It's a stretch of fenced-off emptiness, a place that looks like a small ghost town or a Superfund site without the Haz-Mat suits. The north side of the 500 block of East Pine Street, for so many years a veritable hub of activity, is now derelict and empty and awaiting the wrecking ball.
It's a damn shame, too. This stretch of street was a social nexus and contributed mightily to Pike-Pine's well-regarded sense of itself. When five popular bars and restaurants cease to be within a short period of time, by definition a neighborhood changes. Of course, change can be for the better. But in this case, with a massive, mixed-use development slated for construction by a company that has stated it won't rent to bars or nightclubs, the odds are the results won't be regarded fondly by those who lived in the neighborhood before its construction.
Pike-Pine is a neighborhood that welcomes density, a point of view endorsed in its neighborhood plan. On paper, the upcoming project connects with the notion of greater density simply by adding more housing. And the buildings it replaces, while home to popular venues, were by no means architectural treasures. While there is much about the upcoming project's design that rightly sends people into fits, it is at least hypothetically possible that a new project could be at least an aesthetic improvement over a block of smaller, dilapidated buildings.
What's lost is the social side of the ledger: the character of the neighborhood, the flavor of a place. Land use statutes can define maximum building heights, codify setbacks and specify parking requirements, but they are ill-equipped to prescribe context or taste. With that in mind, a neighborhood is left with making its presence felt at design review meetings and generally keeping the focus on developers to create projects that fit into the context of the neighborhood.
Sometimes such efforts are successful, sometimes not. But keeping developers' feet to the fire is something the Pike-Pine neighborhood is known for. Given the vast amount of developmental change coming to the Hill, such community vigilance is needed now more than ever.
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