Fenway spark

A quirky neighborhood searches for unity under siege

by Ben Geman

BRIDLED GROWTH

When the Boston Red Sox let slugger Mo Vaughn slip away, they all but ensured that the New York Yankees would have little to fear from them in the near future.

Evelyn Randall, a community activist who has lived in the Fenway for 37 years, wishes she could say the same for her neighborhood.

Like many Fenway residents, Randall is worried about the team's anticipated pitch for a new stadium. "My worst fear," she says, "is the traffic it will cause, and the noise."

The Sox' plans aren't all that worries Fenway residents these days. The old Sears building on Park Drive is being redeveloped as a mall and 12-to-15-screen movie theater; another multiplex is planned for nearby Lansdowne Street. Emmanuel College wants to expand. So does Children's Hospital. Looming over it all are plans by New York development powerhouse Millennium Partners, which is proposing a massive upscale housing and commercial complex over the Mass Pike, right where the East Fenway meets the Back Bay.

To Randall and other activists, the drawbacks of this boom threaten to drastically outweigh its benefits. The sheer scope of proposed development threatens the fabric of the Fenway -- its housing costs, its streets, its identity as a neighborhood.

"There is a real-estate feeding frenzy under way," says Peter Catalano of the Fenway Action Coalition, the most militant of several Fenway residents' groups. "The sharks are circling."

Yet ironically, the very size of the frenzy may end up helping the prey. If development is inevitable, the sudden onslaught of so many big-ticket proposals could give concerned residents an edge: the convergence has drawn new attention to the Fenway, giving disunited residents a chance to pull together and influence what's built there.

State Representative Byron Rushing (D-Boston), for example, sees the moment as a chance to pressure the city into creating a "master plan" for the Fenway. And already the fear and activism sparked by looming development have spawned an interesting side effect: the development has forced debate on questions like "What is the Fenway, anyhow?" and "What the hell should the Fenway be?"

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As a neighborhood, the Fenway has always been hard to pin down. Far more people visit it -- for the Museum of Fine Arts, the ballpark, the clubs on Lansdowne Street -- than know it as a quirky, livable neighborhood near central Boston.

Extending a few blocks on either side of the Back Bay Fens, the Fenway includes several dense residential streets lined with brick apartment buildings. Busy and loud east of the Fens, quieter to the west, it fills a niche in the city: a neighborhood close to downtown that's still affordable in many stretches.

It is also fairly diverse. It's home to about 33,000 people, according to the 1990 census; within its borders more than a dozen languages are spoken, both by the large student population and by long-time residents and families. The Fenway -- particularly the East Fenway, between the Fens and Mass Ave -- is packed with students, but according to the Fenway Community Development Corporation (CDC), there are more than 1000 families there as well.

"There has long been a perception of this neighborhood as a student ghetto," says Steve Wolf, a board member of the CDC. "But we have a lot of long-time residents in this neighborhood. . . . I know people who have been here since the 1940s."

Josh Cook, an eight-year Fenway resident and co-owner of the Designs for Living Café and Bookstore, prizes what he calls the "Big City-Little City" thing: "You have a large enough city to remain somewhat anonymous, but you also have the feeling of knowing people, a personal closeness here."

That neighborhood fabric is the inspiration for a clever bit of grassroots PR: large white pieces of paper with black arrows pointing to the ground, that activists hope to see plastered on walls and signposts around the neighborhood. I LIVE HERE, reads a message on one poster. I WORK HERE, reads another. At the arrows' tips, more text reads, THE FENWAY: NOT A SKYSCRAPER. NOT A BALLPARK. A NEIGHBORHOOD. The posters are the work of the CDC, which hopes to build support for its effort to force the city and developers to address residents' concerns.

Those concerns are real. The Red Sox, for instance, are historically bad neighbors who not only attract crowds and trash, but seem uninterested in neighbors' input. Residents fear that a bigger Sox presence will mean a bigger headache. Also, new condos and other gentrification could imperil the neighborhood's diversity, both racial and economic.

The Fenway, however, is also characterized by another kind of diversity that's not quite so rosy: its fractious neighborhood groups. In a city where neighborhood associations are the primary line of defense against insensitive development, the Fenway's lack of cohesion has so far kept it from exhibiting the kind of self-protective strength seen in South Boston or the Back Bay. A patchwork of activist groups seem to agree on little beyond the name of their neighborhood. A recent Boston Tab article, which asked WHO SPEAKS FOR THE FENWAY?, found that multiple organizations have different -- and competing -- visions of what the Fenway should be.

