Jeremy C. Fox for Boston.com

The setting sun shone down as an outbound Orange Line train approached Roxbury Crossing.

By Jeremy C. Fox, Town Correspondent

Spring is in the muggy, fetid air on the MBTA

Storified by Jeremy C. Fox· Fri, May 03 2013 12:32:56

Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @jeremycfox.
Follow Downtown on Twitter: @YTDowntown.

By Matt Rocheleau, Town Correspondent

Subway service between the Orange Line’s four most northern stations will be replaced by buses after 9 p.m. on five days each week for about one month, according to the MBTA.

Shuttles will run between Oak Grove Station and Sullivan Square Station from 9 p.m. until the end of service on every Sunday through Thursday from May 19 to June 21, officials said. However, there will be no evening diversion on the night of Sunday, May 26, due to the Memorial Day holiday that Monday.

The buses, which are accessible for people with disabilities, will stop at those two stations as well as at the two stations in between: Malden Center Station and Wellington Station, according to the T’s website.

During the times the four subway stations and their connecting tunnels are shut down, MBTA crews plan to perform work on the Assembly Square Station Project, officials said.

For more information, contact the MBTA Customer Communications Department at 617-222-3200, TTY: 617-222-5146.

E-mail Matt Rocheleau at mjrochele@gmail.com.
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By Katie Vatalaro, Globe Correspondent

Jeremy C. Fox for Boston.com

Downtown Boston.

By Jeremy C. Fox, Town Correspondent

A City of Boston initiative has been named one of the top government innovations in the country by an institute at Harvard University.

The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is among 25 semifinalists for the Innovations in American Government Award, presented by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“These top 25 innovations in government offer real, tangible ways to protect our most disadvantaged citizens, educate the next-generation workforce, and utilize data analytics to enhance government performance,” Stephen Goldsmith, director of the center’s Innovations in Government program, said in a statement Wednesday.

“Despite diminishing resources, these government programs have developed model innovations that other struggling agencies should be inspired to replicate and adapt to their own communities,” Goldsmith said.

The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics works to deliver an array of transformative city services to residents, ranging from enhancing public spaces, to increasing civic participation, to improving educational outcomes, according to Harvard.

The 25 initiatives were selected by a panel of researchers, practitioners, and policy specialists, Harvard said. The Innovations in American Government Award winner and four finalists will be announced in the fall.

In the list released Wednesday, the programs are presented in alphabetical order and are not ranked.

The Ford Foundation created the award in 1985 to draw attention to effective government programs, Harvard said. The awards program has since recognized more than 400 government initiatives at the local, state and federal level, as well as tribal governments, and provided more than $22 million in grants to support efforts to help disseminate those programs.

A full list of the Top 25 programs is available here.

Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @jeremycfox.
Follow Downtown on Twitter: @YTDowntown.

(Matt Rocheleau for Boston.com)

By Matt Rocheleau, Town Correspondent

The temporary extra patrols of well-armed police officers and soldiers in MBTA stations are gone. But the quest to bolster the long-term safety of the public transit system is far from over.

The T still has $80 million in unspent federal homeland security grants, which have been doled to public transportation systems across the country since 2002.

The $60 million in federal grants spent by the T over the past decade has helped make the agency a national leader in the industry of public transit safety.

“The efforts toward security and policing that the MBTA has had in place for a number of years have really been looked at as a benchmark for the industry,” said Greg Hull, director of operations, safety and security for the American Public Transportation Association.

And, when the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon two weeks ago, officials at the MBTA said that, while shocked and devastated like the rest of the city, they were prepared, largely due to the new equipment and training acquired in recent years.

“It was controlled chaos,” said Randy Clarke, senior director of security and emergency management for the MBTA and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.

He described the atmosphere of the T’s central hub for dispatch and communications, or Operations Control Center, as officials scrambled to secure stations and stop some service after the explosions at Copley Square, and then again several day later when the system was shut down during a lengthy manhunt.

“I hate to say we’re used to crises and trained for them, but we are,” Clarke said.

On Monday, two weeks after the Marathon bombings, MBTA officials gave a tour of the control center, which includes some of the transit industry’s most sophisticated technology for daily operations and security.

By Matt Rocheleau, Town Correspondent

Free Wi-Fi Internet access will soon be broadcast from 16 existing pay phones in Boston.

And officials from companies leading the effort hope to, pending city approval, rapidly expand the service so that a total of about 100 existing pay phones across Boston will offer free wireless Internet hotspots by the end of this summer. By the end of next summer, they hope they will have reached a total of about 400 payphones citywide.

The effort, called “FreeBostonWiFi,” is being carried out on a trial basis, company officials said.

