Let there be light

And there was light at the end of the tunnel on last Saturday's Common Boston Weekend tour of the three new MBTA stations at the end of Dorchester's Red Line branch, which mark the end of an era of descent into darkness to alight from or crowd into a train.

From left, the new Fields Corner, the renovated Shawmut and the new Ashmont stations give Grand Central glory to your southbound commute and serve as dignified gateways to their respective neighborhoods.


Yep, Cambridge Seven Associates have done it again.

These architectural masterhands behind such luminary landmarks as the Forest Hills and Porter Square T stations have mastered the art of making light out of shadow and lightness out of heft. Just as they had demonstrated with the spiraling aquatic tank ramp they had carved out of the concrete cavern of their New England Aquarium and the soaring atrium space they had scooped out of the granite-block cell-block confinement of the old Charles Street Jail when reforming it as the Liberty Hotel.

By similarly lightening up the Fields Corner, Shawmut and Ashmont T stations, C7A have liberated commuters from the dank, stuffy sheds they used to arrive at or depart from for decades. They are now treated to a bright, warm welcome into, or bon voyage from, their neighborhoods.

FIELDS CORNER

In the shelter of thy wings

Since its opening on November 5, 1927, the Fields Corner station had been a creepy climb to adungeon-like depot of a waiting platform, and this concrete bunker-box had stood cheek-to-jowl with an abutting three-decker, imposing daily train-roar on its occupant.

Now the platform is lightly shaded by feathery wingspan awnings of translucent polymer plastic that shed longed-for light on one's train wait, and end the three-decker's 80-year wait for elbow-room and breathing space. There's more of that in the station's new gray-granite entrance floor, which is cool without being cavernous, owing to the glass walls and halogen lighting.

Not only does Fields Corner II broaden commuters' tunnel vision, but — in true modernist spirit — it externally expresses its lightness of being, as well as its meteorological functions. The louver curtains foretell the feathery fineness that awaits you on the platform before you take off to work, while mitigating polar winds and letting the sun shine in, in stark contrast to the old station's somber solidity. The glass curtain walls also let the neighbors in, giving you a clear view of where you're getting off as you roll into the station.

Also connecting the station to its neighborhood are the new accessible walkways and clearly identified entrance points from both main cross streets. The walkways include Charles Park, a linear field of grass and plantings that makes your approach along Charles Street to the station a true "fields corner" more pleasant than the graffiti-prone concrete corridor of yore. The busway, too, has been lowered for the direct bus-to-station access our worklife demands.

Vive la différence
Shawmut Station was named for the old Shawmut Branch Railroad that originally ran through here. Incorporated in 1870, the railroad was taken over by the Old Colony Railroad in 1872. The Old Colony and then the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad operated on the Shawmut Branch until September 4, 1926, when the Metropolitan Transit Authority (precursor to the MBTA) took over the branch as the first leg of its Dorchester Extension from Andrew Square in South Boston to Columbia (now JFK/UMass), Savin Hill and Fields Corner, extending to Shawmut in 1927 and Ashmont in 1928. The extension was run along the Old Colony Railroad mainline in a depressed right-of-way that put the Shawmut station underground.

Why underground? For the simple reason that area residents were NIMBY-nervy about the new subway rumble-roaring and clickety-clacking through their neighborhood (as the Old Colony had done), keeping them awake and depreciating their property values. The result: a cut-and-cover concrete right-of-way that lay dormant and waiting for a linear park or pedestrian path for decades — until recently.

Yes, the Shawmut Station renovation included an approach — an allée, shall we say — toward it on an axis aligned with the station's symmetrical composition. This grants the old station a French Renaissance ambiance, heightened by its original festoon relief panels and curlicue sign bookends, its architecturally compatible new handicapped-access elevators, and especially the new curtain-wall windows interspersed between the polished granite columns (some of them taken from the old Savin Hill station when it was removed), which brighten your entry with the lofty, delicate dignity of the Sun King's (Louis XIV) Versailles palace near Paris. Vive la différence from the bricked-up cavern the station used to be!

En esprit de Versailles et des Tuileries, the right-of-way segment extending from Centre Street to Melville Avenue is botanically bordered by the Shawmut Garden. This is a community-maintained oasis of 36 different species of medicinal plants, selected for their herbal healing value to calm your walk to and from the T before or after a stressful day at work, and to make you feel safer in the neighborhood.

The plants appear on a seasonal rotational basis: in winter, we see witch hazel and yew; in spring, hawthorn, St. John's wort and yarrow; in summer, angelica, black cohosh and blueberry bushes; in the fall, fringe tree, lavender and juniper. Funded by the City of Boston's Department of Neighborhood Development in conjunction with the MBTA, this lovely garden is the fruit of a long-term collaboration among architects, artisans, community advocates designers, elected officials, scientists and teachers.

