Massachusetts General Hospital’s 10-year Institutional Master Plan, which includes a new 10-story building, received unanimous approval from the Boston Redevelopment Authority last week.

“It’s a no-surprise situation for people around us. We’ve been very open with the plan since the beginning,” said Dr. Jean Elrick, senior vice president of administration at MGH. The plan has been “stable for a year,” she said, and allows for improved access and aesthetics from the hospital’s Cambridge Street side.

The 10-story building behind the Yawkey Center for Outpatient Care will incorporate an expanded emergency department, surgical suites, a radiology and oncology department and 150 patient beds. A public MGH museum, still in the planning stages, will be located on the corner of North Grove Street.

The plan also provides for the possibility of adding retail outlets along the hospital’s Cambridge Street border, a move that members of the task force and the community at large have supported at public meetings soliciting input for the plan.

“MGH is committed to improving the Cambridge Street side of its campus,” said BRA senior project manager Sonal Gandhi. Gandhi said that MGH has already taken measures to improve pedestrian access and traffic issues around the hospital, including changing Parkman Street from one-way to two-way access and changing the direction of traffic on North Anderson and Fruit streets.

Peter Thomson, a member of the task force that sought input from MGH workers, the city, and the Beacon Hill and West End communities, said that the biggest issue facing Beacon Hill is how the hospital will manage its traffic. “Our main concern has always been access by cars to MGH. They’re gradually working on that,” he said. Options outlined in the plan include access from Blossom Street off Storrow Drive and making Fruit Street two-way accessible.

Task force member Paula O’Keeffe said that MGH has been responsive to community feedback. “I think it’s going to be a real addition to the neighborhood,” she said.

A frequent volunteer at MGH, O’Keeffe said that five additional patient floors in the proposed new building would alleviate overcrowding and patient volume at the hospital.

The plan will go before the Zoning Commission for final city approval on Wednesday, December 6. MGH must then secure approval from the State Department of Public Health.

Some residents think Suffolk University students are turning Beacon Hill into “party central,” but a new study shows a lot of other college students are contributing to that late night noise.

Numbers released by the Boston Redevelopment Authority Research Department in its briefing report “Insight” show that 1,359 graduate and undergraduate students live in off-campus housing on Beacon Hill and the West End. About a third are Suffolk students. Earlier this fall the university reported that 425 of its students live off-campus in the neighborhood.

Of the total, 630 are full-time undergraduate students and 652 are full-time graduate students. Of these, Suffolk has 249 full-time undergrads and 105 full-time graduate students living in the neighborhood.

The BRA research shows that 117, 975 students attend Boston’s 36 institutions of higher education, but it did not indicate in its report where students in each neighborhood attend schools.

The information was devised from reports submitted by the universities under the University Accountability Ordinance, passed in 2004 by City Councilor Michael P. Ross. The ordinance requires colleges and universities in Boston to report each semester on their students’ residences within each city zip code. The new requirement was a collaborative effort between Mayor Thomas Menino, the City Council and local schools in which a compromise was crafted that respects federal privacy statues and other concerns. Schools are given 45 days from the beginning of their school year to file the report.

The findings on Beacon Hill and the West End confirm reports made by Richard Grealish, director of Suffolk’s Office of Neighborhood Response and the Boston Police Department. Both Grealish, who accompanies a police detail on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings when responding to loud party calls, and Area A-1 Captain Bernard O’Rourke estimated that more than half are related to non-Suffolk students, and young professionals.

Grealish routinely identifies and disciplines Suffolk students causing the loud parties and notifies the other institutions if their students are involved in an incident.

As for young professionals, Grealish hopes the added police detail hired by Suffolk will present a deterrent to the disruptive behavior. “Last Friday night alone, we received six phone calls from different individuals reporting a loud party by young professionals on the corner of Mount Vernon and West Cedar streets,” he said. “We brought two police cars to the scene.”

“Unfortunately, young professionals have the money, the time and the energy to party,” he said.

