Newtonville and the Pre-History of Transit-Oriented Development

 

Every work day, I walk about a ½ mile from my home to the Newtonville MBTA Commuter Rail Station to take the Worcester/Framingham train to work in downtown Boston. I trek past rambling Victorian houses and through a busy little shopping district to the railroad station, which is next to the Mass. Pike. I am fortunate to be living the dream of “walkable urbanism” that so many people around the country are advocating for today.

You could say that these morning and evening walks helped inspire my new book The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth (The MIT Press, 2013). This book seeks to explain Boston’s metropolitan growth by describing nine periods of suburban development. The book’s key theme is embodied in its subtitle “From Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth.” As a long-time observer of cities and suburbs, I have been surprised to see how railroad suburbs that developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries have been rediscovered by the “smart growth” movement.

The Hub’s Metropolis explains how railroad-oriented residential development was an accidental by-product of the first railroads. My “village” of Newtonville (Newton is made up of 14 “villages,” not “neighborhoods”) developed after Greater Boston’s first railroad line was opened up through Newton. On April 7, 1834, the first railroad train headed out on the Boston & Worcester Railroad line to West Newton, which was called Squash End at the time. The company’s investors had wanted to route the rail line through Watertown and Waltham, which boasted flourishing textile factories, but those communities rejected the proposal. Newton, a rural community, welcomed the iron horse and set on a course toward becoming one of Boston’s first and most prestigious suburbs. Congressman William Jackson, a leading Newton businessman, helped the railroad company acquire the right-of-way through his town.

The idea of building railroads caught fire, and Boston investors quickly built railroads to Providence, Worcester, and Lowell (1835), Salem (1838), Newburyport (1840), and Plymouth, Fitchburg, and Fall River (1845). These train lines were spokes emanating from the “hub” and still serve as the commuter lines of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

The railroad entrepreneurs built their trains to transport freight. Little did they realize their infrastructure would spur the development of a new type of built landscape—railroad suburbs. It took the railroad companies a few years to figure out there was a potential commuter market living on the outskirts of Boston. The Eastern Railroad, which operated between East Boston and Newburyport, introduced the first season tickets in 1839. The Boston & Worcester Railroad started offering reduced commuter fares and scheduling rush-hour trains—the “Newton Special”—four years later. The term “commuter” originated with the “commuted” price reduction for yearly passes.

By 1849 there were fifty-nine commuter trains coming into Boston every weekday from less than fifteen miles away, and another forty-five trains traveled from longer distances. According to the Boston Directory, the number of suburbanites commuting into the city grew from 1,600 in 1845 to over 10,000 by 1860. The Boston Evening Transcript identified a dozen railroad suburbs: Dedham, Milton, Quincy, Dorchester, Brighton, Newton, Medford, Melrose, Malden, Winchester, and Somerville, and West Cambridge (Arlington).

The railroad opened up land near railroad stations for residential development. Speculators laid out subdivisions and street arrangements that optimized development opportunities—there was no municipal planning or land use regulation in the nineteenth century. Railroad suburbs like Newtonville flourished across Greater Boston, producing a legacy of distinctive, well-built commercial structures and houses that form the foundation for current-day redevelopment. Railroad suburbs stopped growing around 1920, when the automobile started to reduce railroad use and produced a low-density suburban landscape.

Railroad commuting declined rapidly after World War II. During the 1950s and 1960s, several passenger lines were eliminated and service was cut back on the remainder. In 1969, 29,500 passengers road commuter lines each day. Fortunately, Boston never completely abandoned the commuter rail lines, although it came close. In 1973, the MBTA bought up the remaining bankrupt commuter lines, which had been operated by the Boston & Maine, the New York Central, and the New Haven Railroads, to insure continued commuter rail service.

By the 1980s and the growth of the downtown Boston office sector, use of the commuter lines increased. By 1990, 76,000 people were riding commuter rail each day. Under Governor Michael Dukakis, the state remodeled South Station, which had almost been demolished in the 1970s, into a handsome terminal that also serves Amtrak. A new North Station was opened in 1995 with the construction of the TD Garden. These station improvements spurred the expansion of the MBTA commuter rail system.

