They Fixed Downtown Too

[ablarc]

THEY FIXED DOWNTOWN TOO.

My mom didn?t drive. We lived a couple of blocks up the hill from the end of the Boston College Green Line.

Every week she took the trolley downtown to go shopping. There was a cornucopia of department stores: Jordan?s, Filene?s with that great Basement, Gilchrist?s, Kennedy?s, Stearn?s, White?s, Raymond?s, several others?

Each store targeted a market in the spectrum of class from elite to poor folk.

My mom came back on the trolley bulging with bargains. It was the best and easiest shopping in the world. It wasn?t pretty, there was no climate control, but it was compact and practical, the selection was comprehensive, the bargains were real. And you could get there without driving.

Some of the department stores opened branches in suburban malls.

Then gradually the department stores started closing or changing. The landmark event came when Jordan-Marsh tore down its big old emporium and replaced it with a low-slung, featureless brick box that belonged at a mall. Suburbia had started to invade Downtown with its vapid but scientific building types.

Raymond?s, the low-class department store, closed and got torn down. The crowds grew a little thinner. They stopped using mounted police to keep folks on the sidewalk at Christmastime.

After a time, they built an ugly plastic canopy over the sidewalk of some of the stores, obscuring them with good intentions. The idea was to keep rain off customers? heads --sort of like in a mall.

And a second idea was to actually brand Downtown as a mall. Everyone knew these always succeeded. So they re-branded it ?Downtown Crossing.? They even tried building an indoor mall, Lafayette Place, but though they hired a big-name architect, it was an epic failure: wrong location, wrong configuration, wrong look.

They paved the street in brick and banned cars --leaving the roadway for emergency vehicles to hang around and create a state of ? well, emergency. Permanent emergency. Because they were clearly anticipating something, the place started to look dangerous.

As a mall it wasn?t much good --cold in the winter, hot in the summer, increasingly dirty, infested with punks, police cars and delivery vans. Every year or so, a department store closed. Folks on the sidewalk gradually grew lower class. Parking lots began to proliferate.

After a while a no-man?s-land opened up between what had been a shrinking Downtown shopping district and the contracting Combat Zone. What shops this transition area contained seemed aimed at dealers, pimps and their admirers.

Sack?s first-run movie emporiums closed. Some started showing porn, others just stayed empty or were converted to restaurants. After a while, the porno theaters started to close, together with the strip joints --hounded by the ladies of Chinatown, because their hubbies had become habitu?s.

We all know what happened in 2008-09: big plans gone awry, a soured economy.

Place resembling a war zone.



* * *


Then they figured out how to fix it.

A bright newcomer named John A. Keith came out of nowhere to defeat Menino. Keith fired the entire BRA, then personally selected a small brain-trust of like-minded free-thinkers --free, that is, from the stifling effects of unexamined book knowledge and academic norms. When they talked, these folks sounded much like some members of ArchBoston.

They went to work to fix Downtown.

First they threw out the absurd moniker, ?Downtown Crossing.? This put everyone on notice that the Washington Street area would be knitted back into the city as an integral part.

But however glorious its past might have been, Downtown came back in an all-new guise. Its newfound success was based not on targeting the working class of Dorchester and Eastie --these folks had long defected to Wal-Mart in their cars-- nor, for that matter, on demographic considerations at all.

Though --like customers of Copley Place, Harvard Square or Newbury Street-- they were from the entire metropolitan region-- customers of the revived Downtown arrived mostly by subway. Most city-dwellers started their shopping trips on transit, while suburbanites switched at new-built transit-stop garages on all four lines.

And they crossed all boundaries of class, these metropolitan Bostonians, because they were all attracted by a new trait that Downtown had never traded on, because it had never possessed the trait. And because much of Downtown was missing, this trait was so extravagantly slathered on in new construction that they all found it even more magnetic than Copley, Harvard and Newbury.

