The Beacon Hill Civic Association has come out against a proposal offered by the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary to build a four-story building for administrative offices on the surface parking lot it owns at Charles Circle. The BHCA’s chief argument is that it objects to our neighboring institutions’ expansion into Beacon Hill’s residential area.
Here’s a different point of view.
First, you need to know that I have an apparent conflict of interest in this matter. A lawyer from my husband’s firm represents MEEI. I didn’t know that when I began following the hospital’s proposal and forming an opinion about it. Now that women are engaged in civic matters as much as men, couples frequently face these conflicts. I’ve dealt with them by simply letting people know about the conflict. Now that you know, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether my argument has merit or whether you think I can be influenced by such a relationship.
The first problem with the BHCA’s argument is that a building on this site is NOT an expansion. It’s a change of use—to something better.
MEEI has owned and occupied the site since 1850. At first, MEEI’s hospital building stood there. It was razed in 1899, and in 1909 MEEI built the hotel we now call the John Jeffries House as a nurses’ residence with a parking lot beside it.
The second problem with the BHCA’s stance is that its policy of objecting to institutional use within historic district sometimes reduces residents’ quality of life. That’s the case here.
Right now the site is a surface parking lot. The reason to support an MEEI building on the site is that such a building will offer more to residents than a surface parking lot does. Surface parking lots are blights, and most neighborhoods are eager to get rid of them. Consider the Washington Street lot that Millennium Partners has parked cars on while it waited to build an apartment building across from the Avery condominiums and the Ritz downtown. Millennium will finally begin construction this summer. The neighbors are delighted and relieved. They want the parking lot gone.
But it’s not just getting rid of the blight. A building has many advantages. It could reflect and restore the curve that once gave Charles Circle its name. This building is slated for ground-floor retail and a café that expands onto the sidewalk in the summer, a new place to meet our friends on our way to and from the Esplanade. It would restore a grand entrance to our neighborhood that would attract subway patrons, Liberty Hotel guests, West Enders and out-of-town shoppers to our commercial district, helping the shops along Charles and Cambridge streets prosper—and our shops’ viability is critical to our quality of life, since we never want to get in a car to do anything.
Since Mass Eye and Ear owns the two properties on either side of the parking lot—the Charles Street Garage and the John Jeffries House, it is unlikely they would sell it to a private developer. Many civic association board members would support a private developer’s office building because they agree that the parking lot is a blight. But a hospital’s administrative offices seem about the same as any other kind of office. It’s copy machines and people in business clothes, not x-rays, patients and white coats.
The BHCA opposes this change of use, but it has not spoken out when the hospitals have RENTED space on Beacon Hill. MGH moved into the whole second floor above Harvard Gardens less than ten years ago. MEEI recently moved out of the two-story building at West Cedar Street and Charles Circle, which it occupied for ten years. One could consider a new building at Charles Circle simply a replacement for their rental space at the end of West Cedar.
I can imagine opposing a plan in which a hospital would take over a space on Cambridge Street and install blank windows on the ground floor to protect patients’ privacy, as MGH did across the street next to Finagle a Bagel. But that’s not the plan here.
You should know that I also have a conflict of interest with the civic association. My husband and I have both served on its board. And our family is among the BHCA’s strongest supporters financially, since we don’t have to always agree with something or someone we value.
But it grieves me to see the BHCA take a stand based on a principle that was well intentioned when it was laid down, but ultimately hurts the neighborhood.