Back Bay development downsized
By Thomas Grillo / Boston Herald – July 29, 2010
A plan to extend Newbury Street’s toney shopping district to Massachusetts Avenue has been downsized in response to a lawsuit from neighbors.
Kensington Investment Co., owners of Grand Circle Travel, have reduced the scale of the project at 93 Massachusetts Ave. Under the revised plan filed with the Boston Redevelopment Authority today, the developer will renovate the existing four-story brick retail building and construct a four-story addition at the rear on Newbury Street. The previous plan called for improvements to the older building and a five-story addition.
In 2008, the BRA and the Zoning Board of Appeals approved the original plan. But abutters, including the Eliot Hotel and the Harvard Club of Boston, filed suit against the ZBA in Suffolk Superior Court. They argued that the new retail development would exacerbate traffic in a congested part of the city, increase shadows, eliminate views of Newbury Street and diminish property values.
The new plans do not require ZBA approval because they comply with zoning rules. Under the revision, the total square feet of the retail development will be reduced to 30,000 square feet from nearly 49,000 square feet.
See also: Kensington scales back Mass Ave project
Landmark decision – Not all notable Boston buildings should be preserved
By Paul McMorrow – July 30, 2010
THE BOSTON Landmarks Commission will soon grant landmarks status to the Christian Science Center. That outcome is all but assured. What follows looks far less certain, and in that uncertainty, lurks trouble.
This current round of landmarking is a relatively quiet affair. The Christian Science Center complex is a beloved public gathering space. Architects admire the space for its detailing and for the way its geometry harmonizes with the historic neighborhoods around it.
Not all projects of the 1960s were designed as well, though. Several of the concrete-heavy modernist structures in Boston’s urban core choke off street-level vitality, sever neighborhood connections, and impede rational patterns of real estate development. They’re not just ugly; they’re also anti-urban.
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“The worst thing would be for us to learn the wrong lessons from landmarking the Christian Science Center,’’ said George Thrush, director of Northeastern University’s school of architecture. “I do not think we’re saying all Paul Rudolph buildings, all I.M. Pei buildings, all steel-reinforced concrete buildings built in the 1960s, deserve to be preserved as a keeper of the flame of that era. Are we going to make permanent the errors we made in the ’60s?’’
Deaf, blind promised a better film experience – Theater chains add captions, narration
By David Abel – Globe Staff / July 30, 2010
Josh Pearson, who has been blind since shortly after he was born, has always loved going to the movies.
The 18-year-old from Barre appreciates the sound and how the play of light sparks his imagination. He usually goes to movies with sighted friends, who whisper plot details in his ear, but that has its cons.
“There have been too many times where people say at the end of the movie that I ruined it for them,’’ he says. “It can be an unpleasant experience.’’
Now, however, Pearson and thousands of other blind and deaf residents of Massachusetts will have more opportunity to experience movies independently, in a way closer to that enjoyed by those without disabilities.
After more than six months of negotiating with national movie theater companies, Attorney General Martha Coakley announced yesterday that three of the state’s largest chains agreed to increase the number of theaters equipped with devices that help the deaf and the blind enjoy movies.
In a settlement to avoid a lawsuit, Regal Entertainment Group, National Amusements, and American Multi-Cinema, or AMC, promised that over the next three months they will increase the number of accessible theaters to 34 across the state and that the number of auditoriums featuring films in those theaters would increase from 14 to 63, ensuring that 15 percent of all auditoriums in the state will have equipment that projects text, including captions, onscreen for the deaf and provides narration for the blind.
In Boston, the AMC Loews theater off Boston Common and the Regal theater in the Fenway will have three accessible auditoriums each. In Cambridge, the AMC theater in Harvard Square will have two, while the AMC theater in Chestnut Hill will have one. Theaters in Dedham, Revere, and Swansea will have one accessible auditorium.
YMCA to train staff on nursing – Raising awareness on breast-feeding
By Kathy McCabe – Globe Staff / July 30, 2010
The Greater Boston YMCA will train its 1,500 employees in Eastern Massachusetts on a state law protecting mothers’ right to breast-feed in public, after an employee at its Woburn facility told a mother to stop breast-feeding her baby because doing so violated the Y’s policy against eating food in a child care facility.
Elizabeth Gomez, a mother of three from Medford, said she was told by a Y employee to leave the baby-sitting area of the North Suburban YMCA after starting to breast-feed her 3-month-old son earlier this week.
“She said there is no eating or drinking within the [baby-sitting] area,’’ Gomez, 36, said in an interview yesterday. “She told me I had to go out into the hallway. . . . I said, ‘I have a lawful right to be here.’ ’’
A YMCA spokeswoman said the part-time employee, who was not identified, has been disciplined.
“The employee misinterpreted this as a public health issue,’’ said Kelley Rice, vice president of external affairs of the Greater Boston YMCA. “It is not. . . . We support a woman’s right to breast-feed in our facilities.’’
A state law protects mothers who breast-feed in public. It states that a mother “may breast-feed her child in any public place which is open to . . . the general public’’ and where the mother and child are lawfully present.
Focus on the family – Nicholas Nixon’s photos of his wife, their children, and her sisters offer a rare sense of intimacy at the MFA
By Mark Feeney – Globe Staff / July 30, 2010
Nicholas Nixon first came to public prominence 35 years ago. He was one of 10 photographers in what would come to be seen as a landmark exhibition. “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape’’ looked at the interaction of settlement and environment. It was nature photography that encompassed both the man-made and natural.
The Boston cityscapes that Nixon had in that show seem very far, except geographically, from the 75 black-and-white images in “Nicholas Nixon: Family Album,’’ which runs through next May 1 at the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s a long overdue MFA recognition for Nixon, who has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Design since 1975. The temptation to hail him as a local hero is great, except that Nixon stopped being local in reputation almost as soon as he moved here, in 1974. He had his first Museum of Modern Art show in 1976. He’s had subsequent solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoMA again, and numerous other museums.
Yet if “New Topographics’’ has nothing in common visually with the MFA show, which consists of photographs of Nixon’s wife, their children, and her sisters, they share a fundamental thematic bond. Lives lived together and how they shape the emotional setting where they’re lived are at the heart of “Family Album.’’ Those issues no less apply to the much larger family album his work comprises: projects he has done over the years about people on their stoops, AIDS patients, the elderly, schoolchildren. Is it ungrateful to complain that this fine show couldn’t be larger, a career retrospective, and encompass them, too?
From Universal Hub: Legislature agrees to let city rent out two old buildings on Common, in Fens for restaurants
762 – Baghdad is founded by caliph Al-Mansur. More anniversaries.
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