was skeptical of those claims. After all, the T, which initially promised to complete the renovation by the end of 2006, had blown umpteen deadlines by then. And the cost of the project had ballooned by the millions.
But head over to Kenmore, and it seems like O'Reilly's people will make good on his promise schedule-wise, if not budget-wise (the price tag has jumped yet again, to $47.7 million, but what's an extra 400 grand between friends).
The dramatic, giant-arched bus canopy at the center of the square is fully glassed-up. Commuters can now get from there to the train station without risk of impaling themselves on construction materials. In the station, handsome steel-and-glass enclosures surround stairs to the platforms. Above ground, paved walkways guide bus riders safely out of the terminal and onto the streets.
All of the traffic lanes heading into the square are open, and cars move smoothly, even on a busy Monday afternoon. The sidewalks - and the intersection of Commonwealth, Beacon, and Brookline - are paved in handsome brick. Trees and grassy islands have appeared.
Kenmore is still rough around the edges. The ground is dug up in places. The spot where an elevator will carry people from the bus stop to the subway station is still a hole (the elevator is due to arrive next month). Frowsy old bus shelters squat beneath the flashy new one. Awkward signs, some of them handwritten, direct commuters to the B Line or beg their pardon for the inconvenience.
But at least now the end is in sight, and a good end it is.
That got me feeling all hopeful, so I headed down to another interminable renovation project - the one at the Arlington T stop, underway for more than three years. Here, too, it seems that the MBTA is finally close. A gleaming new ramp, glass elevator shaft, and stairway sit on Boylston Street. A large, soon-to-be landscaped garden runs beside them.
Underground, the station still looks a bit like a bomb hit: Stripped walls on the half-closed platforms await new tiles. Naked bulbs hang from the ceiling. But O'Reilly says it won't be that way for long: The old Arlington Street entrances to the station will reopen in mid-May, he says.
"We're ramping things up," trumpets a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority banner that hangs on the station walls, promising to deliver the new Arlington stop by spring.
Commuters maddened by the delays aren't buying it so far. One of them changed the '09 completion date on the banner to 2019.
You can understand their doubts. Day after day for years they have negotiated the morass that is their T stops.
O'Reilly and T spokesman Joe Pesaturo say both projects were delayed by factors beyond their control: Lawsuits from neighbors, the hazards of excavating in an old city, utility lines nobody knew were there at Kenmore, and structural problems with Arlington's mezzanine level that revealed themselves only after work began. "They don't run into these problems when they're building a transit station in Phoenix," Pesaturo said yesterday.
Maybe. But they knew it was an old city when they started digging. And the renovations at Kenmore, Arlington, and Copley - that last project partly frozen since a giant crack appeared in the historic Old South Church - have worn commuters' already-withered patience.
It's finally clear that we're about to get some beautiful, handicapped accessible T stops. The hope here is that the MBTA hasn't sacrificed too much public trust in the process.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is
abraham@globe.com
