1924 map showing Park Front Road, via Leventhal Map Center's Atlascope.
WCVB reports that residents who have always thought they lived on West Roxbury Parkway near Weld Street woke up this week to find new city street signs IDing their street as Park Front Road and now they're having trouble getting deliveries, so they've resorted to putting up paper signs reading "West Roxbury Parkway." Read more.
WBUR reports on a financing issue that could affect some 400 South End residents living in apartments owned by the Tenants’ Development Corp.
The Zoning Board of Appeal today granted permission to the owner of a Harvard Avenue apartment building to convert one of the area's ubiquitous basement real-estate offices into an apartment, but rejected his request to do the same thing to a laundromat on the other side of his building's main entrance. Read more.
At 5:34 a.m., Ross Levanto reported:
Major water leak at the Troy Boston building, 266 East Berkeley in Ink Block, South End. Power is off and residents (including me) displaced.
Zoning Board of Appeal members said today that they had nothing against the technical aspects of a landlord's plans to convert his two-family house with eight bedrooms into a three-family house with nine bedrooms, but rejected the proposal after neighbors objected to the sort of tenants now living there: Pot-smoking, beer-swilling, rowdy partiers they say spent much of the summer carousing late into the night. Read more.
The Boston Fire Department reports it evacuated the 27 apartments at 6 Hamilton Pl., the alley that leads to the Orpheum off Tremont Street, early Sunday morning because of high carbon-monoxide readings. No residents were reported ill.
A water main burst Monday afternoon at Spring Park and Chestnut avenues, leaving residents near the Stony Brook T stop without water all night and into this morning. BWSC reports it hopes to have the water restored by noon.
The challenges faced by the Boston housing market have been well documented in 2020. The pandemic has caused massive shifts in urban population distribution in metropolitan areas all across the country, and Boston is no exception. It effectively took one of the nation’s hottest real estate markets and caused it to come to a grinding halt as apartment vacancies soar all over the city.
The South End has some nice doors. And there's an Instagram page that's collecting photos of them all.
The Boston Housing Authority announced this morning it's suspending "non-essential" evictions though the end of the year due to Covid-19 concerns. Read more.
The City Council agreed today to look at setting up a sort of "secret shopper" that would pair white and minority testers to see what happens when they apply for the same apartment. Read more.
Groveland, across the Merrimack from Haverhill, is one of those places you never hear about unless something awful happens there. Welcome to Groveland, where a white vigilante decided to chase after a black woman driving through the town - where she lives. Read more.
Applications open Friday for Boston's rental relief fund aimed at helping residents who have lost their jobs due to Covid-19 pay their rent. Read more.
Two landlords, one the retired owner of a small building in Allston, have filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Judicial Court seeking to overturn a law passed and signed last month that bars the eviction of most tenants during the current state of emergency. Read more.
Greg Cook educates us on the history of the poodles, owls and other sculptures permanently affixed to the exterior of 9 Dwight St. How did this whimsy ever get approved in a neighborhood with a historic commission? Well, it went up in the 1960s and 1970s, when the architectural standards in the South End were not what they are today.
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