Worcester Infill and Developments

DZH22 said:
I focus first on walkable neighborhoods and I wouldn't want to walk anywhere in Worcester beyond the downtown. I'm not going to drive 50 miles to see a nice new intersection of 6 story nondescript whatever-type buildings. So as a visitor, if a city's downtown sucks, then the city sucks. That's kind of how it works.

Also, the rest of the growth is because you have so many empty buildings for conversions. Architecturally, preservation is both the most critical as well as most boring step when a city is trying to turn itself around.
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Sounds like what you're describing is architectural tourism, not actually just visiting a city to do something.

Plenty of the people I run into walking around canal or shopping or eating aren't residents. People visit a city to...you know..do something. If architectural tourism is your only reason to visit a city I can understand your position. I don't go to Boston to look at buildings only
 
Development doesn't need to be sexy. It just needs to work for the city.

Are some of these designs meh? Yeah, they're fairly boilerplate. But I'll take "meh" and occupied and redeveloped over vacant/abandoned buildings that are crumbling and parking lots.
 
DZH22 said:
I focus first on walkable neighborhoods and I wouldn't want to walk anywhere in Worcester beyond the downtown.
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I find the Canal District much more pleasant to walk around than Downtown personally..
 
DZH22 said:
For Worcester, 10+ floors.



Bringing the existing buildings back to life is a critical way to revitalize a moribund city like Worcester. Nobody is denying that. However, FROM AN ARCHITECTURAL STANDPOINT that also makes it the most boring phase of the process. Nothing new or different is being added. Basically, you're taking an old building where the original use has run its course, and updating it to make it viable today. That's an awesome thing! It also adds nothing architecturally! The same buildings are still there. The city essentially LOOKS the same, although certain old buildings went from their last legs to a new life (typically as residential).

So the way I see it, most of what's happening doesn't fill in any new blocks or empty lots, or visually change the city. Those buildings that do fill in are the same 4-7 story pieces of junk that are popping up in literally every suburb inside 95 or on 495. Multiple beautiful old churches can't avoid the wrecking ball and are replaced with complete junk.

Now look at a city like Portland, filling in small lots downtown, densifying its footprint, even putting up a new tallest. There's an exciting city in a serious growth phase. The "half our city is comprised of abandoned buildings that need to be converted" phase is over. At this point every year that city seems to get bigger. If I go back to Worcester in 40 years, what will I find? Still all the same buildings, except maybe a few new stores and restaurants? No more beautiful old churches? No new buildings over 10 floors in a 40 year span? Add in that the downtown layout makes walks boring and predictable, and doesn't seem to attract interesting development so really hasn't improved since I first went 20+ years ago. Unless I want to watch minor league baseball or attend a specific event there's no reason to go to Worcester.
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I mean, as I noted in the post you quoted, the board that hands out the Pritzker Prize, the highest award in architecture, disagrees with all of this but you do you boo.
 
found5dollar said:
I mean, as I noted in the post you quoted, the board that hands out the Pritzker Prize, the highest award in architecture, disagrees with all of this but you do you boo.
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Disagrees in what way? What are you talking about? Did Worcester build a bunch of interesting things I have missed in the last 20 years, or did they build a bunch of crap while managing to retain a few of the buildings that were worth saving? So your big argument becomes they didn't tear down everything, so that's good enough?

Again, if you are still stuck in the rehab phase because half the stock in your city is falling apart, that's all well and good for revitalization. It also puts you in your place, a city that just isn't "there" yet and may never be. If not for Springfield, Lawrence, Fall River, and Brockton you'd be like the Flint of Massachusetts. At least in your favor, your city is a solid step up from Lawrence, Fall River, Brockton, and possibly Springfield. Massachusetts scrapes the bottom of the barrel in enough places that Worcester gets to look better by comparison.

Blackbird said:
I find the Canal District much more pleasant to walk around than Downtown personally..
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Just took a look at this. Seems like a very small area to be honest. Like once around the block and that's the whole Canal District as far as I can tell.

This brings me to another thing I noticed about Worcester, is that it has small pockets of cool stuff but they end very quickly. If it was all consolidated it would be a somewhat solid urban area. Instead it's so fractured that the whole does not add up to the sum of its parts.

