Architects vie for a chance to rejuvenate Dudley Square

Longtime Roxbury resident and merchant Jamaada Abdal Kallaq-Smith remembers Dudley Square the way it was before years of "deterioration due to drugs and what they call the ghetto, before the socioeconomic things that go on in a city took hold."

"When I was growing up here, it was stupendous," recalled Kallaq-Smith, whose family has for decades owned A Nubian Notion, a Dudley Square store that sells Afro-centric gifts and products. "Everyone's dad owned a shop. We were very proud of our schools. My mother would go to shop at Blair's Foodland and Ferdinand's [Furniture]. Then I went away to college and came home. It just wasn't the same."

Now, Kallaq-Smith and others who have tried for years to orchestrate a grass-roots effort to fix up Dudley Square hope to finally watch their neighborhood jump on the fast track to urban renewal.

City officials expect its revitalization to come via a design competition launched by Mayor Thomas M. Menino that challenges local architects to design a municipal office facility on a 30,000-square-foot, city-owned parcel in the heart of the square. The winner will be chosen next spring and given the opportunity to see the city build their design on the lot partially occupied by the historic five-story Ferdinand's Furniture store building, now vacant and run-down.

City planner Kairos Shen said it is folks like Kallaq-Smith who make the revitalization of Dudley Square crucial.

"Dudley Square is one of the most important Boston neighborhood centers," said Shen. "It's the center of the city's African-American culture, and a critical part of Boston's identity."

That's why Kallaq-Smith was chosen to sit on an 18-member task force created by the city in April to provide community perspective. The Mayor's Dudley Vision Project was launched in 2007 after Menino announced the city's plans to create a new police station, which will eventually be relocated on the former Modern Electroplating site, to renovate the library, and to fulfill his 2004 promise to create a new municipal services building on the site of the Ferdinand building, where the state had originally planned to move its Department of Public Health.

"Ultimately, our plan is that this new municipal building will trigger a wave of revitalization throughout this community," Menino stated in a news release.

Introducing the competition was last spring's Dudley Square Community Charrette and Design Competition, held by the Boston Society of Architects, in conjunction with the Boston Redevelopment Authority, Common Boston, and the Roxbury Masterplan Oversight Committee to generate interest in the Ferdinand site.

It asked architects to design plans for a new Dudley Square police station and the Ferdinand Building - knowing their designs wouldn't actually be developed, not this time anyway. Instead, the four winning submissions received cash prizes of $5,000 and $10,000 and were exhibited at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center during the American Institute of Architects 2008 Convention last May.

It wasn't until mid-September that the city put out a request for the Dudley Square municipal office facility design competition. The BRA has received but not yet reviewed 24 proposals, said Shen.

The city asked that the proposals retain the building's historic facade, be environmentally friendly, and include flexible office space with the option to serve a variety of city departments, because it is uncertain which will eventually move into the building.

Next month, the competition will be narrowed down to five design teams, which will each be given $50,000 to flesh out their design, based on the community's needs. Finally, in March a panel of internationally recognized design professionals and Dudley Square stakeholders will review the finalists' designs and choose a winner, who will be given the opportunity to negotiate a design services contract with the city.

The Dudley Square municipal building will cost the city $85 million to $100 million, a price tag that Shen says the city plans to pay for through fund-raising next year.

"The idea is to have this public investment, a not-for-profit, that will build more stability and service into Dudley Square," said Shen.

And Kallaq-Smith looks forward to it - with one thing in mind.

"I just want to make sure the culture and history is perpetuated and maintained. We don't want what happened in the South End to happen here," she said, referring to gentrification that took place in recent decades.