Porter Square Neighbors Association

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The ceremony will be held Tuesday, May 25 at 5:30 pm at the City Hall Annex, 344 Broadway.

Oaktree Development and St. James's Episcopal Church plan to build a 46 unit, 78300 square foot condominium on the combined car wash and church site. The new building would contain a new parish hall for the church, and the project would provide the church with money to maintain their beautiful and historic, but crumbling, church building at the corner of Beech Street and Massachusetts Avenue. Neighbors are deeply concerned about the size of the new building, impact on the neighborhood, and traffic on Beech Street.

Here are letters granting conditional approval from the Cambridge Historical Commission and the Planning Board. Further review of the conditions by the Historical Commission is scheduled for May 6.

Here is a collection of information about the proposal, here are materials from the October Planning Board Special Hearing, and here are updated drawings and a covering letter from the developer, presentated at the December 15 Planning Board review.

On June 22 the Cambridge City Council voted 8-1 to create a Lesley Porter Overlay District. This new overlay district rezones Lesley University's Porter Square campus, including the former North Prospect Congregational Church site, to allow Lesley to bring the Arts Institute of Boston to Porter Square. It limits what Lesley could eventually build on the parking lots behind and across Massachusetts Avenue from University Hall, although Lesley has not proposed any specific plans for those sites. It also has provisions to require open space and to encourage ground floor retail.

Here is an image from Jessica Pratt arguing against the car wash condo project.

Here is my completely unofficial summary of last night's Planning Board meeting on the Lesley Porter Overlay District zoning proposal, and also about last week's Historical Commission decision on the North Prospect Church building.

After lengthy public testimony, last night the Planning Board voted unanimously for a positive recommendation on the zoning proposal, but with expressions of concerns over two specific areas: open space, and dimensional limits on future buildings west of Mass Ave. In fact, they used words like "enthusiastic" support and "excellent" petition. They seemed to feel that they did not need to address moving the church, since it is not a zoning issue per se, and the Historic Commission has already done so. Please note that the Planning Board's recommendation deals with the zoning, not the specific AIB project which will need to go through a special project review later (assuming the zoning change passes the City Council.)

Last week the Historical Commission decided to recommend that the church be granted landmark status. Basically they accepted their staff report, which treats the entire building, not just the original part, as historic. This means that any future modifications to the building would need to pass further reviews by the Historical Commission.

In both cases, the exact wording of the recommendations to be sent to the City Council is still being worked out.

The next event in this saga is the Ordinance Committee meeting at 4PM next Tuesday, April 14.

John Howard

The Walden Street bridge will open for traffic on Friday, December 19, approximately midday. Construction supervisors on site said that the first vehicle across will probably be a snowplow.

Here is a letter from City Engineer Owen O'Riordan giving some specifics about work remaining to be done:

Dear Walden Street Bridge Neighbor,

Please be informed that JF White Construction, working for Massachusetts Highway Department will reopen Walden Street Bridge on Friday December 19th 2008. While a significant amount of additional work remains to be completed, most particularly NSTAR Electric duct bank work on the south eastern side of the bridge, the contractor has at this time completed the bridge deck and the majority of the sidewalk and so is in a position to have the bridge open for traffic.

The PSNA email discussion list is back under a new name: psna@portersquare.net

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Letter to the Editor - Cambridge Chronicle
19 August 2008
Michael McKee

I would like the opportunity to respond to a number of statements contained in the letter from Mr. Francis McGrail, regarding the proposed zoning amendment that would allow a hotel in Porter Square.