It appears that Rep. Barry R. Finegold of Andover did not like hearing that members of a Beacon Hill cooperative building may have unfairly disqualified one of his constituents from living there, and so has set out to keep it from happening again.

Finegold and two senators from the Andover area, Mark C. Montigny and Susan C. Tucker, have proposed an act in the legislature that would limit the standard for eligibility to live in a co-op to financial criteria only. A public hearing on that act is taking place today, May 15, at 10:30 a.m. in Room B-2 of the State House.

Neither Finegold nor his aide returned calls to the Times for this story. It has been reported, however, that Finegold was prompted to sponsor this bill by John Walsh, a resident of North Andover who is a wealthy chief executive and sole owner of Elizabeth Grady Companies. Walsh’s rags-to-riches story began in a Somerville housing project, and he claims that his application to buy a unit at 68 Beacon Street was turned down by its board of trustees because his background was ‘unsuitable,’ and that he was told he would not ‘coalesce’ as a member of the coop. Walsh presumably convinced Finegold that the trustees had been unfairly biased in disqualifying him from living in the unit. The trustees have remained silent on the subject, which is currently is litigation.

To make sure this doesn’t happen again, Finegold wants the state to take away the rights of a co-op’s board of trustees to use any criteria other than financial status when approving new residents. This morning the public will have an opportunity to weigh in on that proposal.

Cooperative buildings are like private clubs, according to David Thomas, an attorney and real estate expert. They currently have the right to choose who lives in the building as long as they do not discriminate against anyone who is of a protected class.

“While [the 68 Beacon Street] case may or may not be discriminatory, it raised the issue that there is not a developed set of regulations for co-ops in Mass,” said Thomas. “As a policy issue, is there a need for more regs to prevent perceived ills? Have people created a folklore that says co-oops exist so you can discriminate?”

In the case of co-ops, the entire building and land are owned by a corporation in which the apartment ‘owners’ are shareholders,” explained Thomas. “It has a corporate form of governance, in which shareholders elect directors who manage the building, set fees and have the right to approve new unit owners before they buy.”

Approving new unit owners can be a lengthy process and often requires submission of personal and professional references in addition to financial records. Since the shgareholders are equally financially responsible for the property, Thomas thinks the board of trustees should have the right to screen the financial records of future residents. “You are going into business with your neighbors,” he said. “There is a lot of interdependency. Some levels of permissible screening prevent some of the worst financial abuses, which would have to be absorbed by the other stakeholders.”

But the appropriateness of other criteria is more complicated. Thomas said co-ops must to avoid decisions that could be viewed as discriminating against citizens protected by law, which include, among others, race, color, age, sexual orientation, national origin, religion and ancestry. “It is a function of deciding what are the permissible criteria and making sure you don’t run afoul of discrimination.”

Gail Flatto, who lives in a large co-op on Chestnut Street, said while her board of trustees requires two letters of recommendation as well as financial reports, she does not believe anyone has ever been turned down as long as they met the financial requirements.

On the other hand, a resident of a smaller Chestnut Street co-op, who asked that her name be withheld, said she and her husband had purchased a unit in a co-op primarily because they wanted a safe place to raise a family. They believe that can be accomplished only through the approval process. “The quality of life here is excellent. It’s peaceful. We all spend time together,” she said. “I feel confident we won’t have an undesirable person, such as sexual pervert, living near our children. But if that is changed, it negatively impacts the value of our property.”

She also questioned whether the state even has a right to legislate regulations for co-ops. “A co-op is a corporation, a private contract between shareholders,” she pointed out. “Does the government have the power to do this?”

Thomas shared that concern and questioned whether Finegold’s proposed bill, which would impose additional regulations on private corporations, would be permissible constitutionally.

“In the end, this will be decided in the courts,” he said.

CAPTION: Garden club members Molly Sherden and Susan McWhinney-Morse are chairing the garden tour this year.

SIDEBAR: To show off the Hill at its best this Thursday, please sweep your sidewalk and gutter, and make sure your window boxes are filled with flowers.


For 78 years in May Beacon Hill’s sidewalks have played host to hordes of visitors who have come to see the neighborhood’s private gardens. The ladies and a surprising number of gentlemen find the Hill’s narrow streets, brick sidewalks, perpetually burning gas lamps, and one-off shops interesting and appealing — and certainly different from any environment they typically spend time in.

But it’s the gardens, hidden and often accessible only through what seem to be secret passages, that really tickle a visitor’s fancy. Once inside a garden, visitors notice that the urban perspective changes from a line of rowhouses to a surprising jumble of ells, garden walls, balconies, all with a sense of enclosure.

