Because of high energy costs, living on large lots in the exurbs will no longer be affordable to the middle class. New policies will go into affect that support infill development in older city centers. As the populations of central cities grows again this will put a strain on already fragile infrastructure. Cities will begin rebuilding mass transit systems they ripped out long ago in favor of the car. People will still have cars but better mass transit along with walkable communities will make driving less mandatory and more affordable.

Gentrification has continued its insatiable march forward. Areas that were once hip are now populated by the middle classes with large new apartment buildings going up where fancy condos once were (and before that vacant lots and burned out buildings). Areas that are today considered the ghetto will be the new hip places where artists and YUPies mingle. The poor that once filled these streets will have been pushed further out into once middle class suburbs.

This will not have come easy. Much like the riots that flamed white flight in the 1960s, new class riots will erupt as the inner city poor feel the pressures of a society that they cannot afford to live in while being pushed out by much wealthier whites. Riots and demonstrations will ensue, and while the city will call calm and understanding, behind closed doors the elites will be helping move the poor out so real estate developers can move in.

This new rebirth of the city will mean that there will finally be political pressure put on restoring streetcars and building new subway lines. Because the poor will have been forced out into the suburbs, where rail service is few and far between, new Bus Rapid Transit lanes will appear on highways. Highways were once crushed with traffic can now afford to lose a lane for the only mass transit available for suburbs.

Suburbs will not die. Though the once urban poor will have moved in, many middle class and wealthy people will still be able to afford living there and will prefer it. Large lots will let people have small farms, usually tended by a local farm company so the residents don’t have to do the work themselves. Most suburbs will have created town centers, much like the old main streets, where residents can walk to. These centers will allow for bus and light rail transit to shuttle residents into the city or to a commuter rail station near by. Because of the class differences, gated communities will be the norm, even more than now.

The children who today are not yet born will become the artists that reclaim the abandoned edge cities of the future. Our massive malls today will be abandoned when energy costs make them unsustainable. Most will be left to decay as the suburbanity around them will be given up. As the inner cities looked to Americans in the 1970s and 1980s, so too will these edge cities look in the near future. But this is exactly the type of place young artists and rebels need to grow and create. Malls will become the new loft spaces. Communities will grow where consumers once walked past retail stores. The massive parking lots, already over grown, will be turned into collective farms. The large roofs will be used for water collection and solar energy. Malls, once symbols of everything wrong with the culture of mass consumption, will be turned into the very ideal of sustainable communities. This lays the ground work for the gentrification of the suburbs in the next 50 years.

High Speed Rail has replaced air travel as the preferred means of getting from cities that are close to one another. Air travel will still be available but will be supported by the government and will only fly long distances or in certain corridors with large amounts of traffic (i.e. Northeast Corridor). Many of the new rail lines will have been built, or are being built, along medians of highways since the land is already owned by the states and the rebuilding of central cities has meant land prices have increased to the point where eminent domain is not as affordable, nor as popular, and option.

The only time I’ve been through JP was when I rode my bike along the Emerald Necklace and ended up in Mattapan. I don’t remember much of the area other than the parks so I figured if I was staying here I should explore it a bit.

JP isn’t as big as I thought it was. It was a streetcar suburb and as such is very walkable. It is mostly residential, even along the commercial areas. What I like about JP is the variety of housing. There are streets with single family houses, duplexes, triple-deckers, apartment buildings, and even a mansion thrown in here and there. Parts reminded me of Arlington, where I grew up.

There are sections of Jamaica Plain that are very hilly and this is where some of the older, more interesting buildings are. There are hills with large lots on the top with a single mansion, usually painted some dark green color, with mansard roofs and dark windows, surrounded by very large and very old trees. This is the type of neighborhood where horror stories are set, street after street of Houses of Usher.

Like I said, this is in the older section of JP. When you come down off the hills there are smaller houses, but just as odd. The area was home to a number of factories and workers homes since this was one of the first areas in Boston to gain a railroad. Most of the factories are gone, though some buildings remain, usually on the other side of the tracks, the Roxbury side.

Today the Orange Line makes all the stops the B&P used to while the commuter rail whizzes by to serve communities further out. Because land was originally cleared for a highway up this way there are still some abandoned lots near the Orange Line along with the parks of the Southwest Corridor. This gives commuting to and from JP an interesting feel. Living in New York, when you get off a subway station, you get off in a city, a dense neighborhood with retail and residences all mixed in. When you get off the Orange Line stations you get off into a suburb. There is a large park and across the street are wooden houses, with a small shop but not much else. Because there is also no parking you don’t get the sense that you are in a modern park-&-ride facility far out in the suburbs, but that you are in a real place.

On the other side of Centre St are more houses, though because this is the area of Jamaica Plain that is actually flat, the streets are straighter and the houses are more similar, though just as interesting. If the last section of JP reminded me of Arlington Heights then this reminds me of East Arlington. I realize that most people reading this will not understand what I mean so I will explain:

Geographically, Boston lies in an area known as the Boston Depression, a low area surrounded on 3 sides by large hills. This was created when a massive glacier sat atop the area now known as Boston, literally depressing the land. If you go to the observation deck in the Prudential Building and look at the horizon you will see hills on three sides, with the ocean on the fourth. This geographical phenomenon is most responsible for shaping the growth of the city. It defines where the roads and railroads where built and where the poorer areas and wealthier areas were built (poorer areas are typically in low lying areas while wealthier areas are built on high ground, though this isn’t always the case).

Arlington is a town that is built with one side on the escarpment that rings Boston and the other inside the depression. Because of this, the area known as Arlington Heights has a more natural road pattern (winding roads that follow the contours of the hills) while East Arlington has your standard grid pattern. The houses on the Heights are usually bigger and more expensive while the houses in the East are more uniform and less expensive. I see the same pattern in JP, with the exception of larger houses along the edge of the neighborhood along the Jamaicaway, the section of the Emerald Necklace home to Jamaica Pond.

