Robert David Sullivan 2

Mass. shut out of planners' "best places" list

Massachusetts was shut out of the American Planning Association's annual "Great Places" list, released earlier this month. But city and town planners don't have to go far to find inspiration, as three New England spots were honored: Front Street, in Bath, Maine; New Haven Green; and Central Square in Keene, New Hampshire. 

Lest the above examples suggest that the APA has quaint, small-town taste, I should point out that other winners this year include Chicago's Lincoln Park and New Orleans's Faubourg Marigny neighborhood.

Last year, two Massachusetts sites were on the list. Downtown Salem was named a Great Neighborhood (its "eccentric street grid, and profusion of archetypal old houses belie a humming, mixed-use district"), and Boston's Washington Street grabbed a Great Street designation (for its South End section, not for embarrassingly empty Downtown Crossing).

In 2007, the first year of the awards, Northampton's Main Street was the only Bay State recipient.

Cross-posted at CW Unbound.

Massachusetts not so great this year, say public planners

Massachusetts was shut out of the American Planning Association's annual "Great Places" list, released earlier this month. But city and town planners don't have to go far to find inspiration, as three New England spots were honored: Front Street, in Bath, Maine; New Haven Green; and Central Square in Keene, New Hampshire. 

Lest the above examples suggest that the APA has quaint, small-town taste, I should point out that other winners this year include Chicago's Lincoln Park and New Orleans's Faubourg Marigny neighborhood.

Last year, two Massachusetts sites were on the list. Downtown Salem was named a Great Neighborhood (its "eccentric street grid, and profusion of archetypal old houses belie a humming, mixed-use district"), and Boston's Washington Street grabbed a Great Street designation (for its South End section, not for embarrassingly empty Downtown Crossing).

In 2007, the first year of the awards, Northampton's Main Street was the only Bay State recipient.

How Boston parks measure up

The Trust for Public Land has just released its 2009 City Park Facts, tallying acreage and spending devoted to public recreation in the 77 largest US cities. Boston comes off fairly well, even if it doesn't dominate in any area. Here are some of the highlights:

• Parkland comprises 16.3 percent of Boston's land area, higher than the 77-city median of 8.6 percent (and higher than Philadelphia's 12.6 percent and Chicago's 8.2 percent). But the Hub falls short of New York's 19.6 percent and Washington's 19.4 percent. The lowest percentages were mostly in Western and Southern cities such as Fresno, Tucson, and Nashville.


• Because Boston is so densely populated, its sizable package of parks amounts to only 8.3 acres of park for every 1,000 residents, well below the median of 12.9 acres. (Anchorage has 1,794 acres per 1,000 residents; Jacksonville is a distant second, with 129 acres.) But Boston is second only to Washington, DC (12.9 acres), in per-capita parkland among the 13 most densely populated cities.


• Boston ranks 31st of 77 cities in total spending for parks and recreation per resident. In FY 2007, Boston spent $61 million, or $101 per resident. That's higher than the median of $82 but not that impressive when compared to other high-income, high-cost-of-living metropolises. San Francisco spends the most ($300 per resident); Boston is also behind Washington, DC ($277), New York ($142), and Chicago ($126). The most meager parks department in the US is in Buffalo, which spent $3.2 million, or $12 per resident.


• The report includes Top 10 lists for specific types of recreation areas per capita, but Boston doesn't make any of them. Portland, Oregon, was tops for ball diamonds and dog parks; Minneapolis led the way in tennis courts; Cincinnati had was the best equipped for swimming pools; and Las Vegas was ground zero for skateboard parks.

Fantastic MBTA voyages

There are fantasy baseball and football teams, so why not fantasy MBTA routes? The Future MBTA has posted ideas from readers for subway lines that will probably never be built in anyone's lifetime. The most impressive idea posted so far involves two urban rings that intersect near the South Bay shopping center. As long as it's play money, why limit yourself?

Note: The Future MBTA site was tagged by SHIFT Boston, a three-month-old blog on urban design here and around the world. Check out its fantasy view of the Rose Kennedy Greenway here.

