credit: D. Harney



Joe Fallon of the Fairmont Copley took the Fairmont’s canine ambassador Catie Copley for a walk in Copley Square on Tuesday.

A city ordinance to increase the fines that could be assessed to the city’s graffiti vandals has broad support with the Boston City Council and is awaiting a legal fine-tuning before going to the council floor for a vote next week, according a source in Councilor Michael Ross’ office.

The legislation, which was sponsored by City Councilor Michael Ross of Beacon Hill, would allow judges to impose a $300 city fine for each offense a defendant is found guilty of, on top of the state’s fine structure for graffiti crimes.

“The city already makes graffiti vandalism a criminal act, but they follow the state law on fines and penalties,” explained Ross’ Chief of Staff Jerome Smith. “What we’re doing is adding our own fine to the system, which would be assessed on top of the state fines.”

According to Smith, the bill, which has majority support in the city council, is currently being reviewed by the city’s attorneys to clean up language in the proposal.

“There was some question of who would implement this bill, but we want the police to implement it, because they’re generally the ones that catch graffiti vandals and build cases against them,” said Smith. “So that kind of thing is being looked at now. We expect [the ordinance] will come out for [a vote] next week.”

CAPTION: The Smith College guest room in the College Club of Boston’s new Smith College guest room was unveiled at a special cocktail reception last Friday evening.
CREDIT: Courtesy photo


When the eleven guestrooms of the venerable College of Boston needed a new look, members had quite a challenge — which they met by creating a challenge of their own.

They called it the Dream Room Makeover Challenge, and it’s similar to popular television shows like “Design on a Dime” and Trading Spaces.” Designers are given fourteen days and a set budget to remake one of the guestrooms in the Victorian brownstone located at 44 Commonwealth Avenue. And, in keeping with the mission of the oldest women’s college club in America, each room is being inspired and named after a prominent college.

So far, local designers have created guestrooms honoring Wellesley College, Connecticut College, Radcliff College and Emmanuel College. Last Friday evening a special cocktail reception was held to unveil the newest redo: the Smith College room.

“There are still six rooms remaining, with probably three to four of them undergoing makeovers this summer,” said designer Lisey Good, club vice-president and a designer who created the Connecticut College room. “Thus far we only know that there will be a Vassar room.”

When the College Club was looking for a designer to create a room for Smith College, the obvious choice was Heather G.Wells, a designer with a solid Smith College degree behind her who has a studio on Boylston Street as well as one in Chicago.

“”They gave us the money, and we put in some of our own, and started by picking through all the furnishings and antiques in the house to see what we could use,” said Wells. “We revitalized the room using Smith’s colors, yellows and blues, and repainted the whole space.”

Wells used a lot of old pieces because she wanted a traditional yet transitional design that updated the room but retained the flavor of the house. She used the existing beds but reupholstered the headboards with fresh fabrics, as she did with two existing Martha Washington chairs and a desk chair. She replaced a small Oriental rug with a larger blue one, added matchstick blinds and new lighting to the room. Hanging on the wall above the bed are a collection of blue Smith College plates purchased on Ebay.

The bathroom in the suite was thoroughly redone, with new flooring and fixtures, and on the wall is an old Smith College poster she also found on Ebay.

credit: Courtesy photo
caption: Marlborough Street residents Mike Bradley and Alex ran in this year’s Back Bay 5K.



The 2007 Back Bay 5k race, hosted by the MIT chapter of the Chi Phi Fraternity, The Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay and The Esplanade Association, was held on April 28. Chi Phi has sponsored the race for the last eleven years to benefit Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. This year there were 136 registered runners, about 80 of which were Back Bay residents. The event raised approximately $3,500.

Winners include Stephane Ricoult, Katie Guynn, Richard Bagge, Gill Gregory, David Beatson, Barbara Grandberg and Paul McCormack.

A recent proposal sponsored by City Councilor Rob Consalvo is hoping to limit the use of plastic bags in the city, which he argues litter the streets and harm the environment.

“This is a huge issue of trash and litter. Plastic bags are one of the biggest culprits,” said Consalvo, who plans to hold a hearing on the issue next month. “Plastic bags are an environmental nightmare they… take up tons of space in our landfill and contribute to our dependence on foreign oil.”

Yet even before the recent measure was proposed, local retailers said they’ve been encouraging their customers to adopt the popular European method of using their own bags to carry groceries.

Deluca’s Market on Charles Street and its counterpart on Newbury Street in the Back Bay use mainly plastic bags for their groceries, although they also offer customers the option of paper bags. But in February, owner Virgil Aiello said he ordered an advance shipment of canvas bags with the store’s logo, which quickly ran out.

