Rio Grande (née Dudley Square Residential Tower) | Washington St. | Roxbury

Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

Roxbury's legal borders were dissolved when it was annexed. So yes its "real" borders did change they were destroyed. Roxbury no longer includes some parts that it once did as a town. In reality Mission Hill or Longwood were probably their own neighborhoods in some ways even when Roxbury was still its own town.

Definitions of places change so yes if you are in Longwood and say you are in Roxbury you are wrong that piece of Roxbury became its own separate neighborhood and the two areas are not in any way similar or tied together as they may have been at one point in the past.

tl:dr Things change, definitions of neighborhoods and places change.
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

what do we think are the prospects of this going through? it appears that the development team has the blessing of the community (no small feat) but has this team completed projects of this scope in the past?

I hope so. More mid-income developments are sorely needed. I wouldn't mind seeing one or two of these at every transit node.
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

As the person who first made the comment about the neighborhood, let me explain in addition to just linking the "silly old map".

A quick Google search, shows this an article with this sentence last year in the Globe: "Boston Police are searching for four men suspected of robbing five people near McLaughlin Playground on Saturday morning in Roxbury’s Mission Hill area." Some may say that's bad reporting, but my point is the media changes the boundaries of Roxbury all the time. "would be the tallest building ever constructed in Roxbury" for example, when Mission Hill and Longwood already have buildings that tall, but it makes a better headline.

When I said that the City uses the old town boundaries for "various things", I'm referring to DPW district yards, the way services are provided (Roxbury area police serve Mission Hill and Longwood), the fact that Mission Hill and Roxbury share the 02120 zip code, etc. If you type in any street in Boston, the DPW Street Book will tell you its administrative neighborhood http://www.cityofboston.gov/publicworks/streetbook/. All the streets in Mission Hill and Longwood list Roxbury. I may have gotten carried away with including Fenway though, my bad :/
 
Last edited:
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

The bank stays.

I am confused why this is being marketed as "mid-income" housing. I assume it will be market-rate, and a Dudley Square apartment would presumably be as appealing to people as would be East Boston, where rents are much higher for a two-bedroom apartment. Not sure if the developer is pitching it like that in order to gain support or if he actually plans on keeping the rents that low. If he's really going to keep them where he says, then he'll be the first real estate developer in the history of the United States of America who has done so out of the kindness of his heart.
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

fattony said:
This is getting silly. Longwood and Fenway are no more a part of Roxbury than BU is in Brookline. 150 year old maps are fun to look at, but aren't relevant.
Click to expand...

I assume you're saying that because BU does sit on land that formerly did in fact belong to Brookline...

Historically, Roxbury also included the Back Bay, mind you all... and all of the South End...

I doubt that Roxbury had much of a pan-consciousness as it does now... when Roxbury was bigger, the Highlands and Fort Hill were very much their own neighborhood, and so was Dudley, and all the lowland, post-industrial areas around it. Ditto for Lower Roxbury which is nearly completely extinct as whatever goes by the name of "South End" marches further and further toward Melnea Cass. Any idiot who moves to Boston now thinks the South End stops at Melnea... Not so.

bigeman312 said:
There is obviously debate over where Roxbury begins and ends today (as there is no longer a municipality called Roxbury), but that BRA map is the closest thing to correct that exists. It has the Southwest Corridor as the border between Roxbury and Fenway/Mission Hill.
Click to expand...

Since the borders aren't official though, what matters most is the consensus of locals. You can dig up police district maps, trash collection maps, neighborhood community maps all you want. Even Google maps makes its own and somewhat arbitrary decisions on where the border is. Those don't matter if they don't reflect what the people who live there think.

And while most real locals, I am certain a minority, would not call Longwood Roxbury anymore, I am sure that there are some older folks in the Fenwood area who would still say they identify their neighborhood as part of Roxbury.

Fact is, there IS no border. There is a transition zone, buffering two areas that become increasingly identified as one or the other. And those border zones shit and change.

This was an interesting project that sought public input on neighborhood boundaries. I would be interested in the demographic of the people who submitted their entries. Assuredly, it was heavily weighted toward young, white and of fairly middle class origin. Certain not as many people from the outlying neighborhoods, as you can see from the N's. Mattapan barely exists in the minds of whoever participated... And not one person defined the area along Heath Street as Roxbury... Bromley Heath is, without question, in Roxbury and not Jamaica Plain, as is Jackson Square, but I am sure that over the ensuing 15 years as the neighborhood between Heath and Centre gentrifies, that will all change, in a more universally regarded way. Edit - interestingly, the Bromley Heath website calls it JP. I dunno. I disagree.

roxbury.jpg

******

Re: this project, isn't this the same project that seeks to build a large nightclub for live music? If done well, this would be a huge win for the neighborhood, but good street level will be critical.
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

JohnAKeith said:
The bank stays.
Click to expand...

