CAPTION: An artist’s rendering of the restored Brewer Fountain Plaza.

With a restored and once again functioning 19th-century bronze fountain as its centerpiece, the Friends of the Public Garden and the Boston Parks and Recreation Department hope to revitalize the Brewer Fountain Plaza, the long-neglected gateway to the northeastern corner of the Boston Common.
“It will be a real legacy project,” said Henry Lee, president of the non-profit Friends group. “It will help define the entrance to the Common.”
The fountain was removed from the park in June and is now undergoing a $558,000 restoration, made possible in part by a federal grant from the Save America’s Treasures program. After it is reassembled near the State House – tentatively set for later this fall - the fountain will feature completely restored artwork, as well as a new pump.
In 1867, Gardener Brewer, a wealthy Boston merchant, imported the fountain featured at the 1855 Paris World Fair and placed it on the Common across from his Park Street home the following year. Around 1917, the fountain was relocated to its most recent site near the State House, and in 1974, the surrounding area was reconstructed by increasing the pavement and removing many nearby trees.
Today, the refurbished fountain is merely the first step in the revitalization of the area as proposed by the Brewer Fountain Master Plan, a collaborative effort from the Friends group, the Parks and Recreation Department and the Solomon Fund - a family foundation dedicated to preserving the city’s parks.
If the Master Plan’s proponents win the approval of the Boston Landmarks Commission at a hearing scheduled for this afternoon, they hope to eventually remove the exiting pedestal and raise the level of the plaza to that of the elevated fountain and basin, which would alleviate draining problems and improve access to the structure.
The pavement around the fountain would be reconfigured and reduced, resulting in a 10-percent increase in green space and making room for new trees to be planted. “We want to isolate the fountain, so it’s completely surrounded by trees,” landscape architect Marion Presley said. Victorian-style benches, movable seasonal tables and chairs and additional lighting would also be added to the plaza.
Another component of the Master Plan would reduce the width of the Lafayette Mall, which runs adjacent to Tremont Street, to 20 feet, making it consistent with other walkways on the Common. The flower boxes near Tremont Street would be removed, and benches, a raised planting strip and a historic iron fence installed along the street.
Herb Nolan, associate director of the Solomon Fund, estimates the cost of the entire project at $2.5 million, nearly $900,000 of which he said has already been collected from mostly private donations.
Meanwhile, City Council President Mike Ross, chair of the Special Committee on the Boston Common, is pleased with the plan.
“It’s going to help revitalize and bring new life and activity into the park and become the gateway to the Boston Common,” Ross said. “I think it will bleed into the surrounding areas, including Downtown Crossing.”
Lee of the Friends group agrees with this optimistic prediction for the Common, viewing the Brewer Fountain Plaza project as a major step forward in improving long-neglected areas of the park.
“We’ve been concerned about the deterioration of the Common for a great many years,” Lee said. “What we’re doing now, in a sense, is tackling the problem segmentally.”

The Boston Parks and Recreation Department has announced that the delayed renovations to Phillips Street Park, located at 21 Phillips St. on Beacon Hill, are back on track and scheduled to see substantial completion by the middle of next month with final completion by the end of October.
Now that utility work is completed, the $460,000 renovation project is in its final phase. The finished park will feature an upper plaza with brick paving, ornamental metal fencing, benches and game tables, and a lower plaza with a sculptural play structure for five to twelve year old children. An amphitheatre seating wall with tiered levels will provide additional flexible seating for the lower plaza and ornamental metal fencing will protect the plant beds. New drainage systems and planting are also part of the overall park design.
Work on the park improvements began last October. Construction was suspended due to weather during the winter, resumed in April, and delayed during the summer due to coordination of utility work. Finish work will now commence including plantings, lighting, concrete and brick paving, ornamental fencing, site furnishings, rubber play surfacing and the remaining curbing.
For further information, please call the Boston Parks and Recreation Department at 617-635-4505.

CAPTION: A Japanese print from the Museum of Fine Art’s collection.

