Boston in the BoomBy Jane Holtz Kay Boston, the venerable City on a Hill, is percolating beneath its State House dome. "Hot," "boom," "world class," the words light up the urban switchboards. "There are so many projects it is stunning to me," says R.J. Lyman, assistant secretary of environmental affairs. And more: Fortune magazine not only named Boston the third best city to do business in mutual funds and high technology, but lauded the more bountiful aspects of the city's life: a cleaner harbor, more open space, a drop in crime. True, the urban surge is nationwide. But Boston's economy rumbles beyond the Three Big "c's" --casinos, coliseums, and convention halls--of flailing urban areas. With property sales up 10 percent, office vacancies below 4, and new digs for hospital, technology and financial services, a project or tower-of-the-month is launched. Add massive infrastructure projects in the city's core plus residential and commercial projects around its metropolis of three million, and you can almost hear the jackhammers stuttering. On the face of it, Boston would seem to face the next century with not only the sound of success but advocates aplenty to brake its wild ride. Even before the boom, the last half century has seen the historic city surpass America's threadbare municipalities, holding and coming into its own. The hub boasts more designers and planners per capita than most American cities, not to mention more respect for the past and concern for the present. From preservationists and conservationists to street-by-street neighborhood activists, a tradition of stewardship lives. In a country of the new, Bostonians have long memories. Citizens of the brainy metropolis wreathed by 68 colleges and 250,000 students, cast a skeptical eye on the trendy; they eschew those artificial cities themed for tourists or cloned by prosperity. And, having watched the late 1980's boom-bust real estate cycle leave a residue of untenanted towers and vanished historic buildings, veterans of the real estate explosion cross-examine both planned and unplanned growth: Where are today's planners taking them in the boom? Certainly, the planners of the past have taken them far: Boston is the big plan to end all big plans. In the 19th century, the city's forbears carved its marshes and hilly topography into a superbly shaped citiscape laced to streetcar suburbs and wrapped by an Emerald Necklace. By respecting that past, by stopping myriad bulldozers and by mustering local initiatives, Boston proper, a city close to 600,000, boasts buildings retained and streetscapes saved. A premier walking city, doubling its size through as many commuting workers, it has maintained this mobility and strength through the mass transportation system that transports them. Such 19th and early 20th century "firsts," have more recent accomplishments to update the legacy: the most co-housing in the country, the fewest "adult areas" among U.S. cities, the first land bank and the powerful Cape Cod Regional Commission. Its ghetto neighborhoods display fewer of the burned-out hulks and blighted sites of inner city America, reflecting a black poverty level of 24 percent, a low of 6lst on the list of 77 U.S. cities. Jobs are up, poverty down. The revived neighborhoods of this older African-American community and the new Asian and Hispanic immigrants also reflect a deep care for their surroundings. "There are more stakeholders, more people invested in their neighborhoods-- affected ties," Nine Meyer, head of the Historic Neighborhoods Foundation, says. Despite what economist Barry Bluestone calls "a giant gap" in their wages, the economy is "relatively buoyant," he says. "At this point, the region and the city are better than they've been in ll years," David Soule, director of the 35-year old Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), observes. In contrast to America's decentralizing cities, Boston and its municipalities account for 40 percent of the region's new development. Moreover, the city's commercial cornucopia is based on "clusters" of economic activity--the universities, teaching hospitals, technology and financial services likely to endure. "An unbelievable opportunity," says Soule. Opportunity, to be sure. But questions remain as real estate speculation heats up the market and planning languishes. Will the city and the region take advantage of the boom's opportunity? Or will it undermine its legacy of planning? Many fear for a repeat of the ill-fated, ill-planned "Massachusetts Miracle" when the waters parted only to swamp the state in less than six years. "Boston is still one of the great urban success stories in the country. Downtown Boston and the inner ring of communities--Cambridge, Brookline, even Chelsea--are vital places," Robert Yaro, a Boston transplant now director of New York's Regional Plan," concedes. "But for every job we've retained or residence that we've retained, it's been a holding pattern." Land consumption has increased three times the rate of population since 1970. "That's just been devastating to the countryside. New England is the nation's heritage and it's being subdivided to oblivion." Moreover, though pep talks on the "challenge" and "opportunity" of good times waft