At the June 19, 2007 meeting of the Boston College Task Force, Jeanne Levesque, Director of Governmental Relations at BC, announced that BC's institutional master plan website would be going "live" on July 16.
And it did tonight -- find it at http://www.bc.edu/imp/ , which is really a redirect to the VHB website http://www.vhb.com/bostoncollege/imp/default.asp . The announcement came via email (not press release) from Tom Keady, Vice President of the Office of Governmental & Community Affairs at Boston College.
It's welcome to see the information (and links to it) in one place!
It includes BC Task Force meeting minutes that were previously only distributed via email, a higher quality image of the master plan visual than my previous attempts at photography of it, and pictures of various parts of the master plan (the existing conditions pictures are new while the proposed building pictures are from the BC Magazine illustrations of late 2006). A nice little bonus: they managed to update the picture of the Brighton Fields to correct the location of the softball field from the outdated BC Magazine version.
I found the picture of the current Edmonds Hall undergraduate dormitory with the fire truck outside it to be an odd choice. We all hope it's not another dumpster fire next to the dorm set by undergraduates to burn their textbooks and notebooks. Probably just the students pulling the fire alarm. Again.
For those who have been attending the meetings of the BC Task Force and/or BC Neighbors Forum to find out about BC's housing, athletics, parking, and transportation elements of their institutional master plan, however, you won't find much in the way of new information on the website -- or even a description of their proposals other than just the pictures described above. For the detailed information, you still have to rely on the Brighton Centered blog. But I'm sure that will change as the process goes forward and they submit proposals to the Boston Redevelopment Authority under the Article 80 process.
One thing that is sure to annoy the neighborhood, though, is that the institutional master plan documents still include #34U: the 600-bed undergraduate dormitories in the "Brighton Campus" (former St. John's Seminary land). After the neighbors expressed a great deal of frustration and exasperation over BC's apparent refusal to reconsider this element of their institutional master plan, there will no doubt be many more unhappy neighbors and City Council candidates over BC's dorm proposal until they withdraw it.
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2 comments:
Since you are obviously an expert, I'd like to know -- Where should BC put new housing?
I'm not an expert, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to find locations for undergraduate dormitories that would co-locate the students and put them closer to their classrooms. (a) Don't tear down Edmonds Hall (or at least build new dorms at the same site); (b) build dorms densely on the MODS site; and (c) build dorms densely on the current Rec Plex site (that BC wants to tear down). Undergraduate off-campus housing problem solved.
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