Where I am, I could probably walk down 500 miles of safe/different interconnected streets for an essentially infinite amount of unique walks. The downtown areas and local squares flow into each other, rather than feeling totally separated like in Worcester. Worcester's downtown has fairly clear boundaries where it just doesn't run directly into the next urban area. I could maybe get 2 good miles in before I saw everything there was to see. For the peripheral areas discussed, how long does it take to walk the entirety of them, 5-10 minutes? That's just so boring. It reminds me of the southern cities the way they abruptly die 1 street beyond downtown.

I'm sure I'll be back in Worcester at some point within the next few years, just because I really enjoy driving out into the hinterlands once in a while. It seems like downtown will offer the same blah experience it always has, so I'll have to take those extra 5 minutes to check out the other areas being touted. But again, the whole point goes back to downtown. It's stale, nothing large is going up to visually alter the balance in any way, and it's slowly but surely losing some really nice churches. It's not vibrant, and it's not visually growing even if improvements are being made to existing stock.
 
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DZH22 said:
Just took a look at this. Seems like a very small area to be honest. Like once around the block and that's the whole Canal District as far as I can tell.
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The busy area of canal these days is a few blocks. from Madison to Green, to harding to water street. and area about the same size as the CBD.... what did you look at? google maps?
 
ctsketch said:
The busy area of canal these days is a few blocks. from Madison to Green, to harding to water street. and area about the same size as the CBD.... what did you look at? google maps?
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So you're including this wasteland as part of the area? Is this where Polar Park sits now?
www.google.com

Google Maps

Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.
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It looks like the triangle formed by Green Street and Harding, starting at Kelly Square.
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2522859,-71.7974936,213a,35y,3.75h,70.32t/data=!3m1!1e3

So that's about 10 minutes to do the whole triangle. Then what? I guess walk across one of the highway bridges into that residential neighborhood to the immediate Southeast?
 
DZH22 said:
So you're including this wasteland as part of the area? Is this where Polar Park sits now?
www.google.com

Google Maps

Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.
www.google.com www.google.com

It looks like the triangle formed by Green Street and Harding, starting at Kelly Square.
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2522859,-71.7974936,213a,35y,3.75h,70.32t/data=!3m1!1e3

So that's about 10 minutes to do the whole triangle. Then what? I guess walk across one of the highway bridges into that residential neighborhood to the immediate Southeast?
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First of all, that street view is dated, not an empty wasteland there anymore, it has the parking garage mostly used by ballpark visitors now, so you have some foot traffic up and down the new Green Island Blvd these days on game day and that corner is a construction site, 5 over 2 going up. sure if you speed walk the triangle and skip all the streets in between you could do it in 10 minutes, but I am talking about the length of Madison, Green, Harding, Water from Kelley to Downtown are the most walked areas and busiest pedestrian areas these days and all the streets that connect them.

canal.PNG
 
I won’t argue that most of the new/proposed construction in Worcester is just average in terms of architectural appeal. And that’s OK, given that the city is still in revitalization stage after a long and persistent decline. There won’t be any State Street HQs or St Regis residences in this town. Residents here are wary of large, shiny projects, there was plenty of resistance to the ballpark. Those kind of developments don’t make economic sense. One good example is the proposed Hope Point tower in Providence, which may already be DOA.
Worcester is doing pretty well in rehabbing existing (and gorgeous) old building stock, and many people prefer living in those converted buildings.
There still is plenty of unused or underused real estate everywhere in the city to make an architectural statement once developers thinks it’s appropriate or the planning board has the luxury of getting selective.
Worcester is just further behind in its post-industrial recovery than the Portlands of the world. I remember plenty of blah construction in and around Boston in the late nineties and early aughts. It was a lot of cookie cutter utilitarian and hasn’t aged well at all, but it’s serving its purpose to this day.
 
cubalibre said:
I won’t argue that most of the new/proposed construction in Worcester is just average in terms of architectural appeal. And that’s OK, given that the city is still in revitalization stage after a long and persistent decline. There won’t be any State Street HQs or St Regis residences in this town. Residents here are wary of large, shiny projects, there was plenty of resistance to the ballpark. Those kind of developments don’t make economic sense. One good example is the proposed Hope Point tower in Providence, which may already be DOA.
Worcester is doing pretty well in rehabbing existing (and gorgeous) old building stock, and many people prefer living in those converted buildings.
There still is plenty of unused or underused real estate everywhere in the city to make an architectural statement once developers thinks it’s appropriate or the planning board has the luxury of getting selective.
Worcester is just further behind in its post-industrial recovery than the Portlands of the world. I remember plenty of blah construction in and around Boston in the late nineties and early aughts. It was a lot of cookie cutter utilitarian and hasn’t aged well at all, but it’s serving its purpose to this day.
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I'm in total agreement. Worcester doesn't need flashy architecture projects. It needs infill and projects that activate and stimulate the neighborhoods - things that make the city livable and less looking less desolate. Just because most of our recent developments aren't big and sexy doesn't mean they aren't good for the city.
 
