Born Again
Flattened 50 years ago in the name of urban renewal, the West End is once again in turmoil over its future.
A HALF-CENTURY AGO, the city of Boston bulldozed nearly the entire West End neighborhood in an unforgiving urban renewal rampage. Government officials stopped collecting the garbage and allowed a neighborhood to rot. Modest homes were labeled slums. Buildings were destroyed and countless families displaced to make way for a high-rise complex of apartments few of them could afford. Earlier this summer, a US Supreme Court decision showed painful urban renewal history repeating itself. The court gave its OK to the city of New London, Connecticut, to take property against owners' wishes to make room for an upscale residential, retail, and office complex on the waterfront. Again, the little guy did not inherit the earth.
Some little guys, however, have long memories. The New London decision was a reminder of past injustice. "You don't own your home anyway," says Jim Campano, 64, a onetime West Ender whose family home was razed. "You rent from the city, and it's called taxes. Now they can just walk in and take it. There's not much you can do once the Supreme Court rules."
In the West End, tucked between Beacon Hill and the North End, what rose from the ashes of eminent domain were the residential towers of Charles River Park. Today, the buildings dismissed as sterile are surrounded by a teeming structural hodgepodge, including sprawling Massachusetts General Hospital and formidable institutional complexes. On the fringes of the neighborhood are a world-class arena with a new name and a jail. And, of course, there's Mulligan's on Causeway Street, a popular neighborhood eatery where stuffed sandwiches take their names from world-famous golf courses. Opened in 2001, Mulligan's looked from the outside like a nasty hole in the wall until the rusting Green Line tracks above Causeway Street came down last September and let the sun shine in. The change was startling, even for those who had planned for it. "We had been talking about it for so many years," says Bob O'Brien, executive director of the Downtown North Association, "but with demolition of the viaduct and the Green Line tracks, the impact still comes as a tremendous surprise."
The removal of the elevated tracks isn't the only news in the neighborhood. It brims with development and bursts with promise. Yet, as happened years ago, some residents feel that forces outside their control are changing the West End.
THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD had narrow streets, packs of four-story tenements, and retailers on most corners. Few traces survive. There is the grand Otis House on Cambridge Street, designed by Charles Bulfinch, built in 1796 and now open for tours. Another relic sits on a speck of land not far from the TD Banknorth Garden, formerly the FleetCenter. The four-story brick apartment building at 42 Lomasney Way, shrouded in billboards and encircled by streets, escaped the bulldozers and wrecking balls of the 1950s and early 1960s. Behemoth public works projects - the Big Dig, the Green Line tunnel trenching, and the demolition of the old Nashua Street Registry of Motor Vehicles - have nibbled away at the tenement's surrounding turf. One new West Ender calls it a "little house on the prairie." Mike Ross, the Boston city councilor who represents the West End, admires it. "I would love to live there," he says. "It would be comical. Think of all the chaos around that building." But will it last? Jerome Rappaport, developer of the Charles River Park residences, now living in Florida, says, "I know there have been major efforts to try to get that building taken down." He predicts it will be destroyed "sooner or later." Two other surviving tenements from the old West End perch precariously near MGH.
By some estimates, about 7,000 residents lost their homes during the urban renewal half a century ago. They included Jewish, Italian, and Polish immigrants. Many of those displaced got on with their lives. Others, like Campano, who proudly describes how he once hit a wrecking crane with a Molotov cocktail and fought for years to secure more housing for displaced West Enders, can never forget the insult. Campano now lives in Somerville, regularly visits the old neighborhood, and directs the struggling, sparse West End Museum. It opened last summer on the ground floor of West End Place, a mixed-income cooperative of 183 apartments built in 1996 on Staniford Street; Campano secured the space after fighting the building's developers and the city for years. "We're still very limited on money," he says. He struggles to pay the monthly $1,100 co-op maintenance fee with donations. "At the moment, we're holding our own." Campano also publishes a newspaper for former West Enders and hosts the West End Video Newsletter on public-access television.