The most important factor in expanding commuter rail service was the 1990 environmental settlement that accompanied the “Big Dig.” The Conservation Law Foundation brought a lawsuit over the environmental impacts of the “Big Dig,” seeking to balance the highway project with expanded transit service. The lawsuit led to restoration of commuter rail service on the Worcester Line (1994), Kingston-Plymouth Line (1997), Middleborough Line (1997), Newburyport Line (1998), and Greenbush/South Shore Line (2007). With approximately 130,000 passengers per weekday, ridership on Boston’s commuter rail system today is only surpassed by New York and Chicago.

The expanded transit service has spurred an increasing amount of development around commuter rail and “T” stations in Greater Boston. The extensive MBTA transit system has approximately 130 railroad stations and more than 130 subway and trolley stops, not to mention hundreds of bus stops. Going back to the mid-nineteenth century, these transit stations have been nodes of development, which are still vital. Between 2000 and 2010, according to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), nearly 400 projects with 15,000 housing units and 15 million square feet of commercial space were built within a half-mile of transit stations. And twice that amount of development is on the drawing boards. This marks a significant turning from auto-dependent, low-density suburbia to transit-oriented development (TOD).

Boston’s transit system provides a competitive advantage over most American cities. Despite its aging rolling stock, somewhat unreliable service, and heavy bonded debt—all issues that need to be addressed with increased tax revenues—the transit system provides a platform for future development that more auto-reliant cities only wish they could replicate. Some may take the Newtonvilles for granted, but they are models that other parts of the country are trying to emulate.

Readers can check out a 10-minute summary version of a presentation on “Planning the Hub’s Metropolis” that I made at the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, in Cambridge, MA, on October 23. In this presentation, I discussed the difference between the development and implementation of urban and regional plans, often undertaken by government or transportation companies, and the use of vernacular development templates employed by legions of developers and builders. Please view the video Two Kinds of Regional Planning.

Biking in the Netherlands

As Boston works to accommodate bicycle travel, the city turns its eyes to places where bicycling is the preferred mode of transportation—the Netherlands and Denmark. Across the Netherlands, 26% of all journeys are made by bicycle. In the urban core of Amsterdam, 60% of journeys are made by bikes. In Copenhagen, that proportion reaches 52%. In Boston, 2% of commuting trips are made by bicycle, though the amount is increasing.

My son Charlie and I took a recent trip to the Netherlands to experience the Dutch way of bicycling and figure out how bike travel can be increased in Boston. Charlie, having studied during his junior year in Leiden and owned a bike, served as guide. We explored the medium-sized city of Leiden and its environs. We took a rural trip around Volendam and Edam. And we did the urban bike thing in Amsterdam.

It is striking how easy it is to rent bicycles. Every good-sized train station has a bike rental facility. Many hotels rent bikes, and there are bike shops all across the country. We were able to rent bikes from between 7.5 euro to 12 euro a day. Dutch cities don’t offer short-term bike rental services, like Boston’s Hubway, because everyone owns their own bike. For every Dutch person, there are 1.1 bikes.

The university town of Leiden is a dream for cyclists. Within the old city, there are few motor vehicles and no traffic lights. Most people, from ages four to eighty-four ride bikes, particularly the students. It is mesmerizing to sit at a café and watch the bike riders stream along the canals. Without the sounds of motorized traffic, the urban scene is serene. In this mini-Amsterdam, there are few marked bike lines because there are so few cars. Yet, in the modern districts and out toward the countryside, there are separated lanes or cycle tracks along every major roadway. This is the key to encouraging widespread bike use—the public has to feel that there is scant danger of being hit by a car or truck. Bike-riding in the Netherlands is considered so safe that virtually no one wears helmets. The Number One goal for Boston should be to create as many miles of cycle tracks as possible.