The new Downtown is urban, but really it always was, along with its three leading competitors. But because so much of it is newly purpose-built, it blows the others away with something they couldn?t match without extensive rebuilding. For the one thing John A. Keith and his cohorts demanded of all new construction in Downtown was that it had to be ? BEAUTIFUL!

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0040.jpg

It made people feel special to go there.

Mid-block passageways were developed:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0080.jpg

And numerous of Downtown?s tiny alleys were upgraded, such as City Hall Avenue:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0120.jpg

Shopfronts entice with slick design:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0160.jpg

Arcades connect to subway entrances:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0200.jpg

It makes people feel special to go there. They want to hang around a while:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0240.jpg


Though Downtown?s building stock is good, it?s not always cheerful. Dabs of color can enliven drab streetscape:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0280.jpg

Amazing what can be accomplished with a well-executed mural and a few flowers:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0320.jpg

The criterion for hokeyness was excellence of execution. If the execution was excellent, it wasn?t hokey:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0360.jpg

Shops were encouraged to stay open evenings and were plentifully laced with pubs:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0400.jpg

A little streetcar line ran the length of Washington Street from City Hall Plaza to Tufts:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0440.jpg

Arcades and alleys abound in the new Downtown?

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0480.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0520.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0560.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0600.jpg

But at the center of it all, lies the mother of all arcades:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0640.jpg

John Keith?s men figured out how to finance and implement all this. Their specialty is politics.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautifulshopping/0680.jpg


Photos from SSC.

.

[vanshnookenraggen]

I hate to admit it but I am completely ignorant of Lafayette Place. Could someone gimme a history of that?

btw who wrote the first part?

[ablarc]

I hate to admit it but I am completely ignorant of Lafayette Place. Could someone gimme a history of that?
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5063/is_200104/ai_n18440769/

The buildings are still there, but restyled and converted to mostly office use.

btw who wrote the first part?
ablarc, the ruminator.

[Lurker]

It was the BRA's moronic love child with the misguided mission of trying to bring shoppers lost to suburban malls back into the city by building a crummy mall with underground parking.

Several through streets crossing Washington Street were eliminated. The Annex Building to Jordan Marsh along with the old Woolworths, the RH white Department Store, and a few others along Chauncy Street were demolished. All the fabric was replaced with a single superblock development consisting of a mall with a circular circulation path and a Swiss Hotel. The mall was an immediate failure and eventually the space was gutted for the current awkward office/retail setup.

Blocking off the cross streets helped expedite the death of retail on Washington's side streets and isolated a chunk of downtown both pedestrian and automotive traffic from Tremont and Washington Streets. Demolition wiped out the historic street wall along Washington Street between Summer and Avery Streets and left us with the Hayward Place lot.

Now some dolt wants to add two towers over the joke. The whole blight deserves to be leveled and redeveloped along the old street configuration.

[ablarc]

It was the BRA's moronic love child with the misguided mission of trying to bring shoppers lost to suburban malls back into the city by building a crummy mall with underground parking.
"Crummy" is one of the operative words to explain Lafayette Place's grand belly-flop. Designed by Giurgola in ascetic but uninspired Brutalism, it was anything but beautiful.

You can do a successful mall in the city; Copley Place is evidence of that.

But you have to get the circulation right; it needs to be a shortcut from one place to another that people frequently feel the need to link on foot.

And you have to make it look good by prevailing standards.

[Ron Newman]

Copley Place isn't exactly attractive on the outside, though. All of the design was (and is) focused inwards.

[PaulC]

Now some dolt wants to add two towers over the joke.

Is this something new?

[JohnAKeith]

John Keith or John Galt??!

[ablarc]

Are they different?

[blade_bltz]

I would hope so.

[kennedy]

Why does it have to be indoors? I don't like the indoor pictures, no matter how pretty. Downtown shouldn't be a froofy luxury district, that's Newbury Streets territory. It should hold the same purpose your mom used it for-the people! Not everyone can afford what's on Newbury St., nor do they need it. They do need a supermarket, a department store, and a ton of specialty boutiques and services, all accessed by the subway.

