The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 23

An area's future unfolds amid reminders of the past i i -i "T-W -i CORRIDOR Continued from Page 1 gion's only black-run Institution of higher learning will have a permanent home. Set In the middle of the black community it is designed to serve, the college emphasizes career skills. Chance for minority developers In the corridor's most extensive project, a 5.5-acre site outside Ruggles Station known as parcel 18, officials are requiring a 30 percent minority ownership and participation. Through an unusual parcel linkage program, the group of developers chosen for Ruggles will be awarded a contract to own and develop a lucrative downtown property. This will be the first time that minority developers participate in building Boston's downtown.

If all goes according to plan, next year mothers will push baby carriages and children will cycle ph paths alongside grass growing on strips that had been cleared for ihe elght-lane Southwest Express-Way. Nearly 400 units of subsidized, mixed-income housing are due to go up. some of which will provide home ownership opportunities for people who could not otherwise afford them. Developers are expected to start bidding on many of the contracts in coming months. A handful of companies shopping for small in-town locations have expressed interest in industrial sites that have been abandoned for decades.

Digital Equipment Corp. has a minority-run, 400-employee manufacturing plant on land that was cleared for an expressway connector. Good- ...111 ln1.mlA0 trianAa murA -1 i i I ZA 5 mayor said In an interview. "I'm looking at abandoned buildings, no supermarket. I'm looking af kids that aren't getting an education.

I'm looking at high crime. And I think It's about time to move from that and at least do the best we can trying to bring Jobs; trying to bring affordable housing, deal with the Issue of displacement The city and the state hope to achieve those goals through an Innovative venture that relies heavily on private capital and public resources. The clty-initlated stategy in1-volves linking the development of the 5.5-acre parcel 18 to that of a prime, city-owned site on the edge of the financial district, currently occupied by a garage. Developers willing to take a chance on the Roxbury site, surrounded by pub-' lie housing, have a strong likell-' hood of profits at the downtown lot. The Boston Housing Authority has allocated $24.5 million to re- duce the height of unsightly towers and landscape the grounds' of neighboring housing Roxbury's Gilmore has headed a comniunity task force that has spent 10 years exploring ways this site could buoy development of the entire corridor.

National Importance seen "This has importance for the whole nation," Gilmore said about the parcel 18 linkage proposals which has Just been approved bf the Boston Redevelopment AuL' thority and the MBTA "No other major city has put together a minority team to own a piece of the rock," he said. Gilmore added that community development corporations will al30 own 10 percent of this project with the stipulation that they return profits to the community. Parcel 18 Is also expected to include one million square feet of stores and office buildings 'and space for a cultural center 'and1 housing. It is sometimes referred to as a "mini Copley Place," which is the kind of talk that both delights and frightens community activists, who recall the displacement of poor residents from the South End in the name of urban renewal. I "If parcel 18 creates 15 more millionaires of color that's fine, but that's not the point." said Jamaica Plain resident Charlotte Kahn.

"Community development has to be much broader than that. "The criteria for evaluating the of the corridor should be at least in part whether it benefits low- and moderate-Income people who live there." (NEXT The other new corridor, Washington Street) tr r- i Globe stall photoDavid L. Ryan activists say they are searching' for measures to ensure that a portion of those Jobs go to people from the neighborhood. The MBTA has responded by contracting with Northeastern University for a study to determine available job training programs. Other officials say they share these concerns.

"We, the community and the city have come to share a sense that there's a thing called the neighborhood economy," said Al-den S. Raine, Gov. Dukakis' development director. "The neighborhood has become a place where the Jobs are outside of it." Flynn sees opportunity Mayor Flynn said the Southwest Corridor provides the opportunity to make fundamental improvements to the blighted sections of Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. "I'm looking at an enormous amount of poverty, am 1 not?" the Kaai 5 E3 tm 4 looking toward Back Bay Station.

ty's agenda emphasized the importance of jobs for residents of the neighborhoods that have suffered youth unemployment rates as high as 50 percent. Charlotte Kahn, the head of Boston Urban Gardeners, recalled a black woman standing up during a meeting in 1974 about designing informational kiosks and saying, "I don't care if kiosks are here or If the roof slopes. 1 care If my son gets a Job." The kiosks are currently being designed, said Kahn, but there is less certainty about the jobs. While the construction of the new Orange Line did produce work for around 37,000 people, many of them were from outside the city. Because the project was federally funded, there was not a requirement to employ Boston residents.

MBTA officials estimate that 12,000 permanent jobs will result from development associated with the project. Community Parfc rejoins A view of a section of the $742 million Southwest Corridor project, win iiiuuoLiiea iu muvi. across the street from Digital. Plans are afoot elsewhere in the for stores, offices, and perhaps a community-owned su permarket. But some community activists, who have spent the last 15 years struggling for these very things and whose vision of the area's revival was often dismissed as that of Idealistic dreamers, are afraid.

Activists worried "The project could be a failure," said Chuck Turner, one of the early antihighway activists. of us who brought it this far. people living in housing projects, who wondered whether this would be for someone else or really for us, are still not sure. It is still hard to tell what, will, ha p- pen." -i V. when activists stoppett tne highway, they vowed to turn, the destruction on its head, to develop the area for those who had lost their homes and nearly lost their s-nm.

i 7- could hardly be given away a decade ago, the numbers are singularly dramatic. For example, on crumbling Lamartlne Street, which abuts the corridor, houses that could not fetch $10,000 in the late 1970s now command 10 times that amount. Philip Hart, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts In Boston who was Involved in the post-highway community planning, said: "Now that the developers are interested, to what extent can the community still benefit? And to what extent can those who were on the front line for all those years benefit?" "In the old days of stopping the highway our slogan used to be: 'People Before said Gloria Fox, a Roxbury legislator who participated in the citizen's antihighway coalition. "Now It's got to be: 'People Before Development'." Jobs emphasized from start From the start, the communi "We wanted to reflect the romanticism of the rail and the importance of the Back Bay station, which has existed in some form for 100 years," said Mariarine Abrams, a member of the station's site committee and president of the Back Bay Association. "As we were planning it, we had images of the Orient Express and of 19th century Back Bayers travelling to New York with these marvelous trunks filled with beautiful clothes." For Ruggles, architect Lee said, the two open entrances symbolize efforts to bridge Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, divided for so long by the granite embankment that ran along the old corridor.

