Reclaim South Bay

[tangent]

I'm having a hard time seeing the advantages of flooding half of Boston in a redevelopment plan.

Think "aquaculture"... not to mention the tourists that would come here for the spectacle of it all. Make Boston great again... like the old old old days.

 

[stick n move]

Fort point reclaimed up by the hospitals, south end, Ink Block, Boston medical... for parks, water taxi, recreation...etc. Plus the Boylston street extension through the fens connecting The Back Bay to the Fenway neighborhood. These two things alone I think would be pretty huge for Boston. We did expand the muddy river and that came out great, but overall I think were looking too in the box. We need some outside the box developments that actually change the city and don't just add more buildings. Theres many different things that would fundamentally change the city and make it better/more accessible/connected. Here is only 2 examples.

Aerial view showing fort point restoration/Boylston st straightening. Surprisingly it all fits. I would try to sell this the same way theyre trying to sell the Blackstone canal in Worcester. Its a reclamation. This is filled in land and bringing it back to how it once was is much different than just coming up with "hey a canal would be sweet right here". It would be bringing back some of old Boston. Look at what is there now, we filled in a waterway for this crap? It would be the least we could do.



Restore Fort Point to some of its former glory. Now this property that will inevitably be built on in the future is now waterfront property with a nice cable stay bridge. Also there would be walking/biking paths along both sides of the channel for recreation. People dredge canals and dig holes every day this would be a piece of cake with massive benefits to the city.



Straighten Boylston st and make it a 2 way street for its entirety. This slows down traffic and also gives a "main strip". Right now you have to loop around and come down Newbury...etc to get back out of the city making outbound traffic for thousands upon thousands of cars passing through our old brownstone neighborhoods to get out of downtown. This would at least help some of that congestion. I think theres quite a few 1 way streets that could be made 2 way. Imagine a straightened out Boylston st with the pike parcels completed, 2 charlesgate west, and a more filled out fenway neighborhood. This would really make the city bigger and pull it out west and also the pike would all but be gone from view. The city would truly start at Longwood vs now where Longwood is kind of disconnected. 1000 Boylston brings the back bay skyline closer to the fens so it would really feel connected.


https://postimages.org/



What else do you guys think would be reasonable but very impactful projects that would bring the city together more that have not been proposed yet? So nothing like NSRL or red-blue. What outside the box ideas are there that haven't been thought up yet or had proposals for that you guys would like to see happen?

 

[stick n move]

Throw this one under too late:

But I think it would have been cool if back in the day when they were first reclaiming the land to build Logan between the islands in the harbor I think it would have been cool if they had built a bridge to East Boston so Eastie residents could have had a way to walk/bike to the city. They could have made it large enough for ships to pass under like the Tobin, and also later on aligned the runways where they wouldn't interfere with the bridge. Best of all we never would have had runway 9/27 to screw everything up height wise downtown.

 

[Charlie_mta]

The straightening of Boylston Street is an intriguing idea. I was wondering about what kind of connection with Charlesgate could be made,and this is a quick and dirty concept, including removal of the blighted Bowker overpass:

 

[Justin7]

PostImage.org is broken. You can fix the images by changing postimg.org to postimg.cc, but I'd recommend moving to imgur or something more reliable.

Anyway, I know we've had this discussion before but what is gained by straightening Boylston?

 

[Downburst]

Anyway, I know we've had this discussion before but what is gained by straightening Boylston?

Besides additional damage to a historic park system that has borne the brunt of ill-conceived road construction for decades?

Anyways- speaking of Charlesgate, I'd highly recommend checking out the Charlesgate Alliance, which is working to rethink the area with Landing Studio, the same group behind Undergound at Ink Block. (Disclaimer: my workplace works in partnership with this Alliance.)

https://charlesgatealliance.org/

 

[Shepard]

Anyway, I know we've had this discussion before but what is gained by straightening Boylston?

It's really an unfriendly pedestrian experience where the Bowker comes into the Boylston curve, and creates all sorts of weird and disorienting detours. I think the idea is that it stitches together Back Bay and Fenway a lot more cohesively, which I agree is a good thing. Is it a top 10 or even top 20 project? Probably not.

 

[Justin7]

It's really an unfriendly pedestrian experience where the Bowker comes into the Boylston curve, and creates all sorts of weird and disorienting detours. I think the idea is that it stitches together Back Bay and Fenway a lot more cohesively, which I agree is a good thing. Is it a top 10 or even top 20 project? Probably not.

It is terrible, but I think that has nothing to do with the curve and everything to do with a poorly designed autocentric intersection. Just fix the intersection.