A
hand-drawn schematic shows new roads and traffic
flows envisioned by city-hired urban planners. The
two double-pointed arrows in blue indicate a new
road through the proposed Bayside development from
Day Blvd. to Morrissey Blvd. and a Mt. Vernon
Street without 'the chute.' In orange is Morrissey
without its frontage roads. In green is the
proposed refiguring of the road around UMass-Boston
as well as a new road that would go either behind
or in front of the Shaw's Supermarket, the Boston
Globe and other buildings on the western side of
Morrissey Boulevard. The red arrow indicates I-93.
By Pete Stidman
News Editor
The bare skeleton of a master plan that would
transform Columbia Point from a sleepy, car-centric
side street area to a destination for shoppers,
nature lovers and sightseers alike in the next 20
years hit paper last month. The rough ideas were
shown for the first time last Thursday at a
Columbia Point Master Planning Task Force
meeting.
A series of sketches drawn by consultants were
projected on a screen in the Loyola Room at Boston
College High School, showing entirely new roads,
bike paths and open space weaving and bobbing
through the point. For the most part, they were
tentatively well received by the task force and
public who were present.
"You have my stamp of approval on the network,"
said Paul Nutting at the meeting, a member of the
task force and a Savin Hill resident. "One of the
main goals we had was to separate the regional
traffic from the local traffic and you've done that
and also provided a lot of pedestrian and bike
access."
Some parts of the plan could significantly
change the Bayside on the Point development planned
by Corcoran Jennison Companies at the site of the
old Bayside Expo Center, including a road that
would cut through the project from Day Boulevard to
Mt. Vernon Street to Morrissey Boulevard; and a
public square on the scale of Copley Plaza, half of
which would occupy space where what is known
locally as 'the chute' exists today - a small
connector from Day to Mt. Vernon.
Urban planners from the city's consulting firm,
Crosby Schlessinger Smallridge LLC (CSS), stressed
that the plan would be realized in pieces over
decades, not all at once.
Other highlights of this early draft plan
included a bike path running through athletic
fields and the UMass Boston campus for the length
of the peninsula; an extension of Harbor Point's
main street, Harbor Point Boulevard, to connect to
Morrissey; and chopping off or significantly
narrowing Morrissey's frontage roads and remaking
it into the parkway it was originally intended to
be.
"The idea is to redirect that traffic back up
onto the freeway," said H.H. "Skip" Smallridge, a
principal at CSS.
Not all stakeholders accepted the plan
wholesale, however. Father George Carrigg of St.
Christopher's church expressed concern over the
possibility of losing part of the church's property
to the connector road, particularly with children
in the area, and a resident from Harbor Point said
she felt her neighbors would be concerned at the
prospect of attracting people into their "gated
community."
"The church does not support the road," said
Carrigg. "The church may want to develop facilities
to serve the new population."
Christopher Hart of Adaptive Environments - an
advocate for universal accessibility - even brought
up the specter of eminent domain, but John "Tad"
Read said it wasn't being looked at as of yet,
although the Boston Redevelopment Authority does
have the power to carry it out. He stressed that it
is very early in the planning stage and the BRA
wants to work with the community to determine what
is appropriate.
Other potential roadblocks to the new road
proposals floated by CSS are the Boston Teacher's
Union (BTU), which would literally sit right in the
path of the proposed Day to Morrissey connector; as
well as the MBTA, Synergy - which owns Shaw's
Supermarket and the buildings behind it - and even
the Boston Globe. The latter group would all have
to agree to an access road that would run from Old
Colony Road near the JFK/UMass Station to the other
side of the Globe building, possibly running
between these buildings and the I-93
expressway.
Smallridge said CSS and the BRA have met with
the Globe, Synergy, and the T and all are open to
the idea, as long as it fits with their future
plans, which are unknown even to them as of yet.
Patrick Connolly of the BTU recently told the
Reporter that the union is not unwilling to move,
but just hasn't heard the right offer as of
yet.
All of these new, and for most, welcome ideas
did raise a few questions in the task force, such
as 'Who's going to pay for all this?' and 'How do
we fit this in with Corcoran Jennison's
project?'
Corcoran Jennison Companies' proposal
for 350-units of rental housing, 250,000 square
feet of retail space and 200,000 square feet of
office space on the current site of the Bayside
Expo Center has already begun its Article 80 Large
Project Review Process with the BRA, and if the
roadways around and through the proposed
development are going to change with the master
plan, one would think the project would have to as
well.
"I have to admit it's a little problematic,"
said Joe Sammartino, representing Phillips Family
Hospitality at an informal meeting specifically for
the Bayside development after the task force
meeting. "The process is going forward and with
this process we're doing tonight, there are some
significant differences than what's on paper."
Jay Rourke, the BRA's project manager for
Bayside, advised the group to include the new
information from the task force in their comments
on Bayside, which are due on Aug. 15, including
directions on what traffic or any other impacts
they may want Corcoran Jennison to study before
they submit their Draft Environmental Impact Report
later in the process. This prompted a discussion of
just how much the community could ask from the
developer to offset the traffic and other impacts
Bayside will bring to Columbia Point.
While some said they thought Corcoran Jennison
shouldn't be held liable for all of the mitigations
the master planning task force seeks, others didn't
feel comfortable counting on Synergy and other
would-be developers to come through with their
projects. So far, Corcoran Jennison has proposed
just $1.4 million in traffic and pedestrian
mitigations, which includes signalizing the
entrances to their own development.
"I think we have to look at this project and
think about this traffic impact as if the rest of
it wasn't going to happen," said Bill Cotter, a
Savin Hill resident. "A lot of them are still
sitting on the sidelines. We're faced with this
one, and they're ready to move. I don't think we
have any choice
I think they have to absorb
the burden for what they will cause."
At a meeting tentatively scheduled for
mid-September the task force will move on to
consider proposals for land use on the point, and
if one of those are accepted by its members,
traffic modeling studies for the possible scenarios
will get underway, said Read. A rough idea of what
the future traffic patterns might be under the
above proposals might be available by October or
November, he said.
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