The recent renovation to Porter Square allowed the city to host an opening ceremony in June complete with a street theater troupe, presentations by the mayor and the deputy city manager, as well as a brief speech by Sy Shapiro, after whose family the newly redone plaza gets its new name.
Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to win over the Boston Globe, which described the new design as "repellent", adding that the designer, Toshihiro Katayama, has created a "giant forbidding crosswalk" in what should have been quiet space in the cacophony of the traffic jumble that is Porter Square.
City Hall workers, especially those who've been thinking about and planning this project for the last fifteen years, can only throw up their hands and say "you can't win 'em all", though no doubt such a resounding No from Cate McQuaid of the Globe had to land pretty hard on what's undoubtedly been a long, long process.
Bad reviews aside, we Cambridge residents should not mistake the Porter Square refurbishing for anything less than it is – the first piece of a rapid transformation of Massachusetts Avenue from Porter Square to the Arlington line.
The first clue probably should have been the rumblings by the MBTA to sell air rights over the commuter rail tracks approaching Porter Square. Lesley University seemed interested, but there were lots of questions. Last I'd heard, all plans are on hold. I'm guessing this idea has not had its last hearing or telling.
The next big piece, of course, is the completion of the Trolley Square development at the point where the Minuteman Bikepath intersects with Massachusetts Avenue. From an urban design perspective, filling in the "street wall" along Mass Ave makes sense, and Trolley Square will absolutely provide that. Forty units are slated, and construction has been happening apace.
Yet not everybody rejoices in the niceties of the language of urban infill projects. A passer-by, in one of those random conversations that can happen at a stoplight, said she thought the new development would bring some good, but also some bad. Too many people (and cars), she said, but at the same it would help with business in the area. And she added – it might provide some more political support for the extension of the Bikepath into Boston. Though she wouldn't give me her name, she said she was a graphic designer who'd lived locally for quite some time.
I believe she was right in her intuition. The Trolley Square construction, along with the other new development happening right across Mass Ave and bringing another 40 units into the neighborhood, will indeed transform that stretch of road – socially, economically, politically. All those changes will alter what it feels like to walk there, to shop there, to drive around there.
Take retail for example. More people (and more affluent people -- e.g., some of the units in the second development will be priced close to $1 million) are going to ask for shops that cater to their needs. One liquor store has been taken down already, and another may go in time. The battle over the zoning of Marino's restaurant seems prescient. The value of that property and surrounding properties will continue to rise in the near future, bucking the recent general trend in Cambridge. Perhaps most interestingly, the city of Cambridge is going to have to grapple with a thorny traffic and pedestrian management issue – how do you make it safer to cross Massachusetts Avenue at that tangled intersection.
These new demands, at least as they express themselves politically, shouldn't go unheard in City Hall or in the State House for that matter. Within three blocks of Trolley Square, Cambridge City Councillor Anthony Galluccio and Somerville State Representative Carl Sciortino have their offices.
What we should not doubt though is that we are midstream in a time of neighborhood change. Densities along northern Mass Ave are rising. Personally, I think increasing a built presence along that stretch of the roadway will make it ultimately a more enjoyable place to be, and improve human connectedness by changing the fabric of the experience there. But I recognize that an old pattern of Cambridge is disappearing. A new one is being built on top of it. Let's engage ourselves in this process of change, because In 20 years, only the old-timers will remember what it was like "back then".