Guscott_t620.jpg


So are they cantilevering the glass podium over the bank or will it tie in? Am I reading the rendering wrong? Is the glass portion entirely behind the bank?
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

Looks like all or most of the bank is saved except maybe a chunk of the left rear corner. Not reading this as a cantilever.
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

Looks like downtown Quincy.
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

Well that would be an improvement.
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

I like the density, but that design is just awful -- so lazy and oafish. The existing bank is probably the most beautiful building left in Dudley. I'd like to see a much more sensitive and elegantly designed tower in place of this proposal.
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

bigeman312 said:
Yes! I know this is geared towards me, but haha. I like it.
Click to expand...

That's cuz you know that it was said without any real malice.
;)

Nuttin but love aB
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

Ok people, we can rest assured that whatever the boundaries of Roxbury are and aren't (and what..no takers on the Mission Hill as part of Roxbury or an 'independent' neighborhood debate? That was always the flash point when I was younger) that this particular project is in Roxbury.

Now, turning back to the project. If anyone wants some more info on the team behind the project, the Banner ran a piece back in March about Ken Guscott and Long Bay and their plans for the project. I think it was posted in the Rox development forum as well.

What's got me curious though, is the interplay between this project (and Dudley writ-large), the market-rate additions + project based voucher renos to Whittier, and the Hope VI-ed Orchard Gardens/Madison Park low density suburbanized public housing next door. You've got two/three competing ideas for how to revitalize and/or reinvigorate Dudley, but I'm not sold yet as to how well they'll all mesh. It's wrong to say "they should have waited on the HOPE VI stuff" because well this sort of development wasn't an option back then.....but at the same point...they certainly could've (and could go I guess if we're being optimistic) gone a lot farther in trying Dudley back into Lower Roxbury and the South End.
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

Great post, Cantab. Curious why you think all of these ideas are competing, though... seems more like a multi-pronged revitalization?
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

Shepard said:
Great post, Cantab. Curious why you think all of these ideas are competing, though... seems more like a multi-pronged revitalization?
Click to expand...

Well here's my reasoning (and admittedly, there are holes in it): A 25-story is more than revitalization, it's a statement of intent for the future of the area. The HOPE VI Orchard Gardens reno was absolutely necessary, but it doesn't do anything towards making Dudley a destination, it's low-density development in an urban setting, and it doesn't go a long way towards re-knitted the post-SWC/695 wasteland that is the Lower Roxbury-South End borderlands. The Whittier project, the Bolling project, and this most recent one are predicated on urban, economic development - development that would benefit from and partly rely upon a more coherent urban setting along the triple veined Tremont, Washington, Harrison corridor between Mass Ave and Dudley.

It's not coincidence that South End gentrification skipped Dudley for greener pastures out by Mission Hill and particularly JP. If Lower Roxbury hadn't been allowed to decay and hadn't the proverbial straw house when bid bad turnpike commish wolf came around then Dudley would've rebounded along with the rest of the South End (or a little after). Imagine Hammond and Greenwich-style street fronts stretching over the old street layout for a better picture of what I'm talking about. So these HOPE VI townhouse-style public housing renovations are good (at least they're good if the residents see them as an improvement), but they aren't designed to tie Dudley (and Roxbury writ-large) back into Boston which is was the new retinue of projects in proposing.
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

Orchard Gardens isn't exactly low-density, though it is cartoonishly white-picket-fence suburban. I'll say this about Orchard Gardens: when the tide turns around Dudley, whatever housing units are market rate around Orchard Gardens will become highly desirable. Because as cartoonish as it is, it's distinctive as an urban neighborhood.

To me, this all hinges on getting Melnea Cass right.
 
Re: Dudley Square Residential Tower | Washington St. | Roxbury

I believe Orchard Gardens is all public housing (could be wrong, at the very least I think it's price-controlled), so it should be largely spared the housing price crunch if Dudley starts to catch fire in the housing market. It isn't low density for, say, the lower reaches of Dorchester, but compared to the Lower Roxbury of yore it's certainly not nearly as packed as it once was.

Really though, any change to Orchard Gardens is a Phase X possibility and we're just rounding the corner on Phase II or III in Dudley's (re)development, so I pushed this thread a little too far into the future I think.

So to bring it back to a somewhat less far-off timeline, I think another relevant question regarding the "tying Dudley back together"-idea is where the new residents will come from - will Mission Hill start to spill-over to Dudley? Will that spillover have to be channeled through Fort Hill first? Dudley's is both well-connected and isolated - the 66, 1, and SL4/5 all offer access to the far west and West Cambridge, west and Port/Coast in Cambridge, and downtown (and those are all top 5 routes, 4/5 together would clock in at number 1 with ~20k per diem, 66 at ~14k garners #3 systemwide but in the past it's placed higher, 1 - not including CT1 - at 13k which earns in the 4th place). You can have access to your pick of high-skilled employment centers and the best of the lower-skilled retail, restaurant, etc scene......and yet, that's been the case for over a decade so either the push to or pull from Dudley (or both) just isn't quite there yet and I'm trying to figure out why. And if you can figure why, or at least where any new residents are likely to come from, then that's pretty invaluable information in executing a project of this scale.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top