“I think that anything that will encourage shoppers to use a canvas bag is a major step in the right direction,” Aiello said.

Aiello said his second shipment, which numbers in the thousands, should last the stores for some time and cover the scores of bags that are bought by tourists who want to take home a Boston memento. In addition, he said he would offer the bags to frequent shoppers at a discount and give them for free to repeat customers who spend over a certain amount at the store.

If a ban on plastic bags in the city was introduced, Aiello said he would “probably have paper bags on hand but we would encourage even more than now the use of the canvas bag.”



According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s
website, the debate over the benefits of paper versus plastic is still ongoing. It states that while paper bags “generate 70 percent more air and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags…most plastic bags are made from polyethylene, which is made from crude oil and natural gas, nonrenewable resources.”

When it comes to choosing one over the other, the website claims the answer is neither. Instead, it encourages the public to buy reusable bags or use their previously purchased paper or plastic bags when shopping.

Christopher Flynn, president of the Massachusetts Food Association, which represents the state’s grocery and supermarket industry said eliminating bags isn’t the right approach.

“The bag isn’t the issue, the issue is what people do with it after they are done,” said Flynn, who supports a program that would educate people about the right way to dispose of a plastic bag rather than a crack down on their use. “We don’t need to threaten people, we don’t need to tax people more…it’s an education process, we certainly have a role to play.”

Whole Foods Market on Cambridge Street currently only offers plastic bags to its shoppers but also sells and encourages the use of recyclable bags in its stores.
“Any bag that you bring in is 10 cents off when you reuse it and fill it with groceries,” said Whole Foods Market spokesperson Fred Shank. “We also sell reusable bags. We want to encourage customers to use reusable bags.”
Shank said shoppers can also recycle their plastic bags at the store’s customer service center.

Consalvo said he hopes to have an active dialogue at the city’s hearing about the issue with members of retail and environmental groups as well as concerned citizens.
“I am looking forward to having a thoughtful discussion,” he said.

For some Back Bay families, the decision begins with a fear of the “S” word.

“I would feel trapped in a house in the suburbs where there are no sidewalks and I’d have to depend on a minivan,” said Cheryl Clarkson, who has lived in the Back Bay for 20 years and owns Skin Health on Newbury Street.

When her children began to arrive, she, like others, decided to buck the conventional wisdom that says families should leave for the suburbs. Despite the challenges she could foresee, she thought her children would have a better life in the Back Bay than out of the city.

Clarkson and her husband Daniel Townsend made their decision partly because both had grown up in suburbs – she in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and he in a small town in Minnesota – where they were bored. “We felt a lack of stimulation growing up,” she said. “We thought there would be more benefits raising our children in the city.”

Clarkson said she was perplexed when she heard people saying they wanted more outdoor space. “We have plenty of outdoor space because of the river, the Common, and the Public Garden, as well as the playground,” said Clarkson, whose daughter Danielle is 16 and son Drew is 14.

For some, it is the kind of outdoor space that the city offers compared to the suburbs. In the suburbs, observed Marcia Gregg of Marlborough Street, private back yards are typically more important than public spaces. In the Back Bay, it is the public spaces such as the Clarendon Street playground that take center stage. Places like the playground foster a sense of community as people meet one another and work on improvement projects together. “I didn’t want my kids to play in a back yard alone,” explained Gregg. “I wanted them to be forced to go to a playground where you have to meet people.”

Unlike the Clarkson-Townsends, the Greggs were urban dwellers before they moved to Boston to go to law school. “We had lived in Manhattan for about eight years,” said Gregg, who chose the Back Bay because its street grid reminded her of New York. “At first we were spooked by the smallness of Boston.”

She also thought the residential part of the Back Bay might be dangerous since there were few businesses to give it a street life.

But after two years, she had met several people, had their first child, was making friends at the Clarendon Street Playground, and the neighborhood seemed safer.

Gregg thought her children would have a head start in life if they were raised in the Back Bay. “I wanted them to feel comfortable in the city, walk around all the time and be familiar with the subway system,” she said.

City parents say they see their children’s suburban friends as handicapped in that area. They often can’t get around on their own and their parents are often afraid of the city themselves. “We were expected to drive Kathleen out there,” said Sheila Sargent of Marlborough Street, whose daughter went to school in Chestnut Hill. “The mothers didn’t like to drive into town.”

Sargent said she was persuaded to raise Kathleen, now 21, and her other daughter Kira, who is 19, in the city by her husband Charlie, a widower who had raised his son on Marlborough Street. “He said you could raise a child in the city,” said Sargent, who decided to take his word for it

It didn’t take much persuading. She already lived in the Back Bay when she and her husband married and had lived in Germany for five years. Boston seemed to her the most European of American cities, and she was used to Europeans taking city living with children for granted.

