Bosprop Investors LLC received approval from the city’s Board of Appeal last week for the renovation of 37-41 Beaver Place. The developers include TerraMark, which is also rehabbing the former Emerson buildings at 96 and 100 Beacon Street. The Beaver Place building lies directly behind 96 Beacon.

The permission sailed through because the developers decided to redesign the project so that it needed no variances. The Beacon Hill Civic Association’s zoning and licensing committee opposed the project, which, as presented, required a 10-foot setback.

Elliot Laffer of the Groundwater Trust gave the project the go-ahead in its plan to recharge the groundwater, one of the first Beacon Hill projects that must deal with the new regulations on maintaining groundwater at levels that will keep supporting posts throughout the flat of the Hill from rotting.

“We went back to the drawing board,” said Joe Hanley, the developer’s lawyer, of the new plans, which are not complete. He said the new configuration would retain the garage, but could be a single or two-family, and would likely contain a much smaller penthouse than originally proposed.

Hanley said the developer wanted to be sensitive to neighbors’ concerns regarding the rehab.

The Beacon Hill Times follows the progress, or lack thereof, on Cambridge Street through direct observation and interviews with the project’s supervisor John Lepore.

Progress during the week of July 23 - 27

Traffic signals: Best Electric was on the job all last week.

Street paving: May have been substantially completed this past weekend. Striping will occur when the road bed is entirely dry.

Street lights: Still off in the median.

credit: Courtesy photo




Back Bay and Beacon Hill residents gathered last week to celebrate Harron Ellenson's birthday at Bin 26 Enoteca on Beacon Hill. From the left are Vivien Li, executive director of the Boston Harbor Association and a Marlborough Street resident; Harron Ellenson, Beacon Street resident and president of Harron & Associates, Inc.; David Rosenbloom, director of Join Together and a Brimmer Street resident; and Commonwealth Avenue’s Micho Spring, chair of the US corporate practice of Weber-Shandwick.

Photo Caption- Pat Baitler of Flat of the Hill sells a lot of merchandise to tourists over the summer.

While Bostonians may flock from crowded sidewalks to sandy beaches during the summer months, visitors from all over the country and the globe leave their mark on Beacon Hill businesses.

Flat of the Hill, a women’s gift shop at 60 Charles Street, sees a lot of tourist groups as well as individual visitors over the summer, recently including actress Kate Bosworth and musician Jimmy Buffett. Groups tend to come in and browse, while independent travelers do most of the buying, according to salesperson Pat Baitler.

“People purchase gifts and souvenirs as reminders of their trip,” she said. “It also helps that the dollar is weak against other currencies right now, so everything is a bargain for them.”

Visitor leisure spending has followed an upward trend since 2003, according to the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors’ Bureau. In 2005, Boston visitors contributed a total of 6,093.3 billion dollars to the city, with leisure spending reaching a record high of $3.15 billion. These figures represent an 8.4 percent increase in direct spending since 2004 and a 10.5 percent increase in spending from overnight visitors.

Summer visitors stop in at women’s shoe and handbag store, Moxie, at 51 Charles Street, but typical tourists only buy something once in a while, according to manager Jessica Lynn.

“We sell big bags and boxes of shoes that people don’t have room to put in their suitcase,” she said. “Those who really want to shop will have their items shipped home.”

Moxie’s business is strongly supported by Beacon Hill residents, so June and July are quiet months, Lynn said.

Koo de Kir at 65 Chestnut, on the other hand, derives 35 to 40 percent of its business from the visitors’ market, according to owner Kristine Irving. Offering home accessories and gift items, Koo de Kir makes it easy for travelers to get their purchases home through world-wide shipping and e-commerce.

“Our store is interesting and pretty and the European style appeals to a lot of visitors,” she said.

A tempest in a teapot?

Last Tuesday, an article ran in the Boston Globe claiming that a lack of waterproofing in the original construction of the crumbling Storrow Drive tunnel between Clarendon and Arlington streets would mean that it would cost 60 percent more to rebuild in its current configuration than has been anticipated.

The article caused another stir — make that a frenzy — among Storrow Drive Advisory Committee members, who thought they already had most of the information they needed to wind up the process of deciding on the best option for the troubled parkway.

Patrice Todisco, a co-chair of the advisory committee, said no problems about rehabilitating the current tunnel had been discussed at any meeting. “It’s fair to say I was surprised after some 16 meetings to find the rehab option, which has gotten a good deal of support, was not necessarily an option,” she said.

But the article apparently left people with ideas that may not be true after all.

The structural engineer who was quoted said he has not seen the plans for the rehabilitation of the tunnel, so he doesn’t know if the problems he has identified have been addressed. He called the article “sensationalized.”

“I was expressing a concern based on knowledge of 55 years ago,” said Cranston Rogers, known as Chan Rogers, who designed both the Dewey Square tunnel that is part of the Central Artery and the Cambridge Street tunnel in Cambridge that runs under Harvard Yard.

Rogers’s concern that more money would be needed to fix the tunnel was expressed in a letter from the Regional Transportation Advisory Council, of which he is a member, to the Department of Conservation and Recreation, which owns the parkway and is conducting the public process about how to fix the tunnel.