The Fenway Civic Association comes closest to being a traditional neighborhood group. Rather conservative, it is concerned with cleanliness, traffic, and other "quality of life" issues, and is leery of new affordable-housing development. The CDC, meanwhile, shares some of the same concerns but has a more activist agenda, stressing affordable housing and services for lower-income residents.

The Fenway Civic Association distrusts the CDC, which Civic Association vice-president Fredericka Veikley calls too aggressive in its push for more affordable housing. "The CDC tries to act like a residents' association," she says, "and it can't. Because its mission is a development mission, and it can't be both."

Meanwhile, a staff member of the CDC calls the Civic Association "viciously anti-affordable housing" and claims it "represents the agenda of the private, for-profit landlord."

And then there's the newest group, the Fenway Action Coalition (FAC), which sprang up last summer and which has good relations with neither of the other two organizations.

How deep is the divide between the Fenway's groups? Deep enough, clearly, to obscure their common interests. "Just because we would all like to see more trees along Boylston Street and get rid of some of these strip lots is no reason to climb in bed with these people [at the CDC]," says Veikley.

"They all hate each other," says one former Boston official. "Ultimately, the loser is the neighborhood. Because these groups are so divided . . . it gives developers an upper hand."

City Councilor Tom Keane, who represents the Fenway, agrees: "If you are divided, you can be conquered. This is not a war, but it is a circumstance where the neighborhood needs to assert neighborhood interests and make sure those interests are recognized and preserved."

Beyond the schisms, a few other factors put the neighborhood at a disadvantage in development debates. The Fenway, which shares a city-council district with the Back Bay, Mission Hill, and Beacon Hill, has not had an elected official living in the neighborhood since Keane unseated David Scondras six years ago. Voter turnout in the Fenway is abysmal compared to, say, politically potent South Boston. In the city's Ward 4, which overlaps heavily with the heart of the Fenway, just 17 percent of voters turned out in the last city election. And the Fenway isn't rich enough to wield the kind of economic clout that Back Bay and Beacon Hill enjoy.

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Even when community groups aren't at loggerheads, developers hold real advantages over grassroots activists: primarily, more money and more access to City Hall. The FAC's Peter Catalano points to the close ties between Menino and developers like Robert Walsh, who's working with the Sox, and wonders whose side the city is on.

To be sure, Boston is rife with examples of tenants' unions and citizens' groups gaining some control over what is or isn't built in their midst. In 1968, South Enders rallied behind Mel King to push for affordable housing on the land that ultimately became the mixed-income housing development Tent City; recently, South Boston scuttled plans for a new Patriots stadium in that neighborhood.

At this point, the Fenway doesn't have the political or economic clout to pull off anything that bold, but the onrush of development in the neighborhood should foster greater cohesion. The differences between the various groups do, after all, mask some shared interests. Nobody likes trash from Red Sox games and the clubs. And increasing traffic is a pain for everyone. "There is lot more common ground than there is disagreement," says Rushing.

Says BU sociology professor Daniel Monti: "When there is a lot of interest in an area, more groups will come out and be energized, and they will come to learn how to articulate what they think is in the public interest and what they think is in their own interest more consistently and more powerfully than they have in the past."

"When you have more [gradual] change," says Monti, author of the forthcoming book The American City: A Social and Cultural History, "the level of excitement and energy and the number and volume of groups likely to be involved are less than when an area gets hot. And the Fenway has become a hot area."

Already, neighborhood opposition and concern over development has put pressure on City Hall -- earlier this year, Mayor Thomas Menino agreed to hire a new planner to provide some oversight, although the position has not been filled. One top Menino aide says the development flurry "creates the realization that this is an area that's been subjected to a number of potential pressures, and the mayor has responded by calling attention to that."

This year's city elections could also bolster the neighborhood's clout -- and provide something that's been missing for the past six years. Tom Keane isn't seeking reelection, and Scondras and others from the Fenway may pursue the seat.

Developers, of course, are not waiting for the neighborhood to gel. So if Fenway residents want to seize their best chance to slow development, negotiate its scale, or ensure that the neighborhood benefits from it, they'll need to act soon.

Says Keane: "When a community is the focus of a lot of attention, it provokes a host of forces in response -- ones that call upon a community to define itself."

"I think the fact that we are in the spotlight," says CDC executive director Carl Koechlin, "gives us the chance to show people what this neighborhood is all about."

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