Sure, it can be beautiful. Elegant even. But extravagant on the scale of some of those pictures? Not at all. Not at all!

Open up the streets, renovate the subway station, finish the projects on hold, and start some major infill with middle-class housing and necessary retail/services. This is what the middle class needs to live in the city, this is what they want. No city can survive without a strong middle class.

What person would want to live in the suburbs when they can have it all in the city? A supermarket, right down the elevator. A laundromat next door. A wonderful take-out pizza shop run by the neighbors across the street. The Boston Common, the most spectacular backyard anyone could ask for!

Why the hell do we need a fancy-shmancy shopping mall with gilded door handles to fix Downtown? All those alleys and pubs can exist without exorbitant wealth. In fact, they're better without it!

[ablarc]

The content of the post was that whatever they do Downtown, it should be BEAUTIFUL (which that area presently is not). That's all.

I said nothing about luxury. My contention was simply that if they made it beautiful, people would come. People travel to beautiful places to experience them. I'm sure you do too.

[kennedy]

I do. Most of those places, are places that people only visit-not live. Downtown can be a beautiful place for people to live in, not to visit. Vegas is beautiful on the outside, but to people on the inside, those that live there, it's quite ugly.

Perhaps if people visit, then they'll want to live there. I'm saying the intention should be to create a healthy neighborhood, not a beautiful one.

[ablarc]

I'm saying the intention should be to create a healthy neighborhood, not a beautiful one.
...because the two are, of course, mutually exclusive! ;)


(It's why Back Bay is so unlivable.)


:)

[kennedy]

This is heading toward a chicken-and-egg argument. Which comes first, the beauty or the livability?

[czsz]

Rarity is the most common denominator of beauty. Make downtown too unique, make downtown too rare, make downtown too desirable, and it will be the new Newbury Street of the mayah's dreams.

Maybe if the whole city were "beautiful"...maybe if all cities, plural, were beautiful, we wouldn't have this problem. But they're not, they won't be, and we do.

But what does it matter if we're giving up on urban life for these losers anyway:

Its newfound success was based not on targeting the working class of Dorchester and Eastie --these folks had long defected to Wal-Mart in their cars

It's hard to read this thread and not think of class. Practically none of the European street scenes depicted in the first post are remotely affordable places. And the dream is to attract "metropolitan Boston" - those fled suburbanites who would only ever consider a trip to the city to wet their feet on Boylston, Newbury, and their malls (I guess some malls are successful, somehow).

[Ron Newman]

I like most of what is written here but I disagree with roofing over blocks of streets to create a giant arcade or galleria. Streets should usually be outdoors.

[kennedy]

I like most of what is written here but I disagree with roofing over blocks of streets to create a giant arcade or galleria. Streets should usually be outdoors.

Yes.

[ablarc]

This is heading toward a chicken-and-egg argument. Which comes first, the beauty or the livability?
Not sure I understand the question. It's not either/or, and it's not 'which came first'.

Beacon Hill is beautiful and livable. Back Bay is beautiful and livable. South End is beautiful and livable.

South End in 1969 was only livable if you could tolerate crime, rats, and dirty, abandoned, run-down, formerly-beautiful buildings. If you could see past these things, you could recognize it was potentially beautiful. That potential was realized by gentrification and development of vacant lots.

Like the South End, most potentially beautiful places have been gentrified.

Some would say East Boston is kinda livable, though it's not beautiful.

Can you think of any place that's beautiful but not livable?

Not sure there's much relationship between beauty and livability beyond the obvious fact that all other things being equal, people would rather live in a beautiful place than an ugly place. So if a place has potential to be beautiful, folks with money tend to improve it.

Beautiful places built from scratch are rare these days. That's what makes Seaside so special.

We're talking about residential districts. A somewhat beautiful, relatively recent shopping district is Beverly Hills.

