Allan Appel Photo
As maverick architect Robert Orr received an “urban angel” award he spoke of a devil in the details — of the city’s plan to remake the Route 34 Connector into a project called Downtown Crossing.
Nearly 100 people gathered in the community room of the main branch of the library Thursday night to see Orr (pictured) receive his award from the Urban Design League. The gathering became not just an awards event but also a forum to promote alternative ideas to what critics called the city’s overly car-centric $140 million Downtown Crossing project to fill in part of the Connector, have a developer erect a new biotech building, and link Union Station, the medical district and downtown.
Phase One of that effort is to fill in the Route 34 Connector with two four-lane urban “boulevards” in place of the frontage roads and create between them four developable parcels, the first being Carter Winstanley’s 100 College Street medical and lab facility.
The city won a $16 million federal TIGER grant for this phase of the work. Local and state matches brings a total of $30 million for the project.
Thursday’s amicable but passionate meeting and discussion comes at a time of some urgency: officials say the city’s design plans for Phase One are 30 percent complete and Carter Winstanley is poised to sign a development agreement with the city for his 100 College Street building.
The plan’s critics, many of whom were in the audience, are working strenuously in the Community Development Committee of the Board of Aldermen to pass a resolution calling for Downtown Crossing project to, in the language of the resolution, “give equal planning priority to pedestrian, bicycle, mass transit and automobile traffic in the design.”
That includes substituting a pair of two-lane streets for North and South Frontage instead of the two four-lane roads in the current city plan.
Click here for a story on that four-hour debate before the aldermanic subcommittee on Sept. 28. The debate resumes on October 13.
And click here for a story on the critics’ alternate ideas that emerged from a weekend discuss/design/sketch workshop staffed by volunteer architects and planners and organized by the Urban Design League on July 30.
Wladyslaw Prosol watercolor of a George Knight design of a street leading to Union Station.
They included, in Orr’s phrase, “a glamorous and affordable esplanade” with a tree-filled median on the order of Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue. Architect George Knight offerred a rendering of an active, high-density street connecting the beautiful Union Station building with Church Street.
Thursday night Winstanley, along with East Rock Alderman Justin Elicker and city economic development officials Kelly Murphy and Mike Piscitelli and Kelly Murphy, listened attentively as Urban Design League board member Ben Northrup reprised the major concerns.
Among them: Discrepancies between the city’s graphic presentations and the reality of its submissions pertaining to curb radii at College and Frontage streets, and the height of the Winstanley building.
Click here for the city’s plan as presented to the Community Development Committee.
Deputy Economic Development Director Piscitelli said that the project is so dynamic, with so many moving parts, that sometimes there is a difference between a graphic provided at a public meeting and what he called “progress prints.”
“Because of the timeline, the funding, and the need to develop jobs [that is, through fast-tracking the 100 College street building], it’s an open design process. It goes through iterations,” Piscitelli said.
Architect Fernando Pastor & City Hall’s Kelly Murphy.
Economic Development Director Murphy noted that there have been 55 public meetings about Downtown Crossing, with the next one specifically on the Winstanley building scheduled for Oct. 11 at the Wilson branch library in the Hill.
“Plans are not finished,” she insisted; “30 percent [of the design has been] submitted. Our job is to listen and take in all people’s commentary. That includes these people [the critics] and traffic engineers.That’s why we’re here.”
Ben Northrup several times expressed appreciation for the regulatory, funding, and time constraints under which city staff is working. But he remained skeptical.
“The full build-out [i.e. after Phase One] is very vague,” Northrup said. He also worried that decisions made in Phase One, such as the position of the entrance ramps, will preclude the development of smaller, more human-scale streets designed to promote active street life as well as connections between districts as the projects moves into further phases.
Piscitelli: “Now that we’re committed, [the question becomes]: How do we do the phase-in?”
“We want to see a good project done better. We don’t doubt the good intentions of the folks in City Hall. Part of our point is to build momentum and public support to give the folks in City Hall the backup to do what they know is right. That said, we are concerned about the radii” and other issues, Northrup said.
East Rock Alderman Justin Elicker & Environmental Justice Coalition’s Aaron Goode.
He noted the language of the TIGER grant calls for enhancing walkability and biking and connecting, not for making it easier to move cars. He issued a challenge for a reimagined Phase One so that the TIGER money could be used right away for connecting Temple and Orange. And he suggested that maybe even the Winstanley building could be divided into two parts, so it might front on two streets, giving more doors and more street life.
“The TIGER grant money should be spent on place-making, not on making more places for cars,” Northrup said.
Elicker, who had been listening in the back of the room, called the spirit of the discussion great. However, “our goals with the resolution are a little less ambitious. Our focus is making the streets more humane and reducing the scale,” he said.
He added that public safety is his paramount concern, and that perfection should not be the enemy of good: “I want to make sure the resolution is as practical and achievable as possible.”
Too many bad ideas for temporary structures become permanent for any number of reasons including bureaucratic laziness). Stop fast-tracking bad ideas and just accept good ideas in the first place.
Incrementalism does not equal mediocrity.