On Washington St., a call for new voices
Talk to anyone who lived in the South End before the mid-1990s and they'll tell you that Washington Street was a place to avoid. Sheila Grove, a board member of the Union Park Neighborhood Association since 1978, says it was a "swath of desolation."
Now, many say, it's a model of revitalization.
Grove is one of the players who spearheaded the transformation. As executive director of Washington Gateway Main Street since the district gained the Main Street designation in 1997, she coordinated community oversight of the $571 million invested in the boulevard. Now Grove and associate director Ellen Witt are moving on, as are all but two members of Washington Gateway's board of directors.
What happens now? So much of the groundwork was realized by longtime South Enders who watched the elevated train line come down in the late 1980s and spent late nights mapping out a plan for the dilapidated strip. Now that Washington Street is home to a new wave of residents, who will step in?
"We're closing out this phase and moving on to the next phase," Mayor Thomas M. Menino said last month at a gathering at the Red Fez, one of the street's longtime businesses that refurbished its storefront with a grant from Washington Gateway. City officials, Washington Gateway volunteers, business owners, corporate contributors, and neighbors had convened to celebrate a decade of progress and introduce the South End's newer residents to Washington Gateway, hoping to stir up interest among a fresh crop of potential board members. Letters of interest were due early this month and it's expected that the new board will be announced next month.
The Main Streets program, part of a nationwide organization and instituted in Boston by the mayor in 1995, is coordinated through the Department of Neighborhood Development, and works with 19 commercial districts across the city to increase their economic power.
On the surface it might seem that the mission on Washington is accomplished.
"Now we're a Main Street, but we had to build a main street! We didn't have one," said Grove. "We had vacant land, boarded-up buildings, and the only businesses were three pawn shops and four used clothing stores at scattered sites."
Nine acres of vacant land surrounded Washington Street in the mid-1990s. Now the boulevard is host to 160,000 square feet of new commercial space and 57 new businesses. The MBTA's Silver Line provides easy access to downtown. Upscale restaurants set the street's vibrant tone at night and it has blossomed as a district known for its furniture and design stores. Lofts and condos in architecturally sleek buildings such as Laconia Lofts and Wilkes Passage fetch a premium price, while affordable housing has not only remained, it's increased. (A third of the new apartments are priced for low or moderate incomes.)
But according to those who have been involved from the get-go -- the neighborhood association presidents and board members who cleaned up needles and persuaded banks to invest in development on the street -- it's still a work in progress.
"The board worked hard -- hundreds and hundreds of hours," says Randi Lathrop, who helped write the Main Street application and has been president of the Washington Gateway board since it was established. "We feel we've done our job. It's time for a new board with new blood. It's up for them to decide if they want to take on the same projects and initiatives."
"We want what's next to come from the new group of people that form the board," said Emily Haber, program director of Boston Main Streets, which is seeking "a balance of people who represent different aspects of the neighborhood -- long-term residents and businesses and newer folks who've come into the neighborhood. I'd like to see someone from Cathedral [Housing Development] involved, and someone from the Lower Roxbury end of Washington Street. It's still a very mixed-income neighborhood."
Haber said that one focus will be to continue to promote the new and revitalized businesses and bring in more, but modifying the boundaries of the Main Street district may be a matter for the new board to discuss.
"Both 'gateways' are still in need of attention at both ends -- at Herald Street and at Melnea Cass," she said. "They're tough nuts to crack."
According to Witt, there's still evidence of "the old ingrained way of how" the street used to be. While storefront visibility has been a key to fostering a vibrant streetscape, a few businesses still pull their grates down at night. She points out that when the Morse Fish Co. stopped pulling down its grates in 1998, people coming home at night first realized it was there. Business increased by about 30 percent in the first year. Now, according to Grove, they stay open later and do 65 percent of their business during the evening hours.
"We have new, old, and public housing," said Witt. "In the middle are the retailers who haven't bought into the new way because they've been there for so many years of the way things used to be. Gateway always fought to preserve older businesses, but some new lessons are hard learned." 