From Leiden, there are some terrific rides. We rode eight miles to Katwijk, a modest resort on the North Sea. The ride past canals and green fields (blooming with tulips in the springtime) was idyllic. Unfortunately, the clouds rolled in at the North Sea and, before we could eat lunch, it started to rain. We rushed back to Leiden in half the time we rode to Katwijk. The rain was relatively light, however, and we didn’t get soaked. Such is a day of biking in the Low Countries. Another terrific excursion from Leiden takes you to the Green Heart of the Netherlands. The Green Heart is an extensive preserved nature region surrounded by the Randstand ring of the largest Dutch cities. Cycling through the Green Heart is like traveling through a 17th-century Dutch painting, full of meadows, waterways, cows, windmills, distant church towers, and an immense kaleidoscopic clouded sky. The lack of cars truly makes it seem like the 17th century. Little ferries that only carry pedestrians and bikes connect across the watered landscape.

The bike riding in Volendam and Edam, a half hour north of Amsterdam, was similar to riding in the Green Heart. Volendam is a former fishing village located on the Ijsselmeer (now a lake, but once open to the sea and called the Zuider Zee). We rode along the embankment bordering the Ijsselmeer, then cut in along a canal to Edam, the impossibly quaint home of Edam cheese. Auto traffic was virtually non-existent and there was no need for separated bike lanes. At a highway west of Edam, there was a tunnel for bikes to avoid the surface crossing. We rode along a dirt dike toward Purmerend with a canal on the right and lower fields on the left, definitely below water level. Such scenes are multiplied across this flat, water-laced country.
Amsterdam offered a different challenge, especially for riders less experienced with the intense traffic of a large city. Thousands of cyclists have to share the public right-of-way with motor vehicles, electric trams, and pedestrians. There are separate lanes (or sidewalks) for each as well as separate traffic lights. Cyclists cross through busy intersections only when the bicycle light turns green. Through some sixth sense, or ingrained bicycle culture, the ballet of various traffic flows harmoniously through the vibrant city.

We took two journeys through Amsterdam. Renting bikes from our hotel near the Rijksmuseum, we toured through Vondelpark, toward the Leidesplein, and along the 17th-century Western Canal Belt. The narrow streets flanking the canals had no separate bike lane, so we had to share space with an occasional car or van. The excursion was mesmerizing, though we had to pay attention to the rest of the traffic at all times. We even cycled through the set for a movie being filmed near the Anne Frank House.

When we wanted to stop for a snack or to gawk at the architecture, we locked our bikes to railings along bridges or in front of buildings. Besides using a chain lock, it was possible to lock the bike’s wheels to further discourage theft. In the country, theft is not much of a problem, but you don’t want to leave an unlocked bike around Amsterdam for long.

The next day, we toured through the De Pijp district and the Albert Cuyp Street Market. From there we explored the handsome early 20th-century neighborhoods of South Amsterdam, with their Expressionistic brick architecture. At mid-day, the auto traffic was light and the biking along scenic waterways allowed some gawking. You can cover a lot of ground on a bicycle, but still get a strong feel for the place.

Charlie and I had hoped to jump a flight to Copenhagen to sample that city’s extraordinary bicycle riding and compare it with the Netherlands, but we couldn’t get a budget fare on short notice. In any case, we absorbed some important lessons for Boston—create separated bike lanes from motor traffic and develop a local culture that makes cycling a comfortable activity for people who do not normally ride bikes on car-congested city streets. The Dutch have been at this for a long time, but they have honed bicycling improvements over the past three decades, taking measures that can be emulated in Boston.

For a concise overview of bicycling in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, take a look at:Cycling in the Netherlands (Ministry of Transport, Public Works, and Water Management, 2009). http://www.fietsberaad.nl/library/repository/bestanden/CyclingintheNetherlands2009.pdf

Jim O’Connell Interviewed in Quincy

For a short five-minute overview of The Hub’s Metropolis, check out this intereview on Quincy Access Television. This interview was taped to promote Jim O’Connell’s September 24 presnetation at Thomas Crane Library in Quincy. The prohgram starts at 7:00 PM.

