These are just some of the municipal meetings and civic events for the coming week. More are on the City Calendar and in the city’s Open Meetings Portal.
Spears Funeral Home project
Historical Commission, 6 to 10:30 p.m. Thursday. Commissioners consider a demolition request for the A.J. Spears Funeral Home at 124 Western Ave., Riverside, and an attached house at 132 Western Ave. for construction of a building with as many as 60 apartments, 20 percent of which are required to be set aside for affordable housing. The buildings went up in 1856 and 1860. We wrote about the housing proposal here. Watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.
A community engagement review
Government Operations, Rules & Claims Committee, noon to 2 p.m. Tuesday. This committee run by vice mayor Marc McGovern discusses City Hall’s community engagement, with updates on “its structure and direction” and testimony from the councillors about their values, priorities and expectations for ensuring residents know what’s going on and have a chance to engage with plans that affect them. The committee meets at City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square. Televised and watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.
The size of your unit matters
Neighborhood & Long Term Planning, Public Facilities, Arts & Celebration Committee, 2 to 4 p.m. Aug. 14. This committee run by city councillors Cathie Zusy and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler discusses options presented by city staff to regulate maximum unit sizes to ensure that zoning incentivizes the creation of housing – because the bigger the place where a single person or household lives, the smaller the space available to build other places for other single people or households. The committee meets at City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square. Televised and watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.
Harriet Jacobs and a hotel
Historical Commission, 6 to 10:30 p.m. Aug. 14. A petition asks to initiate a landmark study of the Harriet Jacobs house at 17 Story St. and Mount Auburn Street near Harvard Square, where the author of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” lived in Cambridge in the 1870s and provided a home for Harvard students and faculty – a petition crossings paths with efforts to put up a hotel and and residential building by tearing down the neighboring triple-decker at 129 Mount Auburn St. The Harriet Jacobs house would be relocated and restored as part of the work, developers say. Watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.
A stronger
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Rather shocking (though, in a way , not entirely surprising) that there is no image of the hotel that is proposed to be introduced behind a relocated, historic Jacobs building at Story and Mt. Auburn. Cambridge Day should be doing a better job of alerting the public to propositions of this magnitude. This would be an unprecedented eight-story hotel jumping what has been the boundary of what remains of the historic residential neighborhood abutting commercial Harvard Square. But, hark! Poor Bono Public can view the “handsomely presented” images of this horrific proposal at the CHC website under the link for “Project Plans and Staff Reports” here:
https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/historicalcommission/pdf/chcmeetingfiles/case5326_plans.pdf
What’s the alternative, James? Per the article in the Crimson, the group working on it hasn’t been able to raise the money to preserve it otherwise, and the building appears to be in quite poor condition.
The 17 Story Street proposal also includes ~50 residences, meaning ~10 subsidized affordable homes worth more than $10 million to Cambridge.
The proposed building looks great.
It has an interesting façade without going full Stata Center. It avoids the trap many 5-over-1s fall into of using ugly blocky cladding in a lazy attempt at breaking up the massimg. It blends new and old elements rather than unthinkingly aping old forms instead of understanding their function. Without this project the Jacobs House will continue to decay until it’s condemned.
It’s fine to hate on low effort contemporary architecture, but this is not that.
Justin Saif is the co-chair of the group ABC, which as far as Bono can tell, stands for “A Bigger Cambridge.” Unlike Saif, Bono (who is unaware of having ever been on a first name basis with this individual) does not claim to have all the answers. But there may, indeed, be hints of possible “alternative” approaches to preserving the Jacobs building in the Harvard Crimson article from last year to which he refers, but which he doesn’t seem to have actually read. Anyone serious about this topic can read the article for themselves – which he could have easily provided a link to, but didn’t – here:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/11/22/harriet-jacobs-house-cambridge-legacy/
Saif and his group actually pride themselves on opposing historic preservation and they troll every meeting of the CHC to back every project that might have a unit of housing somewhere, no matter how unaffordable. I don’t believe Saif and his group give a hoot about Jacobs. They just want “A Bigger Cambridge.”