Growing pains

As the millennium looms, Boston development plans spark visions of a new city and fears of frayed neighborhoods

Neighborhoods by Ben Geman

When the Menino administration unveiled plans for a new South Boston waterfront in late 1997, critics said the design would foul the harbor. Not the water, but its edge -- the plan called for too-tall buildings, too little space for pedestrians, too much concrete at the city's shoreline. So the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) went back to the drawing board, and -- tah-dah! -- a new master plan for the Seaport District surfaced last month, drawing less venom and more praise. Prizewinning Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell was friendly to the new plan in a page 1 commentary last week, which must be a sign of something, according to former city councilor Larry DiCara. "I don't remember the last time he [Campbell] liked anything -- he is an extraordinarily difficult critic," says DiCara. "It may be that this will be an extraordinary legacy for Tom Menino and [BRA director] Tom O'Brien."

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Still, Campbell's praise and the obvious improvement over the city's original design don't mean smooth sailing from now on. Already, concerns have surfaced about the plan's impact on the existing South Boston neighborhood. Elsewhere, too, a slew of projects -- some mere proposals, some already under way -- are generating a mixture of optimism and anxiety. From the South Boston waterfront to the Fenway, where residents' groups are up in arms about a planned tower over the Massachusetts Turnpike, it's clear: the city is traveling down a revitalization path dotted with speed bumps, if not outright roadblocks, as it heads into the new millennium. "I think, psychologically, people will want to make a mark on this century and there will be a sense of wanting to accomplish things before the year ends," says former Allston-Brighton state representative Susan Tracy, now president of the consulting firm Boston Strategies.

For now, the economy is booming, and Mayor Menino is looking to make his mark on the city with several ambitious projects, including the long-awaited convention center in South Boston. "I think bigger than most people in this city," he told the Globe in November. Menino's big thinking, for the moment, is most evident in his vision for the Seaport District -- the creation of a new wing of Boston that will make the city welcoming to pedestrians right up to the water's edge. The plan could transform South Boston, although just how remains unknown.

The Menino administration has played peek-a-boo with the plans to date, showing slides of its ideas but offering nothing publicly on paper -- BRA officials say copies of the plan, although much-hyped already, won't be available until next month. Some worry, meanwhile, that upscaling the area and building new luxury housing will increase rents in the neighborhood, pushing families out. Others, however, contend that planned new housing will mitigate an existing crunch. The BRA says affordable housing will be included in the mix.

The Seaport plan -- which includes new hotels, shops, and public space-- has at least one community leader worried that development will chip away at the viability of the shipping and manufacturing industries on the shore. "I don't think people in this town want to see the visitor economy grow at the expense of the existing blue-collar jobs . . . in the Seaport District," says Martin Nee, executive director of the South Boston Community Development Corporation. BRA officials, however, call Nee's fears unfounded and insist that waterfront industries aren't threatened by the new plans. "One of the guiding planning principles has been maintaining the strength of the working port in Boston," says O'Brien. Nonetheless, one of Menino's feistier critics on the city council -- at-large councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen, who observers say may be eyeing Menino's office -- says she's looking warily at the administration's vision.

For one thing, she'd like to see a new school in the district, and plenty of opportunities for locals to open storefronts in the new neighborhood. "The administration needs to be constantly reminded that we all have a stake in this," Davis-Mullen says. "This is far too important to be relegated to the Menino administration or Tom O'Brien. . . . What we do now, we will live with forever."

Already, questions have surfaced over which neighborhoods will benefit from Seaport development through the city's "linkage" program, which requires developers to contribute to affordable-housing and jobs programs. When city councilors gave the green light to plans for the convention center last March, they passed legislation requiring that half the linkage money from Seaport projects go to South Boston. But as the Boston Municipal Research Bureau -- a business-funded group that monitors city finances -- pointed out in a report in November, the linkage program, created in the late 1980s, is designed to spread the money citywide. "Once we start seeing the development of the Seaport, this will be an issue that's ongoing," predicts Samuel Tyler, the bureau's director.