through the bureaucracy, complaints about the "Big Squeeze" on housing resound. At Christmas, homeless advocates staged a hunger sit-in to protest the death of a homeless man on Boston Common and emergency shelter visits were at an all time high. More statistically, the Greater Boston Social Survey by the University of Massachusetts cited steep rents, low ownership and pricey homes, high income gaps, racial segregation and declines in manufacturing and retail employment in its fall report. --City of Contradictions--The city on a hill is a city of contradictions, then. The creativity of its pioneering First Night where ice sculptors carved out Emerald City characters glistening for the crowds in a refurbished Copley Square contrasts with a flagging theater district. Its prize Beacon Hill, Back Bay, and South End enclaves and streetcar suburbs show spirit while soaring rents and the end of rent control menace Southie, the North End, and East Boston. The benefits of incredible community identity and neighborhood organization contrast with their racist and parochial aspects. "So much," in Bissinger's words. No question, in the 30 years since the fires burned on Blue Hill Avenue, Boston's African-American Main Street, these communities have come alive. The comeback of Roxbury's Dudley Square Neighborhood Initiative has received a full court press. It, like others of Boston's thriving Community Development Corporation's (CDC) projects which rank high among the nation's and contribute to the neighborhoods' strengths. (see article) Codman Square's Health Center, a model of Boston's potent health centers, revived a neighborhood from its "dark hour" of urban riots and dilapidation. "If you look at it now, you'd say this corner of Dorchester is a quaint New England town," says director Bill Walczak. To see, Egleston Square abrim with small scale shops in brightly tinted hues or the spate of transit-oriented upgrades around the Orange and Red Line 'T' stops is invigorating. "Compared to most cities, we've done pretty well as a place that respects civic and urban values," says Charlotte Kahn, head of the Boston Foundation's Persistent Poverty Program. "So many people have been working so long on so many things, there's a tremendous amount to show for it." For a city tarred with racism, Boston has begun to incorporate a new generation of Asian, Caribbean and Hispanic immigrants into these villages even as they struggle to accomodate the seismic rise in rents. Low and mixed income units by or under the Boston Housing Authority and the Massachusetts Housing and Finance Agency offer a repertoire of often handsome housing from Columbia (now Harbor) Point to Tent City. An $80 million Hope VI grant from HUD for the former and new funds and organization for the latter hold some hope for house-poor Bostonians. Its myriad housing partnerships are myriad and vanguard. Nonetheless, the state which is the fifth wealthiest in terms of income per household is also a low 16th in terms of income disparity between the rich and poor. One out of ten Bostonians live in public housing. Plunging revenues from welfare and HUD's withdrawal combine with the loss of rent control to exacerbate the problem. The Boston Housing Authority has only just established a planning department to survey its 15,000 units of housing and director Kathleen Fields must scramble for innovative tools from energy-saving contracts to an historic preservation grant for a 60-year-old housing project. They need more than housing, of course. Employment is essential. John Avault, economist at the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), is confident that as finance services grow, so will jobs. For those at the entry level, he cites expanding hospital payrolls and 4000 new hotel rooms on the agenda as workshops for the poor. To many, this flagship of economic development looks more like drudgery than whistle-while-you work labor. "There's no job ladder in those jobs," says Peter Dreier, former BRA assistant director, portraying "the boom as real estate speculation that masks the underlying poverty." The gateway to the middle class is for the working poor to join unions, and Boston is not a strong union town, he says. Though employment is up, the city, like the nation, is severely skewed between rich and poor, a "giant gap," says economist Bluestone. Absentee employers augment the problem. Until ten years ago, Boston was a city whose corporate leaders invested themselves in civic affairs. They met--and wheeled and dealed--Boston's fate. Good or bad, "they were engaged in the city," says Dreier. Today many of these corporate leaders are from out of town." There's less accountability." Too often, the city thinks global and forgets local manufacturers for the sake of these giants. The "little businesses and little operations that make the city"--the sheet metal, the welder, the food packaging--get ignored in favor of the hotel man from Chicago or the latest Pied Piper tower, says planner Alice Boulter. Whatever their gripes about city policy, Bostonians anointed its Mayor, Thomas Menino, in last year's election. The politician stood unopposed, a first in the briar patch of Boston politics. As a hands-on mayor benefitting from