To meet the need for an approximate 1 million square feet of new space in the next ten years, Suffolk University is considering a campus expansion that would include a series of linked clusters of campus buildings along Tremont Street.

The suggested plan was just one of a number of ideas considered by the Suffolk Task Force, a group of seventeen community members appointed by the city from Beacon Hill, the North End, the West End, Downtown Crossing and the Ladder District, at its meeting last week.

Task force members asked the school develop a more thorough plan for each area, which includes Temple Place/West Street in the Ladder District, Bromfield/Tremont Street, the Court Street area, New Chardon/Staniford Street as well as the current campus concentration on Beacon Hill for what they hope will eventually become the school’s institutional master plan.

“The initial discussion was ‘where is a good place for a dorm,’” said task force member and Phillips Street resident Rob Whitney, who wanted to see the plan fleshed out more. “That’s a different concept from how do you organize a campus. It depends on the uses that you foresee for the school,” he said.

School officials said the plan for the clustered campus was a first step toward a longer-term strategic concept, one that would develop with continued input from the task force.

“This is more of a prediction at the moment than an established principle,” said John Nucci, vice president of government and community affairs.

“I think it’s definitely a move in the right direction in terms of them planning their campus,” said Tim Padera of Bowdoin Street who served on the task force for the proposed dorm at 20 Somerset. “It’s still a work in progress and at least they are talking and thinking about the ramifications of what they do.”
Councilor Mike Ross whose districts include the student-heavy Mission Hill and Fenway neighborhoods, said the inclusion of dorms in some of the proposed areas was a positive.

Ross, who worked with the city to establish the 2004 Student Accountability Ordinance, which requires schools to keep track of where there off campus students live, said the influx of off campus students has hurt some neighborhoods.

“I think [a dorm] will improve the neighborhood,” said Ross of the university’s plan to build a new dorm at 10 West Street that will house 274 students.
Ross said benefits to the area from the creation of a new dorm would include safer streets and flourishing businesses.

“I see this as being a big positive,” he said.

Although he no longer oversees the Boston City Council’s budget-making process, the former Ways and Means Committee chairman still keeps his eye on what’s going on money-wise.

Now chair of the Youth Violent Crime Prevention Committee and vice-chair of the Youth Affairs Committee, City Councilor Michael P. Ross clearly has youth on his mind, and he wants to make sure extra resources are earmarked to put an end to the violence.

He’ll do that, he said, by finding ways to get resources directed to street workers and community groups who work with young people who lack the opportunity to live in safe surroundings.

He also wants funds directed toward additional physical education and outdoor recess opportunities for kids in public schools, which since 1996, the city is no longer mandated to provide. But Ross said data collected from other communities have shown that an hour a day of physical activity can halve the amount of violent behavior by students. It also helps provide a better learning environment and curbs obesity problems.

“The schools now keep kids bottled up in classrooms,” he said, “when they need to recreate and blow off energy so they can learn better.”

Closer to home, Ross has at the top of his mind an upgrade of the Boston Common, which for years has been overused by special events, galas and races that have all taken their toll on the green space.

“I want it to be the front or back yard for those who don’t have one,” he said. “It is for kids, dogs and people to play in.”

The city has allocated around $1 million in expenditures this year he said, plus there is another million in previously allocated but unspent funds. The Friends of the Public Garden and Common has come up with a $15 million capital needs list, and Ross wants to find a way to generate enough public and private funds to take care of them.

Parks in general are a great investment said Ross, who wants more monies allocated to the smaller parks, such as the Phillips Street Playground, as well. Another priority for him is to have pedestrian walk lights installed at some intersections, such as Arlington and Newbury streets, and replacing the bricks on Charles Street’s sidewalk.

Ross is particularly proud of the city council’s efforts with the police department, which has climbed out of the difficult deficit it has been stuck in since 2000. The number of police on the streets is now the highest it has ever been — which brings Ross back to his first point.

“There needs to be more police enforcement to avoid youth violence problems that could be prevented,” he said. “We have to get to the youth beforehand to head off trouble before it begins.”

Funding to establish a statewide commission to study reentry issues was among several accomplishments achieved by Senator Dianne Wilkerson in next year’s senate budget.

“All across the city, crime and violence is a major issue of concern,” said Wilkerson. “This legislation will draw on the expertise of elected officials, law enforcers, advocates and private citizens who are involved in the reentry issue. The commission will study housing, employment, education and the many other things that contribute to the violence and recidivism of these same people back to incarceration.”

Among other provisions, Wilkerson also secured crucial funding increases for adult basic education, METCO and the Forsyth Institute, which will provide on-site dental care for Boston’s school-age children, and the Museum of Afro-American History on Joy Street. She also supported language that authorizes the Hynes Convention Center to move forward with its plan to expand the revenues it generates and repeals the authorized sale of the Boston Common parking garage.

In addition, Wilkerson secured a $3 million increase for human services workers, an increase in the third-day allowance for seniors living in nursing homes and a much-needed increase in the personal care attendance allowances for those who care for the elderly.

