Susan Foster, Anderson Street, and her stepdaughter Elizabeth Walton enjoyed some hot new fashion trends on Monday, September 10, as part of Boston Fashion Week. The work of one of Boston's hottest new designers, Michael De Paulo, was showcased in a major preview of his Fall '07 and Spring '08 Couture Collections in the Grand Ballroom at Taj Boston. The reception and show, attended by more than 200 guests, were a benefit for the MassGeneral Hospital for Children.
Mayfair on the Hill owner Claire Torpey of Goodwin Place styled models’ hair for an evening of fashion on September 8 at Mayfair. The party honored locally-based luxury women’s clothier, 4march, and featured local models.
4march fuses style with global consciousness and is dedicating its clothing line to social responsibility. Torpey and her staff at the salon created 1920s-inspired hair, and Chenelle Brown provided glamorous make-up that completed the overall look for the models.
Credit: Mike Nesper
Caption: Tom Kershaw and his famous bar.
In 1981, a television producer came to Boston looking for a real, neighborhood bar on which to base a show. He came across the Bull & Finch pub and knew he‚d found the place where soon everybody would come to know its name.
Tom Kershaw, owner of Cheers, opened the now world-famous bar in 1969 as a place for Beacon Hill residents. “After becoming ‘discovered’ for the show, my little neighborhood bar became the world’s most famous bar,” said Kershaw.
The show, which premiered September 30, 1982, ran for 11 seasons, receiving 26 Emmys and a record 117 Emmy nominations. “It touched an enormous amount of people throughout the world,” said Kershaw.
Besides putting him on the map, the TV show allowed Kershaw the chance to travel the country and become involved in national restaurant and tourism associations. “It gave me the opportunity to do things beyond my business,” said Kershaw.
Today, Kershaw is happy to provide tourists a place to rest. “It’s really a two-for-one,” said Kershaw. “They get to grab a burger and a beer and see something famous.”
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the TV series‚ first episode, Kershaw is throwing a party at the Hampshire House from 5 p.m. until 9 p.m. Sunday, September 30. The party, which will be held throughout four stories of the Hampshire House, will have several events, including a Cheers character look-a-like contest and Cheers trivia. Food and drink will also be available and, of course, re-runs of the TV show will be playing all night.
Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at Cheers‚ restaurants, retail locations and online at www.cheersboston.com. A portion of the proceeds will go to Cheers for Children, which has raised more than $1 million for four Boston area charities.
Emma Rait, Beacon Street, enjoyed her pancakes at Hill House’s annual pancake breakfast on Sunday, September 16, to benefit the community organization.
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 September 17 - 21
Traffic signals: Ocean State, the manufacturer of the controls for the traffic lights, has come twice to adjust the lights at Grove and Blossom streets. State is in intensive talks with Best Electric, which hasn’t shown up for several weeks.
Street paving: No progress. But, Lepore said his trailer would be moved over this past weekend.
Street lights: Still not working properly.
Trash barrels: Installation beginning at Charles Circle end of street was scheduled for Saturday.
Regrettably, the plans to fix the tunnel between Clarendon and Arlington streets on Storrow Drive have broken down.
The committee that the Department of Conservation and Recreation created to figure out the best options for a redo of Storrow Drive has been sidelined.
The DCR Commissioner Richard K. Sullivan is promoting a construction plan that is universally disliked by all the downtown players. And his insistence at maintaining the status quo on the redone roadway has attracted criticism from many quarters.
Participants believe that other options, which may ultimately prove better, have gotten short-shrift. They think that DCR’s focus has been on moving cars and that the department has given only token attention to improving the pedestrian or park experience. They also think DCR has not reached out to other public agencies — Mass Highway, the Mass Pike and the MBTA — to come up with mitigation for reducing traffic on what was supposed to be a parkway, not a major thoroughfare.
So, with the public process tanking and DCR’s solutions found wanting, it is time to stop the whole project for about 10 years, a proposal John Messervy, director of capital and facility planning for Partners Health Care, MGH’s corporate parent, proposed last week.
DCR officials are probably incapable of taking such a step at this moment. They’ve dug in their heels too deeply. Neighborhood leaders should get to Governor Patrick, Executive Office of Environmental Affairs Secretary an Bowles, and Executive Office of Transportation and Public Works Secretary Bernard Cohen to shut this project down — for now.
DCR plans to repair the tunnel in any event, and the engineers who described the repairs at an advisory committee meeting said that while the repairs are designed to last at least five years, they would actually last for ten. This needs to be confirmed, or a 10-year patch must be executed.