Learn more about the Shawmut Garden from the free brochure available in a box beside the garden's notice kiosk or the informational signs posted by each plant, or by joining the maintenance crew from 10 a.m. to noon on the first Saturday of each month.

ASHMONT

Light at the end of the tunnel

Quite the before-and-after, eh? The left-hand photo is the way I remember Ashmont station in the 1970s, when I was a ninth-grader traveling by T to Milton Academy for an interview there. Though at ground-level, the station felt like an extension of the tunnel. Adding to that effect was the train's gradual upward incline from Shawmut to Ashmont, which was so incremental it didn't feel like up-and-out, but more like a Swiss train's level exit from a mountain — without the alpine air and ambiance, of course.

However, the other two images show real light at the end. When completed (this year, they say), the new Ashmont station will boast a wingspan roof soaring on the diagonal like the feather-flight of Fields Corner, upheld by a tensile truss skeleton of steel tubes and a regiment of thin columns between translucent screen walls. This will create a light-filled cathedral terminal with escalators and elevators. Lobby entrances will anchor each end, one approached from Peabody Square by an open plaza walkway similar to Shawmut's. The new elevated busway is level with the lobbies. This bounty of breathing room will ease commuters' transition between down-under and up-and-out, as a welcome-to-Dorchester gesture.


I could feel the difference already as the train transitioned me from tunnel to terminal. The tunnel now bursts open into a lofty atrium where sun streams down from the open spaces and translucent mesh screens in-between the columns, giving me a panoramic preview of the neighborhood above. Gone is the black box of the concrete cavern the station had been on the day of my Milton interview.

What goes around, comes around

However, gone is a convenience, too — the ease of darting straight across the platform from the Red Line to the Ashmont-Mattapan High-Speed Line (left photo), which has now been rerouted to an upper-level platformed loop off to one end of the station (center and right photos). An understandable (and perhaps inevitable) move, but one that increases the risk of missing either train because you now have to take the escalator, elevator or stair from one to the other. (This would especially frustrate Milton students, for it is the trolley they depend on to get them to school.)

Nonetheless, it's still the Ashmont-Mattapan High-Speed Line, remarkably unchanged since it opened on August 26, 1929, along the remainder of the Old Colony's Shawmut Branch right-of-way and part of its Dorchester-Milton Branch. Never giving way to the LRV, it retains its old 1940s-50s PCC cars, restored and repainted in their original orange, as a living museum of the era when Charlie couldn't get off the train because he didn't have the exit fare. (Actually, he could get off this one, as it was free at the time.)

But no more are they what Pogo's gang made of them:

No, these archaic barrels have been retrofit with state-of-the-art heating and air-conditioning — so they no longer feel like saunas in the summer and walk-in refrigerators in the winter — as well as the MBTA's new electronic fare and ticket boxes. (Sorry, Charlie.) But their barrel-vaulted ceilings, demi-saucer lighting, fibrous plastic seating and chromium hardware deck us all with Boston Charlie as much as they had done when he froze on them because he didn't have that one more nickel. (Maybe his wife should have handed him chicken soup, rather than a sandwich, as his train came a-rumblin' through Scollay Square.) Now I could enjoy my journey through the hinterlands of Dorchester, Milton and Mattapan in solid comfort as well as living history.

"High-Speed" indeed — so called not because it's faster than the Red Line, but because it runs on its own track, free from auto-traffic gridlock and traffic-light stops — just like the Green Line's Riverside 'D' train on the old Boston & Albany Railroad's Highland Branch — save for one street-crossing at Capen Street. Also, its comparatively infrequent use means fewer rush-hour slowdowns in service, and those old PCC cars, of course, have always been less prone to breakdowns than their high-tech successors.

This is stop number one...

So called because of its procession through Cedar Grove Cemetery, the only Boston train to cross a graveyard.

BUTLER
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This stop at Butler Street in Milton serves its surrounding area well with immediate pedestrian access to the main street and a community notice kiosk introducing the neighborhood. Just like a butler, it cordially greets guests at the entry and ushers them into the main social realm.

Now the Milton Lofts come into view, a condo conversion of a late 19th-century factory, signifying our arrival into the center of...

MILTON

Here was where, on my Milton interview day, I disembarked to wait for the academy's free shuttle, where we had to push and shove to claim a seat before it filled up. (I didn't get accepted. Probably just as well.)

At this point the industrial grandeur of Dorchester Lower Mills and Baker's Chocolate Factory come into view, now converted to condominiums.

