Navy Yard Transit and Transportation

About a year ago my wife and I moved from the South End to Charlestown (near Thompson Triangle). Much more of a community feel than the South End (we know all our neighbors, there's a very active mothers association, etc.), but man do I miss the restaurants in the SE. I asked a friend who owns a couple restaurants in the SE why there weren't more in Charlestown given comparable (though slightly less) density.
He said it came down to a lack of space. There aren't enough ground floor locations zoned to allow restaurants. Not sure why that's a problem in some gentrifying neighborhoods (Charlestown) but not others (South End and to a lesser extent South Boston).
 
Interesting. Similarly, I've always felt that Comm Ave from Harvard Ave all the way down to BC suffers massively from this. Beacon Street supports vastly more retail along the same stretch, even though I strongly suspect that Comm Ave is the higher-density corridor.
 
A lot of the Charlestown storefronts seem to have been converted to residential after the El came down, like this one. I'm surprised some grandfather clause doesn't allow them to be converted back easily.


As for Comm Ave, it was conceived as a grand boulevard to be lined with mansions, which for various reasons never happened. After development stalled for decades and it became a bit of a white elephant until they put down the trolley tracks and haphazardly threw up apartment buildings at the turn of the century when the population started increasing about 10k a year. Its never really had a cohesive vision, and is the worse for it. Below Packards Corner Comm Ave is a retail mecca because it always had activity, since it was simply a widening of Brighton Ave. Even between Packards and Harvard the retail is haphazard at best. There's a wings place and naked pizza, but other then that there is only Clear Flour bakery and that convenience store, which are actually a block off Comm situated at an older square in Brookline. Comm Ave itself is nothing but apartments on that side.
Beacon St, setting aside Washington Square, suffers similarly between Coolidge Corner and Cleveland Circle. You just don't notice it as much because the housing stock is in general more refined, and the trees make the street feel more intimate.
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Comm Ave is definitely more densely populated. As davem said, it wasn't built out until the early 20th century. And it seems that many of the apartment buildings were built around the same time that single-story retail began plaguing the inner suburbs.

As with Charlestown, it appears to be a case of misguided "planning" and bonkered "zoning." There's no reason why ground-floor spaces of any size couldn't be used for retail. People have made all sorts of things work.

In Allston and Brighton it looks like someone made a decision that "commercial zones" had to be composed of dedicated one or two-story buildings that were segregated into a commercial district, and then forced that decision on everyone else. I don't have any solid evidence that this was done prior to 1950s zoning, but the pattern is awfully suggestive in buildings built starting around 1910 or so. Some have also suggested that it might be a side effect of property tax rules.
 
One thing that would be a huge benefit to Charlestown is a direct, dedicated ferry to/from South Station. The existing ferry should run Aquarium - Charlestown - Central Sq Eastie - Winnisimet St Chelsea and then back the same way it came.
 
Randomgear said:
There's a Hubway station that's not too far away. Or get a bike and you can ride to the former Johnie's Foodmaster near BHCC; I think it became a Whole Foods a year or two ago.
Click to expand...

If only this was true. The Whole Food in Charlestown still hasn't opened and has left Charlestown bereft of a single supermarket.
 
There's a huge billboard over McGrath near Twin City Plaza announcing the opening on August 7th.
 
Charlestown Whole Foods is open, I've been shopping there a few times.
 
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