A café on the Community Path

[heliopsis.livejournal.com]

My note yesterday about building a café in the Carli Fence property on the Community Path, triggered substantial interest. I'm delighted! Now let's see if we can make this happen.

ah42 says s/he's adopting the idea, and I say Godspeed! It needs an entrepreneur to make it into a business. ron_newman pointed out that a much larger property, the MaxPac site, will lie alongside the bike path and will extend the path; but that project is currently planned to be strictly residential. We should encourage that developer to include space for a pathside business as well.


Somerville Planning and Community Development is in charge of development on the Community Path as well as the Maxpack site. Write them a friendly letter saying how great it would be to bike up to an open air café on the path.

The Bicycle Committee is having a meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 15, 6:30 to 8:30 PM in the Basement Conference Room at City Hall, 93 Highland Avenue. You can email the contact person, Steven Winslow, and encourage him to promote thoughtful development on the path.

Your Alderman, or the Aldermen at Large can bring this to the city government, and can ensure that development of this site gets appropriate community review. The aldermen at large are
William White, who's also the Land Use chairperson;
Bruce M. Desmond; and
Denise Provost.


And, of course, tell your friends.

Comments

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

As always, you rock and have wonderful brainstorms. You yourself should stay in the game with this idea, not as an entrepreneur but as an Idea Man and visionary. Your kind of visionary energy is essential for things like this to go from cool hypothetical idea to plan. ah42 asked you to e-mail, and I think you should (if you haven't). A lot of us think this idea could come to fruition and are ready to help in whatever ways we're able. :-)

[heliopsis.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'll do what I can...

[ron_newman]

I'm a member of the bike committee and will be at the meeting. One nitpick: Steve Winslow is a member of the committee, but not its chair.

[heliopsis.livejournal.com]

I corrected my post. Thanks!

[ah42.livejournal.com]

Um well. I should say... I'm adopting the idea because brainstorming is mad fun. I really don't think I can pull it off.

God would I love to, though.

[ron_newman]

There are four aldermen-at-large; the one you left out is Dennis Sullivan. A complete list of aldermen is here.

zoned as residential???

[cleanup-davissq.livejournal.com]

http://www.ci.somerville.ma.us/CoS_Content/documents/zoning_map_102705color.pdf

This zoning does NOT show the Carli Fence property as Industrial.

Assuming Carli has a grandfathered zoning agreement with the city, can someone explain how this property can be resold as industrial?

Re: zoned as residential???

[turil.livejournal.com]

Ug, they probably rezoned it as residential because they wanted to sell it as condos. If you see the real estate ad it says something about housing units knowing that they'd get more money for it. That's so annoying.

That whole map needs to be redone into one big "mixed use with community approval".

Re: zoned as residential???

[ron_newman]

Zoning only applies to changes in use, not to existing use. If you own a factory, and the city changes its zoning to residential, you can still keep running your factory as long as you want. Zoning comes into play once you close your factory, and sell the property to someone else.

The zoning of this parcel is actually "Residence C", which allows some commercial use.