CENTRAL AVENUE

VALLEY ROAD

CAPEN STREET

MATTAPAN

Haffenreffer incorporated

The Haffenreffer Brewery is a massive mumbo-jumbo of chockablock structures built from the 1870s to the 1950s according to the beer brewer's evolving needs, without regard to architectural unity or spatial coherence, yielding a labyrinthine layout that would drive Laverne and Shirley to drink and Lenny and Squiggy nuts.

But now that Haffenreffer has closed up shop and merged with Narragansett (who else? — same number of letters, two sets of double letters), the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation has incorporated the old brewery's diversity of digs into a handsome neighborhood of businesses, including a dance studio, a café, a gym, a cleaning company, three cabinetmakers, a food supplier, and — in keeping with tradition — Sam Adams Brewery. On last Saturday's Common Boston-sponsored tour of the complex, Andy Waxman of the JPNDC and Gail Sullivan of Studio G Architects showed us how Baker/Wohl Architects ingeniously interconnected the structures by busting through walls and installing stairs going up and down from one building's second, third, fourth or fifth floor to the other's, since floor levels didn't match from building to building, and historical guidelines demanded as-is preservation of almost all of them. They range from a low mansard brick accounting house retaining its "Night Depository" safe door, a towering castle-like main building (the entrance to the office complex), a wood clapboard horse stable for the Clydesdales that delivered beer by wagon in days of yore, and a corrugated metal hangar-like doohickey for storage of kegs, barrels, forklifts and the like.

Not to mention the yellow-brick smokestack that continues to landmark the site, but in truncated form: safety concerns caused its decapitation, and it awaits a repaint so it can once again read "FENREFFER BREWERY."

The interior shows how adaptable the high ceilings and the vast floor spaces, created by iron columns taking the place of load-bearing masonry walls, are to the building's new uses. And what a museum of construction history: brick walls (retaining much of their paint because sandblasting is now a historical no-no), wood beams, concrete beams, steel beams, iron posts and rails, stenciled-on indicator signs ("HOP STRAINER 30BB"), a wood-deck ceiling with skylight, an old metal track door, and especially a handsome Victorian cast-iron stair with arcaded risers and acorn-topped newel post. And don't forget Sam Adams' beer-barrels!

Making their dreams come true, indeed! And doing it their way!

Welcome to ArchiTalk!

First, a little about myself. I've been an architecture buff off and on since childhood. I credit my architectural appreciation to my father, the late Leslie Larson, who was an architect in the Frank Lloyd Wright genre with Japanese and Scandinavian influences thrown in. He designed warm-wooded, soft-lit, clean-lined homes, apartments and offices for such figures as Tony Bennett, Norman Cousins, David Rockefeller, million-dollar corporate attorney Martin Lipton, and renowned psychologist Eric T. Carlson. When we moved from New York to Boston, my father became a consultant on renovations of historic properties. His magnum opus in both departments was Maison Robert, an upscale French bistro he designed as part of the adaptive reuse of Boston's Old City Hall. (The restaurant closed in 2004, and Ruth's Chris Steak House now occupies its space.)

But I really become a captive fan (fan-atic, I might say) of architecture in recent years, ever since reading Paul Goldberger's 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning book On the Rise and being awestruck by the precision of his prose and the art of his "architext." I went on to study architecture history and theory at Harvard and Boston Architectural College, and to write about architecture for numerous publications, most recently "Home of the Week" profiles in the Executive Domains section of the Boston Business Journal. Prior to that I was doing the same for the Wellesley Townsman and the Needham Times, until budget cuts demolished that part of my job (and I eventually got laid off). In fact, I've amassed quite a paper trail, having also written for the Cambridge Chronicle, the TAB, the Improper Bostonian, Boston Homes, Banker & Tradesman, the Boston Business Journal, MassBuilder, Greater Boston Builder, and Victorian Homes, among others.

Now I'm frantically chasing after freelance gigs to build that portfolio further up, and I thought getting an architectural blog going would keep me writing away until the mags, papers and journals began to come my way again, and help me generate some story ideas. I was also eager to share my love of architecture with the world, and I thought a blog would be the most inviting, least intrusive way to do so, after ruling out an e-newsletter as too spammish and a paper pub as too spendthrifty.

So I hope you enjoy my blog and gain some new insights and hindsights (and lose some oversights) into the ins, outs, ups, downs, back alleys, side streets and front lawns of the architectural space that surrounds, astounds and hounds you, where there's always so much to see, spot, observe, learn, discover, find out, unturn, unravel, unveil, uncover, unearth, and stare you in the face. For architecture is the world we live in, really, so we might as well revel in it while we're still here, no?

The adventure begins...