Chinatown Boston

Lincoln Street Garage // 1956

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Few buildings in Boston showcase the evolution of its neighborhood (or bring out the architectural critics) quite as well as the Lincoln Street Garage in the Leather District of Boston. This Post-WWII mixed use building was originally constructed in 1956, on the former site of the United States Hotel (1839), one of the first major hotels in the nation, which was razed in 1930. The original building was designed by architect Archie Riskin, and stood three stories high with parking on half of the second floor and on the 3rd floor and roof. A fifth floor of office space was designed and constructed by 1959 also by Riskin. Due to its site at the edge of a historic commercial/industrial district and adjacent to the Central Artery, a raised highway that snaked its way through Downtown Boston, the building was minimally visible and faded away to obscurity until the late 1990s when the highway was buried under the city as part of the “Big Dig”. The open scar and subsequent re-greening of much of the former highway spaces necessitated the owners to re-work the building, due to its newfound gateway presence into the neighborhood. Brian Healey Architects renovated the building, adding an additional floor of offices and reworked facades. The result is a Post-war mixed-use hodgepodge of a building that expresses its use visually on each floor in a no-nonsense way, making it a unique urban building. Additionally the building has long been rented to small businesses, almost all Asian-owned with direct ties to the Chinatown and Leather District neighborhoods. Recent plans have been approved for a new office tower on the site and supported by preservation groups stating that “the existing garage is historically significant or beneficial to the neighborhood”, but to me, the further erasure of quirky buildings for more out-of-context developments is not the way to go.

One Greenway // 2015

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Replacing a vacant lot bordering I-93 at Kneeland Street, the One Greenway development provides much needed housing and design as one of the gateways into the Chinatown neighborhood of Boston. A result of community engagement, One Greenway is one of the largest new affordable housing projects in recent memory. The project restores the urban fabric that was lost half a century ago to the construction of major highways, which cut through the community and provides much-needed affordable housing in one of the nation’s oldest and largest immigrant communities. When the elevated highway was moved underground and the Rose Kennedy Greenway was laid out, parcels adjacent were available for reuse, and this was one of the last to be redeveloped. The building mixes 217 market-rate apartments and 95 affordable apartments, to create a mixed-income development, hopefully the future, as to not segregate affordable housing to less-desirable parts of cities. Designed by the firm Stantec, the building creates a solid street wall at the corner, and provides amazing open space at the rear in the form of a well-designed park designed by Crosby, Schlessinger, and Smallridge. The use of beige terracotta panels makes the large building more inviting, compared to the cold and sterile new apartment buildings going up all over the city and region.