Map Reproduction Courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.

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The Fenway has been my favorite neighborhood in Boston since I lived there while going to Wentworth Institute of Technology for 2 years. I loved how the area developed, a mix of apartment buildings and institutions. I had heard that the Back Bay street naming plan was supposed to be extended into the Fens (as the Back Bay Fens was supposed to be an extension of the Back Bay townhouse neighborhood). Obviously this never materialized and by the time the Fenway began to develop the living style shifted from townhouses to apartment flats.

For those that aren’t aware, the Back Bay was filled in beginning in the 1870s and laid out with an alphabetical street naming system: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, and Hereford.

From Wikipedia:

West Fenway features streets named after Scottish cities and towns present in Robert Burn’s literary works; Peterborough, Kilmarnock, Queensbury. This was a result of influence by the Robert Burns (literary) Society influencing the city of Boston when a decision was made to simplify the original neighborhood plan by Frederick Law Olmsted’s office. As originally planned in 1894, the street naming system was to continue the system originating in the Back Bay of naming streets in alphabetical order. Where the Back Bay proper ends at Hereford Street, the Fenway was to continue Ipswich, Jersey, Kenyon (Kilmarnock), Lansdowne, Mornington, Nottingham, Onslow, Peterborough, Queensbury, Roseberry, Salisbury, Thurlow, Uxbridge, Vivian, Westmeath (Wellesley), X omitted, York, and Zetland.

This large map shows how Olmsted originally planned to lay out the West Fenway area. The area looks different today with large rectangular blocks. The original plan called for oddly laid out, naturalistic blocks that would have been much more interesting (especially the 6 sided square in the middle of the area).

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From Tim:

“The history of Somerville, 2010-2100″ is a community art project that is exploring what the future might be like. Both the book and the website present what we’ve found by talking to Somerville community members about the future. In the book and website, you’ll also find official government plans, think tank vision statements, and various ideas and concerns about the future from various other sources.

The Timeline section presents this material as a single timeline. In the Predictions Archive section, you’ll find the actual predictions that community members made.

We’ll be collecting predictions until the end of the year. If you’d like to make a prediction, please email Tim at future.of.somerville@gmail.com . All participants will receive full credit for their images, concepts, stories, and data. All material received by Dec. 31, 2010 will appear on the project’s website and in the final version of the book.

This project is organized by Tim Devin, and is sponsored in part by the Somerville Arts Council. The project is also on Facebook.

To download a free PDF of the book, click here: http://timdevin.com/historyofsomerville.pdf
To view the project’s website, click here: http://timdevin.com/historyofsomerville.html

Capital construction and expansion would be handled by this parent authority or by another authority under the parent authority. The purpose of this new authority will be solely for the expansion and planning of transportation throughout the region. The new authority would not be limited to transit expansion but all aspects of infrastructure expansion in the Commonwealth; this includes highway, freight, and water port facilities.

For example the North South Rail Link would make MBTA operations much more flexible and attract many new riders but the construction costs would be so high that it would require the MBTA to realign funds from operation improvements to debt payments, thus limiting the usefulness of the entire project.

Boston was described by a geography friend of mine as a “baby city”. I’m sure no one in Boston would feel that way but coming from New York it is easy to see how you could look at Boston like a baby city. Boston was comfortable. It wasn’t noisy, the streets weren’t filled with a sea of people (in some places they were but it wasn’t a rush, more like a slow crawl where people were stopping to see the sights.) It was also clean, which I don’t think I would ever say had I not lived in New York. Or maybe that just speaks to how dirty New York is (it is, but that’s how we like it, isn’t it?)

I came up for the Geography Conference but only went to a couple of seminars and blew the whole thing off for most of the week. I really came up to hang out and walk around and that’s what I did. But I came to Boston with the idea in my head that I knew what I was doing with my life, that I had a path and I could see the end of it. I come back to New York questioning what it is I really want to do. I still want to do Urban Planning, I think, but the closer I come to graduation the less I know what that means. Maybe I just got a giant dose of academia and realized that that wasn’t what I wanted, though I think I already knew that.

I remember when I was a kid, I was totally obsessed with dinosaurs and I knew I wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up. Soon that passed and what I wanted was to be was an astronaut. Space was my life. But then I grew out of that too. When I first went to college I went for Industrial Design, and though I don’t think I ever wanted to do that professionally, I knew design would play a big part in my life. I remember the day a professor recommended urban planning as a major, since I was very interested in the city and very much not interested in designing products. The more I learned about it the more I liked the idea. But always in the back of my head I remembered the times when I was truly passionate about something else, only to wake up one day and lose total interest. It scared me that this would happen again some day when it would actually matter. As a kid you can think you want to be whatever but when you grow up and need to find a job, having fleeting passions isn’t going to work out when you need to pay the bills.

But perhaps that was the problem, that Boston was my passion all along. I kept up the T website and would look longingly at maps of Boston, remembering the great times I had there and remembering how it sparked my interest in cities. Maybe going back was what I needed to realize that that was the wrong direction, that I left the city because there wasn’t anything there for me and there still isn’t. Maybe this is the city telling me to move forward, to focus on the new possibilities in New York and in greater cities still. Perhaps the reason I am so conflicted is because I was looking for something that wasn’t there, something that I only remember, and that may have not even really existed in the first place. I think I finally saw Boston as an outsider and it shook me up. Maybe this was the world’s way of saying keep your eye on the prize and don’t look back.

I remember walking down Centre St in JP to the Orange Line to get to Back Bay and I thought I heard someone call my name. I looked back but I didn’t see anyone, but as I was doing this an image of Lot’s wife flashed in front of my eyes as she looked back on her burning home, only to be instantly turned into a pillar of salt. I turned back around, thinking that if I kept looking back I too would transform into a pillar, a monument to all that I have left behind. I think that is the fatal flaw of Boston, that it recognizes and fetishists it’s past, looking back longingly to an era that was perceived as being greater, but in reality wasn’t. The city cannot get past the past, and that is something I cannot do.

Here is a map of all the places I walked last week, some with links to images I took on my Flickr page.