Another thing I noticed walking around the older section is that the streets are very narrow, as are the sidewalks. This gives the feeling of walking in the North End or a European village. It’s a nice change of pace.

At the very end of JP lies the Arborway, a landscaped parkway running from Jamaica Pond to the Arnold Arboretum, a tree museum. The Arborway is a fantastic example of a time when cars were only owned by the rich and only went 20mph. There are giant tree lined rotaries that feed into a parkway with 8 lanes, 2 side lanes with large tree lined medians and a 4 lane road in the middle. It is a prime example of how engineering and landscape architecture can come together and make an simple infrastructure project a work of art.
I didn’t get to go into the Arboretum this time around, though I’ve been in there once before and it is a magical place. The old saying is “You can’t see the forest for the trees” but here is a place that is designed to address that.

Running down the center of JP is Centre St. The first thing one notices is the old trolley tracks that still run in parts of the street. The E branch used to run all the way through JP to Forest Hills but was scaled back to Heath St in the 1980s when the Southwest Corridor Orange Line opened up. Various community groups had been pushing for the restoration of service, now handled by the #39 bus, but resistance from city hall and the pull out from one of the more important backers, the Conservation Law Foundation, had made it very unlikely that service will ever return.

Part 3: Lechmere and Kendall Sq

I took the T from North Station to Lechmere to see some of the new construction that has gone on over the last two years, notably Northpoint and Archstone-Smith. Archstone-Smith is gorgeous and towers over the neighborhood, but because it is set back behind the highway and T line it doesn’t overpower the small residential streets of Lechmere. I would describe it as post-modern art deco. The top reminded me of the tower of the Landmark Center in the Fenway, only made out of colored glass. I think the image on the website has been shrunk down or Photoshoped to make the building appear less tall. In reality it is massive, almost like the giant housing complexes you find in Hong Kong.

The story of Northpoint is a sad one. The area in question is prime real estate if there ever was. Located next to two T stations, a highway (set back enough not to hurt property values), abutting new parks built along the Charles River, and a stones throw to North Station, Northpoint should have been Boston’s answer to Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan. The land used to be train yards and lay abandoned for decades. About 10 years ago developers started putting together a proposal to build a mini city there, complete with housing, office space, lab space, and a new T station that would be built to allow for the Green Line extension to West Medford (whenever the state gets around to that). The land was cleared and a couple of buildings started to go up when the developers got pissed off at one another and started suing. They finished two of the residential units and they are now open, which if you like living in a sand pit is great.

What is most depressing is what has been built is seriously nice. The quality of the design and the materials used are top notch and the townhouse design is ultra modern. The buildings are not overwhelming and have these great elevated front yards that you walk up to. They are even installing a playground in the front yard area. It will be a real shame if all that is ever built of this project are these two buildings.

Next I moved into Lechmere proper. I’m not sure most Bostonians have ever actually been to Lechmere. Sure they have been to Cambridgeside or have seen it on the T map, but I’m sure most people have never taken the time to walk around this quiet working class neighborhood. Stepping off the T you come to OneFirst, a huge residential complex recently finished that combines old industrial warehouses with new construction. I have to say this has proved to me that you can be modern and still not need to build huge extroverted boxes that impose themselves on a neighborhood. Instead of building one giant building, the developers built a number of different looking buildings that all relate to the streets they are on. The buildings on Cambridge St are 6 stories and have retail on the first floor, while the buildings on quiet side street off Cambridge step down to the lower scale and change design to fit in with the rowhouses along the 2nd St. So perfectly did they do this that I didn’t realized what I was looking at was new construction until I took a closer look. I could go on about this complex but it would just be more of the same flattery.

I had worked a temp job at one point in Lechmere the summer before I moved to New York and I happened upon the offices on this walk. I initially didn’t recognize the place because across the street were a series of townhouses that I had never seen before and were so perfect at recreating the colonial period that you find in the older parts of Cambridge that I wasn’t sure they were even modern until I saw the garages in the back. They say make no small plans but these infill developments have inspired me more than the new 1,000 ft tower the mayor wants to build, or Harvard’s total renewal of Allston.

Kendall Sq is changing fast as well. Before I moved, Genzime had just put up their award winning headquarters and there was talk of building some condos in the area. The area just north of Kendall Sq is a sandbox; the condos are going up looking classy and modern, a number of new lab facilities have gone up and are going up, and I stumbled upon a new police station that blew me away. It had these great metal (probably aluminum) details, but used brinck and granite for the faciade. The brick work was interesting and distinctive and the windows were tall with quality frames. I’ve seen so many cheap ugly condos going up in Manhattan and Brooklyn that I forgot what good construction looked like.

I headed off to Harvard Sq where I usually seem to end up anytime I’m in Boston. Some of the stores have changed but most of the square hasn’t. I went into the Harvard Coop and ran into a few people I had worked with 3 years ago; I’m sure that made them feel fantastic for lasting that long (I worked there a year). I picked up a copy of Italio Calvino’s Invisible Cities which I first read down in the break room there. Outside while waiting for Ian I ran into a young woman who I had worked with the day before at the AAG conference. She was from China which made the encounter interesting because we were standing right next to a group of pro-Tibet protesters in the Pit.

That night I went back to Arlington for the first time since I had moved. A few things have changed but not much (the town is no longer dry). Ian and I drove around and he pointed out little things that had changed and we talked about old times. It never hit me how suburban the town is. I always considered it more urban than most suburbs but now after living in New York the place seems like a grave yard. It was only 8:30 but there was no one out, the place was a ghost town. I guess I never noticed it before.