O’Connell Interview in Quincy

Interview about Newton as a Suburban Innovator

 

Jim O’Connell has been interviewed by Ellen Meyers on “Books and Beyond,” a program featured on NewTV (Newton Cable TV). Jim discusses how his book The Hub’s Metropolis helps explain the development of Newton, MA. The first railroad trip from Boston traveled on the Boston & Worcester Railroad line to West Newton in 1834. Within a decade, Newton was becoming one of Boston’s first railroad suburbs. A key developer was Congressman William Jackson, who supported building the Boston & Worcester Railroad through Newton, instead of Watertown and Waltham. In 1844, Jackson laid out Newton’s first residential subdivision–Walnut Park–adjacent to his estate (today’s Jackson Homestead & headquarters of the Newton Historical Society) near Newton Corner. Jackson was also instrumental in developing Auburndale three years later.

You can find the interview at http://www.newtv.org/video/booksandbeyond/april2013/

 

Jim O’Connell Interviewed on “The Urbanologist”

Jim O’Connell has been interviewed in print on “The Urbanologist” website about his perspectives on living in metropolitan Boston.  Jim’s observations address the question “Boston How Did You Grow?” They expand upon the findings in his book The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth.  “The Urbanologist” website is written and curated by Max Grinnell, an historian and urban planner who is particularly active in Chicago and Boston.  Find the interview at

http://theurbanologist.com/post/52381953690/boston-how-did-you-grow

Book Review in “Architecture Boston”

Review of The Hub’s Metropolis in Architecture Boston (Boston Society of Architects), Fall 2013

The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth
James C. O’Connell
MIT Press, 2013
Reviewed by David Luberoff

Preparing to move to Boston in 2000, James O’Connell went “scouting for a home to buy” in Milton near the Blue Hills Parkway. As an urban and cultural historian, he recognized that the road and nearby neighborhoods were typical of Boston’s inner-core suburbs and thought it would be interesting to learn more about how they were built. Thus began a more than decade-long exploration that culminates with The Hub’s Metropolis.

O’Connell, a community planner for the National Park Service in Boston, fills three notable gaps with this book. First, rather than focusing on the city’s historic core, O’Connell turns his eye on the entire region. Second, rather than focusing on well-known epochs and structures, he is interested in the full sweep of development, including the region’s ubiquitous and largely undistinguished split-level houses, Cape Cod–style homes, and McMansions. Finally, O’Connell recognizes that there is a gap between guidebooks, which tell us what to see but not why, and history books, which tell us why but often ignore the what. To fill this third gap, he describes nine waves of development, starting with “Traditional Village Centers and Proto-Suburbs,” continuing through such eras as “Metropolitan Parkway Suburbs” and “Postwar Automobile Suburbs,” and ending with the current “Smart Growth Era.”

The book’s “guidebook” elements point to extant buildings and communities that exemplify each era. In Newton, where O’Connell ultimately settled, he not only suggests well-known sites such as the Jackson Homestead and the MBTA Green Line station in Newton Centre but also points to Oak Hill Park, a development of 418 small, cottage-style homes the city built in the late 1940s for veterans of World War II and their families.

Although useful, the book does have its limits and flaws. Because it spans vast amounts of both time and space, the accounts of specific projects cannot convey the wide array of values, goals, beliefs, and forces that drove them. Writing about the Middlesex Fells, for example, O’Connell notes that it was part of a seminal plan prepared by Charles Eliot and Sylvester Baxter, creators of the Metropolitan Park Commission, a notable example of regional governance in an otherwise fragmented region. However, he does not mention the significant class and religious differences behind the park’s creation. Indeed, as historian Michael Rawson has pointed out, the park’s very name was a 19th-century fiction designed to suggest a nonexistent Anglo-Saxon past for an area called The Five-Mile Wood, popular with Irish-Catholic immigrants.