the Teflon of good times, Menino also took credit for neighborhood concerns and for stabilizing village centers with 15 Main Street programs from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, partnered by the city's Department of Neighborhood Development. Yet, questions multiply as the mayor lags in pushing plans for a civic city in these opulent times. His study trip to America's icon of random growth--Atlanta, the city that drives the most, and segregates even more than Boston, left citizens of the walking city confounded. Pedestrian advocates, the Park Service, the National Trust and just about every protectionist rallied against his proposed $3-million mega-overpass crossing Congress Street towards the belly of Sam Adams' statue at Fanueil Hall. The same week, he uttered an inaugural promise not to "sell out our cities character to the highest bidder so they can build Manhattan-by-the-sea or highrises that cast a shadow over our neighborhoods" saw confirmation of a giant, aloof tower. Many criticize a status-quo mayor for following the developer's lead. They cast an eye at the landscape of beckoning sites and a Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) with a low staff and an even lower disposition to tamper with marketplace dictates. Despite its tearing down of the West End and other blasphemies, the agency shepherded by director Edward Logue in the urban renewal era, was a mighty teaching and planning machine. Today it is a fraction of its former self, shrunk from 700 employees in the 1970s to 100 (less than half planners) today. "I hear it's pretty lean and mean in there," says one planner. Bostonians may be soured by the planning of the last generation, but they know the debacle of non-planning. For that reason, the BRA's fiscal orientation and lack of planning, a figleaf for the mayor's attitudes, are dismaying. And, though Boston, too, relies on a high property tax, its hat-in-hand attitude is distressing. "It's almost as if the city is on automatic pilot," says Ralph Memolo, retired public information officer. "Why has the city not come out with a comprehensive plan in how many decades?" asks land use attorney and mediator "To the best of my recollection, there hasn't been a city plan since Edward Logue." In fact, there was a plan in the late 1970s. A good one, says John Sloan, director of design at the time. It failed. Why? "Because politicians prefer discretionary planning," says Sloan. "With a master plan in place, they feel, right or wrong, that they'll lose both campaign contributions and support in the neighborhoods. If you institutionalize planning, you take away the sense of power that people who give money or vote seek." Risk averse, developer bound, whatever the reason, planning is a process without advocates at City Hall. Criticism of a market-oriented or reactive agency, makes Linda Haar bristle. The BRA director of planning and zoning says she sees her job as taking "advantage of the upswing," a reviewing process. Probed for larger plans, the 25-year BRA employee offers Boston 400, a program looking to the year 2030 and thus far only a series of lectures by out-of-town enlighteners. Grandstanding, not planning, says one disappointed attendee. And, in fact, the most visible projects on the city's agenda confirm the random, undirected nature of the agency's surveillance. Millennium Place: Last year, the New York firm adept at slipping plans through "as of right" New York zoning loopholes, transported its art of the deal to Boston. With permissions secured for the failed Commonwealth Center, a hardfought structure on the site, Millennium took over its approvals, without setting to rest fears of bulk, shadows to Boston Common and congestion meanwhile adding more parking to decant cars into Boston's proverbial crooked and narrow streets. City officials, eager to revive the bedraggled Washington Street's Combat Zone and Downtown Crossing, pressed the vertical mall. Millennium at Mass Pike: Ten Post Office Square: South Boston Seaport Site: The BRA's initial sketch for the to-die-for site was worse than sketchy, however. It allotted pride of place to a ?$700-million publicly-funded convention center with parking for 2000. It also bowed to heavy-hitter landowners, okaying 350-foot towers on the water's edge. By not only snubbing the state's Chapter 9l tideland rule guaranteeing public access to the water but ignoring low building heights, it "made it painfully obviously that there is no vision. It's a disgrace," says Yaro, former head of the state's environmental department. The waterfront's lack of good transportation plus its two first new structures---a dreary brick Federal courthouse in Harry Cobb's late not-so-great period and a boxy hotel for the Trade Center--have already closed off the waterfront and earned criticism as inappropriate, stirring opposition. "You don't step on private property," Haar responds to such indictments. "It's a thing called the constitution," "Their mantra is 'these things are not public land.' But there are standards here in Boston," planner Vivien Li, head of the Boston Harbor Association, retorts. Financial watchdog Samuel Tyler of the business-oriented Municipal Research Bureau is also apprehensive. "Our