Locals seeing red over Baker housing plan | Fallout from Amazon union vote | The giant project nobody is talking about| A curious ode to good government | About Contrarian Boston |
Good medicine? Key approval looms for huge MGH downtown Boston campus revamp
By Karen Cord Taylor
Much ink has been spilled in advertising and newspaper reports over MGH/Brigham’s controversial expansion plans in Westborough, Westwood, Woburn and Faulkner Hospital in Jamaica Plain.
And those plans continued to grab headlines Friday evening, when executives at Greater Boston’s dominant hospital system nixed controversial plans for three outpatient surgical centers in the suburbs, the Globe reports.
However, less attention has been paid to Mass General’s far larger, $1.9 billion, seven-year expansion on its downtown Boston campus bordering Cambridge Street. Totaling more than one million square feet, the project was approved by the Boston Planning and Development Agency in October, 2021.
The state’s Public Health Council is slated to take up the project in May, when it appears likely the council will give a greenlight to MGH’s proposed downtown campus expansion.
The huge project will:
• Expand the overcrowded emergency department, create more single rooms, apply technology to make rooms cleaner and make MGH better prepared for emergencies and disasters. The events of 9/11 and Covid-19 have made everyone more aware of disasters.
• Demolish a 1972 garage on the east side of North Grove as well as two 1990 Cambridge Street office buildings.
• Demolish the remaining North Anderson Street tenement that was occupied for years by the quirky, oft-quoted community activist Norman Herr, who established the holiday lighting at Cardinal Cushing Park at Cambridge and New Chardon streets. Herr died last year.
• Demolish the MGH-owned West End House on Blossom Street. West End House moved to Brighton in 1971.
• Incorporate three stories of the façade of Ruth Sleeper Hall, aka the 1885 Winchell Elementary School on Blossom Street, into a new structure.
• Replace North Anderson Street with a pedestrian street called the North Anderson Arcade. This promises to add an intriguing surprise for pedestrians on the north side of Cambridge Street. It evokes Beacon Hill passageways, instead of wide corporate-style spaces.
• Create a six-story underground garage, adding 175 new spaces,
• Build two “towers” of 12 and 13 stories along Cambridge Street.
• Build pedestrian bridges and a tunnel to connect new parts of the campus to the old.
• Upgrade the Bulfinch Green.
• Make financial contributions to the West End Museum, Old West Church, the Museum of African American History, the Boston Preservation Alliance, the Boston Legacy Fund and the Esplanade Association. MGH will also provide space and funding for a new West End Community Center.
• Honor the old West End through exhibits in the North Anderson Arcade.
• Enliven North Grove, Cambridge and Blossom streets with retail and restaurant ground floor uses.
• Remake the garage on Garden Street on Beacon Hill into something still unknown.
A contributor to Contrarian Boston, Karen Cord Taylor is former editor and publisher of The Beacon Hill Times
Unhappy campers: Local officials push back hard against Baker’s big housing push
We knew they were unhappy about state’s housing law - just maybe not this unhappy.
City and town leaders are taking aim at a centerpiece of the Baker administration’s plans to tackle the state’s housing crisis.
The Massachusetts Municipal Association and the Massachusetts Municipal Lawyers Association are raising serious concerns about the MBTA Communities law and in particular how state officials hope to go about enforcing it.
The new law, which passed last year, uses the threat of the loss grant money to prod cities and towns within a certain distance of T commuter rail, bus and subway stops to open the door to hundreds and in some cases thousands of new multifamily units.
The two influential municipal groups, commenting on proposed state regulations for enforcing the new law, say they support the goals of the housing bill.
But a number communities, especially smaller ones in the outer suburbs without sewer service or municipal water, may simply take the hit and lose state grant money rather than comply with the law, which would require towns to zone for at least 750 new multifamily units.
“Both of our organizations, however, have heard from a greater number of municipal officials who express significant, grave concerns about the draft guidelines,” the MMA and MMLA wrote.
Coming Monday: Housing advocates say a key ingredient is missing from the state’s multifamily development push – affordable apartments and condos.
Think Amazon still wants a Boston distribution hub now?
You’ve got to believe there will be fallout here from the landmark unionization vote on Staten Island for Amazon’s expansion here.
The online retail behemoth has spent years eyeing sites in Boston on which to build a distribution hub to speed delivery service to the region’s urban core.
But we wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon begins to lose its appetite for a foothold in Boston after thousands of employees at a giant warehouse on Staten Island voted by a wide margin Friday to form a union.
After all, Boston, like New York, is stronghold for the labor movement.
Right now, Amazon appears intent on building out millions of square feet of distribution space in the outer suburbs of Boston, and beyond, in places like Charlton.
Don’t bet on that changing anytime soon, even if it means Amazon will take a hit on the speed it can deliver packages to Boston-area doorsteps.
You saw it here first
That would be the battle for a key Roxbury development site between two major downtown Boston developers.
As we first reported here two weeks ago, it’s a big deal and a potential sea change in the future of development in Boston.
The Globe’s Shirley Leung delves deep into the details and what it means for Roxbury and the city in this piece that ran Thursday.
Prioritizing Proper Programs
A reflection on good government
By Peter Pentangeli
Guest Columnist
(A noted public policy expert, Peter is the brother of Frank Pentangeli. In his spare time, Peter tirelessly practices his alliteration skills.)
Public policy proponents take penultimate pride in their promulgation of a plethora of provisions of the Paycheck Protection Program. A proper palette of progressive programs provides a platform for a palmary panacea of panoptic progress. Prejudicial precedent against prior programs places a pall over the prior practices and provides a possible paradigm for panjandrum pontification. A proper panaceist provides a pantagruelian proposal for this pantisocracy. The partocracy may provide proof of a proper programmatic paralogism, perhaps by paralipsis. It is the probable placement of prospective partners that produces a paradoxical perspective. It is the paramount paragon of parsimonious person to seek pecuniary profits from such a paradox provides permanent placement of the proverbial parabasis of this parciloquy paradigm.
Belated April Fool’s!
Peter’s true name is Paul L. DeBole, an assistant professor of political science at Lasell University and regulator contributor to Contrarian Boston. DeBole notes he penned this strange tribute to the Godfather II’s Frank Pentangeli when he was working for the MBTA in the 1990s. DeBole recalls he printed out 500 copies, stuffed them in everyone’s mail slot, and then “sat back and watched the confusion.”
We can only imagine!
Quick Hits:
Don’t get your news on Facebook! “Video game clip falsely shared as Ukraine firing on Russian jets” (AFP Fact Check)
Outdoor dining battle goes citywide: “New Requirements Force Some Jamaica Plain Restaurants To End Outdoor Dining” (CBS Boston)
Promises, promises: “Standing up campaign promises of auditor candidates” (CommonWealth Magazine)
Never ask how low can he go: “As the West closes ranks against Putin, Trump asks the Russian war criminal for political help” (Boston Globe)
What is Contrarian Boston?
I have fielded emails over the past couple weeks asking what Contrarian Boston is about.
Here’s a link to our mission statement – you can find it in the “about” section.
For a more prosaic, nuts-and-bolts description, read on.
An online newsletter, Contrarian Boston publishes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In Contrarian Boston you’ll find analysis of the day’s news, and original reporting as well.
Our focus is:
· Politics and all levels of governance, good and bad, with an emphasis on state and local, with some national mixed in;
· Economic growth and business, especially real estate, housing and new development projects;
· The media and why it does what it does;
· Education, from school board spats to the doings of multibillion-dollar university endowments;
· And whatever else catches our fancy.