Sizing Up Boston's Landscape and Cityscape: Year End Roses and Radishes for 2000By Jane Holtz Kay "You could finish the Big Dig faster with a spoon," says the billboard of the year from the Brigham's ice cream folks as the scooping of the Central Artery goes on ... and on. Boston's longest running de-edifice complex may seem endless but the undertaking beneath the city is not the only noteworthy event as the new millennium marks the cresting of the so-called Era of Affluenza. To score the peaks and valleys of the year, we cast our votes (or chads and cheers), for the following baker's dozen prizes on the landscape and cityscape. Scrooge Citation for Cultural Neglect Boston counts out bucks for ballplayers and cash for conventioneers, but it's coals for the city's Opera House. This endangered Beaux Art beauty, the marbled glory of moviedom, flounders for lack of a minimal $300,000 to fix its leaky roof. Even as city theatergoers starve for a large and luxurious edifice, the Opera House is close to crashing in the winter weather. Humbug to the myopic, Nimby neighbors and foot-dragging city. But more. A prayer that this culturally-challenged city and its citizens will provide the pittance. Triple Crown for Community Character The Bay State's farflung communities--some 351 cities and towns--get the chance to save their piece of the planet with the passage of the Community Preservation Act. Designed to protect their greenery and history, pushed for years by environmental, preservation and affordable housing advocates and boosted by the legislature's matching funds, the law was finally taken through the goal post by environmental secretary Robert Durand‹heading to local ballot boxes to get the final stamp. Pincushion Prize for Cellular Slowdown Will there be a hill or town immune from these looming cell towers? Running rampant, the soaring phone-servers perch over the landscape, decking birds on their flight and powering the nattering classes to menace hapless pedestrians. Notwithstanding, the ever-advancing one-armed cellular bandits, those witless drivertalkers hooked to their fix got a comeuppance this year as Brookline outlawed the breed. Stitch in Time Saves the Neighborhood Citation Pressing forward from the dim days of swipe and hype when old neighborhoods were leveled for new housing, Boston's Department of Neighborhood Development has tucked much-need housing into old corners and vacant lots of the city. Orchestrated by director Charlotte Richie, the department has preserved and enhanced battered streets with agreeable‹and affordable‹settlements in Dorchester and Roxbury at Erie Ellington, Garrison-Trotter and Back of the Hill. Inviting porches, articulated bays, sculpted columns and detailed rooftop cornices atop new three-deckers and multi-family units charm the eye and upgrade the neighborhoods as their tribe increases. Demolition Derby For Crashed Dreams Boston's South Station is on the block, its transportation function in danger, its splendid terminal threatened with gutting by a 47-story tower. Blame Texan Gerald Hines who looks down on Boston from the heights of his tower in Texas' pollution capital for this architectural and engineering outrage. Coddled by the developer-driven BRA and boding ill for the promise of the off-and-running Acela and North-South Rail Link, this is the most destructive plan to hit town since the Garden and North Station capitulated to the last millennium's avarice. Scrubbed Bather Beach Button With sixty percent of the state's waterways potentially unsafe and untested, yet devoid of "NO SWIMMING" notices, safe bathing hasn't been a day at the beach in the Bay State. Despite the Boston Harbor cleanup downtown, raw sewage was still bobbing from other sewer systems into the shores of the state's lakes and ponds, polluting the "swimmable" beaches. Credit the Environmental League and the Surfriders Association for securing the beaches bill that alerts the bathers. Double Turncoat for Dark-of-Night Demolition Historic architecture took the hindmost as "preservation philanthropist" Edward (Ned) Johnson, heir to the family (Fidelity) business, orchestrated the flattening of Salem's handsome, arched brick Armory 1908 headhouse. In the name of providing a "view corridor" i.e. a distant perspective for Moshe Safdie's new Peabody-Essex museum across the street, the injuring parties violated a binding memorandum of agreement by leveling the building. Left behind: a soul-less lot--a keen reminder of the parking lot similarly bequeathed to Boston by this preservation paragon who bulldozed Gridley J.F.Bryant's Devonshire Street brownstone for a "park" for his personal chariot. Roll Back the Road-mongers Prize for Perseverance They thought they couldŠ they thought they could Šand the Jamaica Plain activists did it. With the auto-oriented "T" throwing obstacles and lifting up the E-line's last lap of rails at Heath Street, the Arborway Corridor Committee and Veterans Hospital hung tough and got the wantonly-removed rail restored. Now it's on to the critical struggle to get the self-destructing "T" management to honor the Big Dig pledge to bring streetcars back to Jamaica Plain's streets‹and to their hard-pressed Washington Street Corridor Coalition colleagues, too. Packing Crate Prize for Big Box Takeover Pack up Somerville Mayor Kelly Gay for bowing to asphalt-wrapped Big Box store sprawl instead of creating a walkable annex to her city. Located at the crossroads of two transit lines in the densest, most up-scaling, least-sprawling city in the state, Somerville's barren Assembly Square could merit its "assembly" nomenclature, in the well-wrought mixed-use design espoused by the Mystic View Task Force. Instead of going for its plan to bring in 30,000 jobs and 30 acres of park and $30 million a year in eventual tax revenue, the mayor literally locked her door to the advocates and opening it to the champion-sized chain stores. Golden Slipper for Salvation Boston's most blighted brownfields, those Cinderella sites of toxic waste, are beginning to get a scrubbing on two sides of the waters of Chelsea Creek by the Chelsea Creek Action Group. In East Boston, the Neighborhood Organization of Affordable Housing (NOA) is pushing the Hess oil corporation to clean its former tank farm for good development while transforming 4.5 tainted acres next door into a waterfront park. In Chelsea, the bottom-of-the-pit paved over Parkway Plaza and degraded Mill Creek will get a community life as a restored marsh, courtesy the Chelsea Greenspace and Recreation Committee. Battle Star for Field of Fenway Dreams Besieged by the Goliath owners of Fenway Park grazing off the public turf; assaulted by their academic neighbors -- Boston University extinguishing Kenmore Square rowhouses; Northeastern threatening Hillel House-- the populist Davids (and Dianas) have stayed the course, sustaining the existing ballpark. From the Sears Roebuck makeover into the "Landmark Center," to the Fenway Studios saved from the shadows of Millennium Partners, to the civilized-scale structures and storefronts, the neighborhood activists have helped rejuvenate the embattled neighborhood. Deck the Schools with Boughs of History Janey and Johnny can walk to school, courtesy new, little-noted legislation bolstering the neighborhood schoolhouse. Policymakers who once forked out millions to plant schools in the outskirts and nothing to revive historic school buildings in the core of walkable neighborhoods, finally reversed the handout. Credit Historic Massachusetts for pushing to stem the flight to the outskirts and preserving the handsome but down-at-the-heels schools that anchor their neighborhoods. Windmill for Political Pushover Environmental Don Quixote's tilted at windmills and wound up tilting to the powers that be as the Fan Pier Seaport plan secured the signature of these weary (or waterlogged) defenders. Shorn of any chance for true livability by the mayor's slighting of housing to make-a-deal with South Boston, and deprived of good planning by the BRA's relegating design to the backroom, this latest plop-in project adds its faux lagoon to the faux historicism, ham-fisted hotel and subsidized convention center similarly shoved into this transit-deprived, design-deficient waterfront. No Pritzger prize for caving to wind-churning towers and non-urban layouts in a scattered, superficial salt-and-pepper plan. Just a brief New Year's wish that the environmental energy generated in the process might light a new vision for 200l. Originally published in The Boston Globe, January 1, 2001.
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