concern on this one," says Tyler, "is that the city is going to rely on hotel financing for 65 percent of the Convention Center." That means that the city is much more likely to be lax about permits and ignore the architecture and planning, he says. "This may be Boston's Edge City," Alex Krieger, director of Urban Design Programs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, sums it disparagingly. "It's not very promising. There's a vacuum of interest in real urbanism. Planning is not what it used to be." It would at the least be hard to imagine late 18th and 19th century builders, Charles Bulfinch or H.H. Richardson, the city's premier planner/architects, or landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted reiterating the BRA head's defense of this convention facility. "Orthopedic surgeons could hold a convention at the Hynes," director Thomas O'Brien made the case. "But a show which would like to showcase the newest equipment in orthopedic surgery would need the facilities of this new convention center." So much for vision. --Rising Infrastructure--Beyond all these dreams of Christmas-yet-to-come, a vast new infrastructure is actually rising. As if some unseen hand had dropped tinkertoys from the sky, the steel chassis of massive public works projects shaft upwards on Boston's horizon. The $ll-plus billion Big Dig construction project to bury the 1950s Central Artery that severed the city from its waterfront is most conspicuous. Along a ?five mile stretch where clipper ships once sailed, crews are clearing the way for its underground tunnel to take drivers to and from North and South Shore suburbs. To be completed in 2004, say optimists. Maybe, say pessimists. "Rome wasn't built in a day. If it were, we'd have hired their contractor," a grammatically-challenged billboard apologizes. The Big Dig is not alone in dominating the landscape. With an enlargement of the 25-million passenger Logan Airport and a massive cleanup of the harbor, the city is a construction, or de-construction, zone. The visitor needs a map to sort out which piledriver, which bulldozer, crane, graphic-laden fence, thrusting steel beam, or exposed underbelly of old timber and granite foundation, attests to which project. By land or sea or air, the constant clamor distresses the businesses and dense neighborhoods snuggled all too close. More optimistically, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's old beaches are already fit to swim as the Massachusetts Water Resource Agency (MWRA) joins the scoured Charles River in creating a success story. With the harbor almost refreshed, the Harbor Islands have become a new resource under the umbrella of the National Park Service. Six workshops held this winter prefaced a new plan for the 3l islands. Connect the Harborwalk and more ferry service and the briny source of Boston's birth could come to life. As much as any Rust Belt city, Boston has an aging infrastructure and such projects can promote happy outcomes. But not necessarily so. The city's future after the Central Artery/Tunnel excavations is unknown. Will Bostonians have a promenade to the sea where the old "green monster" once loomed? Can the city effect an above ground revival on its freshminted 27 acres? Environmental Services director Andrea D'Amato is confident that wider sidewalks, narrower lanes, pedestrian features and greening will improve the surface of the tunnel from the North End to Chinatown. Though the green bandaids of boulevards and open space are a crowdpleaser, their maintenance remains unfunded and their appearance unplanned. Money is short and will grow shorter for the final touches that make the upheaval worthwhile. The city has already forfeited the chance to build foundations for buildings to cover the asphalt scar. An Artery vent near City Hall now rising bigger than most buildings is a worrisome "token" of what could come off the drawingboard. What will be the residue of this imperial undertaking? "It's worth pondering," says Joe Brevard of Planners Collaborative. "It's easy to have too much open space. The challenge is to substitute for the ugliness with something that looks like Boston. The road can still be a barrier if you see nothing specific, nothing that interweaves, that invites you," he says. "It's a BRA function to plan on it, but the Massachusetts highway department will own the land." The hour is near, consideration tardy, planning skimpy. While the Big Dig has left space for an underground North-South station rail link connecting Amtrak's solid Northeast route, there is no real commitment to this as to other questions of the project's walkability. Will it secure funding? Can Boston retain its walkability? Can it make big plans? That is a question for the larger region, too, as funds for the Big Dig and highway-oriented policies promote random growth outside the core. While Boston proper has stayed compact and intact, sprawl eats away at the region. The office parks and single-family homes flung salt-and-pepper style off the exit ramp show the free-for-all road policies that undermine public transportation. --The Tomorrow in Transportation--The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) which last year celebrated the 100th