THAT NEW BOSTON

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

It is time for men with innocent eyes to go outside and look at Boston's renewal program and tell what they see. The program risks being "hooted downs" at hearings and in the press. (For example, Robert F. Wagner, Jr,'s, The New Bostonians and their Poverty, in the May 14 CRIMSON). A good way to get informed is to come up into Government Center by subway. I've never seen a new sub-way station, before. This one is, and that is a fresh experience in itself.

Coming out of the Mayan kiosk a 60 acre arena of structural steel is before you. To the left is being put together an 875 foot long office building, curved along old Cambridge Street. In front a three-piece office building is rising, and below that is the plaza and foundation of new City Hall. To the right is the end of Washington Street, an easy connection with the department store sector. Two permanent landmarks edge the project--Sears Crescent and Faneuil Hall. Will citizens freely exchange political ideas in the government plaza? Will modern architecture and a combined location make local government more effective here? No one is sure. But a most awesome, heroic scaled sculptural effort to give government a new Center is emerging for you to see.

Get off the subway next at Dudley Street or Eggleston to see the Washington Park project. This is partial clearance and rehabilitation in Roxbury, a streetcar suburb of frame houses and brick apartments of 1880 to 1930. Here are things to look for today:

(1) The obsolete streetcar commercial buildings are being torn down, most of the housing behind it stays. This is a reasonable and obvious solution, yet it is a break-through in renewal. In many projects in other cities and earlier years the obsolete commercial stayed and the housing came out.

(2) There are temporary basketball courts for teenagers built on the rubble. They are heavily used. A simple thing like that is also unusual in renewal projects, where insurance and supervision obstacles often prevent interim use of cleared sites.

(3) See Marksdale Garden apartments. These were built on slum-cleared land by a church congregation is mostly Negro. The housing itself is mixed.

(4) You will see all stages of renewal around you in Washington Park. Families are moving into new housing, while other buildings nearby are coming down. The place is dying and being reborn all at once.

(5) Harder to notice is the $1.6 millions that have been spent by homeowners on private rehabilitation in this area since 1963.

(6) See Academy House, where a new FIVE bedroom apartment can be rented for $147 a month, a one-bedroom for $75.

(7) See also the new YMCA on a large site, allowed through urban renewal to expand out of a storefront.

So when you actually look at the first green shoots of the New Boston, what do you see? Construction men at work. Public and private affices where low income people will be employed. (Low income people do not work in factories, but in office buildings today. Welfare is distributed to the disadvantaged from office buildings.) In Washington Park, the first of Mayor Collins' residential projects, you see Boston's poverty-plagued Negro minority building new housing, doing rehabilitation, supporting a new YMCA. On the skyline from anywhere you can see the 52 story Pru built privately on a former railroad yard, and the 27 story Bitish building built privately on a parking lot. This is the more visible part of the 36 per cent per year increase in construction adding to the city's tax revenue since 1960. Much of Boston's tax income is redistributed as welfare.

A stream of projects for South End, Charlestown, South Cove, Waterfront, Downtown, etc. are programmed, promising the same superb design and neighborhood cooperation that are becoming visible in Government Center and Washington Park today. These planned projects may never rise. The tender shoots of the New Boston grow as much from external climate as internal genes. Lately hot gases have been blowing across the river from Charlestown and Cambridge onto Boston's tender urban renewal garden. William Weismantel   Student, Harvard Graduate School of Design and   Urban Planner (part-time) with Boston   Redevelopment Authority