[Drybrain]

Agreed with Someone123 above. This particular development seems pretty perfectly scaled, and this location is fine--the buildings it's replacing are some of the dumpiest on the street, with any historical character long gone. This feels win-win. But it's also easy to easy to imagine a scenario in which a bunch of these projects start to reshape the the appearance and character of Agricola in a way that isn't so beneficial.

I wish one of the Centre Plan's heritage districts encompassed Agricola, to help mitigate this. The Creighton Field district will cover the two or three blocks below West Street, but there's a lot of character above that. This is a bigger problem with the Centre Plan's heritage districts--they tend to cover established residential areas which are not really under any threat of demolition anyway, so they feel sort of like a little bit of back-patting, or a sop to already over-coddled homeowners in established areas.

Anyway, I brought this concern about historic vernacular along North End main streets with Waye Mason on Twitter and he was kind of bluntly cavalier and dismissive of the concern, but I think it's a legit critique. Development pressure along Agricola and Gottingen needs to be encouraged, but also focused on the right site. The worst outcome would be the redevelopment of character buildings, and crappy buildings left in place. I would like to think there's some internal logic in the real estate market that prevents this, but there doesn't seem to be--it's a gamble.