Back Bay parents say they find a lot of support from institutions that have been lovingly grown by previous families. Hill House, the local private schools, the Clarendon Street Playground, and the churches have given parents and children activities to enjoy and places to gather. “I have dear friendships with 10 women from the playground,” said Gregg, whose daughter, Christina, age 15, and son, Willy, age 11, haven’t used the playground for years. “We can’t leave because of these close friends.”

Clarkson said the playground was where she too connected with other families.

The pleasures of city life don’t mean that families don’t struggle with one major problem – schools. While there are several private schools in the neighborhood, they are too expensive for some families. With no public schools nearby, many children must leave playground friends when they reach school age. And without a local public school that provides a center for families, getting the children educated can mean many changes or a different school for each child.

“We pieced together an education that was good for the children but we had to be very pro-active,” said Gregg. She said the children changed schools several times, but next year both will be at Boston Latin, which she calls a godsend.

It’s the lack of schools that provokes Sheila Sargent too. “People are sad that they didn’t fight harder to keep the Prince School,” she said.

Unless the children are in one of the local private schools, parents find they are doing what they moved into the city to avoid — driving a car to get the children to school or to friends’ houses.

If parents can keep their children in one of the local private schools there is a special benefit — a pleasant walk to school. Clarkson’s children attended Kingsley Montessori for preschool. “It was wonderful to walk them to school holding their hands rather than putting them into a car seat,” she said.

When children get into their teenage years, parents begin to feel they are into the home stretch. The children can get to school, the Science Museum or the MFA — not to mention Newbury Street — on their own.

Best of all, say Back Bay parents, the city children stick around when they get into their teenage years. “Now that my children are teenagers, their friends always want to hang out at our house,” said Clarkson. “Everyone wants to come to the Back Bay because the kids in the suburbs are getting bored.”


Kids population crunch?

•
Local schools say that the number of applications is up. Moreover, schools in the Back Bay and on nearby Beacon Hill have recently expanded their offerings with kindergarten classes and more grades in elementary school. They report no problems filling their classrooms.

• While conventional wisdom says that it is mostly young professionals and empty nesters who live in the neighborhood, the birth rate in the neighborhood has gone up.

Counts in the census tracts that comprise Back Bay, Beacon Hill and the West End show an increase of about 19 percent in the number of births between 1999 and 2003.

Architecture as trash

The Mayor is talking about tearing down City Hall and building another one in the Seaport District. The consultant for Suffolk is speculating that the university could demolish the state’s Hurley Building and the Lindemann Center and rebuild a major university complex in that location. The new buildings would, of course, be green.

Now, except for a few architects trained in the 1960s and their cohorts, most Bostonians would not be sad to see these buildings demolished. Both are pretty much detested, partly because it is hard to see any beauty there. Furthermore, they function so poorly. For example, in the hearing rooms at City Hall, you can’t hear. And at the Erich B. Lindemann Mental Health Center, they say that if you’re not crazy when you enter the building, you will be after you’ve tried to find your way around in it.

Both of these buildings should be a lesson for architects and their patrons. Good architecture should be able to survive through differing decades of trends and fashions. Otherwise the buildings become trash. Tearing down a small house is one thing. A large building makes a lot of landfill.

So the idea of busting up all that concrete is not prudent. Concrete can be recycled, of course. So can doors, hardware, fixtures and other items. But still. A lot of stuff still has to be thrown away. And that doesn’t seem very responsible.

Perhaps we should return to an earlier time in the environmental movement. Before buildings were called “green,” there was a mantra for the environmentally conscious. It was: “reduce, re-use, recycle.

So before we do something rash, we should consider how to reduce our need for City Hall. (Columnist and Back Bay resident Tom Keane had an intriguing piece about this one recent Sunday in The Globe.) We should consider how to re-use the rooms in City Hall (and the Hurley Building/Lindemann Center and redecorate them so they are not so grim. We should figure out how to recycle the inside of City Hall so it becomes the indoor garden as it was intended.

We’ve thought a lot about change in Boston and how much of the time it is good. When the Back Bay was built, all kinds of public buildings, including churches, moved out of downtown to points west. At some point, the Seaport District could seem as accessible and as attractive as the 19th-century area of expansion. Some of us might move there if services and shops became available.

But there is something gratuitous about the idea of razing City Hall. Tom Menino just doesn’t like his office or the plaza, and who can blame him? It’s not the elegant digs that Governor Patrick enjoys.

But there must be a way to re-make City Hall into a building that is acceptable to this mayor and attractive to all of us. And then we wouldn’t have to finish off the building with trucks going to the dump.