Does downtown Boston need more parking? Does it need to be built under the Common?

Those are two questions Massachusetts Convention Center Authority officials will try to answer in the next few months.

Last week the MCCA issued a Request for Proposals for a feasibility study on expanding the Boston Common Garage toward the south underneath the ball fields located there, said James Rooney, executive director of the MCCA, which owns and manages the garage.

He said the MCCA is not advocating for an expanded garage, but he wants to explore the idea since it was suggested by Senator Dianne Wilkerson’s committee, which studied whether the state should keep running the Hynes Convention Center as well as the new Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. They concluded that the Hynes contributed a significant financial benefit to the Massachusetts economy and should remain open as a state property. The committee estimated at the time that the garage brought in about $5 million in profits that helped subsidize the convention centers’ operation.

“When the garage was built in the ‘60s, it was phase one of a two-phase project,” said Rooney. “We have a certain right to expand.”

He said that whether it is right to do so now — or ever — depends on the results of the feasibility study, which will investigate the traffic impacts, historic site impacts, construction costs, mitigation, the demand for parking and the current supply. Surface parking lots in a half-mile radius of the garage have closed recently due to the construction of new buildings, he said. The deadline for submitting proposals is November 14. Rooney expects the study itself will take until about the middle of next summer. The study is anticipated to cost in the $100,000 range.

The Friends of the Public Garden do not support the feasibility study nor any expansion. “The Friends are unalterably opposed to any expansion of the garage beneath the Boston Common,” said Eugenie Beal, a long-time member of the Friends’ board of directors.

Rooney said that if the expansion were affecting other areas of the Common, he would be reluctant to proceed with the feasibility study. But few trees would be removed, and the ball fields, while heavily used, are not historic or something that can’t be rebuilt. “Had this been in a traditional area where there were old trees and spaces that had never been disturbed, I wouldn’t have issued the feasibility study,” he said. “But, in reality, that section of the Common has been disturbed already.”

Rooney said if the feasibility study shows a need and a feasible plan, he is confident the MCCA will replace what they remove with something even better. “We did the garage restoration and put the new roof on in the 1990s,” he said. “Generally speaking, people would say we did a good job with that. We demonstrated an ability to do this kind of work.”

Beacon Hill Civic Association leaders are also opposed to the expansion. For them the concern is that an expanded garage would attract more drivers. “We are opposed to any project that attracts new traffic into downtown Boston,” said John Achatz, BHCA chair.

Rooney said that if cars are going to come to downtown Boston, it might be a better idea to funnel them into a garage rather than have them circling for parking spaces.

Rooney said that he does not know now how much an expansion would cost or how it would be paid for.

Credit: Karen Cord Taylor



Host Tom Kershaw of the Hampshire House, (from the left) City Councilor Mike Ross and Beacon Hill Business Association President Karen Fabbri of Moxie welcomed guest speaker André Porter, deputy director of the Mayor’s Office of Business Development, to the association’s September meeting.

Porter described how his office could help with matching grants, loans and design assistance in the effort to make Boston’s neighborhood commercial districts the best in the country. Beacon Hill is a model for the best kind of commercial district, said Porter, and a challenge will be for businesses here to make as much use of the city’s business services as other neighborhoods, since the financial help is need-based. He suggested that business owners visit www.cityofboston.gov/dnd to find out more.

One small step has been taken that could tear up Cambridge Street — again.

The state’s Executive Office of Transportation filed an Expanded Environmental Notification Form last week, which starts a process that could bring a Blue Line extension under Cambridge Street from Government Center, connecting with the Red Line at a subterranean station beneath the new Charles/MGH station. The ENF will trigger a Single Environmental Impact Report (SEIR), which will consider three options: no action taken, a Blue Line extension to Charles that eliminates the Bowdoin Station, and a Blue Line extension to Charles that re-locates the Bowdoin Station.

The connector was part of a package drawn up in the 1980s for mitigating the expanded traffic created by the finished Big Dig. The state backed off from planning the connector until the Conservation Law Foundation brought suit in 2005 and Mass General Hospital threatened to sue in December of that year. The state eventually agreed to see what these studies reveal.

A connector should increase transit ridership and reduce traffic since it would enable riders to get between such cities as Revere, Winthrop and Chelsea and Harvard Square with only one change rather than two. It would also directly connect the Red Line’s western riders with Logan Airport. Conservation Law Foundation studies have shown an improvement in air quality too.

The only negative, according to the notification form, is the four-year period of construction when neighboring business and residences and traffic would be disrupted as workers tear up the street and dig the tunnel.