No reason you can't build to be beautiful.

[kennedy]

Point taken.

I'm just saying, building for beauty certainly won't guarantee livability. It's a lot more likely to end up with a beautiful result if you build for livability. My subdivision is beautiful, not livable. IMO, Seaside is ugly as hell. No better than this (http://www.newtownatstcharles.com/).

[ablarc]

My subdivision is beautiful, not livable.
Sorry about that. You probably wish it were urban.

IMO, Seaside is ugly as hell.
You should visit. You'd probably find it charming.

You can spend a week and never once get in your car.

[Ron Newman]

Davis Square is quite liveable, but not beautiful. Ditto for most of Central Square (excluding the YMCA, post office, and City Hall at its far end). Ditto for Inman Square.

Jamaica Plain is beautiful, but largely due to its green landscape (both natural and artificial) rather than its buildings.

[Beton Brut]

Some would say East Boston is kinda livable, though it's not beautiful.

I'm trying the best I can ablarc. I worked in the garden most of the weekend. My neighbors were out too.

Like many of Boston's neighborhoods, East Boston is a mixed bag. The beautiful Victorians on Eagle Hill have been slathered in vinyl and aluminum. Thanks Massport!

I wish we could take a lesson from other, more successful urban villages in greater Boston.

Davis Square is quite liveable, but not beautiful. Ditto for most of Central Square (excluding the YMCA, post office, and City Hall at its far end). Ditto for Inman Square.

Jamaica Plain is beautiful, but largely due to its green landscape (both natural and artificial) rather than its buildings.

Beauty is important, but energy and a sense of purpose can trump it. Ron's examples are all good ones.

But what does it matter if we're giving up on urban life for these losers anyway:

Its newfound success was based not on targeting the working class of Dorchester and Eastie --these folks had long defected to Wal-Mart in their cars

It's hard to read this thread and not think of class.

I see my Brazilian, Columbian, and Central American neighbors on the T most days. Many hop off the Blue Line at State Street. At the moment, they may be the last best hope for Downtown Crossing.

People of my parents' generation are guilty of getting sucked into auto-culture. Look no further than Saugus. Two years ago, they built a Target in Beachmont; it's nearly a mile walk to the T. Brilliant!

To be fair, the ascendancy of the suburban mall (and the subsequent abandonment of Downtown by the working and middle class) was likely brought about by this:

As a mall it wasn?t much good --cold in the winter, hot in the summer, increasingly dirty, infested with punks, police cars and delivery vans. Every year or so, a department store closed. Folks on the sidewalk gradually grew lower class. Parking lots began to proliferate.

This took place during:
a period in American history in which cities were not in demand.

[pelhamhall]

The politics of the area is interesting too, because you have had a number of developers HUNGRY to invest in this area, but few have been successful other than Boss Menino's good friend Tony Pangaro, who was able to build the Ritz towers and was then handed a parking lot for his troubles.

With a kiss of Menino's ring, Tony was unstoppable, other would-be developers in the area just haven't been so lucky.

The racist power-brokers in Chinatown have been fighting tooth and nail to make sure "Downtown Crossing" doesn't become desirable to "those" people that they don't want moving into "their" neighborhood.

Sure it sounds funny, but in this case, the "those people" are whites (or more specifically, non-Chinese). It's documented racism and it's astounding.

So the area withers where it could have an additional 3-4,000 residents over the past decade in shiny new buildings. A few Menino Stumps have arisen, but nothing special.

The increased demographics would have made all of ablarcs ruminations financially possible and even probable.

But no... Menino won't mess with Chinatown, and Chinatown supported him strongly... although it will be VERY interesting if Chinatown comes out in force for Sam Yoon this time around. For all Menino has done for Chinatown, they still may vote for Yoon based on their racism. They will punished for that when Menino is re-elected, and maybe then we'll start seeing some gleaming new towers steam-rolling over neighborhood opposition.

