RE “STATE may absorb $30m on project built over Pike,’’ Page One, Aug. 20: The state’s plan to absorb part of the cost of developing the Fenway Center is too complicated to be accepted or rejected out of hand. But three observations are worth making:
■ With the Massachusetts Hospital School in Canton refusing new students, and with the state having permanently snuffed out 86 adolescent group home beds in Boston, the further subsidy of politically connected developers ought to be questioned as the best use of $30 million in difficult times.
■ In the artist’s rendering of the development I see no hint of beauty or buildings that would add character to Boston’s skyline.
■ The assumption that whereas the Columbus Center at Back Bay Station has seven railroad tracks to build over, the Fenway Center only has two, and is thereby more easily expedited, runs the risk of repeating short-sighted blunders the state has made many times before.
At the moment, new transit projects, even ones well along in their planning, are met with derision. But history is not static. What was originally the Boston & Albany route begs for high-speed inter-city rail; for enhanced and expanded computer rail; and possibly for rapid transit to Boston University and MIT via the Grand Junction across the Charles River, to Harvard’s Allston campus, and/or to Riverside in Newton along the turnpike.
In practical terms this means that the belly of the decking over the turnpike should be built to accommodate five tracks, not two. The engineering for this would be an excellent use of state transportation dollars. The alternative would be to permanently preclude any of the transit improvements noted.
DAVID A. MITTELL JR.
Jamaica Plain 
