The Boston Transportation Department’s revival of plans to improve the Hyde Square rotary is good news. The general idea of tightening car lanes and expanding public space will make Hyde Square much safer for pedestrians and create elbow room for…
Category: Opinion
Editorial: Commemorating marriage equality
May 17, 2004 is one of those dates that civil rights activists will remember 100 years from now: the day legal same-sex marriage licenses became available in Massachusetts and for the first time anywhere in the U.S. So it is…
JP Observer: Bus yard belongs on the highway
Looking into details of a proposal to put a new MBTA bus maintenance and storage facility on American Legion Highway (ALH) instead of on Washington Street at the Arborway makes me pound my forehead with the heel of my hand.…
Editorial: Arborway Yard needs light
Whatever minor tweaks or massive changes may eventually come to the Arborway Yard bus facility plan, there is one thing it unquestionably needs: daylight. For too long, a deeply dysfunctional relationship between the MBTA and the Jamaica Plain community has…
Letter: Thanks for Curley Field support
We asked. And you gave! The Curley K-8 School Playing Field Committee gratefully announces that we have reached our goal! What started as a dream—raise enough funds in one year to transform a 14,000-square-foot, broken-up, unsafe asphalt lot into a…
Editorial: Our Boston Marathon
“Explosions injure dozens at Boston Marathon; many JPers in race.” So read the headline that Gazette reporters, still in shock, wrote atop a breaking news story on the afternoon of April 15, 2013. For nearly four days, the news only…
Editorial: Organizing Forest Hills
Rumblings about a special Forest Hills committee for the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Council and a new neighborhood association forming around Wachusett Street are different expressions of a similar truth. The Forest Hills/Woodbourne area is JP’s hot new epicenter of development…
JP Observer: Commissioner search launches new City focus on arts
When the mayoral candidates, including now-Mayor Marty Walsh, touted the importance of arts during the campaign last fall, the rhetoric was refreshing for people and organizations in Jamaica Plain. Many of our residents work in the arts. The neighborhood is…
Editorial: Another Arborway Yard surprise
Here we go again with another Arborway Yard surprise. The MBTA’s roundabout confession to the Gazette that it is about to start “site preparation,” including a major demolition, is the latest unnecessarily confusing and surprising step in 15 years of…
Editorial: Farewell to a JP behind-the-scenes star
Commercial landlords are rarely lauded. When things go well, they tend to be invisible, and we may only hear their names when things go wrong. Yet they shape our neighborhoods behind the scenes. In JP, some particularly committed landlords are…