Such gaps become more striking when O’Connell, who has strong views on what he considers desirable policies, writes about contemporary issues. He laments the state’s decision not to construct a second major airport at Fort Devens when that facility closed in the early 1990s, but does not note that funding the new airport probably would have required enormous increases in landing fees at Logan Airport during construction and possibly closing Logan after the new airport opened. Nor does he mention that a successful airport at Devens would have spurred the sprawling development he frequently decries elsewhere in the book.

Despite these drawbacks, The Hub’s Metropolis is a welcome addition to my shelves of “books about Boston” and will accompany me as I travel the region.

Corporations Migrate Back from the Suburbs

Often I wonder how it has come about that American cities are becoming popular again. There are a number of reasons, but one that tends to go unrecognized is the change in corporate life. During the decades following World War II, many major corporations moved their headquarters and research divisions out of the city and into the suburbs. AT&T’s Bell Laboratories moved to Summit, NJ, in 1942. General Foods moved its headquarters from Manhattan to White Plains, in Westchester County, in 1950. These symbolic acts set off a corporate drift to suburban campuses that lasted more than three decades.

Connecticut General Life Insurance Company (Cigna) vacated Hartford for Bloomfield, CT, in 1957. General Electric moved to Fairfield County in Connecticut. In the Boston area, Raytheon moved out to an office park along Route 128, along with many other technology companies and laboratories.

According to Louise A. Mozingo, in Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (MIT Press, 2001), Fortune 500 corporations were seeking semi-rural sites that were located near the homes of executives and middle-class, white-collar workers. The corporate buildings seldom took up more than 20% of the campus, which was carefully landscaped to enhance the image of a bucolic campus or estate. The over-riding impression that these corporations made was their isolation, their being walled off from other companies and the rest of the world. This corporate landscape reflected the heyday of the top-down, command-and-control corporation. They did not think they needed to be in the city, rubbing elbows with other businessmen, engineers, and entrepreneurs. They could summon whatever expertise they needed to their suburban lair.

Flash forward to the 21st century and we witness an explosion of corporate and entrepreneurial activity taking place in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. And some of this activity is starting to occur on the South Boston Waterfront (sometimes called the “Innovation District”). Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and many of the largest biotech companies are in on the action. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has stated: “Cambridge is a great brand. The mentality is more around MIT, Harvard, and other universities than it is in the 128 corridor.” The cutting edge of innovation, which is more important to corporations in the rapidly evolving global economy than command-and-control, is in the cities. The key elements of the workforce are the “creative” and entrepreneurial classes, which prefer the hub-bub of urban life and the opportunity to rub shoulders with their peers. There are still many corporations operating in suburbia, but, for those prioritizing innovation, the action is moving back to the city.

Blog on “Brainiac” about “The Hub’s Metropolis”

Kevin Hartnett, a blogger on the Boston Globe’s Brainiac website discussed The Hub’s Metropolis in a piece “Color by Transportation Era,” June 11, 2013. Check it out

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2013/06/color_by_transp.html

Review of “The Hub’s Metropolis” in “Planning Magazine”

Book Review of The Hub’s Metropolis in the American Planning Association’s magazine Planning, July, 2013

Planners Library
By Harold Henderson

Two centuries of Boston suburbs

James C. O’Connell, AICP, a planner with the National Park Service in Boston, finds that area residents “lack a clear perspective of the entire region and how it has developed.” His response is The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth (2013; MIT Press; 326 pp.; $34.95).
Using a format inspired by Dolores Hayden’s Building Suburbia, O’Connell outlines nine stages of development, from traditional village centers and proto-suburbs (1800–1860) and country retreats (1820–1920) on up to interstates, exurbs, and sprawl (1970–2012) and the smart growth era (1990–2012). Along the way, he includes mill towns, Boston’s urban renaissance, and future possibilities for the Northeast region. The account remains readable while covering a great deal of ground both physically and temporally.

Period photographs, plans, and engravings make the book inviting to students of American urbanism anywhere. An example is the view of the Mystic Valley Parkway in 1897: all horses, bicyclists, pedestrians, and carriages. In his postscript, the author speculates on the impacts of climate change, expensive oil, and digital urban management on Boston and environs.