Citizen complaint of the day: Outrageous creeping blight in historic South End

They've got to go!

Whoever made this Citizen's Complaint should be forced to live in the porta potty. Living in a building without HVAC is like wearing whitey tighties after one has discovered boxer shorts.

I should have to see those heinous ac units while using my port a potty.

I truly wish that one of the biggest concerns in my life was the view and location of an air conditioning unit. It must be nice to have those kind of "tough" problems to deal with.

Some people clearly have too much time on their hands and not enough going on in their own lives....

In which I ask how can someone so ignorant of the ways of proper grammar be trusted to preserve our south end? Sowa?

Those aren't a/c units. They are condensers for a mini-split system. Provides heat and cooling using less than half the electricity of traditional electric baseboard and a window unit. This person is being green. Shrinking their carbon footprint and no doubt cutting their utility bill in half. Just had these installed in my condo and the condensers are much quieter than an a/c unit and are environmentally responsible. Seriously - do people not think about the fact that these buildings were built 100+ years ago and they have to be retrofit.

Apparently the complainant was OK with whatever was on the shelf to the right of the rightmost LG Unit because that pre-dates these new units.

And they were presumably OK with whatever filled the now closed opening above the leftmost LG Unit.

What's the difference? All new shiny plastic bits as opposed to weathered plastic bits from the historically significant 1980's? (I'm assuming that when the support and openings were installed, but they could have been from the more modern 90's for all we know)

I'm surprised they're not complaining about the cable/internet boxes on the building nor the horrifically infilled window below the leftmost LG Unit (tucked behind the 'restroom'.

Historic Alley. IT'S AN ALLEY. It's meant to be the behind the scenes, jackalope.

Here. It fronts Columbus Ave at Greenwich Park. Just because there are landmarks regulations doesn't mean that the property owner didn't get approval for the units from SELDC. A variance in a case like this would likely be granted. A side note: imagine the horror that this person will face upon learning that, in this case, Greenwich is pronounced phonetically (not like the places in England and Connecticut), but like Green-wich, as in the now defunct town that was located at what is now the bottom of the Quabbin Reservoir.

Let's bring rents down to historic levels before worrying about the historic integrity of the alley.

South End Landmarks does often crack down on non-historic additions that are visible from public streets, typically the front, sides and roof lines of the building, but not the rear and on alleyways, for the simple reason that modern stuff like HVAC and trash cans and such have to go somewhere. The idea is to make sure owners retain some level of Victorian character to the buildings, e.g., no hot-pink paint jobs, not create a 19th-century Boston version of Colonial Williamsburg.

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