The Victor | 110 Beverly Street | West End

Re: The Victor

I think there is a nostalgic fondness of the West End that many people have who never lived there and are too young to remember it. I am too young, but from everything I heard, it was an awful, dumpy area near the time of demolition. Not saying it was right, and the City Hall sea of brick is awful, but parts of it probably would have been knocked down by MGH or someone else sooner or later.

RE: where the Victor is, I am just happy the terrible Central Artery is gone. Anything is an improvement over that, IMO.
 
Re: The Victor

Shepard said:
But, CRP is the black hole at the center. No reason to go in. Not even clear how to get in. CRP is functional is giving high-end apartment dwellers a cocooned little respite from big city tomfoolery, but dysfunctional by any standards of good urbanism. As I said, CRP is not the entirety of the West End, but it is the black hole at the center.
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This sums up the reference I was making to bedroom suburb (should have specified CRP.) It offers a place to sleep but that's about it except for a small market and maybe a dry cleaner. The recent new buildings could easily have offered 1st floor amenities and up-to-the-sidewalk street wall. Instead, more of the grassy same and developers even crowed there would be a net gain in open space.
 
Re: The Victor

Czervik.Construction said:
parts of it probably would have been knocked down by MGH or someone else sooner or later.
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Better parts than the whole.

In truth, everyone probably would've been evicted to make way for yuppies by now. But at least the city would have more of this tremendous architectural legacy. I bet it'd still have more housing units, too.
 
Re: The Victor

Czervik.Construction said:
I think there is a nostalgic fondness of the West End that many people have who never lived there and are too young to remember it. I am too young, but from everything I heard, it was an awful, dumpy area near the time of demolition. Not saying it was right, and the City Hall sea of brick is awful, but parts of it probably would have been knocked down by MGH or someone else sooner or later.

RE: where the Victor is, I am just happy the terrible Central Artery is gone. Anything is an improvement over that, IMO.
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The city began threatening property seizing for years leading up to the actual invoking of eminent domain, and so people let their properties fall apart.

The city eventually cut back trash pick ups, and then declared the area was a filth-ridden dump and needed to be clear-cut.

The city played dirty in order to take a poor but highly-functioning (as in, a good urban space, not simply "oh, we pack 'em and stack 'em (I don't think there's much "function" to that, no)) neighborhood in order to toss it at developers looking for easy profit and get rid of the "undesirable" minorities and poor.

You know what else was considered a dirty slum? The North End.
 
Re: The Victor

You guys are probably right. Some would have been swallowed up by MGH, but the rest probably could have morphed into Boston's version of MPD or TriBeCa - going from hood to good.
 
Re: The Victor

czsz said:
Better parts than the whole.

In truth, everyone probably would've been evicted to make way for yuppies by now. But at least the city would have more of this tremendous architectural legacy. I bet it'd still have more housing units, too.
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Well... the era of Urban Renewal was credited with creating a modern economic engine in a city which was, at the time, dying in the same way Detroit is today. I'm not in any way saying that the travesty in the West End was a good thing, but it's naive to believe that we would simply have had "another Beacon Hill" in the West End, Scollay Square, etc. The effects of doing nothing would have been far more complex than that.
 
Re: The Victor

http://thewestendmuseum.org/history-of-the-west-end/immigrant-era/

http://004e136.netsolhost.com/images/4WestEnd.pdf
^^^
Slide presentation.

The slide presentation sets the area of the West End as 48 acres. The West End History museum gives the West End population in 1920 as 63,000. If the museum was counting population in those 48 acres, that's over 1300 people per acre, and assuming buildings average three stories, that's 100 sq ft per person. That kind of density likely means the housing stock was beyond salvaging; the core stock supported 23,000 people living there in 1895, and 63,000 in 1920.

Again assuming the same 48 acres, in the 2010 Census, the population of the West End was about 4,000, living in 2,900 housing units, or about 60 housing units per acre. If one had preserved the old West End, gentrified it, and each unit averaged 900 sq ft per person, that would be a current population of 7,000.

http://www.bostonredevelopmentauthority.org/PDF/ResearchPublications//WestEndSF1NBHD.pdf

The West End was largely doomed by the automobile. Narrow to very narrow streets and no parking.
 
Re: The Victor

Equilibria said:
Well... the era of Urban Renewal was credited with creating a modern economic engine in a city which was, at the time, dying in the same way Detroit is today. I'm not in any way saying that the travesty in the West End was a good thing, but it's naive to believe that we would simply have had "another Beacon Hill" in the West End, Scollay Square, etc. The effects of doing nothing would have been far more complex than that.
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This "dying like Detroit is today" is a total myth, probably propagated by people who were either involved in the dirty deed or are tireless Boston apologists who hate anyone seeing fault in the city's present day condition. Today's Boston economy is energized by hospitals and universities. Maybe some MGH expansion was helpful, but Boston would not have been a ghost town without Charles River Park being built. If anything, the greater housing capacity of the West End would have deflected gentrification from other neighborhoods and kept housing in Boston slightly more affordable, improving its competitiveness.
 
Re: The Victor

Dying like Detroit isn't a myth at all. Boston's declining population and economy post WWII is a fact anyone can look up. Whether or not CRP, Government Center, the Artery, and renewal in general was an actual solution is strongly debatable though. The city had a bunch of wealthy investors either sitting on a ton of money or investing outside of town, urban renewal happened, and all the sudden the "Miracle" happened. I don't think I've ever seen a study show a strong correlation, but it definitely makes you wonder if the renewal, which was basically the only intervening event between the era of decline and the era of rebirth, had anything to do with it. It's easy to look back on those projects now and see their major major failings, but it's also important to remember that they made people feel that Boston had a future and was a place worth banking on.