The Nichols House Museum will present a lecture entitled “The Floating World Comes To Boston: Ukiyo-e Prints from the MFA 1809-2009” by Sarah E. Thompson at the American Meteorological Society, 45 Beacon St., on Monday, Oct. 5, at 6 p.m., followed by a reception.
Thompson is the assistant curator for Japanese Prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received her A.B. from Harvard University and her PhD. from Columbia University. She taught Japanese and Asian art history at Vassar College, Oberlin College and the University of Oregon and has curated several exhibitions of Japanese prints (most notably “Undercurrents in the Floating World: Censorship and Japanese Prints” at the Asia Society in New York in 1991) before coming to the MFA in 2004. She is now supervising the Japanese Print Access and Documentation Project (JPADP), whose ultimate goal is to photograph and catalogue all 50,000 Japanese prints in the MFA collection.
The collection of Japanese prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with about 50,000 works, is the largest collection outside Japan and one of the largest and finest in the world. Over half the collection was the gift of a single prominent Bostonian, Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow, who lived in Japan for seven years in the 1880s. Dr. Bigelow converted to Buddhism and enthusiastically collected all forms of Japanese art; he deposited his collection at the MFA in 1890 and formally donated it in 1911. This lecture will examine the strong interest in Japan among Boston intellectuals and art collectors of the late nineteenth century, and the continuation of their legacy to the present day.
Admission to “The Floating World Comes To Boston: Ukiyo-e Prints from the MFA 1809-2009” is $15 for members of the Nichols House Museum and $20 for non members. Reservations are strongly recommended. Please call the Nichols House Museum at 617-227-6993 for further information.
The Nichols House is a historic house museum that offers visitors a unique glimpse of late 19th and early 20th century domestic life on Beacon Hill. Located at 55 Mount Vernon St., the museum is currently open for tours Tuesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

This project is not in the interests of the City of Boston, other developments already approved, or the neighborhoods affected. The developer (hereafter referred to as “Raymond”) is on record that the existing garage building is profitable, so that only a very large-scale new project would justify redevelopment. Thus, there is no economic hardship justifying extraordinary zoning relief. The project should not be built.

The Project Will Have a Negative Effect on the Economy.
Our city economy is suffering for reasons beyond the general economic meltdown across the country. For many years, Massachusetts has been losing population relative to other parts of the country. During the economic boom, we lost major employers due to takeovers by companies headquartered elsewhere. We no longer have the corporate headquarters of major banks, insurance companies and manufacturers filling our downtown and Back Bay towers. Along with the departed executives went a large proportion of their legal work. While we hope, of course, that newer businesses will grow to take the place of those that have departed, we must be mindful that many of the latter took over 100 years to reach their full size and space needs, and realistically new ones may be expected to do likewise, particularly since advances in information technology have made offices more efficient. We should expect – and plan for – a diminished need for office space for many, many years to come.
If Raymond were the only party affected if its project is too large or unneeded, one might say Raymond should be allowed to take the risk and to protect itself, as it plans to do, by building when conditions are right and in phases. However, the proposed oversupply of space will affect not only this project, but owners of existing buildings and of projects that are already in the pipeline. One need only look at conditions in Miami/Fort Lauderdale or Las Vegas to see how over-building can destroy the entire real estate industry in an area.
When I asked a representative of Raymond, in a public meeting, where he expected to get tenants to fill the space he proposes to build, he said he anticipated attracting them to move from older buildings in the city. He adduced in favor of his project the new tax revenues and linkage payments that would flow from it. He did not subtract from those figures the diminishment of revenue due to tax abatements to be received by owners of the vacant properties nor the reduction of revenues from failure of other proposed projects.

