Northeastern eyes dorms

True on both counts, but no cause against Boston. It's anonymous in the sense that you could take a very similar panorama in virtually any city in the world.
 
Sorry ablarc, I guess Boston doesn't have the resources of Dubai. Wait! Dubai doesn't have those resources anymore either.

Maybe Harvard Design School students and faculty can do pro bono work to create a truly stellar vista from every point in Boston.
 
Building K does look better though if it goes through. However, it is more of a typical building, a stark contrast to IV's "outside the box" shape.
 
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I was surfing the web and found these two similar photos of Northeastern University's campus, except one was taken circa 1998 and the other was taken in the last year.

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Isn't the difference tremendous? I notice a lot of you on this forum like to bash NU's architectural quality and can be quick to dismiss what the school has built as of late, but you have to honestly admit that the development has made a positive impact both on the city and the skyline
 
My only disappointment is where can NU expand now.
 
The comedy "Build A Deck Over The Tracks And Drop A High Rise On Top Of It" option comes to mind.
 
I love that NU developed all those parking lots, I just wish they were a bit easier to navigate. We still suffer from Tower-in-the-Park syndrome.
 
Those photos are awesome.

Kudos to NEU. The West Campus is pretty good stuff all around.
 
The "East Village" is the next step in the development process. The delayed Residence K on the site of Cullinane Hall will be the first building. The Gainsborough Street Garage will be demolished for 1 or 2 new buildings and the side parking lot of Matthews Arena will be built on, after demolishing the Matthews Annex.
 
Wow, the South End looks tremendously big in that second picture.
 
KentXie said:
My only disappointment is where can NU expand now.
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I've had the same concern, but as my imagination has run wild I've come up with the following possible solutions:

1. As mentioned, East Village will happen... it's not a matter of if, but of when it will be built. That will add anywhere from 600 to 1200 beds to the housing stock, pushing us close to the 10,000-mark for students able to live on campus... not too shabby when you see what the campus looked like in '98.

2. Bury a multi-level parking garage under the Columbus Lot, then convert the space at ground level into a relocated Cabot Center. In essence, construct a brand new, state-of-the-art facility for our athletic teams as Cabot is becoming increasingly outdated. And while they're at it, the school should do some work improving connectivity from south campus to main campus and covering up the railroad tracks.

3. Once the athletic facilities from Cabot are relocated to the Columbus Lot site, tear the building down (as if it has any real historical significance) and turn this new space in the heart of campus into classroom facilities, event space, and a new diamond shaped quad. Cabot, after all, sits mostly on space formerly used as field for the Red Sox when they played at the Huntington Avenue Grounds. It would be really cool if they could restore that identity somewhat by expanding the Churchill Hall quad northward and making a real baseball diamond, surrounded by modern academic/administrative buildings. Sitting adjacent to the NU Green Line "T" stop, it would make an impressive gateway to the heart of campus.

4. Bury the North Lot behind Stetson East about 8 to 10 feet below grade and make the current level a softball field. The site is large enough to accommodate that, and I have a feeling surrounding Fenway residents would appreciate a view out their windows of a green softball field instead of a drab parking lot.

5. Demolish the Forsyth Building. I learned that this 2-story building situated in the heart of campus use to be a parking garage and was then enclosed and turned into class space and the UHCS offices. This is outrageous! NU should raze the darn thing and redevelop the site into 1 or 2 academic spaces (possibly additional lab space for engineering).

There's still plenty of potential for NU to expand. It's mostly about redevelopment at this point, but as NU tries to tout itself as a greener university optimistic with the prospect of making all new construction/renovations LEED-certified I'm sure a few of my ideas have crossed their minds as well.
 
There was an article in the Metro a week ago or so talking of Mission Hill and college students. It was the same old story....neighborhood wants colleges kids out.

They even mentioned Brookline and the number of noise complaints can increase during the summer.
 
The Battle of Mission Hill
Town-versus-gown tempers are boiling over near the Northeastern campus, as residents charge the giant school with 'death by incrementalism'
By CHRIS FARAONE | June 9, 2010

NOT GOOD IN THIS HOOD Through the early ?80s, abominable Mission Hill tenements were sometimes deprived of heat, water, and even windows.

Oftentimes, inner-city dwellers who have to routinely phone police about disorderly neighbors fear retribution from gangbangers or drug dealers. That is not the case in Mission Hill, where folks who anonymously told the Phoenix about loud parties and constant intoxicated pandemonium there are instead scared that Northeastern students ? whose keggers and illegal porch barbecues often rage until four in the morning ? will smash bottles in their back yards and rearrange the side-view mirrors on their cars.

In fact, the incursion by Northeastern students into Mission Hill, the South End, and Roxbury is changing the face of those neighborhoods, and not just via the superficial evidence of broken glass, fire hazards, and mangled property that students leave in their wake. Multi-generational Bostonians are actually being displaced in alarming numbers, as their neighborhoods increasingly become extensions of the institutions that surround them, and as those colleges and universities continue to rapidly expand their campus footprints and inadvertently drive up real-estate prices.

Among the concrete harbingers of change that have particularly riled activists are: 52 existing affordable-housing units near the Mass Ave T station, which Northeastern now owns and can legally inhabit in 2023; that school's magnificent Fenway concert hall that is the former site of the dearly missed St. Ann's community church; and massive Northeastern facilities hovering above Columbus and Huntington avenues.