"I think you'll see the elected officials from South Boston argue that that's an area that will be greatly impacted, and it is legitimate to have 50 percent of the linkage go to the impacted area," he adds. "People from other parts of the city will say it ought to be where there's [the greatest] need."

So far, reception of the Seaport plans has been generally placid and welcoming compared to the controversy over schemes for a massive housing and entertainment complex above the Massachusetts Turnpike, at the intersection of Boylston Street and Mass Ave. The proposal -- offered last year by the New York development powerhouse Millennium Partners as part of the state's plan to develop the space over the turnpike -- drew a harsh reaction from resident and community groups in the Fenway and Back Bay.

For the most vocal of the organizations, the Fenway Action Coalition (FAC), the planned skyscraper is one of several ideas being bandied about that amount to nothing less than a siege against the neighborhood. "The noose is getting tight and forcing this neighborhood to the point of extinction," says FAC member Peter Catalano. Irritation with the project has already sparked one City Hall protest and criticism of Menino for ceding too much power to the Turnpike Authority. Now, Catalano says, the group may take to the courtroom as well as the streets, arguing that the proposed tower should be subject to Boston zoning codes. It seems likely that the cacophony of criticism aimed at the project as presented will essentially sink it.

But O'Brien hints that the final project will likely be very different than what's been proposed. "I think there is basic agreement that something should be built there to improve the site and reconnect the neighborhood," he says. "The developer is still searching for what exactly that project is." With the Millennium fight under way, Catalano and others are bracing for an announcement -- possibly soon -- of the Red Sox' plans for a new ballpark. There, however, naysayers will find it harder to gain traction -- observers say there's political will building to reach an agreement with the Sox, particularly since Patriots owner Robert Kraft has bolted. "I think watching the Patriots leave will create momentum for banding together to work with the Red Sox," says Tracy. "I believe there is a different feeling toward the Sox than the Patriots. They play in Boston and baseball is a tradition in this town, and they play a lot more games."

Not all new development in the area is so controversial. Work on the Fenway's Landmark Center building, which is slated to include Blue Cross and Blue Shield, a movie theater, and several retail tenants, is proceeding quietly. And Millennium Partners is working on a far less controversial housing and entertainment complex on a stretch of Washington Street between Downtown Crossing and Chinatown, which is already inching toward completion. Just a day before Christmas Eve, the area, barely a quarter-mile from the frenzy of shoppers at Downtown Crossing, was barren and silent -- but that will change when the project is completed, as soon as the end of 1999. "It will really anchor Washington Street," predicts O'Brien. "It will be terrific."

Plans for smaller developments, too, are generating a sense of both accomplishment and concern as the year begins. This is evident in Lower Roxbury, where a long struggle between community residents and Northeastern University over plans for new student housing was resolved in November. All parties say they have come a long way since word spread in 1997 of the school's plan to build hundreds of student-housing units on Columbus Avenue. Residents and area politicians feared a neighborhood overrun with Northeastern students, worrying that Lower Roxbury would morph into an adjunct campus. So they demanded that the plans include more affordable housing and fewer students. And, after demonstrations and negotiations with a BRA distrusted by many in the area, they won.

Still, headlines heralding the deal don't tell the full story. The agreement calls for the BRA to sit down with Lower Roxbury residents and officials to create a "master plan" for publicly owned land in the area. What's more, Northeastern must disclose what it owns in the neighborhood and what its expansion plans are. "Neither one of those things is going to be easy, if you think in terms of how long it took us to come to agreement on these parcels," says state representative Byron Rushing (D-South End), who helped engineer both the resistance to Northeastern's original plans and the deal eventually agreed to in November. "If the city and Northeastern don't do what they are supposed to do, the community is not going to support anything happening on that land, even what we agreed upon."

What they agreed upon is significant, merging the needs of residents and a school viewed with suspicion by many in its neighborhood. "After we negotiated and came to terms, it was well worth it," says Annie Fowlkes, a tenant leader who's lived in Lower Roxbury for four decades. "But we are not finished."

With the development boom spurring projects across the city, her assessment need not be limited to a few parcels on Columbus Avenue.

Ben Geman can be reached at bgeman[a]phx.com.