So far, the city’s Department of Innovation and Technology has approved Wi-Fi installations at 16 pay phones, located around City Hall, Faneuil Hall, Downtown Crossing and Long Wharf, according to Tyler Kratz, president of DAS Communications, which is one of four private companies partnering on the effort.

RCN Business Services, LCC International Inc., Pacific Telemanagement Services and DAS Communications announced their plan at a conference in Boston last week.

Four temporary demo sites were set up at pay phones near the Hyatt Regency hotel where the conference was held, the companies said.

One site at Cambridge and Court streets near City Hall Plaza was heavily used even though nothing was done at the site to advertise that the Wi-Fi signal was there.

“People had no idea it was there unless they saw it on their phone,” or other mobile device, said Kratz. “People were using it quite a bit. It blew my mind.”

Over about a 24-hour span last week, about 18,000 mobile devices “noticed” the Wi-Fi. About 2,000 devices connected and more than 200 people spent and average of 17 minutes using the Internet connection, he said.

“There’s a demand for this,” said Kratz.

He said the Wi-Fi service at that payphone by City Hall was supposed to be permanent. But, last week it was struck by some bad luck. A vehicle rammed into and damaged the booth. But, Kratz said the companies plan to have it replaced and restore Wi-Fi service within a couple of weeks.

The other 15 pay phones in line to get Internet hotspots are also located in downtown Boston and in areas that draw a high number of pedestrians, including commuters, business professionals and tourists.

Kratz said another focus will be to add the service to pay phones in low-income areas of Boston where some people cannot afford their own Internet access.

“Boston is a great city. With all of the college students and the young people it’s perfect demographically,” he said. “And we really want to make sure this is not just clustered in one spot.”

The Wi-Fi hotspots will offer around-the-clock Internet access for an unlimited amount of time at no cost to users or taxpayers.

The signal is usually accessible within 100 to 200 feet of the kiosk, though range can vary depending on whether there are objects or structures around the kiosk that could interfere with the signal.

To connect to the Wi-Fi hotspots, users need to select FreeBostonWiFiSSID on their mobile device and then accept the connection’s terms and conditions. No password is needed and no personal information gathered.

The companies that own the kiosks and run the service pay for installing and maintaining the new infrastructure at the payphone stations.

Some of the kiosks themselves have advertisements on them to generate revenue for the companies, but Kratz said the Internet service will not display ads on users devices.

"The partnership is giving new life to telephone booths that have almost become extinct due to the evolution of the cell phone," said a statement from Jeff Carlson, vice president and general manager of RCN Boston. “Small cell and Wi-Fi technology deployed through this partnership is another step toward delivering high quality wireless by lighting up hotspots in Boston using RCN's unparalleled fiber network."

The payphone kiosks will broadcast Wi-Fi in part by using small cell technology, which allows mobile devices, such as cell phones, to work.

"It's interesting and a little ironic that capacity demands from the cellular market has allowed for the repurposing of existing phone infrastructure, like payphone kiosks,” said a statement from E.J. von Schaumburg , vice president of Advanced Mobility Solutions at LCC International. “Utilizing small cell technology, we can take advantage of the excellent kiosk locations throughout an urban area and deliver high quality cellular capacity at the street level."

Last summer, a pilot program launched in New York City in which free public Wi-Fi Internet hotspots were emitted from routers installed at about 10 payphones.

Kratz said his company has been involved with the efforts in New York City and that his company now runs Wi-Fi from about 20 payphones there and plans to soon add the service to about 40 more payphones.

City officials in New York have said they plan to have Internet service added to all 12,000 payphones there.

Several weeks later after the program debuted in New York, two at-large City Councilors in Boston – Felix G. Arroyo and Ayanna Pressley – proposed doing something similar here.

Kratz said he has since met with Arroyo to discuss replicating the service in Boston and that he and other city officials have been instrumental in helping it launch.

Use of payphones has become rare because of cell phones. Some payphones no longer function to make calls. Others have been removed entirely.

Wi-Fi hotspots will help restore some use to the old payphone kiosks, officials have said.

The first-ever payphone was installed at a bank in Hartford in the late 1800s.

Since 1997, the number of payphones nationwide has dropped from an estimated peak of about 2.2 million to about 400,000, according to a petition that the American Public Communications Council, which advocates for payphone use, sent to the Federal Communications Commission last spring.

Kratz said the roughly 400 payphones in Boston his company hopes to bring Wi-Fi to are all owned by Pacific Telemanagement Services. He said there are few others in the city.

Kratz said his company is also in talks with city officials about the possibility of having free wireless Internet access broadcast from key municipal buildings, like police and fire stations, as well as from old-fashioned fire alarm boxes around Boston. But, Kratz said, no agreement has been reached and other companies are pitching similar ideas to the city.

E-mail Matt Rocheleau at mjrochele@gmail.com.
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Jeremy C. Fox for Boston.com

Children played in the Armenian Heritage Park during a heat wave on June 20, 2012.

