Watertown Square BioTech Building | 66 Galen St | Watertown

AdamBC

AdamBC

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Replace a car dealership and gas station with an office building? Improve the traffic flow on Galen St? Seems like a big upgrade to the current situation.


ZfEx70W.jpeg
 
AdamBC said:
Replace a car dealership and gas station with an office building? Improve the traffic flow on Galen St? Seems like a big upgrade to the current situation.


ZfEx70W.jpeg
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I found the hidden flaw: 2 garage parking levels at nearly 300 spaces. Yuck.

Everything else with it looks pretty nice. Very much love the ancillary streetscaping and transit improvements to Galen; they're all long overdue. But that is too high a parking ratio for a site that literally overlooks a semi-major bus depot with high-frequency fan-outs in all directions and directly aspires to be 8 blocks from an Urban Rail station. It's dumping more cars on an already way too congested thoroughfare in direct blunting effect to the transit improvements. That's the wrong reasoning to base a Galen corridor improvements plan on. Given what transit improvements--RUR/Urban Rail @ Newton Corner, BRT-ization of the 71, rebuild of Watertown Garage next door into a major West region Yellow Line frequency-increaser--could very well be locked into a MassDOT budgeting CIP by the time this thing is erected and ready to lease, the design needs to way more aggressively reflect where the mode shares of its environs are immediately trending. As is, that's a lazy Alewife-baseline parking ratio for planning brains stuck in neutral.

Needs further revision. This is a "THINK, damnit!" moment where the developers + City really need to project ahead 10 years to the moving target of where H2O Sq. mode shares are going to be (or should be going to be if sustainability was the overriding goal). Hint: the future doesn't pigeonhole Exit 17 as the gravitational singularity of their universe to the unfortunate degree it is right now today.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
I found the hidden flaw: 2 garage parking levels at nearly 300 spaces. Yuck.

Everything else with it looks pretty nice. Very much love the ancillary streetscaping and transit improvements to Galen; they're all long overdue. But that is too high a parking ratio for a site that literally overlooks a semi-major bus depot with high-frequency fan-outs in all directions and directly aspires to be 8 blocks from an Urban Rail station. It's dumping more cars on an already way too congested thoroughfare in direct blunting effect to the transit improvements. That's the wrong reasoning to base a Galen corridor improvements plan on. Given what transit improvements--RUR/Urban Rail @ Newton Corner, BRT-ization of the 71, rebuild of Watertown Garage next door into a major West region Yellow Line frequency-increaser--could very well be locked into a MassDOT budgeting CIP by the time this thing is erected and ready to lease, the design needs to way more aggressively reflect where the mode shares of its environs are immediately trending. As is, that's a lazy Alewife-baseline parking ratio for planning brains stuck in neutral.

Needs further revision. This is a "THINK, damnit!" moment where the developers + City really need to project ahead 10 years to the moving target of where H2O Sq. mode shares are going to be (or should be going to be if sustainability was the overriding goal). Hint: the future doesn't pigeonhole Exit 17 as the gravitational singularity of their universe to the unfortunate degree it is right now today.
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Strictly anecdotal but perhaps illuminating: my oldest used to be in daycare just 500 yards west of the Galen/Nonantum bus depot. I'd take them on the 71 bus to get to daycare, then after depositing them, I'd start walking to the Galen/Nonantum depot to grab one of the 500-series to Downtown.

Sometimes, I'd get anxious, thinking I'd just miss a bus that was exiting the depot to get on the Pike. But then I'd remember: it was essentially impossible to NOT catch up to a 500-series bus exiting the depot in the morning, as 3 or 4 would invariably be jammed-up in the horrific rush-hour traffic crawling uphill on Galen to try to squeeze onto the Pike--and thus you could always catch up to one of them by walking up Galen. And I do mean walking--a regular, 3 mph gait.

So to be more precise: if you started walking from the Galen/Nontanum bus depot at, say, 8:05 am, at the same time a 504 or whichever was exiting the depot, you could always beat it, at a normal 3 mph walking pace, walking uphill to the Bertucci's at the corner of Pearl, 700 yards away. And you could frequently beat it to the Newton Corner rotary bus shelter, another 200 yards up Galen, based on how things were lining-up.

