Green Line Extension Lechmere to Medford

The Massachusetts Architectural Access Board has much more stringent requirements than the federal ADA. It's the reason the T has been installing redundant elevators at a lot of stations. Honestly, speaking as a parent who has taken his kids to the Museum of Science via Science Park many times, crossing the intersection at ground level is not that big a deal.

Most of the steelwork for the new elevated is up:

Halfway:
https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/10/01 ... cials-say/

(Was this subtopic raised somewhere before?)

Should the station get a new name?

I read for the first time (in Boston Street Railway Assn's Rollsign magazine) the claim that a Richard Lechmere, who gave his name to the locale, was a slave owner.

So, will today's woke and cancel culture demand a new name for the station? Perhaps the name Northpoint?

I think I heard about it being renamed East Cambridge but I don’t know if there was a social justice aspect to it.

Not defending it in any way, but owning slaves back then was fairly common. It's not like the guy was evil because he owned slaves; he was a product of his times.

In a way, the rightness or wrongness of Mr. Lechmere, long dead, who gave his name to a square that gave its name to the BERy stop at the end of the East Cambridge Viaduct, is not really the point. The names of things and places are for us now, not for people in the past. If a substantial number of people are unhappy when they hear the name Lechmere, then change the name for that reason, especially if, as is likely, very few people would really mind not hearing the name Lechmere. If more people think of the station as being in East Cambridge than as being in Lechmere Square, then change the name for that reason. It doesn't help or hurt Mr. Lechmere either way. And since the largest number of people probably don't even think about whether there was a person named Lechmere (at my age, I think of the old store first, but if someone had told me it was named after a lake in England I'd have believed it), it's probably not a big deal either way and can hardly be said to be keeping historical memories alive. (Different from Mr. Yawkey, for example, who was all the good and bad things that he was in living memory and whose way was very clearly named in his honor.)

The name hasn't been relevant since the store closed in my opinion. Transit stations should be named in ways that make it clear what is accessible from that location and should not be seen as sacrosanct. We've changed other station names from time to time. When Auditorium became Hynes, was that done to undermine the war veterans for which the nearby auditorium had been named, or was it to make it clear that it serviced the convention center? I'd say go with North Point or East Cambridge because either would be more relevant.

HenryAlan wrote: ↑Tue Oct 06, 2020 12:56 pm ... When Auditorium became Hynes, was that done to undermine the war veterans for which the nearby auditorium had been named...

Wasn't it originally the John B. Hynes Memorial Auditorium, named for the former Mayor of Boston, when it was built? Didn't they just change the name to be a little more specific? I always heard of things at the "Hynes Auditorium" growing up and knew the station to be associated with it.

Originally it was Massachusetts; you can still see some very faded tile signs on the wall between the tracks. It was renamed Auditorium in 1965 upon completion of the War Memorial Auditorium (later the Hynes Memorial Auditorium). It was again renamed Hynes Convention Center/ICA in 1990, two years after the Hynes Convention Center replaced the old Auditorium. I suspect that name was chosen rather than Convention Center/ICA to avoid confusion with the then-proposed BCEC.

Or Mechanics and Prudential, just a hop skip and jump away from Massachusetts (Ave., I assume, was the idea), Auditorium, Hynes/ICA.

Lechmere viaduct at Land Blvd. MIND THE GAP.

*looks up at viaduct*

*looks down at plans*

*removes hardhat and scratches head*

"Dang. Little too short..."

They'll build short ramps on both sides of the gap, so the LRVs can do an Evil Knievel jump across it. No problem.