Once dismissed as the “lost block” of Boylston Street, the area spanning 1064 –1100 Boylston St. at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue has undergone a drastic transformation, thanks to a partnership between the city, Berklee College of Music and other local landowners.
“This is a great day for a small little section of Boston,” City Council President Mike Ross said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday. “It was kind of a forgotten space until a group of business owners and a great institution – Berklee - got involved.”
The city collaborated with property owners Berklee, The Hamilton Company and Investment Properties, Ltd. to revitalize an area that was formerly marred by uneven sidewalks, insufficient lighting, vacant storefronts and inaccessibility for people with disabilities.
The recently completed changes to 15 feet of privately owned sidewalk include the creation of new terraces next to the storefronts, granite steps and granite retaining walls, planters and benches and black steel railings. The city also applied more than $225,000 to its 10-foot portion of the sidewalk adjacent to Boylston Street and for the installation of new thorn-less honey locust trees that will line the block.
“What you have today is the apex of private-public partnerships,” said Harold Brown, chairman and CEO of The Hamilton Company. “This going to become a centerpiece of the Fenway area.”
Joining longtime tenants Looney Tunes and Little Steve’s House of Pizza on the block are Berklee Books and Music’s new, expanded location and Upton Bass String Instrument Company. Soon to arrive are burrito haven Boloco, which is expanding and relocating from its current address on Massachusetts Avenue, and Pavement Coffeehouse, a new venture from the proprietor of Espresso Royale Caffe.

The Friends of the Public Garden (FOGP) are celebrating a landmark anniversary this year. At its first of many events planned for the year, FOGP will present news of the Brewer Fountain Plaza Renovation at Boston Common tonight at The Hampshire House, 84 Beacon Street beginning at 6 p.m. At this event, in which the renovation plans for the centerpiece of the Common will be discussed, there will be various announcements parlaying the plans for the FOPG 40th anniversary celebrations. These plans will include a launch event in January that will highlight the coming agenda of a series of activities for children, an evening of recognition for those who have contributed both time and energy to the FOPG, as well as a poetry slam that will include students from Boston University.
Today, we take for granted the Common and the Public Garden that are alive like in the Fall. Chipmunks, squirrels and birds fatten up for the long winter months ahead, bikers, boarders and moms pushing strollers get their wheels out for the last of the long wanderings over the walkways; and the workers of the world take the few remaining outdoor coffee breaks of the year. Everyone is savoring these last few moments before the air, now crisp, turns too biting to linger and even the evergreens sleep under a blanket of snow. However, it is hard to imagine the dreadful conditions that lead the group of locals to try and save the Common and the Public Garden forty years ago.
In 1970, after watching the Public Garden and the Common “deteriorate almost beyond repair,” as Liz Vizza, Administrative Director at the FOPG described, “a small group of neighbors, led by current FOPG president Henry Lee and the late Stella Trafford, rallied together to fight a gargantuan threat to the first public botanical garden in the United States.” A major five-skyscraper development deal was planned that real estate mogul and owner of U.S. News & World Report and the New York Daily News Mort Zuckerman had put before the receptive civic leaders.
The development deal made sense to the Boston Redevelopment Group as well as then Mayor Kevin White. It would provide millions of shining square feet of space in a city that was in desperate need of revitalizing. Vizza goes on to explain, “So many of the fences had been pushed over and people would just drive their cars right up into the Garden and the Common.”
However, the development would cast a giant shadow over the Public Garden, darkening the skies over the plants and the trees, some of which were hundreds of years old. The skyscrapers would starve the Public Garden of sunlight.
Lee and Trafford formed the Friends of the Public Garden to rebuild the fences as well as fight the devastation the buildings would bring. After ten years of constant contention with both developers and city planners, Lee and Trafford, with the support of the community, played David to the 600 foot steel Goliaths and FOPG persevered.
Today, that struggle to maintain two of the jewels of the Emerald Necklace as designed by Frederick Law Olmsted stands as a model of advocacy and citizen participation in modern urban city development. FOPG, now responsible for stewardship of the Public Garden, the Boston Common and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, work to maintain the balance between private involvement and city responsibility, walking that tenuous line of partnership and “holding someone’s feet to the fire” Vizza muses.
It has been a tough forty years for the FOPG, but to see the Public Garden and the Common today, one can only hope that the FOPG will be a part of the Boston community for many more anniversaries to come.
For more information on the Friends of the Public Garden and their upcoming anniversary events, please visit www.friendsofthepublicgarden.org/.

