New kids on the ArtBlock
DRIVING THROUGH South End streets dominated by Boston Medical Center, the cabdriver asks if what I really want is not 731 Harrison Ave. but 732 , which is one of BMC's sturdy buildings and a likely destination.
In fact, however, 731 Harrison is the right address, the location of ArtBlock -- a project that was born when the city put out a first-time-ever request for developers to build a project where artists could live and work.
ArtBlock is three buildings, two new and one old, that promise to keep Boston vibrant.
The middle building is the old-timer, the Joshua Bates Art Center, a cheerful red brick structure with arched windows that was built as a school in 1884. The school's bones are still there: an old cloak room, an elderly blackboard, and a dozen classrooms that have for years been artists' studios, which weren't up to code until renovations were done as part of the ArtBlock. On either side of the Bates are two new, five-story buildings with 54 condos, 26 of which are affordable units priced at under $200,000 and set aside for artists. In the lobby of the new building to the east is an art gallery.
"We used to wink at artists," Mayor Thomas Menino said at the ribbon cutting, recalling years when artists had fewer options and moved into illegal spaces. Not anymore. To help build ArtBlock, the city donated the land for free and invested $1 million.
The project is an ode to tight spaces. Across one street, BMC buildings let out a low mechanical whine. Across another street is the Cathedral housing project. On the other side of the alley in back are other residential buildings. So it took highly skilled shoe-horning by the New Atlantic Development Corporation and years of conversations guided by the Boston Redevelopment Authority to make the project work and keep neighbors happy.
"This space can really expand the SoWa district," the president of New Atlantic, Peter Roth, says of the neighborhood south of Washington.
The SoWa nickname has a wanna be quality, an over eagerness to borrow the cache of SoHo in New York or London. But a walk around the neighborhood clears up cynicism and proves Roth right. ArtBlock is a good fit for a unique neighborhood. It's the part of town where Washington Street is wide in a grand way and adorned by the elegance of the Silver Line's tall bus stop stations. It's where mixed use works: residential buildings with street-level stores that create a lively sense of place. It's also home to $650 million in investments over eight years and 1,800 new units of housing, 1,000 of them affordable, according to Randi Lathrop of the BRA.
It's too obnoxious to say look out Newbury Street or stand back Back Bay. But one does want to say, look at this, it's a neighborhood where all of Boston's many pieces seem to fit.
ALYSSA HAYWOODE 
