For Boston Sand & Gravel, 700-plus new neighbors is cause for concern
A Charlestown cement plant has safety concerns over the big apartment complex planned next door.
In its six decades operating off the industrial edge of Charlestown’s New Rutherford Avenue, the giant Boston Sand & Gravel complex has never had a neighbor.
Now, 705 apartments might go in on some empty parking lots next door. The industrial stalwart is pushing back, worried that its massive trucks and all those people could make for a bad mix.
It’s an uncomfortable tension between one of the where a number of new development proposals promise to transform an area that has long been left to industry.
Boston Sand & Gravel has always been a neighborhood patron, said Mark Spaulding, a 30-year Charlestown resident and architect with SMMA, who worked on the redevelopment of nearby Hood Park. But Charlestown, and especially Rutherford Avenue, is changing, he said.
“Boston’s future relies on establishing more affordability, and that’s a tricky point,” Spaulding said. “We need to seek solutions that allow for coexistence.”
In this case, there’s an access road between New Rutherford Ave. and Boston Sand & Gravel’s complex nestled beneath Interstate 93 and the flyovers to Route 1. At its busiest times, as many as 890 trucks a day use the road, hauling concrete, sand, and other heavy materials from the sprawling facility to construction sites all over Greater Boston.
On its way out to New Rutherford, the access road cuts between two city-owned parking lots, which cover 5.1 acres in all. Today they’re mainly used as student and staff parking for Bunker Hill Community College, but affordable housing developer Trinity Financial is planning to build 705 apartments there. Trinity even agreed to bring a branch of the YMCA to the site.
The Boston Planning and Development Agency board approved the $500 million project’s master plan and first phase on Thursday.
Sand & Gravel has concerns.
Its trucks are heavy and slow to stop. A redi-mix truck can weigh 77,000 pounds, while a semi truck can weigh 99,000 pounds. Putting those in close proximity to so many people is asking for trouble, wrote company president Dean M. Boylan, in a recent letter to state environmental regulators who are reviewing the project, and will “cause irreparable harm to BSG operations.”
“It should be incumbent on Trinity to analyze the impact of BSG truck traffic on the Master Plan Project, especially where the Master Plan Project will bring hundreds of pedestrians in close proximity to an industrial use,” Boylan wrote. “The proposed vehicular circulation patterns are inherently unsafe.”
The company’s leadership supports housing development at the site, they said in written statements to the Globe, but wants to ensure that safety and environmental concerns are taken seriously.
“Locating hundreds of new families — who will live, play and attend day care — next to our site requires very careful attention to roadway design, circulation patterns, and safety and environmental features,” Boylan wrote in an emailed statement. “Those must be incorporated into the planning from day one.”
Trinity has met with Boston Sand & Gravel nearly a dozen times to discuss potential designs and traffic patterns, said senior vice president Abby Goldenfarb.
The developer hired a traffic engineer to study the issue, and initially proposed that both truck traffic and residential vehicles share the access road. Sand & Gravel proposed an alternative design where it would create new egress and acceleration lanes within the project site itself, but that wouldn’t work for Trinity. The current proposal creates two separate residential driveways within the site, keeping as much separation as possible from Sand & Gravel trucks.
“We determined the best way forward is to just separate project traffic from their industrial traffic,” Goldenfarb said. “Not everyone is going to always be 100 percent happy with every single decision a development goes forward with, but we felt this was the most safe alternative.”
The project’s design, Goldenfarb said, orients residents within the site itself, with buildings facing inward and away from the access road. There are also existing crosswalks that drivers must heed, she said. And Trinity has developed on and around industrial spaces before, notably with its One Canal and Avenir apartments in Bulfinch Triangle.
“Living in the city, you do have to be aware of your surroundings,” Goldenfarb said. “We’re adept at managing and mitigating those concerns.”
So are residents like Tim McKenna. He’s lived in Charlestown for 16 years, and seen many big changes: the North Washington Street Bridge replacements, upgrades to Clougherty pool, improvements underway at the John J. Ryan playground. While they can be painful in the moment, he said, they make neighborhood life better.
The 44-year-old sits on the board of the Charlestown Neighborhood Council and was part of the citizens’ group advising the city and Trinity on the Austin Street lot project. He and his wife have raised three kids in the neighborhood, and plan to stay. Even if they wanted to move, there are few options in Charlestown, and he’s watched a whole generation of longtime residents grapple with leaving because there’s just no place for them to stay.
So McKenna supports the Austin Street project, and another 700-plus homes in the neighborhood, and he said many longtime Charlestown families support the general concept of affordable housing. Whether they’ll move into a project right by the highway and heavy truck traffic is another question.
“It’s not like there’s no precedent for having multi-use residential development situated closely to the industry,” McKenna said. “We want to have housing that feels right, treats everyone with dignity, and really has the socioeconomic mix that we pride ourselves in having in our neighborhood.”
Most Popular
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com