The Beacon Hill Civic Association has generally supported the connector. “I haven’t seen the [notification form], so I know nothing about the specifics,” said John Achatz, the BHCA’s chair. “There are significant advantages for the transit sector, but the real question for our neighborhood is how hard it will be for us to live with the construction period.”

Achatz and others have felt that the state’s cost estimate — now listed as $242 to $302 million in the notification form— for this quarter-mile tunnel and new station has been inflated.

If the project were to proceed, construction would begin in 2013 and completed in 2017, according to the notification form.

Credit: Courtesy photo
Motorcycle owners have gotten tickets for parking their motorcycles perpendicular to the curb, as this one is. City officials say that motorcycles should be parked parallel, as a car is.

Credit: Karen Cord Taylor
The worst that could happen happened recently to this Beacon Hill motorcycle. But it was towed because it was in the way of the street cleaner, not because of the direction in which it was parked.





If there is one consistency in Boston, in particular on Beacon Hill, it’s parking; there isn’t any. So why is resident and motorcycle owner Rob Rottenbucher being ticketed for creating more space?

According to Rottenbucher, the Boston Transportation Department is now ticketing motorcycles parked at an angle instead of parallel to the curb. He recently received his first citation since moving to the Hill eight years ago. “They must be low on revenue,” said Rottenbucher, who has been parking at an angle since he’s owned a bike.

“Car owners don’t want motorcycles parking parallel,” said Rottenbucher. “It needlessly takes up space,” which Beacon Hill does not have.

Jim Mansfield, director of community affairs for the BTD, said the city doesn’t have room to allow angle parking. Motorcycles that park at an angle stick out beyond cars and actually reduce the width of the street, creating a potential risk for an accident with other vehicles, said Mansfield.

Rottenbucher, who has seen bikes knocked over before, said, “Angle parking has nothing to do with [the accidents], it’s just from cars running into them.”

A person in violation of parking their motorcycle at an angle can expect a citation for parking in between spaces, accompanied by a $25 fine, said Mansfield.

Although many motorcyclists park at an angle, and some even park on the sidewalk which is also illegal, the law requires bikers to park parallel to the curb, said Mansfield. The BTD is currently looking into the parking situation for motorcycles, but no specifics can be reported at this time.

Rottenbucher, who is unsure of how many bikers actually know the parking law, wants it changed to legalize angle parking in residential, non-metered areas. “If the bike isn’t taking up any more width than a car, there’s no reason it can’t be parked at an angle,” said Rottenbucher.

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 September 24 - 28

Traffic signals: No progress.

Street paving: No progress. The trailer was still there on Friday.

Street lights: Still not working properly.

Trash barrels: The contractor installed new covered trash barrels at regular intervals all week. On Friday at noon, they were overflowing.

Remake City Hall

A wind farm on City Hall Plaza? That’s the latest suggestion from the frustrated Tom Menino. It would certainly be an improvement over what is there now — broken bricks, a concrete patch and a parking lot for cars of unidentified people.

But the real issue is City Hall itself. Will Boston tear down this bunker, or will it renovate it in such a way that it wins the hearts and minds of its users, especially Mayor Menino, and the city’s citizenry? We urge the city to renovate it. It would be satisfying, but environmentally irresponsible, to tear it down.

Most Bostonians, including Mayor Menino, don’t like the building. It’s ugly, and it has major flaws, such as not being able to hear in the hearing rooms, and the plaza is just plain pitiful.

The architectural community has defended the building. They have proposed that the building be landmarked. In fact, the magazine ArchitectureBoston, published by the Boston Society of Architects, identified the problems the building has and challenged six young design teams to solve those problems.

Both architects and the general public can agree on the building’s problems. According to ArchitectureBoston, the building is too opaque, too big, too confusing inside, too ugly, too dark, too empty in the public spaces, too costly to run and too isolated and inaccessible.

The magazine noted that Boston City Hall’s architects, Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, who saw the building as based on the idea of an ancient castle, encouraged change.

“When we designed the City Hall,” they wrote, “we envisioned not only a fragment of the city, but also a fragment in time. That is to say, we regarded the construction of the building to be the start of a process that would engage successive generations of the citizenry in the embellishment, decoration, and adornment of the robust armature that we had designed.”

So the architecture community has taken them at their word and mounted a spirited campaign to rework the building in a 2010 kind of way.

The products of the young architects’ imagination are shown in the September/October issue of ArchitectureBoston, at the pinkcomma gallery at 81B Wareham Street in the South End and at http://www.architects.org/publications.

Their visions may or may not be what we want for Boston City Hall. But they show that we can remake this place. We should get started now.