Building a New Boston by O'Connor covers the renewal era pretty well. Wilson's Urban Renewal is pretty good too, although only covers Boston briefly.
 
Re: The Victor

In what way did Charles River Park contribute anything of any economic value to the city?

Now the Prudential Center, there's an urban renewal project that actually did a lot to help rejuvenate Boston.
 
Re: The Victor

Ethics aside, it replaced a neighborhood with a dwindling population and lower-class tax base with a neighborhood with a stable population and middle to upper-class tax base. CRP was supposed to be the solution to White Flight and it's impact on the city budget. If it actually was, I don't know, but that was the thinking at the time when everyone was freaked out that the city was going to fall into the ground.
 
Re: The Victor

^ There would be a ton more yuppies living in the West End today if CRP hadn't laid waste to it, and their contribution to the tax base would've been far higher.

What's missing here is a comparison to a much more apt case study: NYC, where very little or limited urban renewal took place along the same lines. Highways were successfully opposed and neighborhoods left largely intact. What happened? After a shitty period during which it was still nowhere near as ghost-towny as Detroit became, the city bounced back and was able to leverage those intact neighborhoods as serious assets.

More like NYC than Detroit, Boston had core neighborhoods that were never in danger of emptying out and were relatively safe. The city would've muddled through the 70s and 80s and emerged just as wealthy and prosperous, with better architecture, had CRP never been built.
 
Re: The Victor

I would argue that the Charles River Park actually hurt the city.
A) it destroyed a true urban area and subbed in tower in the park style development that resembles an expensive luxury version of the 1950s and 1960s NYC housing projects.
B) it lowered the number of housing units in the area which makes the housing shortage even worse now
C) yes Boston's economy wasn't doing well and it's population was declining but it did not grow until sometime between 1980 and 1990
I noticed you mentioned the Central Artery which was built in the 1950s. From 1950 to 1960 Boston lost 13% of its population the largest decrease it has ever experienced. That same ten year period saw the start of the redevelopment of the West End.
In 1960 Government Center was being built along with the many other public housing projects around the city some of which were started in the 1950s.
After this period the population continued to fall for the next 30 years until after the 1980 census which was well after when all of these projects were built.
 
Re: The Victor

citylover94 said:
After this period the population continued to fall for the next 30 years until after the 1980 census which was well after when all of these projects were built.
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Exactly. Particularized solutions never worked for Boston. It really rebounded as a beneficiary of broader trends during the 80s and 90s toward financial services, meds+eds, and urban living. Detroit had a one track industrial economy and couldn't take advantage of this shift the way Boston could, which is why it continued its death spiral.

You can argue that redevelopment for skyscrapers in the financial district was necessary, but CRP, Government Center, the Artery? Harder case.
 
Re: The Victor

I would say that the building of the skyscrapers was good overall.
The one qualifier I would add is that there was no thought of ground floor retail. This should be changed as it would be relatively simple to change the first floor layout of many of the skyscrapers downtown.
 
Re: The Victor

Boston;s population in 2010 was still down 23 percent from its level in 1950. Yet there were 23 percent more housing units in the city than these were in 1950.

# of housing units / population Boston
1950 222000 / 801500
1960 238700 / 697000
2010 272500 / 617500

In the larger picture, the loss of 48 acres of the old West End had little effect on long-term population or housing trends in Boston. Wendell Arthur Garrity had a much greater effect on Boston than did urban renewal in the West End.
 
Re: The Victor

Hasn't Boston's population trended up in the last few years?
 
Re: The Victor

Yes and no while the busing crisis did not help and increased white flight the city had already lost 21% of its population over the past 20 years which is the bulk of the decrease in population as even at its lowest point Boston lost about 33% of its population. The busing crisis may have prevented an earlier faster recovery, but it did not start the process of disinvestment and white flight which had commenced about 20 years earlier with the construction of the central artery and the destruction of large areas of the city for housing projects and Gov't Center.
 
Re: The Victor

Suffolk 83 said:
Hasn't Boston's population trended up in the last few years?
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Yes its population has increased since the 1990 census.
1990 +2%
2000 +2.6%
2010 +4.8%
Total increase since 1980 of about: 9.4%

The reason it has not regained its previous population is it lost so much.
1960 -13%
1970 -8.1%
1980 -12.2%
Total decrease of: 33.3% about 1/3
 
Re: The Victor

stellarfun said:
Boston;s population in 2010 was still down 23 percent from its level in 1950. Yet there were 23 percent more housing units in the city than these were in 1950.

# of housing units / population Boston
1950 222000 / 801500
1960 238700 / 697000
2010 272500 / 617500

In the larger picture, the loss of 48 acres of the old West End had little effect on long-term population or housing trends in Boston. Wendell Arthur Garrity had a much greater effect on Boston than did urban renewal in the West End.
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I appreciate the hard numbers. Unfortunately I have only an anecdotal point to add - hasn't the urban household size decreased significantly since 1950? Instead of families of 3, 4, or more filling out those housing units, demand today is primarily for 1 and 2 bedroom units for 1 or 2 inhabitants. The "relative" demand for housing units may well have increased despite the population decrease. The increased student population throws a monkey wrench into my back-of-the-envelope math, since they provide demand for larger units with lower per-bedroom rents.
 
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