Shirley Kressel vs. Boston City Council

underground said:
Conversley, can you name one project that they've rubber stamped out right?

Prudential Center's two towers, followed by the two projects on Melcher and Summer Streets in Fort Point Channel.

Are you saying the BRA doesn't rubber-stamp and it waters down proposals because the developer shaves off a couple of stories? The project is proposed a few stories higher than intended, to allow for this generous compromise.
Click to expand...
 
kmp1284 said:
Shirley says ---> No one is really planning for the city to grow in a healthy way
Then please enlighten us on your vision for healthy growth. Something about your credentials to make such pronouncements would probably help too.
Click to expand...

My vision is sort of Jane Jacobs, mixed use, mixed people, dense, heavily residential (people actually living here, not just owning condos), fine grain, small blocks, transit not cars, democratic public spaces, government doing public work and regulation, business doing private work (Jacobs' second-best book is "Systems of Survival"). Probably not exciting in architects' terms, although I appreciate creative (not necessarily large) architecture. I think more in terms of "fabric" than "icons" or "gateways." More environmental and social justice concerns than stunning visuals.

My credentials: BA, Brandeis Univ., Masters in Landscape Architecture, 1983, UPenn (with Ian McHarg -- Design with Nature, etc); Masters in Public Health, 1969, UCLA; 25 years of work split evenly between the two.
 
Thanks again for such a reasonable and well-thought out reply. I very much appreciate you taking the time to speak directly with this pro-growth, pro-development crowd - it's interesting to hear your line of thinking.

I'm learning a lot about your frustrations and the things that drive you - and I hope you can see the angst from the pro-development side, and what drives us.

While we will continue to have... well... almost everything to disagree about, I am very much appreciating these thoughtful discussions.

And to answer your question about Deval's ethics review... for me, I view Deval as a curiosity, not a real politician, so I'm curious to see how this ethics review comes out. I think that like all Governor's of Massachusetts he got bored of this powerless job 6 months in, and maybe this will be a way for him to shake things up before he ditches us for a real job.
 
shirley kressel said:
Prudential Center's two towers, followed by the two projects on Melcher and Summer Streets in Fort Point Channel.
Click to expand...
The two new building's at the Prudential Center are pretty bad examples seeing as how the master plan of that area has been argued over since time in memorium. Also, it's not the BRAs fault that the loudest complainers were high rise condo owners looking to protect their view and Jackie Yessian claiming that adding 6 stories to an already tall building located right in front of the second tallest building in the city was the greatest injustice ever cast upon the human race.

As for the Melcher and Summer Street projects, are you talking about the Children's Museum Expansion and the FP3 project? Was there even opposition to those projects? I can't really remember hearing any complaints and I can't imagine why someone would complain about a small addition to a beloved non-profit or adding 3 floors to a small building. In that case, you can't charecterize the BRA as rubber stamping them, seeing as how there weren't any complaints to begin with.
 
No. Melcher is #49 Melcher, owned by Archon/Goldman Properties. 316/322 Summer is owned by Lincoln Properties. FP3 is owned by Berkeley Properties at 354 Congress. The projects that were rubber-stamped got plenty of opposition, for months, and in the context of many broken BRA promises to build a neighborhood at Fort Point Channel instead of a back-office district. The testimony at the BRA hearing was eloquent and moving; and far from rejecting development, these community people have always invited more housing and neighborhood-type commerce.
 
See my point of view is much simpler, and based on the United States Constitution and the general rule of United States (not Boston) law...

A developer owns these buildings. (Is it Lincoln?) The market used to say that condos would be a good fit here, now the market is different.

Now, condos would fail there. As FP3 has failed. So, as the market changed, so too do the developer's plans. Obviously. Now they will build offices there. The market has dictated this. Not the developer.

No problem, it's their buildings, it's their asset, let them do as the market decides. Who the hell are we to tell them how to operate their asset?