By Jeremy C. Fox, Town Correspondent

The Armenian Heritage Park on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway will participate Saturday in World Labyrinth Day, an event promoted by the Labyrinth Society in an effort to heal the Earth, the Armenian Heritage Foundation announced.

At 1 p.m. in downtown Boston, and upon the same hour in other time zones around the world, people will walk labyrinths as a gesture of solidarity and peace, the foundation said in a statement.

Countries expected to participate in the global event include Australia, the Bahamas, Canada, China, France, Ireland, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The event is held each year on the first Saturday in May.

The Armenian Heritage Park is a gift from local Armenian Americans to the city and the state, the foundation said, and is designed to celebrate the experiences of Armenian immigrants and their contributions to American society, and also to commemorate those killed in the 1915 – 1923 Armenian Genocide and other mass killings.

Its labyrinth is made up of inlaid stone surrounded by strips of grass and symbolizes life’s journey, the foundation said. “A single jet of water and the symbol of eternity mark its center, representing hope and rebirth. Art, Service, Science, and Commerce are etched around its circle in tribute to accomplishments and contributions made,” it said.

The labyrinth walk will take place at 1 p.m. on Saturday, May 4. For more information about the park, visit www.ArmenianHeritagePark.org.

Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @jeremycfox.
Follow Downtown on Twitter: @YTDowntown.
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AP Photo/Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority

In this 2010 photo provided by the MBTA, Richard Donohue Jr., left, and Sean Collier pose together at their graduation from the Municipal Police Officers' Academy.

By Jeremy C. Fox, Town Correspondent

A Twitter tribute to MBTA Officer Richard Donohue

Storified by Jeremy C. Fox· Fri, Apr 26 2013 13:26:34

Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @jeremycfox.
Follow Downtown on Twitter: @YTDowntown.

By Johanna Kaiser, Town Correspondent

The $175 million One Canal project planned for the Bulfinch Triangle is no longer required to find a much-desired supermarket for its ground floor in order to move forward.

The Boston Zoning Board of Appeal voted Tuesday to amend the provisions requiring developer Trinity Financial to lease 20,000 square feet of its 12-story apartment building’s ground floor to a supermarket in order to move forward with the development.

The firm’s attorney, Katharine Bachman, told the board it has been difficult to secure an operator for the space, especially as Delaware North Cos., owner of the TD Garden, moves forward with plans for a high-rise development on the old site of the Boston Garden near North Station.

Those plans call for two towers with hundreds of residences, a hotel, offices, a multilevel Target, and a 45,000-square-foot supermarket on an underground level with a prominent entrance on Causeway Street.

Trinity Financial's search for a supermarket operator has been “complicated by the North Station development,” Bachman said, noting that the proposed space is larger and more centrally located.

Under the agreement established last year, Trinity Financial is freed the supermarket requirement if an alternative supermarket was open and operating in the immediate area.

Downtown neighborhood residents have worked for more than a decade to bring an affordable supermarket to the area, and Bachman said Trinity Financial “is committed to do its best to bring a supermarket to this site.”

The request to remove the requirement and allow the project to move forward was supported by the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services and city councilors Felix Arroyo, Sal LaMattina, Stephen Murphy, Ayanna Pressley, Mike Ross, and Charles Yancey.

The North End/West End/Beacon Hill Supermarket Committee and the Downtown North Association also submitted letters of support, according to Bachman.

“This will allow us hopefully to get to the final stage,” Robert O’Brien, executive director of the Downtown North Association, told the board.

E-mail Kaiser at Johanna.yourtown@gmail.com. For more news about your city, town, neighborhood, or campus, visit boston.com’s Your Town homepage.

Jeremy C. Fox for Boston.com

The Christopher Columbus Park playground.

By Jeremy C. Fox, Town Correspondent

The Friends of Christopher Columbus Park will celebrate spring with a playground cleanup and pizza party and is asking for donations of new sandbox toys, the group announced.

Neighborhood families are invited to participate in the annual cleanup of the play area and the placement of fresh sand in the sandbox, along with a celebration that includes food and entertainment for the children. It will take place Saturday, May 4, from noon to 2 p.m., and will include free pizza, children’s games, face-painting, and a performance by Big Joe the Storyteller.

Each year, the friends group supplies fresh sand for the sandbox, it said, but many of the toys in the box are showing their wear. It is asking for donations of plastic trucks, shovels, buckets, brooms, and other sandbox-appropriate toys.

New toys can be dropped off until May 4 with the front-desk concierge at 300 Commercial St., directed to the attention of Ruth Gonzalez Vega.

For more information about the Friends of Christopher Columbus Park, visit www.foccp.org.

Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @jeremycfox.
Follow the North End on Twitter: @YourNorthEnd.