Roxbury Infill and Small Developments

Thanks reverend_paco, I'm happy to see something is being done but without changes to the zoning to allow buildings to create a better street wall there is only so much that can be done with the road. I'm glad they are adding trees, bike lanes, and through streets but this has more to do with safety than urban design.
 
After NY and other cities built their grid and the success was blatently obvious we should have takem a grid oriented path towards development when we did things like this or the west end. Each time a new scar was ripped through an area- which was usually a grid anyways we should kept that going. We could have made the city a lot easier to navigate vs the spaghetti plate we ended up with.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
In this particular case the clearing was for the highway as this is where the 95-695 interchange was supposed to be. Somewhere on this forum has been posted the renderings and it would have been devastating.
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No, van… the interchange was going to be at the end of the yellow line, which is at Columbus (which would have become 95 outbound of this map). The plans weren’t totally down to the fine detail, but as I know you know, there were also plans to construct major arterials across the city to connect the new highways; Columbus was going to become one of them and would have been widened (inbound of the interchange, that is). Ritchie, Marcella, Townsend and Quincy Streets were also going to become a four lane connector to 93, hence MLK Blvd.

However, all of this was going on at the same time as very aggressive demolition of the entire part of roxbury between ~ Northampton and the Roxbury Highlands. The highlands was where more affluent blacks as well as Jews lived. The lowlands around Dudley were poor - the end of Albany Street had been paint factories and metalworks and other toxic stuff from very early on, due to the canal that used to run into that area (where the Asian funeral parlor is). Then you had all the factories around Roxbury Crossing. So the area in between was sandwiched between two industrial zones and swelled in numbers with the migrations of poorer blacks heading out of the south after the two world wars. The more affluent Roxbury residents, partly due to class snobbery, were actually on board with a lot of the clearance.

Some of the initial plans proposed a very sprawling interchange - see the links below for an amazing site of maps including an overlay of the proposed inner belt. While that map shows a massive interchange, by the late 60s the plans had changed to a much tighter interchange with the rest of the surrounding land converted to a new project with a high school and housing called Campus High. The school is now called Madison Park because the demolished park (faintly visible, that you can see in the paco’s picture) was called Madison Square. That’s the cleared land in the lower right of the pic.

https://www.mapjunction.com - awesome site... select “inner belt mosaic 1962”, but note this was a very early plan.

https://archive.org/details/campushighschool70bost - BRA plan for Campus High, 1970. Note that the inbound segment of Columbus Avenue is depicted as a major arterial, also unbuilt.

http://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/8929ac8c-3180-4e13-971b-ac103e92dd37/ - Another image from the BRA’s site.
 
UrxsnbB.jpg


Looks like that land was cleared for the interchange (1962). Obviously plans changed as Madison Park/Campus High UR was developed after the interchange was moved.

AEd8WUl.jpg


A small point of interest, I never understood why the small residential section along Melnea Cass had the extra side streets right up against the boulevard. Clearly they were designed when I-695 was still planned and they wanted to keep them separate from the frontage roads. It's a total waste of space today.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
UrxsnbB.jpg


Looks like that land was cleared for the interchange (1962). Obviously plans changed as Madison Park/Campus High UR was developed after the interchange was moved.

AEd8WUl.jpg
Click to expand...

All the interchanges in every highway project in Boston were originally planned to be much more sprawling than they are today...

Like I already said, the map that you posted (and that I already shared a link to) shows a very early plan for the inner belt from 1962. The demolition was much later than 1962, when the plans had already shifted - note both the size of the interchange is smaller, as well as the alignment being shifted further to the north. I will give you, just for the sake of argument, that perhaps, the initial eminent domain clauses were adjudicated for the purposes of a highway project, although I am very skeptical of that. What are needed are the land clearance permits and dates. What I do know is the West End was actually cleared in ‘58-59, and that was the first truly major clearance project. The Roxbury stuff happened much later, so that 1962 plan is not necessarily reflective of whatever permits finally ended up being pulled for the purposes of clearing the land we are talking about. I am not completely certain, because I don’t have all that permit data, but from what I’ve read, it doesn’t look like this is a case of “we already cleared all this land for the highway, but now we want a smaller interchange and have to figure out what to do with the leftover land”. I’m not trying to create an argument just for the sake of one, but despite an admittedly destructive period of highway clearance, the highway story is only one strand of aggressive, big government urban renewal projects… And to just look at that original map of all the cleared land and only blame highway construction plays to the masses (on here, where we are generally aligned on transit policy), and loses the rest of the story, both for Roxbury as well as nationally. Slum clearance coincided with construction of both transit and housing projects, often but not always together, and equally destructive, regardless. People like to trot out keywords like urban renewal and inner belt as examples of how horrible midcentury transit policy was, while generally lacking knowledge about contemporary housing policy. I think having all the fine details in place is important.
 
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BeeLine said:
Uhub reports a proposel for an addition to 1950 Washington.

http://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/b8593547-a37a-4ea6-9430-597fb45f6095

1950 Washington
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This is the building which houses Restoration Resources, a store which buys and sells old architectural elements from the brownstones in the South End and Back Bay area. For anyone who's interested in "architectural antiques" I highly recommend you drop into the store.