[czsz]

Racist or otherwise, I tend to sympathize with the Chinatown NIMBYs more than others. I'd rather see Chinatown preserved as long as possible as an ethnic neighborhood than see it steamrolled by condo towers. If anything, DTC might be better off being taken over by Chinatown rather than vice versa.

Menino wasted his efforts trying to push through buildings in Chinatown proper, some of which never materialized. It would have been better to compromise in order to fast-track sites that really needed filling, like Hayward Place.

[pelhamhall]

I'd like to see Chinatown turned into the North End - which is Italian in flavor, but not in substance.

I don't believe any ethnic group (or any group at all) has the right to live in any part of the city. I think that's racist.

The city changes, I welcome change. Field's Corner was all Irish once... now its almost all Vietnamese. Good. I welcome this. But don't tell me in thirty years the Vietnamese will be clamoring for their "right" to live in Field's Corner.

The North End wasn't always Italian, Chinatown wasn't always Chinese.

To cede downtown crossing to one ethnic group seems counter-productive, especially when viewed in the light of ablarc's original post.

[czsz]

Let me clarify - I don't want to freeze Chinatown in time. I understand that cities have a "constant of change".

But the kind of change that happens downtown has hardly been productive for stimulating, ethnic neighborhoods. Let's not pretend that there's just going to be ethnic turnover if Chinatown goes. There would be glass condo towers, Starbuckses, and whatever the post-recession equivalent of investment bankers are. My preference for Chinatown isn't racist, it's pro-urban.

So while I don't think Chinatown has a "right" to survive, I would prefer Menino at least try to stop actively trying to kill it by sponsoring luxury developments there. Boston has plenty of other spaces for these.

And I would love to see the kind of drive, ambition, and appreciation for dense urbanity that helped build Chinatown extend to the improvement of Downtown Crossing, rather than the large-plot, all-chips-in strategy the city continues to pursue there.

[pelhamhall]

Well, I respectfully disagree, downtown Boston is a great place for tall glass condo towers. There should be a Chinese restaurant row or two, some specialty Chinese retail, etc... but that's it. No one ethnic group should be allowed a strangehold on the entire crucial core of Boston. These are the people who have rallies at the W Hotel to force business to hire people based solely on their Chinese ancestry. These are people who fight hard (and often win) to keep Downtown Crossing undesirable. I bet if after this election they swing to Yoon, Menino will send in the bulldozers in earnest. Will be interesting to see.

[Ron Newman]

I'd much rather have 10 Chinese restaurants and groceries than one condo tower replacing them. The former contribute to urban life and benefit everyone.

I thought we were for micro-sized development and against megablocks? The existing Chinatown is about as micro as you can get.

[ablarc]

^ ... with a big ol' parking lot at its core.

[czsz]

There should be a Chinese restaurant row or two, some specialty Chinese retail, etc... but that's it. No one ethnic group should be allowed a strangehold on the entire crucial core of Boston.

I just spent a whole post explaining how this was about urbanism, not ethnicity. As Ron points out, the Chinese in Chinatown have been better at preserving and cultivating urbanism than Boss Menino and his developer friends. I wouldn't care if they were West Indian or Botswanan or a rainbow coalition. I would just rather, at this point, turn over DTC to an entrepreneurial army of immigrants than to the people who brought us Kendall, the Seaport, and the tragedy of Filene's. They wouldn't be able to fill the parking lots (or maybe they would - think stores spilling into them, and markets, evolving into dense alleyways like those that were once there), but they would at least be able to fill the empty storefronts.

[blade_bltz]

^ ... with a big ol' parking lot at its core.

Yet Tyler St somehow manages to be one of the most exciting in the entire city.

Plus, there's a mural in that parking lot. More than the Seaport can say.