The senate budget now moves to conference committee, before moving on to the governor’s desk for his signature in time for the new fiscal year, which starts in July.

credit: Courtesy photo
caption: The library at the newly renovated Park Street School.




Park Street School on Brimmer Street was recognized by the Massachusetts Historical Commission for the extensive restoration of the 1913 Colonial Revival building the school calls home. At a ceremony last Thursday at the Massachusetts Archives Building, William Francis Galvin, secretary of the Commonwealth, presented the preservation award to Park Street School Headmistress Tracey Bradley, project architects Don Mills and Craig Whitaker of Mills Whitaker Architects and project contractor Marc Truant of Marc Truant & Associates.

In 2003, responding to the expressed needs of families living in the heart of Boston, the founders of Park Street School purchased, restored and updated the former Brimmer School for children in kindergarten through grade 6. Classes began in September 2005 in the newly restored building, which incorporates state-of-the-art technology within a rich historical context. Many parents and friends living in the immediate surroundings invested significant amounts of time and money to restore the elementary school.

Park Street School also won an honorable mention in the 2006 Accessible Design Awards Program of the Massachusetts Architectural Access Board for making the historic building into a fully accessible facility.

Cambridge Street Monitor

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

Progress during the week of June 11-15

Traffic signals: no work.

Plantings: Scheduled for this past weekend.

Street paving: Scheduled for June 23.

Prepare yourself for a slew of utility companies coming in to do one last dig in the street before the paving, since city officials, notably Dennis Royer, the new chief of public works and transportation, appear to be cracking down on the practice of digging up streets that have been newly paid.

Sidewalks: The trailer was moved on Friday, which allows workers to finish the sidewalks and plant the last four trees.

credit: Roger Farrington




On Friday, June 1, The Green and White Ball was held in the Grand Ballroom of Taj Boston. Marking the 170th anniversary of the Public Garden and the 80th anniversary of Taj Boston's landmark building, more than 250 people gathered to celebrate Boston's historic green spaces while raising over $500,000. All proceeds will go to the Friends of the Public Garden endowment to provide for future administration and care of the Public Garden, the Boston Common and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall.

Friends of the Public Garden President Henry Lee, Mount Vernon Street, Nina Doggett, Barbara Hostetter, Mount Vernon Street, David Gibbons, general manager, Taj Boston.

Elizabeth Nassikas, Mount Vernon Street, and her father Laury Coolidge, Chestnut Street.

Marilyn and John Keane, Chestnut Street.

Build that school — any school

That Boston boy, John Hynes III, has floated what to some is an outlandishly elitist proposal: he wants to build a private school as part of his development in the Seaport district. He has also proposed building a performance arts center, which appears not to have fostered the same kind of controversy. Otherwise, the development that Hynes’s firm, Gale International, proposes is the typical mix — housing, offices, hotels, retail and open space.

We urge Hynes to plow ahead with his private school proposal. We also urge him to keep an open mind if school officials decide that they might want him to build a public school instead.

We applaud his acknowledgement that families, not just empty nesters and working singles and couples, want to live in Boston. It’s about time that developers realize that families exist.

For its lifetime, this column has been agitating for more accommodation for downtown families. The benefits of keeping families in the city are overwhelming — environmentally, socially and economically. It is schools, more than any other facility, that make city living possible for children.

In the Back Bay and on Beacon Hill we know what it is like to live without a walk-to school, and it is not a pretty sight. It provokes some families into deserting Boston for the more family-friendly suburbs. It means that all parents who decide on a public school have to put their children on a bus. It means that the neighborhoods become more and more segregated by income since it is mostly only families with extraordinary financial means who can afford both the high cost of housing and private education.

The mayor has so far complained that Hynes must believe that the Boston Public Schools are not good enough for the relatively wealthy families who can afford his housing prices.

But maybe, being a Boston boy, Hynes understands a more basic premise on which the Boston Public Schools has operated. It has demonstrated that it doesn’t want to provide schools for the city’s relatively wealthy families.

The experience of two downtown neighborhoods is a good example.

The Back Bay and Beacon Hill have had no walk-to schools since the Prince School on Newbury Street and the Peter Faneuil School on Joy Street closed in the 1980s. In 2002, when Emerson College put its Brimmer Street building on the market, Back Bay and Beacon Hill neighborhood leaders put together a financial plan to buy it and assist the Boston Public Schools in establishing a school that kids in both neighborhoods could walk to.

But in January, 2003, school officials nixed that idea. They said they didn’t have the money. Neighborhood officials said they were told privately that school officials didn’t believe Back Bay and Beacon Hill families would take advantage of a public school. The building was ultimately bought by Park Street School, which is now full of Beacon Hill and Back Bay kids.

School officials maintained there weren’t enough children in the area to warrant a school. The 2010 census will let us know what the actual numbers are, but you have only to look at the overwhelming numbers of applications to the neighborhoods’ private schools and the overflowing playgrounds to know that more and more families want to stay in the city.

John Hynes’s project is all about hope — hope that if you build it they will come. That’s as true of kids as it is with the empty nesters and young singles or couples that most developers try to attract. City officials need to cultivate the same hope and confidence that Hynes has.

Keep at it, John.