anniversary of its subway, the nation's first, still laces the hub. Half of Boston's workers commute by public transportation; a million passengers in 78 communities depend on it. Yet maintenance problems persist and bus cutbacks and failure to hook up the outer circles of the region beleaguer towns and cities. "Stop I 95. PEOPLE BEFORE HIGHWAYS," said the spray-painted sign opposing a proposed inner belt almost 25 years ago. It was a classic of community resistance and planning. Grassroots and leadership groups tethered their power to stop the road. They secured the nation's first transfer of highway funds. Out of such labors, planners and communities created Boston's Southwest Corridor, a landmark 20-year project that stitched the South End and Back Bay, black and white, old and young, vegetable garden and basketball court in a superb display of incremental and overall planning not replicated. To be sure, the T managed to launch the Old Colony Line to the South Shore last fall and a new North Station is en route. More broadly, the state's Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) now has a more representative body to widen road-based dictates of the past while transit activists push for an Urban Ring to connect city schools, institutions and the less-served population. Yet, overall, asphalt schemes abound. As the Big Dig stretches the state's budget and strains its leadership's power to cull money from Congress, shortsighted planners confront growth and congestion with more concrete. Bureaucrats support a $50 million dollar bridge plunging into the fragile Cape Cod ecology while shortchanging modes from ferries to vans, buses to rail. Plans emerge to widen Route 128, Boston's "Technology Highway," prompting a "Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard" cynicism from drivers who have suffered a generation of makeovers. Uncoordinated transportation pampers Logan and fringe airfield expansions, ignoring Amtrak's forthcoming high speed rail to New York which would relieve a third of Downtown airport trips and lure suburbanites to rail. Yes, a legacy of public mobility enables a car-lite lifestyle in which Bostonians do half the 15,000 vehicle miles of their carbound but Boston is coasting on this heritage, too. "From my perspective," says transportation planner Cara Seiderman of neighboring Cambridge looks at Boston and the region, "things like traffic and transportation are fundamental to how people experience the city. It's a real problem if you don't have a transportation department," she says. Even with public works support, the empty sidewalks of Cambridge's car-oriented Kendall and Lechmere Squares contrast with the retrofit of older ones of Central Square replicating the Bay State's auto-dependent approach. Ironically, this metropolis whose early planners invented the metropolitan parkway system, now neglects both transit-oriented design and greenways. Sprawl-supporting policies threaten urban life, encourage superstores and impinge on wetlands and forests, draining vitality from older village centers. Typically, Governor Paul Celluci recently gave the fringe town of Billerica three million dollars to widen its roads for a Wang headquarters. "Now there's an urban strategy," former Governor and T champion Michael Dukakis notes wryly. Regional planning or growth management thus trails far behind Florida, Oregon and Washington, New Jersey and the newly-minted "smart growth" plans in Maryland. "My greatest frustration," says attorney Edith Netter, an assistant BRA director in the mid-'80s, "is that the state has not enacted statewide planning. They haven't seized the initiative to enact comprehensive planning legislation." The last attempt by 1000 Friends of Massachusetts to pass a bill on land use failed; the organization itself folded into the Environmental League of Boston. Jim Gomez, the League's director and other believers, await better times to push the bill. Even advocates for a Community Preservation Act, an enabling tool that merely lets communities who vote to do so, apply moneys from home sales to public projects faces stiff opposition in the legislator. Regionalism, explored elsewhere, draws few activists in this Balkanized state. Can the metropolis make big plans? --Little By Little Plans--If nothing else, Boston's citizens have made fine little ones, propped good old ones and stopped bad new ones. Name a project. Name a neighborhood. Name a cause. And you have one, two, three grassroots, environmental, historic or fervid neighborhood groups. They range from airport expansion opponents in East Boston to a constituency for the so-called salt and pepper bridge staging a money-raising road race. And don't forget the lawyers and judges, who ordered school busing, the clean up of Boston Harbor, and the repair of public housing. The recent City Hall Plaza project to transform part of the public space of the ll-acre plaza in front of the building into a hotel with ?7450-parking spaces generated meetings, an exhibition of designs, media coverage, and at this writing, a re-review by the General Services Administration whose Federal Office Building stands next door. "Boston has its share of guardians," Krieger who designed the controversial