Above: The Future MBTA's master plan. No larger image available because of copyright issues.

Nobody wants too many restaurants

It's a familiar pattern in Boston: A neighborhood becomes gentrified (i.e., safe and attractive), raising hopes that stores selling things like books and household necessities will move in. But instead the main street is dominated by (mostly upscale) bars and restaurants. It happened in the South End, and it seems to be only optimistic outcome in my neighborhood of downtown Malden. (Photo of the South End's DeLux restaurant -- which is hardly the most deluxe eatery in the neighborhood -- by ckirkman.)

Washington, DC, is experiencing a similar phenomenon, and one response has been to put limits on the number of restaurants and bars that can open in a neighborhood. On Greater Greater Washington, David Alpert explains the rationale:

Restaurants, especially those allowed to serve alcohol, can afford higher rents than neighborhood-serving businesses, like grocery stores, hardware stores, pharmacies and dry cleaners. As bars and restaurants become successful, an area draws more foot traffic, attracting more of those businesses. Landlords can charge higher rent, which pushes out the local businesses. This is basically an economic game theory problem: the most natural equilibrium states are a mostly-vacant corridor on the one hand, and nothing but bars on the other.

What do Bostonians think about their neighbors?

The Boston Public Health Commission has just released Health of Boston 2009, a hefty report on all manner of things affecting the well-being of residents, including environmental conditions, access to health care, and the incidence of "risky" behaviors such as smoking and binge drinking.

One section explores the "community assets" in the city's 16 major neighborhoods (North Dorchester and South Dorchester are considered separately). The BPHC's survey of neighborhood residents reveal some different attitudes in different corners of Boston. Below are some of the survey questions, each followed by the neighborhoods with the highest and lowest percentages of residents answering "yes."

Attended neighborhood meeting in 2008:
Charlestown 60%
Allston/Brighton: 24%
Charlestown was the only neighborhood to top 50%.

Have three or more friends in neighborhood:
Charlestown: 91%
Fenway: 42%
More than 75% also answered yes in the Back Bay, Jamaica Plain, the North End, South Boston, the South End, and West Roxbury. Besides the Fenway, the figure was below 50% only in Mattapan.

Neighbors "share same beliefs about right and wrong":
Roslindale: 69%
Fenway: 41%
Is this a knock on the student population in the Fenway? Roxbury was the only other neighborhood below 50%.

Burrito shop saves Downtown Crossing!

I guess you work with the downtown development that you have, not the downtown development that you wish you had. From today's Boston Globe:

Mayor Thomas M. Menino strolled part of the Downtown Crossing district of Boston yesterday, shaking hands with enthusiastic shop owners and celebrating the grand opening of a burrito shop....

"It's important to have people walking there," Menino said after cutting the ribbon at Boloco, a chain restaurant that has large windows that open onto Province Street.

The next time you walk past the section of Washington Street that used to be Filene's, remind yourself: No, this isn't Berlin circa 1945, for I'm within walking distance of a Cajun burrito with organic tofu!

Hungry for a public market in Boston

The Globe floats the idea of a genuine public market for Boston (but in its Saturday edition, so you may have missed it). City officials want to site it alongside the Rose Kennedy Greenway, near the current microscopic-and-misanthropic Haymarket area:

Two firms have filed proposals to redevelop the Blackstone Street property and both have included ground-floor space for a food market and cafe. Adjacent land near the weekend Haymarket, known for its cheap produce and seafood, is also being considered for a second public food building.

"It's a missing piece of the city's fabric," said Don Wiest, the president of the Boston Public Market Association. "The products we have to sell in Massachusetts are second to none, and we have an opportunity to create what should be one of the great public markets of North America."

