CAPTION: T workmen adjusted Charlie ticket machines last week in anticipation of the new entrances to Arlington Station on Berkeley Street.



If you get on or off the T at the Arlington Station, you’re going to have to learn a new route.

New temporary entrances and exits at the Arlington T Station opened on Wednesday on Berkeley Street. The Arlington Street entrances will remain closed for about 16 months.

New Charlie ticket machines were installed last week at the temporary entrance. After passing through the ticket readers, riders will walk through a tunnel to get to the platforms.

The work, which began in April, was precipitated by the need to make the station handicap accessible. But the project, which has been in the works since 1996, was delayed by neighborhood opposition to the location of an elevator, which will be built on the south side of the Arlington Street Church on a wide sidewalk.

“The elevator will have a metal-framed glass top,” said Tom Bretto, the T’s project manager. “It’s transparent so you can see the church.”

When the project is finished, elevator users will connect with a tunnel ending at the mezzanine level of the station where two other elevators, one for the inbound direction and one for outbound, will descend to the two platforms. Two escalators, one of which was installed in 1951, will be replaced.

The station itself will get new ceilings, floors and wall tiles, as well as automated fare collection equipment. Artists are now working on panels to be inserted at the mezzanine level that will depict the fish weir used by the native Americans prior to English colonization. The fish weir was located where the station sits and at the same level, which is now underground rather than under water.

The direction of the stairs in front of the Arlington Street Church on Arlington Street will be reversed. “We looked at where the pedestrians were coming from,” said Barbara Boylan, director of design for the T. “More people were coming from the offices along Boylston Street than from Newbury.”

At Arlington Street, the refurbished entrances will conform to the Boylston Street master plan, said Boylan.

The projected date of completion is late 2008, at which time one stairway at Berkeley Street will remain open as an exit only.

Elliott Laffer, executive director of the Groundwater Trust, greeted Dennis Royer, newly-named chief of public works and transportation, at a Move Massachusetts meeting last week. Royer said he was going to change the way some things are done in Boston.




Boston will have no more speed bumps if Dennis Royer gets his way. Royer, who became chief of public works and transportation for Boston about two months ago, also said the city will finally have street signs.

“I’m trying to find out what street I’m on, and there are no signs,” the former Denver traffic engineer said about a drive he took in Boston when he was still unfamiliar with the city. “It had a median and trees and was really nice. I ended up at the Public Garden, but I was still asking myself, ‘What street am I on?’”

Royer now knows how to identify Commonwealth Avenue even without the street signs, he said at a Move Massachusetts meeting last week, where transportation advocates and planning buffs gave him a warm reception. “They told me you can’t find your way around Boston, and it’s true,” he declared.

But he’s going to make some changes. “Tourism is an important industry in Boston, and you have to make it easier for visitors,” he said. “Signage is key.”

So are Boston’s road conditions, which Royer called poor. He said it isn’t wise to rely on filling potholes quickly. The best approach is to not allow them to occur in the first place. So he issued a warning to the utility companies: it won’t be as easy to get permits to cut streets, especially ones recently repaved, and when a permit is issued, someone will be watching to make sure the street is repaired properly. “In half the cuts, the asphalt isn’t even cold yet,” he observed. “There’s going to be a certain level of pain and suffering.”

A guy with a sense of humor, Royer said he is aware that Denver, with a newer infrastructure and streets laid out on a grid, is not Boston. “I took over the finest 1965 traffic signal system in the U. S.,” he said about his first job in Denver. “The problem was it was 1985.”

He said the city gave him the money and he made improvements. “A lot of the things I did there, I can do here,” he said.

Some other steps he intends to take are to get public works and transportation heads in the metropolitan area together to try to solve problems in concert with one another instead of having a project stop at a town line. He said he wants Boston and other cities and towns to buy supplies together rather than separately. In Denver, this strategy reduced prices, especially for the smaller municipalities who wouldn’t have had the buying clout to get lower prices on their own.

While he said that Boston has many advantages other cities don’t have, he wasn’t entirely complimentary. He called Boston’ pedestrians arrogant and stupid, but he said that city government’s decisions sometimes made them that way.

Perhaps the most far-reaching goal he discussed was triggered by a walk into the North End through Haymarket. He said it was filthy. “I was appalled at what I found piled up in the street.” He wants to automate trash collection and clean the streets on the same day. But to do that he said he has to get to the curb. So all the parked cars would have to move.

Such a plan would mean that street cleaning would take place 12 months of the year, not nine. Presumably such a practice would mean that snow plowing could also take place along the same streets.

The cleaner streets would be a boon in the “walking city.” “The biggest disincentive to walking [along Boston’s sometimes-narrow sidewalks] is the trash,” he said. “It’s a huge quality of life issue.”

He acknowledged that such a drastic change will take several years to implement, partly because the last contract for trash collection is good through 2009.

When Mayor Menino hired him, Royer said he told him he wanted to do things differently from the way they had always been done. Royer explained that there were two ways to go about solving problems. One was to follow the example of the captain of the Titanic and try to avoid the icebergs. Another was to “go where no man has gone before.” Royer said for him there’s no question about his style. “I take the Star Trek approach,” he promised.

credit: Jaclyn Trop




The much-anticipated Borders opened for business in The Newbry building last Thursday. The 24,000-square-foot, two-floor book store features a Seattle’s Best Coffee café and a Paperchase shop to satisfy one’s stationery needs. Borders, the latest addition to The Newbry, joins Citibank, Filene’s Basement and H&M at 501 Boylston Street, the former headquarters of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company.

Fed up with the Legislature’s failure to act upon the health care amendment, Commonwealth Avenue resident William Spring and nine other Massachusetts supporters last week filed suit against the Commonwealth to make sure the amendment gets on the 2008 ballot.