“Lots of people look forward to this on an annual basis,” said Susan McWhinney-Morse of Temple Street. “It’s a rite of spring, and it is popular because of its very nature — it’s hidden.”

McWhinney-Morse is the chair of this year’s garden tour, to be held Thursday, May 17, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. rain or shine. Eleven private gardens are open to visitors, and gardens at the Church of St. John the Evangelist and Peter Faneuil House are featured, as are the Temple Street Park and Rollins Place, which is newly spiffed up for this event.

Proceeds from the tour go to environmental and garden causes, mostly in Boston, but also to regional and national efforts.

After 78 years of practice, the garden tour, which can draw as many as 3,000 visitors, practically runs itself, said McWhinney-Morse. The first task each year is for club members to choose a co-chair, who serves as an assistant to the chair, learning how the tour goes together so she can run it the following year. Molly Sherden of Walnut Street is McWhinney-Morse’s co-chair. McWhinney-Morse learned her duties by assisting Mary Fran Townsend of Chestnut Street last year.

The next step is identifying the gardens to be shown, a task that takes place in the fall. Club members agree when they join to open their gardens on the tour every three years, but life interferes. A garden owner might be re-pointing the back of her building or renovating a kitchen, making her garden inaccessible. With 60 members, though, the club has enough gardens that their owners usually open the gardens about every four or five years.

Since many garden visitors come every year, the club tries not to bore them by presenting the same gardens too often. Two or three new members join each year so new gardens are continually refreshing the choices the chairs have.

This year McWhinney-Morse tried to find gardens that were grouped in a geographically sensible way. “We aim for 10 to 12 gardens,” she said. “I didn’t want visitors having to go to the four corners of the Hill.”

Sometime in the winter, the tour chairs get the rest of Beacon Hill involved. They ask restaurants if they want to be listed on the tickets as places where ticket holders might get lunch. They usually work with the Church of the Advent to set up space for coffee and cookies and a boutique. They contact Hill House, Beacon House and the Otis House Museum, which open their restrooms to the public on that day. They work with Copy Clone to produce the brochure with descriptions of the gardens. Visitors pick these up at tables on Charles Street the morning of the tour.

In January, Janie Walsh of Walnut Street and Paula O’Keeffe of Chestnut Street search out items for the boutique. The two women have run the boutique for many years, so it appears effortless, said McWhinney-Morse.

The chairs assign someone to design the poster and the invitation. Garden club member and artist Rachel Claflin designed this year’s poster, which features her own painting of tulips. In early March, garden club members get together to address 4,000 invitations, which some regular attendees rely on to remind them to get their tickets.

The hardest thing, said McWhinney-Morse, is pulling everything together at the last moment, with staffing for each garden and the ticket selling tables in place. She is grateful this year not to have to deal with trash pick-up, which no longer takes place on Thursdays. But one new problem is that the Mayor’s Boston Shines weekend clean-up was scheduled this year in April, leaving three weeks for the streets to get dirty again. Beacon Hill organizations used to mount an official effort to clean up the weekend before the tour.

McWhinney-Morse said she agreed to chair the tour because she believes every garden club member should take her turn. But she’s made her task a little more difficult than usual.

She is showing her own garden this year, so while managing the tour she’s also yanking out plants that died over the winter and replanting new ones in the long narrow shade pathway that runs beside the ell of her house.

With everything almost done, McWhinney-Morse has only one last worry: Will there be sun and warm weather making the day a really good one?

Given the way many bicyclists ride the wrong way on Charles Street, it was an accident waiting to happen.

Nora Carey of Orlando, Florida, travels all over the world — weekly. She runs Disney’s International Food and Wine Festival, and in that capacity travels to just about any place where there are chefs and winemakers interested in epicurean adventures.

About two weeks ago she had just flown in from Chile and, before heading off to Oklahoma, she opted for a day of R & R at the Beaver Place home of her Boston cousin, Maribeth Brostowski.

Late that afternoon she headed toward Lauren’s Nails on Charles Street, stopping first for a cup of Starbucks coffee. Ready to cross the street, she saw that the light was green but that no car was coming, and so she stepped off the curb.

That’s when it happened. Carey was hit and thrown into the air by a bicyclist traveling the wrong way down Charles Street. The staff at Black Ink saw the accident, got her off the street and into their store, cleaned her face and called the ambulance. The bicyclist, who said he was a Harvard medical student, was shaken up, and his bike was scraped, but he was able to pick himself up and continue on his way. No one knows his name.

Doctors at MGH, where she was taken, discovered that the two bones above her elbow were broken, necessitating an operation at 3:00 a.m. the next morning to set the compound fracture. Thirty-two staples were put into her arm.

