Although Boston still wants to re-open the Long Island treatment campus and the state is planning a new recovery center at Shattuck Hospital, both are year's away, say Mass and Cass business owners and residents, who today pitched the idea of building a recovery campus at Widett Circle - the isolated collection of food-processing plants off I-93 that few had heard of until the failed 2024 Olympic group wanted to build a giant stadium there. WBZ reports.
The MBTA announced this morning it's completed its $255-million purchase of the 24-acre Widett Circle to store and maintain trains on South Station routes - both current and planned future routes to Fall River, New Bedford and Pittsfield. Read more.
CommonWealth takes a look at the MBTA's plan to buy most of Widett Circle, which nobody had heard of before the Olympic effort briefly made it famous, for what would essentially be a waiting area for commuter trains, doesn't make sense.
The MBTA said today it's going to try to buy the 24-acre Widett Circle, which our brief Olympics bid lifted out of obscurity only to return to being the home of low-profile food-processing concerns, to use as a place to store commuter-rail trains between the morning and afternoon rush hours. Read more.
Do you know what it takes to park a train? To create a place to park a train? Are you aware of the almost trivial simplicity of this task? Well, the MassDOT is quite aware that the public (including elected officials) have no clue, and are thus ripe for the type of manipulation which they (and other public transit agencies) have perfected over the last few decades.
New Boston Food Market, a co-op that owns food-processing facilities in the no-longer unknown Widett Circle, has signaled its intent to build a two-story fish-processing plant, to be shared by several fish processors, at 3 Dolphin Way, at the end of Fid Kennedy Avenue in the Raymond Flynn Marine Industrial Park. Read more.
UPDATE, 9:25 a.m. Second alarm struck.
Boston firefighters are at the AmeriCold Storage building, 100 Widett Circle, for a fire in basement ducts and first-floor loading dock. Ammonia is present. At 8:40 a.m., the first-floor fire was declared knocked down and the flow of ammonia into the building turned off.
Boston 2024 today released details of its plans to spend more than $100 million on insurance to cover the risks of a hurricane hitting Boston during the Olympics, terrorists striking the games, sponsors dropping out, ticket sales proving disappointing or entire countries boycotting the games. Read more.
Boston 2024's "2.0" plan for Widett Circle calls for tearing down all the existing industrial and mass-transit facilities in the 83-acre area and turning it into 8 million square feet of office and residential use with the hope Boston gets the Olympics, but under a plan that would continue even if we don't get the games. Read more.
Boston 2024 officials are outlining their "Bid 2.0" version of the proposed 2024 Olympics in Massachusetts. Current Boston 2024 Chairman Steve Pagliuca says the plan still calls for buying out the existing businesses in Widett Circle and building a temporary stadium there - and then turning the land after the games over to a private developer, who would build a whole new transit-oriented development with 4,000 apartments. Read more.
Steve Lynch (D-South Boston) went on NECN's Broadside tonight and told host Sue O'Connell that condemning the existing businesses at Widett Circle for a temporary 60,000-seat stadium is stupid and something he'll fight. Suffolk Downs might work, he says.
"I don't think you'll build a stadium for three weeks and then take it down," he said. "I really think it's a bad idea."
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