I talked to the owner once and he mentioned how his store used to be where the current SOWA studios are, but he got pushed out once rents started skyrocketing. I feel sad that this proposed work might push him out, so I urge people to drop in.

This is also around the corner from some proposed apartments that were featured in an earlier post:
http://www.archboston.org/community/showpost.php?p=290394&postcount=214
 
reverend_paco said:
This is the building which houses Restoration Resources, a store which buys and sells old architectural elements from the brownstones in the South End and Back Bay area. For anyone who's interested in "architectural antiques" I highly recommend you drop into the store.

I talked to the owner once and he mentioned how his store used to be where the current SOWA studios are, but he got pushed out once rents started skyrocketing. I feel sad that this proposed work might push him out, so I urge people to drop in.

This is also around the corner from some proposed apartments that were featured in an earlier post:
http://www.archboston.org/community/showpost.php?p=290394&postcount=214
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Nice. I’ve wanted to check that place out for a long time.
 
Roxbury in general seems to suffer from the super block more than other areas of Boston. Probably because they are government projects and people used the latest idea. It is sad that one of the most beautiful areas of Boston, with such great natural topography, has been so badly abused. I hope as those developments age out they are replaced in a way that is more connected, per Whittier and Orient Heights.

vanshnookenraggen said:
UrxsnbB.jpg


Looks like that land was cleared for the interchange (1962). Obviously plans changed as Madison Park/Campus High UR was developed after the interchange was moved.

AEd8WUl.jpg


A small point of interest, I never understood why the small residential section along Melnea Cass had the extra side streets right up against the boulevard. Clearly they were designed when I-695 was still planned and they wanted to keep them separate from the frontage roads. It's a total waste of space today.
Click to expand...
 
Part of what I'm railing against is that the city isn't doing anything to fix these problems. They are keeping most of the mid-20th Century planning mistakes and just in filling the parts that never got filled or leaving small new sections to developers. I'm not suggesting we go back to the top down planning of old but rather look at the street grid and think of ways for new development to knit the city back together, rather than this suburban sprawl going on.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
Part of what I'm railing against is that the city isn't doing anything to fix these problems. They are keeping most of the mid-20th Century planning mistakes and just in filling the parts that never got filled or leaving small new sections to developers. I'm not suggesting we go back to the top down planning of old but rather look at the street grid and think of ways for new development to knit the city back together, rather than this suburban sprawl going on.
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The barriers separating Roxbury from the rest of the city are significant, and the numerous no outlet street systems that comprise the endless housing projects only reinforce the ghettoization - in the true meaning of that word. The Longwood Medical Area is literally right down the street from Dudley but it's worlds apart.. you've got Columbus Ave + the Orange Line, but the entire east wall of Columbus is superblocks of Roxbury CC, then Madison Park, then the Whittier St development. They'll never repair the street grid through RCC, but I fear there will be little change as re Madison. The Tremont Crossing development looks like maybe there will be some tiny connection, Dudley-ward, but I'm sure it will be some one way BS road or something. And I am sure there will be endless resistance from the neighborhood as well as school to doing what really needs to be done, which is a two way roadway connection from Columbus to Dudley that's between Melnea and Malcolm X.
 
FK4 said:
numerous no outlet street systems
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I'm totally getting off topic here, but I think this really fucks up traffic in many places. Alewife is so bad because they thought it would be a good idea to drop off a highway into a single city street (Alewife Parkway) and connect it to a bunch of streets that don't have any outlets. It's a recipe for disaster and the worst designed part of the Boston area. Even the transit station is not at all pedestrian friendly.

Roxbury doesn't have the traffic issues of Alewife. But they should definitively try to transform some of the low income housing into mixed income denser developments.

Although to be honest I think the percentage of low income residents needs to be a third or less for it to work the best. Any higher, and the property values of the market rate would be dragged down and the place would still turn into the ghetto that housing projects created when they were built.

I think the city should have pushed harder to include more affordable units in the Seaport rather then pushing it out to poorer areas. A spread of subsidized units is much better then having the units concentrated in certain neighborhoods.
 
tysmith95 said:
Although to be honest I think the percentage of low income residents needs to be a third or less for it to work the best. Any higher, and the property values of the market rate would be dragged down and the place would still turn into the ghetto that housing projects created when they were built.
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This is a fine line to walk because mixing incomes often leaves out services that cater to the poorer residents simply because they themselves cannot afford to be there anymore. Breaking up poor neighborhoods is even more disastrous because the social support system is itself so important and fragile. Middle class residents have more options but poorer residents don't. This means that an area like Dudley Sq needs to be redeveloped more consciously than other, more affluent areas. All I'm saying is we can do that AND create a better urban environment at the same time.
 
I drove on Washington from Cummings hwy to Melnea Cass for the first time since last summer and wow there's a lot of development on that stretch since then.

Beeline maybe you know whats the large development that has its foundation dug near Boston Latin?
 
Suffolk 83 said:
I drove on Washington from Cummings hwy to Melnea Cass for the first time since last summer and wow there's a lot of development on that stretch since then.

Beeline maybe you know whats the large development that has its foundation dug near Boston Latin?
Click to expand...

Responce to your question on the JP Infill thread.
 
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