A parcel of hope
It isn't hard for E. Lorraine Baugh, the head of the Lena Park Community Development Corp., to remember when the project she is engaged in would have seemed impossible.
When Baugh arrived at Lena Park less than a decade ago, the agency was headed for bankruptcy and mired in controversy. To say it was mismanaged would be a gross understatement. It was a classic example of everything a community organization shouldn't be. Nevertheless, she had a vision for what she hoped to accomplish, and pursued it with soft-spoken determination. ''I wanted to build a different kind of community in the city of Boston," she said last week, sitting in her Mattapan office. ''This is a perfect example of how a dream in 1999 comes about."
The community she wanted to build was on the site that has bedeviled dreamers over two decades: the former Boston State Hospital. This week, her dream takes a step toward fruition with groundbreaking on Olmsted Green, an ambitious housing and job-training development on the property.
The logjams that had kept the site from being developed began to break several years ago. There is now a nature sanctuary, and another housing project is currently under construction on part of the 175 acres. But Olmsted Gardens comes the closest to fulfilling the neighborhood's longstanding hope for a project that would include housing and job development, something that could provide more of a boost to the neighborhood economy than housing alone.
The Lena Park CDC has built strong partnerships in making the dream a reality. Developers Kirk A. Sykes and Jerome Rappaport Jr. of New Boston Fund brought to the project the one thing community groups typically struggle to attract: lots of money.
Sykes may be best known for building a hotel on the Crosstown site in Roxbury, while Rappaport is a member of one of the city's best-known development families. Both said they were attracted by the good the project could do for surrounding neighborhoods and their residents.
Boston State Hospital closed in 1979. In its day, it was a mental hospital housing hundreds of patients at a time. In the nationwide move to allow the mentally ill to live in their communities, such hospitals fell out of favor in the 1970s. Baugh, a former nurse, recalls the last days of the hospital, when residents were released with inadequate healthcare and services and no real plan for their future.
For a generation afterward, Boston State was one of the city's most elusive development prizes. Politicians and community activists hoped it could provide housing, economic development, job training, green space. In the search for the perfect project, the parcel sat.
Even now, there is criticism that the 400 units of housing planned for Olmsted Green is too small, that the project will not be dense enough to relieve the housing crunch -- and rising prices -- in the neighborhood. They plan to build 17 units to the acre, where some projections say it should be more like 40 units per acre. That, of course, would require using almost all of the available open space.
''I've had developers say, 'Where's the tower?' " Rappaport acknowledged. ''We wanted to build something that really respects the nature of the site, that would be enough to build a community without overbuilding the site."
The reason people are excited about the development, I think, is the failure to develop Boston State long ago came to symbolize a dysfunctional neighborhood where nothing ever really came to pass. That perception wasn't fair, but it was there, and developing the site could go a long way toward erasing it. If it does that, it will have accomplished a great deal.
''When people say Roxbury or Dorchester, they have a picture of something," Baugh said. She hopes this project will be the start of a different, and better, image.''It's a whole picture of how it looks to have a community people will die to live in."
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 