The goal is not to ask private developers to build the Fort Point Channel into some idyllic commune where artists can live for cheap, the goal is to produce revenue from the assets that the developer owns. The market drives revenue and will tell us how that area will develop in the future.

End of story. Yeah, artists lofts, condos, awnings and cafes... would have been nice. Not today. Today, they're building offices. Simple. Someday, maybe the area will become hot for condos again.

As for the "artists", well there is plenty of inexpensive real estate available in my neighborhood in Dorchester. Stop being such fucking snobs and demanding a downtown luxury location for your artist studio. Ridiculous.

Evict them all if they can't afford the area. Every single artist on the street. New artist neighborhoods elsewhere in the city will pop up. This is how it works.

This city has absolutely no shortage of cheap housing or cheap real estate. Mattapan, Roxbury, Mission Hill, the bad western parts of Dorchester... plenty of cheap artist space.

I don't think anybody became an artist to live in downtown luxury. They have no right to live in that area unless they can afford it. None. The history of the city is written by new groups displacing old. We live in a city not a museum.
 
A big part of the issue is that many people want to pretend to be artists. They attempt to get subsidized rent, despite having a rich mummy or daddy, and demand to live 'the lifestyle' in a chic neighborhood with every luxury within reach, as anything less would be uncivilized. Do these poseurs ever produce any actual art of merit.... probably not. But they can have little shows with their like minded peers to peddle garbage, which no sane person buys, and perhaps con the ICA to display it.

The art industry has the same problem as the architectural industry in promoting no talent primadonnas in a suck-up lemming culture, while failing to recognize true talent. The loser interviewed on 60 minutes last week, whom couldn't stand that one critic dared point out his work required less effort than soiling oneself, epitomizes that problem. All of this spills over in the politics of artists' areas, as the self proclaimed nobility of artists demand the commoners pay for the privilege of their dubiously 'beneficial' cultural presence.

Meanwhile the 'real' artists are renting in some Godforsaken hell hole of a neighborhood, living on peanut butter and tuna, freezing half to death, creating great works of art, just praying some art promoter stops frequenting shows filled to the brim with poseurs to discover them. Shortly thereafter all the poseurs will arrive in the 'real' artists' neighborhood to take it over, cause the rents to rise so much the 'real' artists are driven out, and the poseurs start playing pretend again with their like minded friends.
 
After college, I was an "actor". Then, I became an "artist". Now, I'm a "writer". See how easy it is?
 
Lurker, I'd have to stay you're being a little bit mean. These people who you call 'fake artists' are not artists, they're hipsters. To give you a full explanation, I'll post the lyrics to Hipster Girl, by MC Lars, a Stanford and Oxford graduate, who is now a post-punk nerdcore laptop rapper.

"I met her in the thrift shop bumping indie hip-hop
Calculator wrist watch, Shins t-shirt and flip-flops
Queen of the hipster scene, straight out of Vice Magazine
Social outcast at 16 but now she lives her BoHo Dream
She came from Omaha to Williamsburg
She loved Karen O and she had heard
That Brooklyn was the hipster mecca
Packed her bags with her friend Rebecca
Said she had a thing for broke dudes in bands
Who lived by Union or by Grand
So we went down to the Bedford Bar
And bought a six dollar PBR

...random...

She thinks uncool stuff is mad cool, indie culture's fad rule
But cool stuff is uncool, right? That's why Friday's Jewel night
She reads books no one has read, laughs at jokes no one has said
So ironic with her taste, her whole life is cut and paste
It's a metrosexual romance, she wears my shirts and I wear her pants
We play dodge ball, kid sports are cool
Watching Spank Rock and McCarren Park Pool
She's my trust fund baby bohemian, her vegan humus keeps her thin,
I love my L-Train girl it's true..."

Not artists, hipsters with trust funds that wanted to get out of the midwest. And hey, I take offense to you calling all artists fake. I can consider myself an artist even though I don't live in the slums, are you implying that all talented artists are poor?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top