With its dock in a state of serious disrepair, Community Boating Executive Director Charlie Zechel hopes the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) can find the money to replace it before the spring of 2011.
“The dock facing the Union Boat Club is dilapidated to the point where it’s not safe anymore,” Zechel said. “It’s a very serious situation, and there’s no interim or permanent solution.”
Incorporated in 1946, Community Boating Inc. is an educational non-profit organization that operates in association with DCR and offers a wide range of sailing programming on the Charles River for adults, children and disabled individuals.
In regard to the weatherworn dock, Zechel said this “creeping crisis” isn’t a first for Community Boating either, citing the failure of a 50-foot section of a dock in the fall of 2003. Zechel expects the dock will endure another season but would need to replaced by April of 2011 for the following season.
DCR spokesperson Wendy Fox said the $4 million project remains a high priority for the state agency as it awaits federal funding for the next fiscal year.
“The design is 95-percent complete, and we have the permits all in hand,” Fox said. “We’re waiting for funding, and we don’t know what we’ll have yet.”

With his recent promotion to marketing and volunteer coordinator, Brian Koslosky of Hill House hopes to get more local residents involved in the community center while maintaining its welcoming presence in the neighborhood.
“I hope to grow the volunteer base into other neighborhoods and attract more young professionals,” Koslosky said. “At the same time, I want to continue the friendly atmosphere Hill House provides for kids.”
A native of suburban Philadelphia, Koslosky moved to Boston to attend Northeastern University and played on the college’s soccer team. He began working part-time at Hill House in the fall of 2007 as a program assistant for the soccer program, handling a wide range of duties including scheduling games and practices, ordering uniforms and recruiting volunteer coaches.
Koslosky was immediately struck by the tireless dedication of the many people who volunteer and show their support for Hill House.
“Hundreds of people will turn out for a soccer game on a Saturday morning, bringing together kids from different schools,” Koslosky said. “Everyone is so involved and just wants what’s best for the neighborhood.”
Upon graduating from Northeastern in May of 2008, Koslosky expanded his role and began assisting with baseball and other athletic programs at Hill House.
In his new position, Koslosky faces additional challenges as the person responsible for planning Hill House events, including the Halloween and Valentine’s Day parties, birthday parties for children and a monthly dinner for seniors.
Together with Development Associate Kelsey Brunone, Koslosky will also oversee Hill House’s two biggest annual fundraising events - its Christmas tree sale and the Backyard Dash in the spring.
Koslosky has already implemented a unique approach to outreach by which Hill House will concentrate its efforts to help one group at a time. “I want to streamline the program to focus on a single charity each month,” he said. This month, Hill House is assisting the Charlestown-based Harvest on Vine food pantry, and future partners will include Temporary Home for Women & Children and Project Hope, which provides Christmas gifts for needy children.
Following the launch of Hill House’s newly revamped Web site in August, Koslosky is now streamlining the site to make it a valuable tool for residents citywide.
“We’re going to add a community-resource page with information and links for everything residents of the City of Boston would need,” he said.

The battle is never done …

All too often, elected and appointed leaders focus solely on the urgency of the day and sometimes forget to take a long view of what their decisions will have on the future generations.
Fast forward to today.
When anyone looks from upper floors of the Four Seasons, the Ritz Carlton condominiums, the Union Club or any of the other buildings surrounding the Boston Common or the Public Garden, one sees a green oasis.
If not for the Friends of the Public Garden (FOPG) this picture could have been very different or maybe been only a memory of the generations from the beginning of the 20th Century.
FOPG was started in 1970, when Boston was on its knees with school busing and economic stagnation. Their vision to preserve and protect the verdant open space was pitting them against city officials whose main goal was building badly needed new development.
Their first battle in the late 1970’s, fighting a five-tower development that would have cut off a significant amount of sunlight into this oasis was truly David versus Goliath.
Yet, they won this and many other major victories that have rescued and saved the green spaces of the Common, the Garden and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall.
Today, the battle to protect these spaces continues. It is a battle never done.
Boston has turned into a hot real estate area and the neighborhoods that surround the Common and Garden are among the hottest and most expensive in the city. While these neighborhoods have thrived, there has been an adverse effect on these open spaces where grass and trees are in danger. At a meeting last year on the Common, Henry Lee, FOPG leader said that the ground is so hard from people walking on it that rain sometimes can not penetrate to the roots of the shrubs and trees. Such comments and conditions have helped to make saving the Common one of Councilor Mike Ross’s causes.
After 40 years, everyone publicly recognizes the intrinsic value of these spaces. But today, in the backrooms among developers who believe they are the city’s future as well as its power brokers, there are moves afoot to build much larger buildings, with high density, that overlook these precious park lands. These new steel towers with thousands of people living and working in them could end up destroying everything that has come before.
We are a generation whom have become all too aware that “green” is the way to go. However, we still give this cause more lip service than practice.
We congratulate the FOPG on their milestone anniversary knowing that unfortunately the fight to protect open space is no easier today than it was in 1970.
Maybe on its 80th anniversary, our leaders will finally heed the lessons from the FOPG and pay closer attention to those who have saved the city’s most fabulous and irreplaceable open spaces.