Which is to say: "THINK, damnit," indeed.
 
They also appear to be planning for a second phase to replace the two story building on Water St.
 
RandomWalk said:
They also appear to be planning for a second phase to replace the two story building on Water St.
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...which will undoubtedly baseline the same too-high parking ratio as its next-door neighbor, further compounding the problem.

This shouldn't be a big fix. Look at transpo trending vs. where the neighborhood wants to be...take red pen to P1 level and backfill it with more lobby square footage...keep P2/basement level stet @ around 160 spaces, and you're good. Ratio is appropriately lowered to incumbent transit and 'easy-reach' this-decade transit improvements; the adjacent developments follow suit and stake themselves to the same right-sized TOD-leaning lower ratios.

Emphasis: "Shouldn't be" big. Unfortunately we know all too well what old habits die hard. This is going to suck hard if they carry through with this ratio to build, because once they stake that as the baseline it's going to be nigh impossible to curb. The next-door parcel will do the same, and so will every other potential parcel flip to Newton Corner. More Pike over-centricity, more cars shoved onto a corridor that already can't manage what it's got. Despite all the rich array of transit options, Alewife brainrot locks itself in before they even know what they've done to their future. For a city that's still on the learning curve on doing density right, they need to be picking up on this problem fast/now and pushing back for corrective action on the parking ratios. Constructive criticism of this project's design must start now at the muni level.
 
Watertown is a stubbornly provincial place, which insists that it’s still entirely a streetcar suburb.
 
RandomWalk said:
Watertown is a stubbornly provincial place, which insists that it’s still entirely a streetcar suburb.
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It's also supremely weird that Watertown possesses a tiny little sliver of land on the south side of the Charles River, which this parcel is embedded in. The vast majority of Watertown's southern boundary more-or-less follows the contours of the mighty Chuck--but here, it was like the Watertown Puritans were thinking in the 1630s along military lines, e.g., "we must establish a beachhead against these ferocious Newtonians and the commanding position they've fortified on the Bertucci's/Hopsters plateau, otherwise we'll be thrown back across the Charles and utterly annihilated." Can't make planning in the Watertown Square area any easier...
 
DBM said:
It's also supremely weird that Watertown possesses a tiny little sliver of land on the south side of the Charles River, which this parcel is embedded in. The vast majority of Watertown's southern boundary more-or-less follows the contours of the mighty Chuck--but here, it was like the Watertown Puritans were thinking in the 1630s along military lines, e.g., "we must establish a beachhead against these ferocious Newtonians and the commanding position they've fortified on the Bertucci's/Hopsters plateau, otherwise we'll be thrown back across the Charles and utterly annihilated." Can't make planning in the Watertown Square area any easier...
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Watertown used to be a massively large land-area municipality, and #2 in Massachusetts Bay Colony population after Boston because of it. All of Waltham and parts of Cambridge (Mt. Auburn/cemeteries/riverbank), large portion of Belmont, sliver of Weston and Lincoln (via Waltham) were eventually torn away from it between the 1710's and 1850's...Weston the first and Belmont the last territorial cedes. I gather the Newton border has always been pretty firm (Newton Corner was never under anyone else's jurisdiction), but otherwise the sum total of ship-navigable Charles outside of City of Boston was contained in Watertown so that's why it breaks the way it does.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Watertown used to be a massively large land-area municipality, and #2 in Massachusetts Bay Colony population after Boston because of it. All of Waltham and parts of Cambridge (Mt. Auburn/cemeteries/riverbank), large portion of Belmont, sliver of Weston and Lincoln (via Waltham) were eventually torn away from it between the 1710's and 1850's...Weston the first and Belmont the last territorial cedes. I gather the Newton border has always been pretty firm (Newton Corner was never under anyone else's jurisdiction), but otherwise the sum total of ship-navigable Charles outside of City of Boston was contained in Watertown so that's why it breaks the way it does.
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18th Century claim concerning fishing rights. Traded for some land downriver, apparently.

 
I love Watertown been working here for 35 years now, it’s changing fast especially along arsenal st , wd luv to see the Watertown mall replaced with???
 
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