plaza hotel, observes. "Any band of citizens can get its wishes voiced. The BSA can say we want a task force and everything stops, or the Landmarks Commission can. To developers that's irritating. That's a great brake on the development process but it's very important in perfecting the vision. In terms of the democratic process and citizen input and infrastructure there's only one city that can compare with it," says Krieger. "That's San Francisco." "This is the town that stopped the inner belt. This is the town that stopped the high spine. This is the town that stopped the Commonwealth Center and on and on," says architect and urban designer Lee Cott. He cautions Millenniam Partners to watch out. From preventing a Park Place that would have shadowed the Public Garden almost three decades ago to refurbishing H.H.Richardson's Hayden building and the Liberty Block last year, preservationists have clocked some of their finest hours here. New and old blend in a rich waterfront of madeover wharfs, homes and shops extends along the Harborwalk. Copley Square and Post Office squares--the first remodeled into a popular plaza; the second covering a parking garage with a park--have become urban oases. Architects have retrofitted the staple tower-in-the-plaza from windswept wastelands to lively lunch places: beside Citizens Bank's granite tower, benches hold chatting officeworkers and tourists beside rivulets of water; at the Bank of Boston plaza, lunchgoers gather, their senses sated by the smell of barbecuing sausages and musical performers. --The Regional Role--Yet, that zealous caretaking and neighborhood zeal have their downside, too, in the divisions that obstruct a broader planning. The list of fragmented ventures trying to defend or fend off projects one-by-one runs long: the city of Newton laboring to preserve open space, "The People's Republic of Cambridge" building public housing, the town of Belmont fighting off developments intruding on an Olmsted landscape. Yet, all need more than singular good intentions in the era of the encroaching big box, big house, big car. Uncoordinated, by an alphabet of agencies--the MAPC, the MWRA, the MBTA, MDC (Metropolitan District Commission), the MPO--each with separate turfs, the Bay State behaves as the classic "every tub its own bottom." And out along the ring beyond 128, growth on route 495 is uncontrolled, commerce coddled for the car and old towns filled with an architecture of the exit ramp. Scattered, buckshot buildings intrude on old neighborhoods and drain smaller centers. Wetlands and forests are threatened and traffic congeals. Where, how and who will create a regional plan? How can the micro (the neighborhood forces) and the macro (the state) share their strengths? "There's no vehicle for reconciling new plans with old communities," says attorney Netter. "There's not even a vehicle to exchange information or find ideas or models." Massachusetts is unique among the 50 states in locating its State House and City Hall paces apart. The legislature, the governor and the federal agencies sit in an urban core, not an outpost. And some potential to coordinate is in place. Funded by a $10 million open space bond administered by the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, the MAPC regional planning agency has secured a stronger role in helping communities to grab hold of growth, says director Soule. "Time is ripe to revisit the relationship between towns and cities. We haven't had this high level connection and energy since I've been here." Mayor Menino has signed on, he says. Regionalism has begun to nibble off the boundaries of this splintered state. Positively, too, population growth is slower here than in many parts of the country and today 13 district areas have formed to deal with land use issues it stimulates, he says. In one spin off, the agency has joined with Yaro's Harvard students to create a Massachusetts Bay Commons, corridors to preserve natural areas and shape land use patterns. But the MAPC has only an advisory role for its 1422 square miles of which Boston proper is a scant 46. Like an earlier executive order 385, it has no real power to alter the usual "measles map" that brings "road rash" to the landscape. Soule remains sanguine, nonetheless. "If we can get through the Big Dig--and that is a big if--and not lose our nerve and not lose our way, we will have a city that's more ready to meet the 2lst century than any other city." Golden times have provided a golden opportunity but it is the Bay State's legacy of planning, of walkability, of compact villages that make for the readiness. The city and the region offer a comeliness, a compactness and vigor that are a model for a new modernity. But will their citizens plan for its future? How do you get a booming city to capitalize on its splendid past and prosperous present? "How do you fix the roof on a sunny day?" Soule puts it. Others recall how the hit or miss lack of planning in the last "Massachusetts' miracle" failed to light the landscape. And, they, too, would like to see something more luminous this time 'round. Originally published in the Boston convention issue of Planning Magazine in 1998.
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