The 2000 Census put the neighborhood's population at about 4,600. "The array of people who live there from around the world is really quite extraordinary," says Martha Walz, the state representative whose district includes the West End. "And there's so much economic diversity - from very poor people living with Section 8 housing vouchers and food stamps to very wealthy doctors from Mass. General and everybody in between." New West Enders, of course, don't remember the neighborhood wiped out decades ago. To them, Westie is still every bit as authentic as Southie. Many of the recent arrivals, such as Jane Forrestall and Carol Matyka, discovered the joys of living there quite by accident.
Forrestall describes how she stumbled onto West End Place, the grand-looking building with a soaring rotunda: "I had an appointment with a broker in Charlestown, and she never showed up. So I walked by here, saw the sign, and a few months later, I bought it." Forrestall moved from an apartment in Framingham and sold her home on Cape Cod to relocate to a two-bedroom co-op in 1998. "When I moved into the city, I knew nobody, but I thought if I'm going to live here, I better find out what the neighborhood is all about. So I started going to meetings." Forrestall, a real estate agent, has become an activist on the West End Council, a group of trustees and directors from West End Place and two Charles River Park properties, Hawthorne Place and Whittier Place.
Matyka, a public relations executive for a medical publishing company, made the decision three years ago to move out of her Dorchester Victorian rental and buy a downtown condo. She narrowed her search to Beacon Hill. "Friends said to me, `You really should checkout Charles River Park,'" but she dismissed the idea. "Oh, no, it's a suburban apartment complex in the middle of the city. That's what I thought of the place." Matyka knew of Charles River Park when it was first going up in the 1960s. "I remember as a little girl coming into Boston when they were building this and first seeing the signs - `If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now' - and saying to my father, `Daddy, Daddy, why don't we live there?'"
Generations of New Englanders, trapped in traffic snarls on the tail end of Storrow Drive, knew the modern West End only by that billboard taunt, which stood for decades as a sales pitch for the city life. Rappaport dreamed up the slogan in 1967 while observing a Leverett Circle bottleneck outside his office window. He recalls pointing out the motorist mess to his marketing people: "I said to them, `If they lived here, they'd be home now.'"
"To me, it was the most fascinating sign in Boston," says Ross, 33. "I asked my parents about it when I was very young and first saw it. My father and I would have big discussions about it. I didn't get it. I didn't get what those buildings were. Now I know inside those buildings is a great community."
That's what Matyka discovered, too. While searching for a down- town home and inspecting too many cramped quarters on Beacon Hill, with "refrigerators so small you couldn't put in a pint of ice cream," she finally relented to a realtor's urgings to look at apartments in Charles River Park. She ended up buying a roomy Hawthorne Place studio, with sleeping alcove. "I love the quiet," she says. "In the summertime, it's so private. It's like coming home to a garden." Modeled after modernist architect Le Corbusier's scheme of towers in a park, the cosseted campus of Charles River Park has existed for more than 30 years as a world removed from the rest of the city. Critics say the buildings are shoebox ugly on the outside, but the grounds and pathways are well maintained and beautifully planted, and the hard-to-find routes into the complex enhance the sense of privacy. However, the privileged sense of sanctuary is about to change.
DEVELOPER RAPPAPORT BEGAN selling off two of the Charles River properties, Whittier and Hawthorne, as condominiums in the mid-1980s. He then divested himself of all interest in Charles River Park when he made big-money deals with Chicago-based
Equity has ambitious plans for the empty space inside Charles River Park. It wants to erect a 14-story apartment building at the corner of Storrow Drive and Blossom Street, an 11-story apartment building on Blossom, and three brick multi-unit buildings on Thoreau Path - for a total of 306 new units. They will start out as rentals and could, eventually, be converted into condominiums, but no decision has been made, according to an Equity representative. Equity is required to keep 15 percent of the new units affordable, but the other units will be rented at market value. An underground parking garage, which requires blasting through granite, is also planned. Residents have bitterly protested the project, called the West End Residences at Emerson Place, complaining the new structures will congest the area and block some of their river views. Yet, after years of wrangling, the project was approved in December by the Boston Redevelopment Authority and the following month by the Boston Zoning Commission.