The Project Interferes with Projects Needed in their Neighborhoods
One of the pending projects of particular concern to residents of the North End and West End is the development originally proposed by Raymond in partnership with Hines in the Bullfinch Triangle, calling for mixed use – office, retail, supermarket and parking. The majority of us are working families or retirees, and for years we have suffered from the lack of a supermarket in our area. To the credit of the BRA staff, they have worked long and hard to try to get us one. Finally, they succeeded in getting it sited, in the Hines/Raymond Bullfinch Triangle Project, which is all permitted and ready to go. It is not being built, however, nor realistically can it be expected to be, until it obtains leasing commitments from sufficient office tenants. In this respect it is in direct competition with Raymond and the Government Center Garage Project, to the point that Raymond had to withdraw from the Hines/Raymond project to proceed with this one. It is in the interests of the neighborhoods for Raymond to be denied the zoning relief it seeks so that the Bullfinch Triangle Project, which is most important to us, will have a better chance of success.
Similarly, the Filene’s redevelopment is stalled and blighting its neighborhood, and development of the Fan Pier has been cut back. Both of these projects compete directly with the Garage Project for prospective tenants, and there are other projects in the pipeline that compete less directly – all in addition to the existing supply of office space that currently has a substantial vacancy rate. Does not fairness to the developers of these other projects suggest the BRA should not undermine their economics by permitting more space than can possibly be absorbed?

The Transportation Needs of the Project Cannot be Met.
Raymond claims the Garage location is uniquely suited to support the huge amount of space proposed because of its excellent access to public transportation. However, it projects 22,000 daily trips generated by the project – comparable to the amount generated by many of the events at the TD Banknorth Garden. We know from long experience that any time there is a major event at the Garden the T is fully utilized to capacity and the local streets are overwhelmed by incoming cars – and those events are not bringing their crowds at the height of the rush hour, as the proposed new offices would. We also know that whenever there is a Red Sox game in town (typically over 50 weekdays each year) there is a period of approximately an hour before the game where the size of the crowd getting on at North Station and Haymarket prevents virtually anyone else from getting on at the remaining stops before Kenmore. The T is already running as many trains as it safely can at peak periods and has no funds to buy additional cars to lengthen the trains it runs. Even without consideration of the demands on the transportation system of other projects already permitted, such as North Point and the Mass General expansion, there is no available public transportation to support a large project on this site.

The Project Will Have a Negative Effect on Tourism.
The project is, obviously, out of character and out of scale with its surroundings. The Bullfinch Triangle, North End and Fanueil Hall represent the charm of Boston and its history. Those factors are important in attracting tourism. Visitors and residents alike enjoy walking in these areas. They do not enjoy walking in the Financial District. That area, not our neighborhood, is where towers such as those proposed belong. This project has no sense of place; its structures could just as well be in NewYork or Chicago or Hong Kong. If we are foolish enough to make Boston look like a second-rate imitation of those cities we will lose one of the prime reasons visitors choose to come here.

The Project Doesn’t Guarantee the School Used to Get Support for It.
The developer seeks support in the neighborhood by inferring that its financial contribution could be used to build a neighborhood school. Mayor Menino has observed that much more is needed for a new school to be sited; specifically, there would also have to be a source of funds in the city budget to operate it. We do need a school, but it will only be possible to get one in a healthy economy. On balance, this project makes it less likely, not more likely, we will get one.
Due to the length of this lette,r I am not going to comment in detail on the many environmental problems presented by the proposed plan. I do feel compelled, however, to register my concern at the likely impact of shadow and wind. Lack of sunlight is one of the traditional indicia of a blighted urban area. Boston suffers from long winters with unhealthily low levels of sunlight and the small amount of sunlight we do get is precious. It is a major detriment if an apartment or street that currently might get an hour or two of sun on a winter day gets less than that, or gets it only at a time when people are at work and cannot enjoy it. Winter shadows also increase the likelihood of ice on the streets and make it more difficult to see whatever ice there may be, thereby increasing the number of accidents. We also suffer from streets that, at times, are difficult or impossible to walk due to the force of the wind. If we are serious about encouraging people to walk and/or use the T rather than drive in the city, we should not be making it increasingly difficult for them to do so.
There was a time when new development in Boston was virtually guaranteed to increase city revenues and thereby allow the city to address community needs for which it otherwise lacked funding. In that era, it might make sense for the primary question asked by city planners to be: where can we put more development, and what is the maximum amount that can be erected on each such site? That era has passed. We need to revise our planning accordingly and seek to develop other sources of revenue rather than approve undesirable development.