Adding fuel to the town-versus-gown fire, Northeastern's 10-year Institutional Master Plan (IMP) is approaching its July 13 expiration date. That strategy, initially set in 2000 and finalized in the mid 2000s, was a then-heralded compromise that smoothed the ruffled feathers of locals and university officials after much heated deliberation. The crux of the plan would have moved more than 1800 off-campus students into dormitories by 2012. But Northeastern recently reneged on that deal. Citing economic hardship, the school suspended its IMP this past year and stalled major development indefinitely. Now, with nearly half of Northeastern's 15,000-student population still off-campus and the school offering no plan to absorb those numbers any time soon, an army of residents, marching with state and city politicians, are once again waging war to restrain Goliath.

"Northeastern," says one South End activist, echoing his equally agitated peers in surrounding communities, "has no credibility left around here. What they're doing is the equivalent of death by incrementalism, and we're not going to take it anymore."

Mission Hill Impossible

In the 1970s, Mission Hill was Boston's valley of ashes. Overgrown vacant lots and charred homes marred the landscape; abominable project tenements were sometimes deprived of heat, water, and even windows. Back then, Northeastern was a commuter school on the border of a community in shambles, its reach ? and outreach ? hardly stretching more than a few blocks off either side of Huntington Avenue. What is now Dodge Hall was an open field; the current site of Northeastern's sports complex was a parking lot.

Around that time, such community organizations as Mission Hill Neighborhood Housing Services (MHNHS) formed to spearhead projects that significantly improved infrastructure. Local groups have since been remarkably successful in those missions, securing affordable rentals and home ownership resources for thousands of long-term residents, and also playing instrumental roles in such retail-revitalization projects as the $48 million pavilion at One Brigham Circle.

The current disagreement between Northeastern brass and local residents reflects a jarring tug-of-war that accelerated in the late 1980s, when the university, following the precedent of the neighboring Wentworth Institute of Technology, began transitioning away from commuter-campus confines and, activists charge, suddenly became interested in community expansion. Northeastern did not have adequate facilities to match its ambition, though, and before long thousands of undergraduates were renting nearby apartments. To many observers, a 1985 increase in the nationwide minimum drinking age from 18 to 21 worsened the situation, as students were blocked from the bars, and Animal House mayhem spilled into the streets.

As more recent history goes, the direct roots of the current stalemate stem back to the Davenport Commons combined student-and-affordable-housing venture on Columbus Avenue in Lower Roxbury. First proposed in 1996 and completed five years later, the $40 million Northeastern effort was built to include 595 student units and 60 condos for first-time homebuyers from the neighborhood. Though Davenport was facilitated by the well-respected Madison Park Development Corporation, which pushed Northeastern to scale back from its initial 800-student-unit proposal, community members by and large still viewed it as an unfair agreement that would take more away from the neighborhood than it would give back.

Broken promises

A recent "community conversation" between local residents and representatives of Northeastern evidenced the hostility between the warring factions. The meeting, held at People's Baptist Church on Tremont Street on May 27, was the third such roundtable of university, political, and residential interests in recent weeks, and tempers were short. District 7 City Councilor Chuck Turner, who was leading a 50-plus-and-growing posse of perturbed locals, seemed visibly aggravated, but waited politely for Northeastern representatives to wrap their opening comments. Emotions began to fly, though, at the 45-minute mark.

"I find myself in a very difficult situation," said Turner, who served as the first director of Northeastern's Afro-American Institute in the early 1970s. Like others in attendance, Turner was angered by the school's request that the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) extend its IMP, and wanted assurance that low-income residents in Northeastern-owned units will not be moved. Added former Boston City Council president Bruce Bolling, who is skeptical of Northeastern's bid: "Don't make us out to be the bad guys. These people have given a lot to Northeastern already."

If there is middle ground here, few are willing to acknowledge it. To many, this latest economy-related breach of the IMP is just another broken promise. In 2000, the very same year that Northeastern submitted its soon-to-expire plan, administrators over-enrolled the school's freshman class by nearly 600, effectively breaking a pledge to contain the student population. Ten years later, approximately 6600 undergraduates from Northeastern live off-campus; low-income tenants have been priced out of apartments that now fetch monthly rents of $1000 per room; long-time homeowners have seen their property taxes skyrocket due to real-estate values that are inflated as a direct result of student demand.

"I understand this frustration," City Council President and Mission Hill resident Mike Ross tells the Phoenix. "It's a sense of hopelessness among residents who were wishing to turn their neighborhood around."

At the South End meeting and in interviews, Northeastern delegates speak of a variety of temporary housing solutions that they wish to employ until they can afford to build new dormitories. They are also actively pursuing better ways to crack down on off-campus horseplay. But whether or not the BRA board approves an extension of the IMP ? a Band-Aid that would change very little ? the relationship between Northeastern and its neighbors appears to be irreconcilably strained, and will only unravel further as more kegs get tapped and side-view mirrors get buckled.

"While discussions with our neighbors can get spirited at times, we share the same long-term goals," writes Northeastern Senior Vice-President for External Affairs Michael Armini in an e-mail to the Phoenix. "We need to continue working together."

"I find this to be an abandonment of all the work we did for years," counters one Mission Hill activist. "It's disingenuous ? the [Northeastern] leadership that is out in front has not made any real effort to come up with solutions."

Chris Faraone can be reached at cfaraone@phx.com.
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Damn the universities for not giving into neighborhood extortion!
 
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