If you get on or off the T at the Arlington Station, you’re going to have to learn a new route.

New temporary entrances and exits at the Arlington T Station opened on Wednesday on Berkeley Street. The Arlington Street entrances will remain closed for about 16 months.

New Charlie ticket machines were installed last week at the temporary entrance. After passing through the ticket readers, riders will walk through a tunnel to get to the platforms.

The work, which began in April, was precipitated by the need to make the station handicap accessible. But the project, which has been in the works since 1996, was delayed by neighborhood opposition to the location of an elevator, which will be built on the south side of the Arlington Street Church on a wide sidewalk.

“The elevator will have a metal-framed glass top,” said Tom Bretto, the T’s project manager. “It’s transparent so you can see the church.”

When the projec,t is finished, elevator users will connect with a tunnel ending at the mezzanine level of the station where two other elevators, one for the inbound direction and one for outbound, will descend to the two platforms. Two escalators, one of which was installed in 1951, will be replaced.

The station itself will get new ceilings, floors and wall tiles, as well as automated fare collection equipment. Artists are now working on panels to be inserted at the mezzanine level that will depict the fish weir used by the native Americans prior to English colonization. The fish weir was located where the station sits and at the same level, which is now underground rather than under water.

The direction of the stairs in front of the Arlington Street Church on Arlington Street will be reversed. “We looked at where the pedestrians were coming from,” said Barbara Boylan, director of design for the T. “More people were coming from the offices along Boylston Street than from Newbury.”

At Arlington Street, the refurbished entrances will conform to the Boylston Street master plan, said Boylan.

The projected date of completion is late 2008, at which time one stairway at Berkeley Street will remain open as an exit only.

CREDIT: Dhan Shrestha

CAPTION: Head of the Advent School Nancy Harris Frohlich is a woman of many talents. Some were previously unknown until last Saturday when she stood behind the counter of Charles Street Supply answering hardware questions and dispensing information about such things as nuts, bolts, Phillips heads and joint compounds to willing customers like Marissa Bea, Anderson Street. It was all for a good cause: 20 percent of proceeds from all Advent family purchases made under her guidance will be donated back to the school to benefit Julie’s Family learning Program.

Boston will have no more speed bumps if Dennis Royer gets his way. Royer, who became chief of public works and transportation for Boston about two months ago, also said the city will finally have street signs.

“I’m trying to find out what street I’m on, and there are no signs,” the former Denver traffic engineer said about a drive he took in Boston when he was still unfamiliar with the city. “It had a median and trees and was really nice. I ended up at the Public Garden, but I was still asking myself, ‘What street am I on?’”

Royer now knows how to identify Commonwealth Avenue even without the street signs, he said at a Move Massachusetts meeting last week, where transportation advocates and planning buffs gave him a warm reception. “They told me you can’t find your way around Boston, and it’s true,” he declared.

But he’s going to make some changes. “Tourism is an important industry in Boston, and you have to make it easier for visitors,” he said. “Signage is key.”

So are Boston’s road conditions, which Royer called poor. He said it isn’t wise to rely on filling potholes quickly. The best approach is to not allow them to occur in the first place. So he issued a warning to the utility companies: it won’t be as easy to get permits to cut streets, especially ones recently repaved, and when a permit is issued, someone will be watching to make sure the street is repaired properly. “In half the cuts, the asphalt isn’t even cold yet,” he observed. “There’s going to be a certain level of pain and suffering.”

A guy with a sense of humor, Royer said he is aware that Denver, with a newer infrastructure and streets laid out on a grid, is not Boston. “I took over the finest 1965 traffic signal system in the U. S.,” he said about his first job in Denver. “The problem was it was 1985.”

He said the city gave him the money and he made improvements. “A lot of the things I did there, I can do here,” he said.

Some other steps he intends to take are to get public works and transportation heads in the metropolitan area together to try to solve problems in concert with one another instead of having a project stop at a town line. He said he wants Boston and other cities and towns to buy supplies together rather than separately. In Denver, this strategy reduced prices, especially for the smaller municipalities who wouldn’t have had the buying clout to get lower prices on their own.

