MGH Ragon Building | 55 Fruit Street | West End

shmessy said:
Whoa - - that sounds like some serious ATTITUDE from the residents there. Is MGH really being that evil or are these people generally that miserable?
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If you're a West End "neighborhood" resident in 2020, and you're acting like you're the victim of urban renewal and not the beneficiary...

It may be worth stopping this to save the structures, but for their value for the whole City. The neighborhood they memorialize hasn't existed for half a century.
 
Spending an additional $117m on top of the already controversial $1bn for a major healthcare project in order to honor local history is a PR nightmare in the making.
 
shmessy said:
Whoa - - that sounds like some serious ATTITUDE from the residents there. Is MGH really being that evil or are these people generally that miserable?
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Wow! That 23 North Anderson Building is so out of place, and I love it!

Color me on the side that it should be preserved. I haven't been following the thread, but what does MGH want to put there? Could it not be retrofitted or incorporated into a big housing development like we're seeing in the South End?

Edit: just went through the plans. As much as I want to see MGH thrive, this project doesn't seem like a good step in the "fixing-the-West-End" direction.
 
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Blackbird said:
Wow! That 23 North Anderson Building is so out of place, and I love it!

Color me on the side that it should be preserved. I haven't been following the thread, but what does MGH want to put there? Could it not be retrofitted or incorporated into a big housing development like we're seeing in the South End?

Edit: just went through the plans. As much as I want to see MGH thrive, this project doesn't seem like a good step in the "fixing-the-West-End" direction.
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The existing buildings were deemed possible to be retrofitted but only to office space, which is not what MGH needs in their expansion. The hundreds of design restrictions/criteria that need to be met for a new hospital building make these nearly impossible to integrate into any desired structure of this scale. Designing healthcare/hospital buildings is an entirely different beast from most other building typologies. There's a reason healthcare architects work on the same project for sometimes a decade+.

Count me in the cities change vote here. I have never really noticed these buildings or found them to be significant in an otherwise dead urban fabric. If you're in this area, you're likely here for MGH or at an MGH related building, or a resident of the West End on a walk elsewhere.

In a theoretical MGH-plays-nice situation, they either have to fork over $117 million dollars in relocation costs in the name of respecting history (which is extremely ironic that the current West End residents are the ones making a fuss about it), or spend more money and time to find, acquire, and likely demolish some other (likely larger) building to put their 400+ person hospital building(s). This additional spending would not be easily approved from anybody making the final decision, not only because the cost is already hovering around $1 billion and without a doubt took some persuasion to commit to that figure in a time when people were/are rallying against ever-increasing healthcare costs, but especially now, where MGH is expected to lose $2 billion in 2020 due to the pandemic after already cutting executive pay and freezing salaries.
 
stefal said:
Count me in the cities change vote here.
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Cities absolutely change, but whether they change for the better or for the worse is up to the leadership and vision of city hall and the advocacy/input from residents and locals like us and like those West End dissenters. This stretch of the city is largely dead and depressing due to the disastrous decisions of administrations past, and I'm not convinced that the proposal (with its indoor coffee shop, indoor flower shop, and gerbil tube) would make this part of downtown any nicer. At the very least, the West End should compete with Longwood for vibrancy, but it loses that battle by a lot in every way imaginable right now.

And again: I want to see MGH succeed, but not at the expense of the city.
 
They raised the heights of both buildings, one of them by probably a good 50' at least. They were both the same height before, so it's nice to see some height variation along with the modest gains.
 
JeffDowntown said:
Don't they kinda sort of need an underground station to connect to? :rolleyes:
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They have some uses in Level B2. I wonder if those escalators could connect up there in the time before RBX is done. Otherwise, cover the holes in the floor and put couple of pop-up shops in there for now. Much more important that they're not foreclosing on it.
 
Equilibria said:
They have some uses in Level B2. I wonder if those escalators could connect up there in the time before RBX is done. Otherwise, cover the holes in the floor and put couple of pop-up shops in there for now. Much more important that they're not foreclosing on it.
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Good point -- future proofing RBX station access.

Also maybe a sharp stick in MBTA's eye that this would be a really good time to do RBX in concert with this project.
 
Bland hospital architecture, but I wasn't expecting much.

Not a fan than they're tearing down the small brick "MGH Professional Office Building"... its not a piece of important architecture or anything, but I like it.
 
meddlepal said:
Not a fan than they're tearing down the small brick "MGH Professional Office Building"... its not a piece of important architecture or anything, but I like it.
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Is this a historic building? The bigger section looks like it's from the 1980's. Is just the small part on the left the historic architecture?
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