CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS COOL TO $1.2B BUILDING PLAN
By Anthony Flint
The Boston Globe, November 18, 2001
CAMBRIDGE - A Back Bay-style residential neighborhood, two transit stations, 14 acres of open space, and a bikepath leading to a new Charles River park, all replacing a rusting railyard - it's hard to argue with what developers are promising in North Point, the $1.2 billion neighborhood eyed for land near the Museum of Science.
The site, 48 acres at the easternmost edge of the city beside Monsignor O'Brien Highway at the Lechmere station, gives environmentalists a thrill: industrial land close to Boston that is effectively being recycled, instead of farmland being bulldozed for more sprawl. Affordable housing advocates are also overjoyed, because the proposal is mostly residential, not commercial: up to 2,700 units, including some for low- and middle-income residents, by any standard a healthy jolt of supply to ease Cambridge's infamous housing crunch.
Yet if North Point represents "smart growth" for the region, residents in the nearby, working-class neighborhood of East Cambridge are still unsure how they fit into the plans. Traffic, building heights, access to parks, a new class of people who would raise property values even further - the litany of concerns grows long in the once Portuguese-dominated enclave already overwhelmed by development around Kendall Square. "It's not clear how you'd cross over to it," said Mary Ann Donofrio, a lifelong East Cambridge resident who views North Point with some skepticism. "If that doesn't get resolved, it will just be its own separate neighborhood."
For fellow resident Shannon Larkin, who fought for a building moratorium in East Cambridge, it comes down to traffic. "You can design a beautiful, liveable neighborhood, but if you can't get there because you're stuck in traffic or it's too dangerous to walk there, it doesn't help."
The wariness about North Point, three times as large as Fan Pier, about as close to downtown and at least as complex, underscores the difficulty in building on what planners call "infill" sites - vacant industrial land, railyards, and old manufacturing facilities close to downtown. The re-use of such land makes perfect sense to planners and environmentalists, but not always to nearby residents, who must live with growth's consequences.
In Cambridge, in particular, some residents say the city has already grown enough - despite a massive rezoning effort that reduces building heights and favors residential over commercial development. For some, the city already has enough people.
"Cambridge is already the seventh most densely populated community in the nation," said John Moot, president of the Association of Cambridge Neighborhoods. "Now they want to plunk in a lot of high-rise buildings that will be nothing but a gated, luxury housing development, with none of the flavor of East Cambridge."
The tension is not lost on David Dixon, an urban planning consultant hired by residents to help with the rezoning process.
"To me, North Point is like Assembly Square in Somerville - symbols of whether we can grow the core. But if you live in East Cambridge, the home prices are skyrocketing, there are dramatic increases in traffic, and more development just exacerbates the problems," Dixon said. The North Point area, he said, "is a real test of our ingenuity."
Frustration prompts others to put it more bluntly. Antidevelopment activists seek to dilute the needed density at a site that is "a once-in-a-century opportunity for courageous city planning," said Daniel Winny of Lyme Properties LLC, key developers in Kendall Square. "Community-based planning comes down to fear of strangers, traffic, shadows, change."
David Vickery, in charge of the North Point project for Spaulding & Slye Colliers, in partnership with landowners Guilford Transportation Industries, said the project won't generate an overwhelming amount of traffic. It is served by two transit lines: the Green Line at Lechmere station, and the Orange Line at the Bunker Hill Community College stop.
Retail would be limited to 75,000 square feet so as not to compete with existing East Cambridge businesses, Vickery said. There would be 2.1 million square feet of commercial, office, and research and development space, but 3 million square feet of housing, in keeping with new zoning.
The tallest buildings in the complex, up to 220 feet, would bump up against rail facilities along the eastern border of the site, in the shadow of the highway. And all of the 20 to 30 structures would be arranged around a linear park that Vickery hopes will someday connect to the Minuteman bikepath to the northwest, and to a new Metropolitan District Commission park being built on the banks of the Charles River. Plans call for multiple entrance points along Monsignor O'Brien Highway so the area is fully accessible, Vickery said.
On a recent tour through the site, a grassy plain imbedded with rail lines near where schooners once plied waterways in a thriving glassworks industry, Vickery said the land cries out with potential. "This just sets me on fire," he said. "This is the hole in the doughnut, the center where growth should be, instead of out in the suburbs." And, he added, "how many people get the chance to help build a new neighborhood?"
The involvement of Spaulding & Slye, partners in the development of Fan Pier on the South Boston Waterfront, marks a new stage for North Point. The project got off to a rocky start in 1999, when Guilford executives announced a "European-style" village without first consulting with neighbors or even city officials.
Spaulding & Slye, Vickery said, is determined to work with the neighborhood on all aspects of the development, including the critical issue of connections. One key area is the proposed relocation of the Lechmere station to the other side of Monsignor O'Brien Highway, just north of the Bernie & Phyl's furniture warehouse.
The station relocation would improve the O'Brien-First Street-Cambridge Street interchange so commuters stop using local side streets, but residents are worried the new station would become more convenient to North Point than to the neighborhood.
"Most people feel the crossing of O'Brien remains a real problem," said Douglas Ling, co-chairman of the Eastern Cambridge Planning Study Committee, a citizens group.
An expensive proposal to depress Monsignor O'Brien Highway and create a pedestrian plaza above has not been formally embraced. But Michael Mulhern, acting general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, said the O'Brien crossing "will be a key design criteria."
The T supports the Lechmere relocation because it fits in with plans to extend the Green Line to Ball Square in Medford, near Tufts University, and because it would encourage transit use by people who live and work in the new complex.
"When we first saw it we thought it was too good to be true," Mulhern said. "It's the most promising liveable community initiative we've seen."
"I think North Point could be the model urban community, where people work and live," said Cambridge Mayor Anthony Galluccio. "When it's done I hope people say that if we did North Point-style development over the previous 50 years, we would have had much more of a community feel than in Kendall Square or Alewife, where we've made some mistakes."
For others, including East Cambridge resident Barbara Broussard, the question is not so much whether North Point will be built but how it will be built - conceding a certain inevitability to a changing landscape.
"The houses have gentrified. The older people are dying, and the children aren't keeping the properties, they are selling them," said Broussard. "It's always been blue-collar but now it's changing. People are realizing how convenient it is. That's just the reality."
Anthony Flint can be reached by e-mail at flint@globe.com.