A decade will give the state time to repair the Longfellow Bridge, which Messervy says is more important to people and goods getting in and out of Boston than is Storrow Drive. As Messervy has pointed out, the bridge carries not only automobiles, but also delivery trucks, pedestrians and the Red Line. In theory, Storrow carries only passenger cars.
Postponing the Storrow Drive project for 10 years will also give the state time to coordinate plans from its various agencies to implement a coordinated set of traffic mitigation projects such as new ramps to the pike or new MBTA routes that will change traffic patterns in the whole city. It will also give them time to test such ideas as closing entrances and exits on a temporary basis between Storrow Drive and city streets.
A decade will give the state time to figure out how it is going to manage transportation as a whole, not just vehicle traffic. Recent news reports have claimed that in 2005 Bostonians sat in traffic for 46 hours, or the equivalent of almost two full days and nights. Keeping Storrow Drive a major highway will not help traffic flow. Ultimately, it will simply give drivers another roadway on which to come to a halt.
Right now DCR’s recommendations seem antiquated in the face of the state’s own Massachusetts Transportation Finance Commission’s report, which came out on September 17. Among other things, this commission recommended that drivers be charged user fees to drive on the main roads. It recommended an increase of 11.5 cents to the gas tax, as well as indexing the tax to inflation. Taking steps such as these would likely reduce traffic, making previous assumptions about traffic volumes on Storrow Drive faulty.
The plan also seems antiquated given the steps the real “world class” cities have taken or have considered taking to reduce traffic. Paris’s bikes, London’s congestion pricing and New York’s talk of congestion pricing suggest that every transportation project we undertake from this point on has to abandon the 1950s ideas that moving cars fast is desirable or even possible.
DCR has approached this project with those 1950s ideas. Department officials have lost the faith of those who were working with them. It is time to put this project aside until such a time that we can come up with a plan that doesn’t perpetuate the mistakes of an earlier generation.
Official opening of West End Museum by Allison Moore
Renovations complete, the West End Museum will throw a grand opening event for its “Old West End” exhibit commemorating the former neighborhood at the end of next month.
On October 28, the museum will welcome old residents and other visitors with food and special guests. Staff will announce the winner of the $1500 Club drawing, part of a contest that has asked for small donations throughout the year in exchange for the chance to win big money prizes.
The museum board, a subset of the Old West End Housing Corporation, was able to carry out improvements to the facility after receiving a $40,000 grant from the Massachusetts Historical Commission. While the building, located at 150 Staniford Street, has been open for several years, it has housed only “makeshift exhibits,” said museum President and Editor of The West Ender newspaper Jim Campano. Many materials on display come from a smaller display at the Old State House put together by the Bostonian Society in 1992.
The grand opening will signify a more complete start to presenting the rich history of the neighborhood, said Campano. “We’ve spent a lot of time putting [the collection] back together, because a lot of the pieces were missing and some items were broken,” he said. The board has been at work expanding the museum’s collection of old West End relics and memories, which includes photos, a fire escape statue exhibit, and other materials from the heyday of the neighborhood. With new facilities for lectures, said Campano, the museum will also offer a speaking series and will share a collection of videos about the area with patrons, including an ABC documentary titled “Lost Neighborhood” and a collection of oral history interviews.
“We’re focusing on the 1890 to 1958 immigrant experience, which started with Portuguese fisherman cooking fish out in the neighborhood,” said Campano. “We’re not so interested in Charles River Park.”
He means, of course, the towering apartment complex that symbolizes the urban renewal project that closed down the immigrant neighborhood in the late 1950s and forced all its residents to move. In a controversial eminent domain decision, the city cleared out the area and replaced the original shops and homes, full of character, with Government Center, City Hall, and, eventually, more expensive housing. Residents argued that their home, while maybe not up to par with the neighborhoods that wealthy developers lived in, did not need revitalization, but were unsuccessful.
Campano pointed out that the West End interests not only current and former Bostonians but also urban developers and social psychologists from beyond the immediate area. “We were the original ‘urban neighborhood,’” he said, referencing a term used to describe the area in a book of the same name by Suzanne Keller, published in 1968. The museum has an extensive collection of documents from the Boston Redevelopment Authority and other organizations involved in the conflict, and he would like to work on organizing them into files that scholars can easily use.
Former West End residents will likely find the exhibits bittersweet, remembering the good times in their tight-knit neighborhood but also the days when everything went away.
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