"It serves as a functional and symbolic link between the two communities and also provides Northeastern University with a new front door," he said. Scott's hanging sculpture fuses the image of a one-string African instrument called the Diddle Bow with the technology of wave physics, reflecting what Scott says is "the makeup oMhe Roxbury community: primarily black but mixing with other groups in mutual growth." once-divided areas community. They sat through hundreds of meetings and waded through thousands of pages of blueprints, mapping their hopes for the area's economic resurgence. It has come, but In a way that neither the dreamers nor the cynics could have foreseen during the 1970s, when federally mandated busing polarized Boston and drove many middle-class people to the suburbs. The economic changes of recent years have brought many people back to the city, where they have bought homes in neglected areas.

Right behind them came developers who sensed a windfall in condominium conversion and property speculation. Prices were propelled out of the reach of many who stayed. Numbers are dramatic This happened throughout Boston, but along the devastated! Southwest Corridor, where houses jflow, fare collection, seating and signs," said David Lee of the ar-! chitectural firm of Stull and Lee, which has coordinated the design of the entire line. "But at the street level, we wanted every station to be a part of the community it serves, to maintain formal continuity with the buildings around it and to satisfy the desires of the neighbors." So the Massachusetts Avenue station, for example, is built In the bowed front style of buildings that line the street. Forest Hills tries to reaffirm the linkage of the Arnold Arboretum with Franklin Park, reconnecting two pieces of Boston's string of parklands, known as the Emerald Necklace.

At Jackson Square, which will serve the Bromley Heath housing project, space for a farmers' market has been set aside outside. And the Stony Brook station, at Boylston Street, flows Into a small town green landscaped partly with pieces of granite from the old 22-foot embankment that used to run along the corridor. In Back Bay. in keeping with the area's architectural monumentally, plans were lofty. Globe staff photoGeorge Rlzer Marvin Gilmore, a longtime champion of Roxbury revitalization, stands at Ruggles MBTA station.

motifs to reflect neighborhoods 7 wvi 4 nrs vrc -v Mm mw im There will be tennis courts, bicycle paths, play areas for children and community gardens. Areas for street hockey and basketball will also be set aside. Next year, along 4.7 miles of the Southwest Corridor, a new 52-acre park is scheduled to open. Its grassy slopes, trees and recreational facilities will become the next strand In the "Emerald Necklace" of city parks created a century ago by Frederick Law Olm-stead. This is an unusual park with an unusual history: Granite from a 22-foot-hlgh commuter railroad embankment that became a symbol of the fight to stop the highway was used for park landscaping, curbing and retaining walls.

"We wanted to somehow retain some link with the past," said David Lee, whose architectural firm is responsible for coordinating the designs of the park and the transit stations in the corridor. The old granite wall physically divided Roxbury and Jamaica Plainl Now the park, meandering from Forest Hills to the South End, rejoins those communities, Lee said. But as with other elements of the Southwest Corridor reconstruction, there is some controversy, this one involving jobs for local residents. The Metropolitan District Commission, which will take over the maintenance of the parkland next year, is legally bound to use civil service candidates for the permanent jobs in the park. Because civil service Jobs have historically gone to whites from outside the impoverished corridor community, the civil service requirement will likely exclude many community residents, the activists contend.

"The slogan was 'Community jobs for community It was an orientation that we thought everyone was committed to," said Charlotte Kahn. executive director of the Boston Urban Gardeners. The MDC said it plans to re- 1 f-, sense of ownership and prjdej' she said. "The park and the; rest of the corridor were designed to promote community economic-development, and that's what we thought we were working on, for the past 15 years." Community representatives and MDC Commissioner William Geary are scheduled to meet in coming weeks, and both sides said they hope to reach a compromise. -JOANNE BALL By Ethan Bronner Globe Staff s'-um it In Back Bay, you will step from an Orange Line train onto a marble chip terrazzo floor, climb ceramic-faced stone steps, meander under colossal laminated wood arches and arrive, promptly, at the doorway of Nelman Marcus.

In Ruggles, under an equally huge barrel-vaulted archway of steel, you will gaze at John T. Scott's sculptured celebration of movement and African musical tradition. As you descend the stairway, you will be in the middle -of an enormous Paul Goodnight "mural dpnirtlnt rnmmiinlnatlnn! In the Stony Brook i station in Jamaica Plain, you will see paint- ed tiles showing scenes from the neighborhood's history its brew-. eries, its ethnic diversity, its uiicc-ucuiici iiuiuca. Each of the nine new Orange Line stations has been planned with strong community participa- i I -J 1 1 neighborhood should be reflected in design and artwork.

"We decided that in the way the stations are set up there should be continuity of passenger Globe staff photoGeorge Rlzer The Minton Street playground in Jamaica Plain is part of the Southwest Corridor. Next year along the corridor, a 52-acre park is scheduled to open, the next strand in the "Emerald Necklace." cruit aggressively from the community before civil service exams are administered. The agency also pledged to pursue minority businesses when awarding service contracts. Kahn said there might be other hiring strategies that can be used to get community workers. "The park is the front yard of five public housing developments, and we want to make sure that the people who live there have a.