This would be a long-overdue addition to the city. Visit the Jean-Talon Market in Montreal to see what a great public space this could be. But I do think the Greenway spot is probably way too small. Jean-Talon is far from downtown Montreal, and it still gets large, steady crowds because of its size and selection. There are also dozens of gourmet shops specializing in cheese, ice cream, wine, baked goods, etc. that surround the vendors of fresh fruit and vegetables. It would seem ideal to leave room for such shops to spring up around a Boston market, especially given the growing foodie culture here. Has the city considered a market spot somewhere on the T in, say, Dorchester? I fear that there's too much focus on a public market as a tourist attraction, when its success would really depend on steady business from city residents.

Obama as "metropolitan candidate"

The Washington Post's Alec MacGillis has a nice piece on Barack Obama as having the strongest "city pedigree" of any presidential nominee since Al Smith in 1928. (MacGillis dismisses Michael Dukakis as a resident of "genteel Brookline" -- and it's true that, despite having its most famous resident take the subway to Beacon Hill when he was governor, Brookline insists on calling itself a "town." And he writes that John F. Kennedy and John F. Kerry fit Hyannisport and Nantucket better than they did Boston.)

But the gist of his piece is that Obama represents the rise of the metropolitan mindset rather than the revival of urban politics:

With his organizer background, he could have cast himself as a knight riding to the rescue of cities neglected by Republican administrations. Instead, he has adopted the framing increasingly favored by many mayors and urban-policy types -- promoting America's cities based on their strengths, not their failings. Cities, he argues, are now melded to their suburbs, and, taken as a whole, America's metro areas are the "backbone of regional growth," as he put it in a June speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. "Washington remains trapped in an earlier era," he said, "wedded to an outdated 'urban' agenda that focuses exclusively on the problems in our cities, and ignores our growing metro areas, an agenda that confuses anti-poverty policy with a metropolitan strategy, and ends up hurting both."

As a matter of policy, this approach makes sense. As politics, it's even more sensible. The reason the Democratic Party remains competitive (and, this year, ascendent) in national politics is that it has become the Metropolitan Party even as its inner-city base has lost voting strength. This happened a long time ago in Massachusetts, when older suburbs aligned themselves with Boston to elect Democrats such as Dukakis (and, more recently, Gov. Deval Patrick). It's now happening in places such as Virginia, whose slice of metropolitan Washington, DC, seems likely to deliver the state to Obama next week.

Holyoke goes back to the garden

Corby Kummer writes about Nuestras Raices, a community gardening program in the "Gateway City" of Holyoke, in the new issue of the Atlantic magazine. Read Kummer's piece, but also check out Melissa DaPonte Katz's "A Tale of Two Valleys," from the Fall 2006 issue of CommonWealth, in which she writes about Nuestras Raices and the larger issues of poverty and downtown redevelopment in Holyoke, one of the poorest communities in the state and the most heavily Puerto Rican city on the US mainland. (Another CommonWealth, contributor, B.J. Roche, wrote a piece on Nuestras Raices that accompanied Katz's story.) As Katz wrote:

Over time, Holyoke has become the beneficiary of a plethora of publicly funded health and human services, along with grants to combat its problems with gangs, teen pregnancy, and school dropouts. But local officials are now looking for ways to use public dollars to help the city do more than scrape by. Their goal is to salvage something that was left behind by the industrialists who helped develop the city more than 150 years ago: a canal system originally built to power paper and textile mills by harnessing energy from the Connecticut River.

Kummer's focus is not so much the industrial past but the agricultural future at a 30-acre farm along the riverbank:

Ortiz knows how to cook the vegetables he grows (he told me how he fries eggplant): his father is a professional cook, and “half my friends,” he says, are studying to be chefs at Dean Technical. “Some people think gardening is for girls only,” he told me, “and you should get a real job, like working at a factory.” But “seeing someone popular do it makes it easier.”

So does seeing men grow vegetables during the day and use the gardens as social clubs at night. On summer weekends, there are music festivals on a bandstand built from foraged wood. The pig roasts, tended by men, are so popular that the farm will spin off a lechonera, the name for restaurants and roadside stands all over Puerto Rico that sell spit-roasted pig and traditional side dishes.