[choo]

I have done some research on race and urban space, and it is factually wrong to say that Chinatown or the North End were ever entirely one ethnicity. The North End at its height (as well as the Italian section in Milwaukee) were at there highest points only 60 % italian. The rest was a mix. That being said, Chinatown as currently constituted is not overwhelmed. The Chinese have a pluralism in the area.

Interestingly, the only areas in the country that have ever been dominated by a single group are black neighborhoods, (i.e South Side of Chicago). They were, and in many cases still are, over 80 or 90% black as a result of discriminatory housing and funding practices. Food for thought.

I would love for Chinatown to grow and develop while maintaining its distinctiveness and integrity. Condo towers can be incorporated, but we should not rush to create tears in a neighborhood when if you head in the other direction there are plenty of holes in the ground and parking lots that would suit a developer (even one not in Menino's pocket)

[Ron Newman]

the only areas in the country that have ever been dominated by a single group are black neighborhoods

What about Southie before gentrification? Or East Los Angeles? I don't think it's hard to find overwhelmingly Latino neighborhoods in Florida, Texas, California, and other states.

[czsz]

Black neighborhoods haven't been static, either. From Wikipedia's entry on South Side, Chicago:

With its factories, steel mills, and meat-packing plants, the South Side saw a sustained period of immigration which began around the 1840s and continued through World War II. Irish, Italian, Polish and Lithuanian immigrants, in particular, settled in neighborhoods adjacent to industrial zones. African Americans resided in Bronzeville (around 35th and State Streets) in an area called "the Black Belt", and after World War II they spread across the South Side. The Black Belt, which gave a new meaning to the term ghetto, arose from discriminatory real estate practices and the threat of violence in nearby ethnic white neighborhoods.[27]

Post-Reconstruction black southerners migrated to Chicago in large numbers and caused the African American population to nearly quadruple from 4,000 to 15,000 between 1870 and 1890.[28] The population was concentrated on the South Side.

In the 20th century, the numbers expanded with the Great Migration as African Americans voted with their feet and left the South's lynchings, disfranchisement, poor job opportunities and limited education. By 1910 the black population in Chicago reached 40,000, with 78% residing in the South Side's "Black Belt". It extended for 30 blocks along State Street and was only a few blocks wide.[28] The South Side had problems but was also the place where African Americans created a vibrant community with their own businesses, music, food and culture. Compared to their previous conditions in the rural South, many saw opportunities for themselves and their children in Chicago.

After some time, as more blacks moved into the South Side, descendants of earlier immigrants, such as ethnic Irish, began to move out. Later housing pressures and civic unrest caused more whites to leave the city, a complexity of what was a succession of different ethnic groups. Older residents of means moved to newer housing developed in suburbs as new migrants entered the city.[29][30], driving further demographic changes in the south side.

The South Side has had a history of racial segregation. During the 1920s and 1930s, housing cases on the South Side created legal debate in cases such as Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940), which went to the U. S. Supreme Court. It challenged racial restrictions in the Washington Park Subdivision.

Later, the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway added a physical barrier between some white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods. It was the divide between Bridgeport (traditionally Irish) and Bronzeville.

This is a fairly typical story; the same could be said for Harlem and many other black urban neighborhoods across the American north.

[choo]

I did not mean to imply that there is or was a lack of dynamism in these or any of the neighborhoods.

My main point was that as these immigrant groups came into cities and settled in ethnic enclaves were more diverse than we historically designate.

My follow up point about black communities was to show that they did not break out of these groups, and were in fact made even denser and more homogeneous because of racially discriminatory housing practices. This is a legacy we now inherit, look at the minority housing, or lack thereof on the south shore, which is overwhelmingly "white".

[ablarc]

Several decades ago, my friend Bill made repeated attempts to rent apartments for rent in New York's Chinatown, but he was always rebuffed. Finally, a kindly Chinese landlord put an end to it: "Have you looked at yourself?" he asked Bill, who was blond.

[ablarc]

Yet Tyler St somehow manages to be one of the most exciting in the entire city.
If this is true, what does that say about the city as a whole?