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Ripe for building on Orange Line

Opinion | Paul McMorrow

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February 21, 2012|By Paul McMorrow

FORTY YEARS ago, activists from both sides of the Charles came together to sink a pair of ruinous highways. They crossed neighborhood boundaries, bound together and argued that people, not roadways, build communities. And they won.

Their victory came before construction crews walled off their neighborhoods with lanes of speeding cars, but after bulldozers had demolished thousands of homes lying in the paths of the planned highways. Instead of running a highway from Hyde Park to Roxbury, state transportation officials built the Orange Line. The subway line, built along the path of the scuttled Southwest Expressway, helped remake Jamaica Plain. Still, the Orange Line remains lined with empty lots and dead spots, legacies of highway clearing from a half-century ago. So now the old coalitions are assembling again, with the goal of redeveloping neighborhoods along the length of the Orange Line corridor.

The Orange Line spans four municipalities and scores of neighborhoods. Jamaica Plain is a long way from Somerville and Malden, but the neighborhoods act as nodes along a common transit link. This is true in the sense that the line physically connects disparate populations. But the physical geography of lying along a transit line of the Orange Line’s vintage means communities up and down the line share a common economic development profile.

Clearance for the Southwest Expressway, and then the subway line’s construction, often left stops along the line surrounded by vacant land or parking lots. When there were buildings standing along the line, they seldom related to the nearby transit hubs. This means the Orange Line hasn’t yet lived up to its economic development potential. But it also means there’s no greater concentration of development-ready sites in Greater Boston. It’s just a matter of putting the pieces together in a way that makes sense, and takes advantage of the opportunity.

Game-changing development sites line the Orange Line, from Forest Hills to Jackson Square, Ruggles, North Station, Sullivan Square, Assembly Square, and Malden Center. Inside Boston, these development lots are legacies of highway clearance and roadway construction, while north of the city, where communities were split by Interstate 93, the Orange Line’s presence enables a form of dense neighborhood-building that isn’t possible outside mass transit corridors.