Hey, there! Log in / Register
Apartments is apartments, says Stan
By adamg on Fri, 09/27/2024 - 4:26pm
Rendering (with site of current Hatoff's on right) by Choo & Company.
A developer has filed plans to replace the venerable Hatoff's gas station and the neighboring Acme auto-body shop with 256 apartments and ground-floor retail space in two buildings on either side of Rockvale Circle on Washington Street in Jamaica Plain.
The filing, by Joe Hassell's Boston Real Estate Capital, says 51 apartments - 20% of the total - would be rented as affordable, to people making no more than 70% of the Boston area median income.
The plans, submitted to the Boston Planning Department this week, also call for ground-floor retail space in the two buildings and a total of 142 parking spaces in garages on the 1.5 acres of land.
The proposed development at 3430 & 3440 Washington Street will introduce much needed housing to a transit-oriented site, in an architectural form that comports with its historic context while expressing a modern architectural language. The project has been designed to celebrate the history and surrounding context, while at the same time providing a new face to the neighborhood. The project sites are primarily surrounded by residential neighborhoods to the East and South, with commercial and industrial uses to the North and West, mainly along Washington Street. There are also several similarly scaled residential and mixed /use projects that have been recently constructed or approved by the BPDA, both to the North and the South of the overall site, along Washington Street.
According to Hassell's traffic consultant, the new buildings will generate a bit less daily traffic than the current gas station and auto-body shop, which also has an impound lot. The plans call for indoor storage for 256 bicycles and outdoor racks for pedaling visitors.
Hassell hopes to begin two years of demolition, site cleanup and construction towards the end of 2025.
Separately, another developer has proposed apartments to the right of Hatoff's by replacing another garage there.
Hatoff's and its big-headed little hat-doffer has been around for decades.
Morris Hatoff opened a gas station near the old Forest Hills elevated stop in 1929. In 1980, his son Stan, who declared that "gas is gas," moved the station up Washington Street when the state took over the Forest Hills land by eminent domain.
1941 Hatoff's ad featuring the little man with the big head doffing his hat (source):
3430-3440 Washington St. filings and meeting/comment schedule.
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Yes! Build it!
Love this. I'd probably go even a bit lower on the parking given the proximity to Green St. and Forest Hills, but it's fine.
This seems like an understatement, tbh:
Hatoff's is a very busy gas station and, due to the proximity to the T, it's unlikely most of the residents will be daily drivers.
2 years of demo and clean up
2 years of demo and clean up
My condolences to the folks on Kenton and rockvale
Cleanup
Cleaning up the inevitable messes left from a century of gas station issues will remove the risk of contamination of other properties.
Amazing!
Build it! This will make our neighborhood so much more livable!
Boston’s ambitious’ ambitions
Boston’s ambitious’ ambitions (or maybe, Boston’s ambitions) far outpace what the MBTA can deliver.
I live down the street from
I live down the street from here. It’s absolutely easy to get around without a car. The orange line is fine and the southwest corridor bike path is great.
So no expansion?
Didn't Hatoff's literally just try to get permission to add more pumps?
I am definitely curious what the abutters will say about this. It's one way to address their concerns about more exposure to gas and exhaust fumes.
Wait
What about the proposed new pumps?
I'm not in the neighborhood, so I have no opinion either way, other than to preemptively call Kinopio hateful for whatever he posts as a comment to this story.
You can have an opinion even
You can have an opinion even if you feel you have no standing, or feel it’s not one’s place to say, because we all live in the same commonwealth and in a very real sense your opinion does have a form of standing in that if “a thing” can happen in “place x” it can affect what happens at “place y.”
While you are asking
While you are asking questions perhaps you should ask yourself why my benign comments upset you more than local drivers killing pedestrians and cyclists on a regular basis?
Two things
1. Kinopio lives near there
2. Maybe the extremely high child asthma rates in that neighborhood don't bother you?
Ground floor retail?? What a
Ground floor retail?? What a joke. What about all the ground floor retail that is still vacant everywhere already? Vacant darkness with paper covering the windows for over five years now in the area.
Third Cliff Bakery, Drawdown
Third Cliff Bakery, Drawdown Brewery, Happy Lemon, Planet Fitness, Allys Boxing, Brookside walk and train. Should I keep listing ground floor retail in new buildings near this one or did I already list enough to prove you wrong?
Those are great examples, but
Those are great examples, but it doesn’t prove anyone wrong. There are a number of large apartment buildings who have kept their retail spaces empty for years. Developers make a lot of promises of bringing services and amenities to the community and don’t come through. I’m in support of these buildings - we need more housing!! - but the comment above isn’t wrong.
Who builds what?
Please name one project constructed by the BPDA in this vicinity. Never mind that the BRA (which is what the BPDA still is, and it's the BPDA board that votes on this project) hasn't actually built anything of note in decades. The developer is being either deliberately or unintentionally misleading here...
"There are also several similarly scaled residential and mixed /use projects that have been recently constructed or approved by the BPDA, both to the North and the South of the overall site, along Washington Street."
That might just be you reading that too critically
Yeah, you could read it that way, or you could read it as "There are also several similarly scaled residential and mixed /use projects that have been recently constructed and there are several projects that have been approved by the BPDA and not yet built or are still under construction."
Anybody familiar with that stretch of Washington Street knows it's in the middle of getting radically changed by new development and that right now there are newly completed buildings, some buildings under construction right now (the Pine Street Inn building, for example) and still others that are planned but for which work has yet to start.