“She is still recovering at my house,” said Brostowski. “She had one of the best elbow doctors in the world, but she has been unable to travel or work since. She may never be able to straighten out her arm again.”

An out-of-towner, Carey was caught by surprise by the bicyclist who failed to follow traffic laws. But even Beacon Hillers, all too accustomed to seeing bikes riding the wrong way on Charles Street, can be surprised. “It’s terrible,” said Brostowski about the many bicyclists riding the wrong way. “I have a second and sixth grader, and we have had to train them to look out for bicyclists riding the wrong way.”

The best way to get to Cambridge Street from Beacon Street by bike is to ride on the sidewalk of Mugar Way, which is where Brostowki takes her children. According to the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, bicyclists have the right to ride on sidewalks outside business districts.

According to Nadav Carmel of MassBike, the coalition provides cycling education programs and classes on safe cycling for bicyclists. It also has produced a curriculum to train police officers in the rules of the roads as they apply to bicyclists, which was adopted by the Massachusetts Municipal Training Committee and will be used to train new recruits and veteran officers.

Enforcement of the laws pertaining to bicyclists is up to the Boston Police Department, Carmel said. If he had been cited, the Harvard medical student who hit Carey was subject to fines up to $20. She, on the other hand, suffered severe and potentially permanent injuries as well as a loss of work time.

credit: D. Harney



Beacon Hill resident Abby Reohr, just shy of 2 years old, cools off during last week’s heat with an ice cream cone at Café Bella Vita on Charles Street.

The Beacon Hill Times follows the progress, or the lack thereof, on Cambridge Street through direct observation and interviews with the project’s supervisor from Mass Highway, John Lepore.

Paving: Last week the crew got ready for paving by scarifying the asphalt at the edges and raising the utility castings.

Plantings: On Friday, someone had dumped loam into the planting boxes between Bowdoin and Somerset streets, but the loam had not been spread and no trees were planted. It is possible that over the weekend more work will have been done.

Traffic lights: Best Electric has told Lepore they have been working but it is not evident. After many weeks, the light heads at Joy Street, the next intersection to be tackled, still are not in place. It appears that no progress was made in that realm last week.

If you’ve sat through the meetings about the Storrow Drive Tunnel reconstruction or if you have been reading about them in this newspaper, you may have noticed a theme emerging.

Investigate adding ramps to the Mass. Pike.

That’s a good idea.

But a study of additional ramps is not enough. We need to understand the whole traffic ecosystem in downtown Boston. If we changed the directions of some streets, if we made some one-way streets two ways, if we closed some streets to traffic completely, if we opened now-closed streets — would we benefit? If we charged cars a fee to enter the city, what effect would that have? If we determined that only vehicles under a certain size could enter a restricted downtown zone, would our lives improve?

It is obvious that Storrow Drive affects and is affected by all other routes around the city. It’s not just the Mass. Pike. It’s also local streets. It is the bridges to Cambridge.

It is also the history. Since the 1950s streets have changed direction, sometimes on a whim, but at least on an ad hoc basis. For example, about 15 years ago a Beacon Hill neighborhood group closed one exit from Storrow Drive into Charles Circle with no analysis of the effect on other roadways. Probably when the Mass Pike extension opened it increased traffic on Arlington Street, since one entrance ramp is located there. But it is hard to imagine that at that time anyone analyzed the effect to the extent they would now. When Mayor White decreed that traffic on Charles Street should go south rather than north, no consideration was given to the the fact that Berkeley Street would become more crowded.

At this point, with few exceptions — Mass. Ave. and Commercial Street — in downtown Boston neighborhoods, it is only wide streets with medians or parks in the center that are two ways. Commonwealth Avenue and Cambridge, Causeway and Congress streets are good examples.

Changing the way a street works can be a political minefield.
Already, advocates for children are complaining about a Storrow Drive tunnel plan that would greatly benefit the Esplanade, but would cause an increase in traffic on Clarendon Street.

Back Bay residents would like to see Charles Street return to its pre-1984 direction, but Beacon Hill residents will have none of it.

This is not about slowing the process. That’s the last thing that should be done.

But this is a good time to do some brainstorming about what we want downtown Boston to be in terms of traffic. There are three other major projects — the Longfellow, the Science Museum and the BU bridges, — that are also moving forward.

It is also a time when other old cities — Paris and London come to mind — are experimenting with new ideas that reduce traffic that never see the light of day in this new world municipality.

We should also be considering how a subway or a light rail line could enhance this project. So far the Storrow Drive studies have pretty much discounted how rapid transit could be employed to our benefit.

This is an exciting time for transportation buffs in Boston, mostly because of what the Big Dig has brought us in terms of urban improvement. We should not lose our momentum.