West End

The Boston Redevelopment Authority yesterday approved the 32-story Nashua Street Residences, which will bring 503 housing units and a two-story mall to the area behind the Boston Garden and the Tip O'Neill building.

Although most of the residential units will be aimed at the family-less, some 32 units will have three bedrooms.

Firefighters are at 8 Whittier Pl., where a transformer exploded around 8:45 p.m., sending flames into ductwork in the building's garage. The situation went to two alarms, but firefighters had residents stay in place. One resident of 6 Whittier Pl. was rescued from a dead elevator.

The Boston Licensing Board yesterday approved a request from Domino's to extend the delivery hours of its Staniford Street outlet from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. because of near-unanimous support from West End resident groups and nearby businesses - a dramatic difference from the reception Domino's has gotten in certain other neighborhoods.

Two hotels and Mass. Eye and Ear both supported the Domino's request, saying their customers and workers both require pizza late at night. Mass. General acknowledged its overnight workers often partake of Domino's fare, but refuses to formally support licensing requests, William Mohan, a Domino's rep, told the board.

Mohan said the later hours would ease pressures on existing late-night Domino's in other parts of the city, which he said now struggle to keep up the demand from the small neighborhood.

The main opposition at a board hearing on Wednesday came from the mayor's office, which wanted the board to delay action until after Domino's could meet with civic groups in neighboring Beacon Hill. A mayor's liaison said her office is concerned that later pizza delivery would only encourage Suffolk students living on Beacon Hill to party hardier later into the night.

She added the city is also concerned about driver safety, citing a recent attack on a late-night pizza delivery guy. When Mohan said he was unaware of any such incidents, she acknowledged it had happened in Dorchester.

A mother used her body as a shield to try to block a woman waving a large knife at her two young children in the West End yesterday - 19 years after the woman was acquitted by reason of insanity for repeatedly stabbing another mother in a Charlestown supermarket.

Suffolk County prosecutors say that Diane Huggins, 58, approached a 35-year-old Back Bay woman and her children, 1 and 4, as the trio walked along Thoreau Path around 2 p.m. yesterday - and then began swinging a large knife at the children. According to a statement by the Suffolk County District Attorney's office:

WBUR talks to Leonard Nimoy about being forced to leave his boyhood neighborhood:

I wish I could go back to my roots. I can't. They’re gone. The buildings are all torn down. I try walking with my wife to show her where I lived, but it's so difficult because the street configuration has changed so much that I feel it’s gone. I feel my roots are gone.

A resident of the West End apartment complex has filed what she hopes will become a class-action lawsuit against her landlord over a $500 "amenity fee" that supposedly helps pay for a fitness center, concierge and freight elevator, but which she says violates a Massachusetts tenant-rights law.

Suspect. Photo via BPD.

Updated, 6 p.m.

Boston Police report a man who robbed the CVS at Charles Circle this morning handed workers a note that said there were bombs both there and at the nearby West End branch of the BPL and to give the man all their good drugs.

Bombs were not found at either location, police say:

The note further stated that someone would be watching the store in the event police were called. Provided police weren't called, in 2 1/2 hours time, bombs would be deactivated in the pharmacy and the library. After receiving an undisclosed amount of prescription drugs, the suspect fled the store on foot.

The Herald reports the artsy-fartsy crowd thinks SoCa would be a better name for the area south of North Station, or as they're re-imagining it, SOuth of CAnal, which barely makes any sense because Canal's more or less a north/south road, and just, gah, look, if you're so in love with frickin' Manhattan, move there already. Or if it's too unironic for you, try some other neighborhood just dying for some frou-frou boutiques. Like Kings Highway or, I dunno, Passaic. Just leave us crabby Bostonians alone with our West Ends and Bullfinch Triangles.

"The idea is to connect this place more to Faneuil Hall."

Just great: A new place to take all the relatives from The City when they come up to see what interesting little projects you're doing up here in the hinterlands.

And why the hell does everything have to be SOuth of SOmething?

Thanks, I think, to Jay Fitzgerald for pointing out the story, which I'd somehow managed to miss.

Old Boston posts an aerial photo that shows the neighborhood's street layout, just without any buildings, so possibly sometime in 1959.

If you walk past the weird old apartment building on Lomasney Way behind the O'Neill Building, you come to an underpass for ramps connecting Leverett Circle with the Big Dig. ChinatownKicks photographed the imprinted homage to the thriving neighborhood that once occupied the space (and of which that apartment building is one of the few survivors).

Copyright ChinatownKicks. Posted in the Universal Hub pool on Flickr.

MBTA and city officials gather at Science Park station at 4:30 p.m. today to commemorate the fact that the station now has a "secondary name" of "West End." In a statment, City Council President Mike Ross said:

"Tourists and locals alike will now be reminded of this vibrant neighborhood whenever they take the train. I'm grateful to Dan Grabauskas for making the change so quickly."

West End
http://westendmuseum.dreamersland.us/gallery.htm
http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showthread.php?t=10814

http://www.vilnashul.com/bcjh/
http://www.stjosephboston.com/history.htm

http://westendcommunitycenter.com/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/westendboston/

ChezNiki explains how she just hates how there's no way to get from Logan to anywhere else by public transit in the wee hours, like, say, when her plane gets in. She posts a copy of a text message she sent a friend about her ride home to the West End recently:

... Just gettg home now. F*ckg cabby drove through lynn, revere, medford + everett before I threatend him with callg the police + taxi comm. THEN he took me back (home) to Boston! 10 min ride took 25 mins! Hate f*ckg Boston! Im back for 10 mins and the bullsh*t already startd! ...

And Lolita Parker, Jr. is there to take photos.

ChezNiki posts a diary of the fire alarm that got her and her neighbors up early this morning:

... 2:32am May 1st, 2007 ((siren, light and voice fire alarm go off, throwing nightgown on, sticking my head out the front door, seeing neighbor walking the hall, ringing small hand bell)) ...

Rob says what happened to the West End in the 1950s - a city eager for new tax revenue hands an entire neighborhood over to a developer who puts up a banal collection of sterile high rises - should give us all pause following the Supreme Court's Kelo ruling:

... Time will tell, but autocratic municipal rulers may be undertaking massive urban renewal plans before you know it. Municipalities (at least in the Boston area) lose money on every new family that moves into town, due to the exorbitant cost of schooling the children. Towns thought of as wealthy around here are leaving their roads potholed and unpaved, for lack of funds because the schools ate them all up. Municipalities had been doing all they could to discourage new residential development, including enacting minimum lot sizes and moratoriums on teardowns. They also give tax breaks to seniors inclined to move out of town so that new children won't move in.

Now SCOTUS has handed these municipalities a new weapon in their fight to keep their budgets in line: the bulldozer. Simply bulldoze your poorest residents and get them out of town, and put in a giant box store instead. ...

Carpundit notes favorable Kelo utterances from the Boston Redevelopment Authority and City Council President Michael Flaherty (who wants to use the ruling to seize Fan Pier):

Let's shutter the BRA and vote out Michael Flaherty.