Important! Please read blog entry and sign petition!

[lslapiko.livejournal.com]

Help stop over-development of the lot at One Benton Road (formerly the Giobbe House).

http://lslapiko.blogspot.com/2010/04/more-tales-of-giobbe-house.html

Thanks in advance, and please pass on to friends.

To go directly to petition:

http://www.petitiononline.com/giobbe/petition.html

Comments

[talonvaki.livejournal.com]

77% paved over!...Despite the over-development, I love living in Somerville, and I think our remaining 33% is worth fighting for...

Wow. I have an art degree and I SUCK at math, but even I know that's wrong...

PS: You deleted Ron's comment...oh boy...
*gets popcorn*

[lslapiko.livejournal.com]

No one sucks at math more than I do! Thanks for catching that, but at least you could have given me the right answer. Now I have to go and use my calculator. And I didnt delete Ron's comment...I think he did when I fixed what he said. Will you sign the petition anyway? Our, ahem, 23% doesn't need any more shrinking! xxxooo L.

[talonvaki.livejournal.com]

Yeah but do you count on your fingers when you play Cribbage??? I had to use a calculator too! Which...I did after I commented :-)
And sure, I'm signing it now

[lslapiko.livejournal.com]

I suck at math too much to play cribbage. Only word games for me. Crosswords, Boggle, Scrabble.

[ron_newman]

No, I deleted my own comment after Laura fixed her post.

[talonvaki.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay...it disappeared so fast, I was wondering what happened!

[fefie.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this. I live a few blocks away and am dismayed by all this. The old place was an eyesore but I miss the stained glass and the grass. It's bad enough we have so little green space due to lack of zoning 100 years ago (when most of the housing stock was built), but no need to perpetuate that trend now when we know better. And the current trend of stripping all period architectural details (as had happened when the former funeral home across the street from 1 Benton was renovated for condos) is so wrong.

[ron_newman]

I don't understand why anyone would remove stained glass. Doesn't it make the property more valuable?

[lslapiko.livejournal.com]

They sold all the stained glass.

[fefie.livejournal.com]

There were lots of stained glass windows and other architectural gems (antique doorknobs etc) in my 115-yr old home before it got renovated to become 2 condos. It's common practice to remove this stuff from old buildings during renovation and sell it off ...

[i-leonardo.livejournal.com]

old stained glass, especially if it hasn't been well maintained, is a serious hassle. and it's really cold in the winter.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_meej_/]

The actual reason, from what I can tell, is that they couldn't be bothered to think about where else, other than covering half of the stained-glass window, the second-egress stair they needed to install should go. That, and their plans called for dividing up the space that the grand stairwell occupied inside. So with the stairway that broken up and covered, why keep the stained glass?

The building was on the National Register of Historic Places. Unfortunately, the local legislation doesn't give that any weight to put it under the purview of the Historic Commission, and the prior owners resisted being recognized as a Local Historic District, so it didn't happen.

[lslapiko.livejournal.com]

Please let your friends and neighbors know about this and ask them to sign. It would have been so nice to have seen them renovate the house while preserving the architectural details. If you read my current blog entry (http://lslapiko.blogspot.com/2010/04/more-tales-of-giobbe-house.html) and this one http://lslapiko.blogspot.com/2009/08/giobbe-house.html you can see some nice pictures of the house before they ripped all that stuff out to sell it. One of the workmen was kind enough to let me in to photograph it. There are also some good pictures of it in the presentation I link to in the current entry. Thanks for your support! Let's try to stop this before it gets any worse.

[latvianchick.livejournal.com]

On the one hand, I'm with you. I liked the old green lot. On the other hand, it had been for sale for a Very Long time, and for a Very Large sum of money. There was no way in hell anyone but a developer was going to buy it, and no way in hell a developer would NOT turn it into condos. As a single-family, after renovations, it would have been into millions (I think it was 1.2 or 1.3 before renovations...). And, you know, if you have condos you must have parking. Yes, it could have been a nicer redevelopment. But we are not in the age of large grassy lots, sadly.