He advised DCR to rebuild rather than rehabilitate the tunnel if it chose Option A, which is a plan to keep the current configuration of the roadway. There are four basic options under consideration, with several variations on each option. Of the committee members who have expressed a preference for an option, more have chosen Option A than any other option.

Both DCR and Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, the project engineering consultants who have prepared the plans for all the options, agree with Rogers that there are leaks caused by inadequate waterproofing in the original design.

But they say their rehabilitation plans fully address the problems and that a total rebuild is unnecessary, too costly and would take too much time.

“It’s all accounted for in the option for a rehab,” said David Lenhardt, DCR’s supervisor of parkways and bridges. “The concept for Option A includes repairing all the leaks to eliminate them. It’s been in there since day one.”

A rebuild would mean that everything in the tunnel would be ripped out and completely replaced. A rehabilitation means that “anything we deem is in good condition, we’ll leave, and anything that is substandard or deteriorated, we’ll replace,” Lenhardt explained.

Structural engineer Paul Kelley, senior principle in SGH’s Waltham office, also said the plans took the waterproofing problems into account. A rehab won’t last as long as a rebuild, he said, but, with an estimated life-span of 60 years, it is a reasonable choice.

A rehab will include a new roof, replacing a good portion of both the walls and the base of the roadway beneath the asphalt, plugging joints and increasing the thickness of the concrete at all locations, he said. He said the methods will not entirely prevent leaks, but they will be manageable.

Meg Mainzer-Cohen, executive director and president of the Back Bay Association, said that if both DCR and SGH say they had accounted for the inadequate waterproofing, that is good enough for her.

She said she is more concerned that DCR study another option, B-4, that Rogers brought to the attention of the advisory committee at its last meeting. Mainzer-Cohen’s association has gone on record as preferring rehabbing the current tunnel because that plan retains all the on and off ramps of Storrow Drive. But if another plan achieved that objective, she probably could support it. “B-4 retains all the access points,” she said. If I were DCR, I’d be studying that right now.”

Meanwhile, Kelley said he has invited Rogers to his office to look at the rehabilitation plans his firm has prepared.

Be bold about Storrow Drive

There is confusion among those who are participating on the Storrow Drive tunnel committee. Having spent hours considering various options for redesigning the crumbling portion of the road and tunnel, committee members are stymied. They have learned that at least one seasoned engineer believes that replacing the tunnel in its current configuration will be more expensive and time consuming than the consultants have estimated. It’s unclear at this point whether that is true, but it has shaken the committee’s confidence.

They have learned there may be disagreement between Mass Highway, which will build the road, and the Department of Conservation and Recreation, which owns it and plans it, about the standards used to build the road. There is also talk that DCR’s consultants have not given it their best in planning options other than rehabilitating the current tunnel.

Committee members are frustrated that after seven months of meetings in which they learned about the effects of four options and all of the versions of those options, the best they can do is to stick with the current configuration.

The committee is being too cautious. We urge them to consider the benefits of rash ideas. Rash ideas sometimes bring wonderful results. It’s worth a risk.

There’s a long history in this city of rash ideas. And they’ve paid off.

Consider the outcome if, in the 1980s, Fred Salvucci and his allies had said, “This plan for burying the Central Artery is too expensive and too disruptive to push for. We’re going to rebuild what is there.”

Not only would we have missed the chance to bring back Boston’s beauty, we also would have been unable to install the high-tech infrastructure and upgraded utilities that now lie underground throughout the downtown. And, unlike the dire predictions, we had neither a traffic nor an economic meltdown.

Consider what traffic would have been like in this city if our 19th-and early 20th-century forbears had continued to rely on the horse and buggy and those newfangled automobiles instead of building an underground transit system that works well more than 100 years later.

Consider what Boston would have looked like if, in the 1840s, civic leaders had said, “Let’s not fill in the Back Bay. We’re having too much of a fight about it. It costs too much,and will be too messy to haul in all that dirt and gravel from Needham.”

Consider what we would have missed if Bulfinch’s contemporaries had said, “We have enough land on Beacon Hill. We won’t fill in the river along what will become Charles Street.”

Consider where we would be if John Winthrop and his band of colonists had said, “It’s too dangerous, costly and risky to cross the Atlantic, establish a town and then a nation.”

There is regret among the Storrow Drive committee members, as they well recognize, because they are not dreaming big enough. They are letting the MBTA and the Mass Pike get away with a lack of involvement with the planning.

They are letting DCR off the hook by not requiring this agency to include the Bowker Overpass and the Charles River bridges, all but one of which need rebuilding, in the planning. The whole area needs a complete redo.

It takes a respected leader or two and a vision to make this happen. Many of the committee members have the respect and the brains to become that kind of leader and put forth a vision.

But time is running short. If we’re going to fix a mistake and transform a part of the city that needs it desperately, we have to begin soon. We urge committee members to be bold — to imitate their forbears in transforming this provincial capital, more felicitous in which to live than any other American city, into something even better.