The council rezoned the west end of the city this spring, unanimously, and the Planning Board attached a condition that most people missed: it asked the council to run a community process to rename West Chelsea in honor of the people who were displaced from it.
The district
The West Chelsea Mixed-Use Overlay District covers the Market Basket plaza and the industrial land around it, the Bunker Hill Community College site, and the blocks around the commuter rail station, with priority areas at Carter and Vale Streets and at Everett Avenue and Beech Street, the former Floramo’s site. The council adopted it 11-0 in June after the Planning Board recommended it 7-0 in April. The terms are the densest in the city: a floor-area ratio of 7.0, buildings up to 12 stories or 150 feet, no parking minimums, and 10 percent of units affordable at 80 percent of area median income in any project of 20 units or more.
The land is the same land the 1973 fire cleared. The Rag Shop District that burned on October 14, 1973 lies inside the overlay, and the single-story commercial development that replaced it is what the overlay is designed to replace again. We published the history of that ground this week.
The naming condition
The Planning Board’s recommendation carried three conditions. The third asks the council to conduct a community process to name the neighborhood, and to name it for its former residents. The board’s minutes do not say which residents, and the 1973 fire is only one of the displacements that emptied the west end. Urban renewal cleared blocks of it in the 1960s, the Everett Avenue industrial corridor pushed out what remained, and the overlay itself, by design, will change the rest. The board seems to be asking the city to acknowledge that before the towers go up. The council accepted the recommendation without discussing the condition.
What comes next
On September 14, Councillor Leo Robinson filed an order asking the City Manager to meet the owners of Market Basket about their plans for the plaza and report back, and a second order asking for an update on the commuter rail Quiet Zone, which would end the train horns that any residential development near the station will have to live with. Market Basket has not said what it intends to do with its Chelsea land, and the family that owns it rarely comments. The overlay makes the plaza the most valuable redevelopment site in the city, and the city has now asked the question directly.