While he said that Boston has many advantages other cities don’t have, he wasn’t entirely complimentary. He called Boston’ pedestrians arrogant and stupid, but he said that city government’s decisions sometimes made them that way.

Perhaps the most far-reaching goal he discussed was triggered by a walk into the North End through Haymarket. He said it was filthy. “I was appalled at what I found piled up in the street.” He wants to automate trash collection and clean the streets on the same day. But to do that he said he has to get to the curb. So all the parked cars would have to move.

Such a plan would mean that street cleaning would take place 12 months of the year, not nine. Presumably such a practice would mean that snow plowing could also take place along the same streets.

The cleaner streets would be a boon in the “walking city.” “The biggest disincentive to walking [along Boston’s sometimes-narrow sidewalks] is the trash,” he said. “It’s a huge quality of life issue.”

He acknowledged that such a drastic change will take several years to implement, partly because the last contract for trash collection is good through 2009.

When Mayor Menino hired him, Royer said he told him he wanted to do things differently from the way they had always been done. Royer explained that there were two ways to go about solving problems. One was to follow the example of the captain of the Titanic and try to avoid the icebergs. Another was to “go where no man has gone before.” Royer said for him there’s no question about his style. “I take the Star Trek approach,” he promised.

Mass Highway’s ineptitude

There is no Cambridge Street Monitor this week because the week is short. One would think it would be hard to make progress on a road project in only three days, but if you’ve watched the speed with which the MBTA’s contractor is working at Charles Circle, you will know that isn’t the case.

Dozens of workmen are busily laying bricks and performing obscure maneuvers that will apparently result in something. For some reason, both the traffic lights and the street lights are operating in the circle, having been thrown up over about five weeks. Compare that to Cambridge Street, where the Massachusetts Highway Department hasn’t been able to install any kind of lights fully or make them work in more than four years.

Moreover, having given him no help on Cambridge Street, Mass Highway has assigned John Lepore, the engineer who manages the project for them, to two new projects.

This agency has been about as inept on Cambridge Street as Donald Rumsfeld has been in Iraq.

We hope a new governor can imbue a sense of responsibility, effectiveness and efficiency to this pathetic organization. Meanwhile, state Representative Marty Walz is on the case.

In the first week of December, Walz plans to organize a walk-through of Cambridge Street to itemize the problems still unsolved and the work still to be completed. Neighborhood leaders will be with her. It is hoped, but not certain, that Mass Highway will also attend the session.

It may not help until new competent department heads are appointed by Governor Patrick. But it will make neighbors feel better.

Neighborhood traditions

Savenor’s tent was sitting in its usual holiday spot last week in the parking lot. People were overheard making plans for decorating days. Don’t forget — they take place this weekend. Last week starting on Wednesday morning there were parking places to be had.

It reminded us that holiday traditions are not just in families. They are in neighborhoods too, and they become traditions without anyone really intending to make them so.

Savenor’s tent is not that important in the scheme of things, but seeing it there means that a New England winter is about to start, there are a couple of good holidays arriving, families and friends are getting together, everything is normal, and all is right with the world — well, if we don’t count Cambridge Street and Iraq.

Our error

Last week we ran a full-page ad — free and for a meeting that had already been held. If you noticed, you were probably wondering if we had taken leave of our senses. The answer is, “Yes. We took leave of our senses.” We won’t go into all the gory details. But when our staff discussed it we again remembered that there are usually five errors in every issue we print. Most of the time, readers won’t be aware of them. Luckily, we think most of our readers will forgive us for errors we make. Usually, when we make a mistake, we hear about it quickly from a letter to the editor from one of you.

Errors remind us of the purpose of newspapers. Although we try to be as accurate as possible, our goal isn’t to be right all the time. Instead it is to provoke thought, inspire ideas, create conversation, and provide a give and take that makes our neighborhood better. If we’ve done that well, then we’re doing our job.