@DZH22 we get it, you hate Worcester and you really want us to know how much you hate Worcester. It's not flashy enough, or walkable enough, or tall enough. Your bias is clearly towards Boston. Enjoy Boston. This conversation is tiring to those of us that actually want to talk about the positive stuff Worcester is doing verse trying to defend and explain why Worcester doesn't suck.
 
ctsketch said:
First of all, that street view is dated, not an empty wasteland there anymore, it has the parking garage mostly used by ballpark visitors now, so you have some foot traffic up and down the new Green Island Blvd these days on game day and that corner is a construction site, 5 over 2 going up. sure if you speed walk the triangle and skip all the streets in between you could do it in 10 minutes, but I am talking about the length of Madison, Green, Harding, Water from Kelley to Downtown are the most walked areas and busiest pedestrian areas these days and all the streets that connect them.

View attachment 27489
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Out of sheer curiosity, when do people think we will get updated imagery of Worcester from Google Maps / Earth? Based on what I can see, I'd almost say it predates COVID as Polar Park groundbreaking, and Kelley Sq is untouched. Since then, there have been non-trivial completions, (The park itself being a pretty major one) and infill has been happening, but it sure doesn't look like it from a satellite view.
 
Stlin said:
Out of sheer curiosity, when do people think we will get updated imagery of Worcester from Google Maps / Earth? Based on what I can see, I'd almost say it predates COVID as Polar Park groundbreaking, and Kelley Sq is untouched. Since then, there have been non-trivial completions, (The park itself being a pretty major one) and infill has been happening, but it sure doesn't look like it from a satellite view.
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I've been wondering the same thing myself. It's definitely pre Covid-19 still
 
WormtownNative said:
I'm in total agreement. Worcester doesn't need flashy architecture projects. It needs infill and projects that activate and stimulate the neighborhoods - things that make the city livable and less looking less desolate. Just because most of our recent developments aren't big and sexy doesn't mean they aren't good for the city.
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And height doesn't make a building architecturally significant or flashy. Just dimensionally significant plenty of tall ugly buildings around. Architecturally significant has to mean more than just height
 
Umass Medical appears to be significant. Its not downtown but it is still part of Worcester. Looks like the latest wing had a topping off. UMass Chan Medical School holds topping off ceremony

I grabbed some pics from the webby-sphere. BLD UP. That is a very deep foundation. I'm surprised there are not more photos posted on aB. Is the campus gated from the public?

UMass_Chan_1.jpg
nerb-12-21-update-660.jpg
UMass_Biomed_Worcester.jpeg
 
> Is the campus gated from the public?

nope ... public can pretty much go anywhere. I have to admit, the campus is impressive, it looks more and more like Kendall square, not Worcester.
 
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Does Worcester get all the chopped off height from new Boston towers cause that building in the 3rd photo looks an awful like the missing height from the Winthrop Sq Tower. 🥸
 
dhawkins said:
View attachment 27670
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This is significant. It looks like it belongs in North Point, Boynton Yards (Union), or the outskirts of Kendall. With the higher floor to ceiling heights this is at least the equivalent of a 15-16 story residential. It might win this view going over the bridge.
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Google Maps

Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.
www.google.com www.google.com

I wish downtown could see more larger buildings. Something similar happens in Raleigh, where North Hills siphons off a major amount of construction from downtown. Both cities would benefit from more substance in their downtowns rather than building up the periphery. Raleigh in particular is like a street and a half and then you feel like it's over, yet it's a "major" enough city to have a major sports team (stole the Hartford Whalers). Here's a random shot of North Hills. Look at all that square feet that could have been downtown!
1661277537373.png
 
dhawkins said:
I grabbed some pics from the webby-sphere. BLD UP. That is a very deep foundation. I'm surprised there are not more photos posted on aB. Is the campus gated from the public?
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The developments on the UMass Campus have their own thread, though I haven’t updated it in a while:

UMass Medical Center University Campus | Lake Ave | Worcester

Combining the two current projects on the UMass Campus 1. VA Clinic 2. Research Center
archboston.com
 
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