| "I've always
felt a deep love for the City of Boston,"
says long time civic advocate and Langley Road
resident, Charlie
Vasiliades. Clear about this
passion from a very early age, Vasiliades set his
sights on becoming a city planner right out of
the Boston Latin High School. " I had dreams
of living downtown on Beacon Hill, or the
waterfront, but then I realized that Brighton is
the place for me." Charlie's civic
"career" began in 1977, while an
undergraduate at UMASS/Boston (followed by a
graduate degree in city planning from Harvard's
Kennedy School), when he joined the effort to
save the historic Oak Square School on Nonantum
Street from potential destruction. Since then,
he's never stopped being a vortex of constructive
community involvement. Vasiliades is President of
both the Friends of the Oak Square Common and the
Brighton Allston
Historical Society (soon to retire); and on
the Boards of the Brighton Allston Improvement
Association, the Allston-Brighton
Community Development Corporation, Brighton Main
Streets (which is part of the National Main Streets initiative), the
Task Force on the YMCA, many "Save the Green Spaces" campaigns,
and, of course, the Friends of Faneuil Library. Did you have any
idea there were that many civic organizations in
this area?
Charlie
is also one of the people that came up with the
idea for the marvelous and yearly Brighton Hidden
Garden Tours. His lovely family home and garden
was one of the stops on the first tour (there is
an apple tree that provides both Red and Golden
Delicious!).
Friends
of the Oak Square Common is looked upon as a real
success story by City and private agencies, and
retains funding from foundations like the Edward
Ingersoll Browne Trust. One of the reasons for
this is the ongoing community support
demonstrated by its upkeep. A weekly schedule for
watering is shared throughout the hot summer
months, and an annual spring clean-up weekend
supplements the weeding, bulb planting, cleaning
and general looking after that individual
neighbors attend to. If you're interested in
signing up for a week of watering duty during the
summer, contact www.oaksquare.com.
Mr.
Vasiliades makes his living working as a
subsidized housing specialist at the Mass. Dept.
of Housing and Community Dev. He lives in the
home his parents purchased in 1959.
|
Thinking
about the current projects you're working on, and those
that have not yet begun, what is your "vision"
for the future of Oak Square?
Charlie: Fundamentally,
I'd like to see a stable, diverse, attractive
neighborhood. When I say stable I mean largely
family-based, owner occupied, that is people who are
not "transient." The problem that faces
Brighton as a whole, traditionally, over the past 30
years is the issue of people who have no tie-ins to
the community. Whether they are students or
20-somethings who live here for just a few years
before they move to the suburbs, there's no
commitment to the neighborhood. That has an impact in
that you don't know your neighbors, or quite often
you might live on a property that is
unattractive...and all that goes with that. I think
everyone wants to live in a stable neighborhood where
you know your neighbors, take care of your property,
shop your local stores, take pride and have a sense
of rootedness, that is stability to me.
Specifically,
what helps the residential neighborhoods of Brighton
to remain stable is when you help the commercial
core, such as Washington Street which has gotten
ratty at times. Continued improvements that relate to
that, such as Main Streets, the YMCA coming, our
Friends of the Park group, really making the
"artery" of the neighborhood look
attractive and vibrant with good storefronts,
attractive construction for the YMCA building, trees,
good lighting...
Secondarily,
another issue that is very important to me is to
preserve our "open spaces," and this has
taken a lot of my energy over the past 20 years. Oak
Square has one of the highest number of these for an
urban area, such as the Crittenton-Hastings woods,
St. Sebastian's (which we partially lost), the
Cenacle (where the EF Language School is now). For
those of us who grew up here, one of the things we
love about Brighton is that we were part of the City,
but not. It still has a semi-suburban/rural feel.
When I look
out from my house over to the woods of the
Crittenton, I see the foliage in the fall, or a snowy
landscape with the trees, it's a breathing space, a
place for birds. We're a fairly dense neighborhood
and having these parcels is like a remnant of the
natural landscape. Those sites, which are acres of
woods and meadows, gives you a semblance of what the
area used to be like when it was beautiful New
England landscape. Right now, they help maintain that
sense of our neighborhood as having some space, some
beauty, some trees. I think it's important for a
neighborhood to have that green space, and frankly I
think it's a lot more important for us to retain
those, than it is for Concord, which already has tons
of green space, to buy the Walden Woods, no offense
to Concord. Imagine how different it would be coming
down Washington Street toward Oak Square without
seeing the beautiful sweep of the meadow under the
trees of the Cenacle. (It had been purchased by an
Order of Catholic nuns around 1909 or so). Picture if
that was developed.
Can
you identify any major obstacles to that vision?
Charlie: Sometimes
good and bad come from the same thing. One of the
main things that has helped the physical
beautification of the neighborhood is the growth and
health of the economy. But the trade-off is
tremendous real estate pressures on our neighborhood.
When you have rents going from $1200 to $2000 for a
2-bedroom apartment, and homes selling for about
$300,000 some people may be thrilled with that, but
I'm not. What I think happens is that these costs are
out of the range of people who don't make $100,000 a
year. It starts being difficult for families to be
part of the community make-up. It's not that I don't
want professional couples to be part of the
neighborhood, but for the long-term, I think you need
families to have a viable neighborhood, or at least
owner occupation. If you have a lot of absentee
landlords and rentals, that can kill a neighborhood.
I think that is the greatest threat.
It's a tough
question in a market economy. One of the things that
the real estate board has talked about, which has
infuriated us, is changing the zoning. They are
saying that the zoning in neighborhoods with two and
three-family homes is too restrictive (exempting
single-family neighborhoods). To address the issue of
affordable housing, they are suggesting that zoning
should allow for more attic apartments... basement
apartments. There's also a trend of people wanting to
build on every square inch of land, such as
backyards. In other words, a lot of cramming and
squeezing in our community. We've always worked to
stop that because if you have all these places
chopped up, what you get is a lot of overcrowding and
rental prices go up anyway.
We've done
pretty well in Oak Square at maintaining our
community base. One of my theories is a big part of
that has been the Presentation School. Much of this
neighborhood has always been Catholic, and all the
kids that have continued to attend this local
Catholic school means that they can stay right here,
instead of having to move to the suburbs, or travel
outside. I've heard discussions that the Church may
have to close Presentation due to
"consolidations," etc. I hope this doesn't
happen because it really helps to keep our
neighborhood intact.
More
to come...
- the
successful effort to save the Oak Square
School
- what
is the role of our local Community
Development Corporation?
- how
has Oak Square changed over the years?
- the
significance of our local public schools
Go to Part 2 of the interview
Return
to OakSquare.com
|