"We saw the city look at this as open land: `Boy, oh, boy, let's build some buildings,'" says Paul Schratter, 82, who is active in the West End Civic Association and who moved from Lexington to Charles River Park 10 years ago with his wife, Marlis. "And we said, `This is our treasure. We love it here. Don't destroy it. You've already destroyed the West End once. Don't start again.'"
Ivy A. Turner, 44, a member of the West End Council and a real estate broker with a home and office in the complex, sought to stop, and then pare down, the expansion plans. She attended numerous public meetings held by the BRA and says, "The BRA was extraordinarily insulting to us. . . . We couldn't get a straight answer on any- thing. "At the height of the Equity fuss, West End residents got a new city councilor, Mike Ross, who took over from Paul Scapicchio in 2003, as a result of redistricting.
Over the years, part of the West End's political problem has been its unique proximity to City Hall with none of the clout. "The neighborhood has been misunderstood for decades," says Walz, the state representative. "City government has failed to understand the West End is its own distinct neighborhood." The area is also ripe for development - near the banks of the Charles River and at the foot of Beacon Hill - but the constituency has always been too defenseless, as in the case of the old West Enders, or too splintered by divergent interests to respond cohesively to change. Says Walz: "The struggles for the neighborhood today are a result of what happened to the neighborhood decades ago."
The struggles continue. The approved West End Residences at Emerson Place project gives residents scant mitigation measures. Equity has offered $50,000 for window washing for nearby properties at the end of construction and will give the West End Civic Association use of a community room during business hours. The company recently agreed to widen Thoreau Path, the main pedestrian walkway through Charles River Park. Ross and Walz promise they will be looking for more gimmes from Equity, including a contribution toward the reconstruction of the Science Park Station on the Green Line. The West End neighborhood groups fear Equity has a plan to tear down a parking garage on Lomasney Way and put up another residential tower, but the BRA says Equity can't initiate any new West End projects for five years.
Greg White, vice president of development for Equity Residential, predicts construction of the West End Residences at Emerson Place will begin later this year. The vehemence of the opposition surprised him. "There are a lot of longtime condominium owners here, and change is sometimes difficult to accept," he says. "We're not in the business to make people mad. We want to do well with everybody. But sometimes some people get a little uglier than they have to be."
On this hallowed ground, where a neighborhood turned to dust, people feared it would happen all over again. "There are a lot of people who are yelling and screaming who have been here 30 years, and they don't want to change their park," says Forrestall, the West End Place resident. "But that's exactly the way the old West Enders felt. And the old West Enders had to move out so these people could come in."
ELSEWHERE in the West End, the pangs of development are felt. The reconstruction of Charles River Plaza on Cambridge Street is nearly complete. The mall, which once featured the largest movie theater in Boston, has been gutted and rebuilt as a shiny silver-and-glass office and shopping center, with MGH as the primary occupant. Elaborate venting mechanicals atop the rebuilt plaza concern residents, who know the hospital plans to use the space for laboratory research. "God knows what kind of equipment they have in there," says Schratter. A
The Garden's owner, Delaware North, intends to build a 415-foot, 37-story parking/rental/condo tower, destined to become the tallest building in the neighborhood. Called the Nashua Street Residences, it will rise up behind the Garden, beside the entrance to the arena's parking garage. The BRA has moved ahead quickly to greenlight the project.
One profound change has occurred in the West End without fanfare and with full consensus. The people who live in Charles River Park have abandoned Rappaport's utopian title. They now proudly refer to their turf as the West End. "It's an effort we've all been making to call ourselves the West End," says Turner. "Charles River Park was really just the Rappaport buildings." Even developer Rappaport agrees: "Charles River Park and West End are now synonymous."
The city of Boston officially acknowledged the neighborhood in July by placing a blue "Welcome to the West End" sign on Staniford Street. A small ceremony with Mayor Thomas M. Menino is planned for this month. The signage is a significant symbol of a neighborhood's rebirth: If you lived here, you'd be home now.
Monica Collins, a Boston-based freelance writer, contributes frequently to the magazine's "Dispatch" column. E-mail her at mcollins@globe.com. 