Latest Forest Hills residential plans unwrapped

Depending on circumstance, people will either:

- Park on the street near one of the JP Orange Line stops and walk (probably a further walk than present);
- Park at one of the more distant suburban commuter rail stops;
- Take a bus;
- Some minority will adopt biking or another alternate transit method;
- Find another job.

It sucks to be in that position, but building housing is a greater good that helps solve a pressing need. Park-and-ride at terminal light rail stops is a failed model for Boston (even with more parking, like Alewife) and can't scale to meet our future needs. Looking ahead 5, 10 & 15 years, it makes so much more sense to build Forest Hills to be housing-rich than to hold onto a park-and-ride model that doesn't work well in this location.

This area is in the midst of a major use transition. This is no longer going to be a park and ride location in any way, shape, or form. If you want to park and ride, you'll have to use a lot farther out, maybe on commuter rail.

Cities change. The reason the location was ever used as a parking lot is just a historical accident. Stony Brook runs directly under it; its course was changed repeatedly over the 19th and 20th centuries. It was put in a culvert when the railroad was built - the single greatest expense in the railroad project - but it reemerged to the surface at Tower Street, cutting the front part of the lots from Tower up to Morton (then) off from the back parts, and from the expansive grounds of the mansions built along Orchardhill.

When the ground level parkway (back to the future!) was pushed through at the end of the nineteenth century, it was much wider than Morton Street, and the corner was reshaped and Stony Brook rerouted again. At that point, there was a broad square in front of Tower Street and Forest Hills Station, which remained there for decades until Washington street was rerouted. The corner of Washington and Merton (now called Hyde Park and New Washington) had a three-story house with a funeral parlor in the front in 1899.

By 1905, Forest Hills Station was moved up the street, to more or less where it currently is, but the area that is today the parking lot still had Stony Brook cutting it in half about a hundred feet back. Around 1900, that lot was cut off at an angle to widen Washington Street (aka Forest Hills Square). The funeral home at the corner of Washington and Morton was torn down. The string of storefronts on Washington were picked up and moved back along the new street line . So if you're having a burger at Grass Fed, that building used to be a few dozen feet farther forward.

The part of Stony Brook that bisected the lot was finally placed underground sometime around 1914, giving access from Washington Street to what is now the back of the parking lot (then three separate lots on Orchardhill). At that point, people were starting to drive cars, enough to support gas stations and parking lots. The corner lot was sold to Standard Oil, a gas station was opened in 1919, and the land behind the gas station (and over the subterranean Stony Brook) started to be used as a parking lot. The gas station was closed when the Casey Overpass was built, but the parking lot remained. It was an unattractive parcel, wedged between an elevated railway and a viaduct.

If Stony Brook had been placed underground twenty years previously, there never would have been a parking lot there; it would have been more suitable for industrial or retail uses. If that corner hadn't been reshaped a half-dozen times in less than a century, likewise. It's maybe the oldest parking lot in the city, but the use it's changing to is a use it might already have had ages ago if it weren't for the unusual degree of change in local roadways and the presence of Stony Brook. Boston's population is growing rapidly, with great demand, and areas that were neglected thirty years ago are going to be developed today. The idea that a lot at this now-prime location should continue to be used for parking is preposterous.

That's 2 per cent of Forest Hills passengers using that parking lot. It is far more important that we make it possible for people to actually live near a station than preserve the right of 2% to drive to it. Those 300 people could fit in five buses, by the way, which would be a much better approach for moving them to the station.

In addition to a pedestrian sidewalk and separate bike path along the Arborway side of Building B, the Casey Arborway landscape planners have designed a surface "dry riverbed" feature running northeast from that spot across the median to the northern pedestrian and bike paths by the bus yard. That dry river will follow the former course of the Stony Brook, now buried in a culvert underground. Signage will tell some of its history. A very nice touch, that.