In 2002 Beacon Hill resident Barbara Roop began work on the amendment, which would make the Legislature and the Governor responsible for enacting the laws needed to guarantee every resident access to affordable, comprehensive health and mental health care coverage. It does not specify any particular approach to reform, but gives the legislature the tools to make sure it is done.

She founded the Committee for Health Care for Massachusetts and led a citizen initiative that gathered more than 71,000 signatures and had the support of enough legislators to move the amendment to the voters.

“My primary care physician suggested that I join the committee,” said Spring, who believes universal coverage is the only way to guarantee that every citizen, including the poor, receives good health care. “Early on, we were very pleased with the response by citizens and by the General Court.”

In July, 2004, the Constitutional Convention did not act but instead referred the amendment to the next convention.

In July, 2006, the Constitutional Convention ducked a vote by sending the amendment to a “special” study committee — which never met.

The Committee for Health Care worried that political maneuvering and a general reluctance on the part of legislators to amend the constitution would prevent any vote. “We were shocked when the leadership sidetracked the amendment to a committee,” said Spring. This had been around a long time and it is clear this was an evasive maneuver.”

On November 9, the Constitutional Convention met for the sixth time this session and, for the sixth time, failed to vote on this amendment before it recessed — effectively preventing the amendment from appearing on the November 2008 ballot.

“We believe that the General Court had sloughed off its constitutional duty,” said Spring. “And so on November 10, he and nine other Massachusetts voters plus the Committee for Health Care for Massachusetts filed a law suit in Suffolk Superior Court to force the Commonwealth to put the amendment on the 2008 ballot. “The paramount issue for all the plaintiffs is that the General Court fulfill its duty to vote yes or no on every amendment sent to them by the people,” said Chairman Roop.

The suit asks the Supreme Judicial Court to order Secretary of State William F. Galvin to put the amendment before the voters unless the Legislature gives it the second and final up or down vote required by Article 48 of the Massachusetts Constitution.

Donald K. Stern, partner at Bingham McCutchen LLP and former U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, is handling the case. He said in a prepared release that those seeking to put the amendment on the ballot had followed the process set out in the Constitution but have been stymied by the General Court’s failure to vote again on the amendment.

“Neither the text nor the purpose of Article 48 permits or condones the use of non-constitutional means to thwart an otherwise qualified initiative amendment from being presented to the people at a statewide election,” Stern said.

Similarly, Governor Mitt Romney announced at a rally November 19 that he also intended to file an action before the courts for failing to act on the gay right amendment, which had met the same fate as the health care one. “Last week, 109 legislators decided to reject the law, abandon the Constitution and violate their oath of office,” he said. “For the Constitution plainly states that when a qualified petition is placed before them, the legislature “shall” vote. It does not say may vote, or vote if its procedures permit a vote, or vote if there are enough members in attendance. It says “shall” vote.”

Spring said that since the suit was filed, there has been no response from Secretary Galvin.

In this week of Thanksgiving, most Americans actually do ponder the things they are thankful for.

We’ll leave the more sentimental items to others. In this neighborhood, we offer some suggestions for blessings to be thankful for that are usually not mentioned over the turkey.

• The Mall. It makes for a wonderful view for Commonwealth Avenue residents, and it makes a for a lovely walk for everyone. Its shade makes us cooler in summer. Its leaves have emitted that delicious wet, rotting, dried-up fragrance that one smells only in New England in the fall. Its breadth makes the perfect city snow scene in winter. Thank you to those 19th-century Commissioners on the Back Bay, for their straightforward, dignified plan.

• The John Hancock Tower, an emblem for the contradictions of tall buildings. Its sculptural and reflective qualities are wonderful, while its materials and plaza are banal. But, in its reflection, one can sit in a seat at Fenway Park and watch the sun set in the east — a tantalizing thought. From Storrow Drive in the late afternoon, the building’s indentation flashes in a vertical line, again from the sun’s reflection, when the car is at the appropriate angle. From the Southeast Expressway, the building presents a one-dimensional face. It must be that visitors wonder how a building like that can stand up — and, of course, it almost didn’t. Thank you to I. M. Pei for getting at least part of it right.

• The private schools. The city’s public schools abandoned the Back Bay, hastening the trend of families moving out of the city to the suburbs that had convenient schools that were also good. For awhile it looked pretty dim for families, who, if they wanted to stay in the neighborhood, had to schlep children to Brookline, Cambridge and farther out.

But over the past two decades private schools have grown or been newly established to offer schooling to local families. They are not cheap, but they are nearby. Most parents feel a need to keep their children close to them, even in school. It’s not just the pre-schools, run from churches and office buildings. It’s the Learning Project a start-up 30 years ago, and the Commonwealth School, which began 20 years before that. Newman Prep, even older, continues its stalwart ways. Kingsley Montessori has remade itself from its origins and a small building on Marlborough Street 40 years ago into a powerhouse of preschool and elementary education.

It would be better if these private schools were supplemented by a public school or two in the neighborhood, but meanwhile they are making it possible for families to thrive in the city and we thank them.

• The city’s tax and assessing offices. No homeowner wants to see property taxes rise, but at least the system is now fair. Valuations no longer seem arbitrary. The information about how the assessors arrived at their value is public, online and can be scrutinized. The information becomes more complete every year. This is a far cry from a few decades ago, when valuations appeared arbitrary. One suspected that those closest to the seats of power through influence or relations were treated better than everyone else. We’re living at the right time in Boston. We thank Lisa Signori, the city’s financial officer, and Ron Rakow, the commissioner of assessing, for their intelligence, fair-mindedness and honesty, even though we won’t thank them for the tax bill.