SketchUpAustinSt2a | Newton MA News and Politics Blog

On the recent parking thread, there was some confusion over the effective footprint of the building, and Marti expressed a wish for 3-D. Here are a couple of recent attempts to capture the 3-D impact of the proposed Austin Street project in context. The renderings were done in SketchUp. I didn’t do them myself, they were a present from mystery elves so I can’t personally attest to the accuracy, but it looks like a reasonable representation. If anyone else wants to try their own version, have at it.

From the angle above you can see Shaw’s on the other side of Austin Street, although not the portion over the Pike as far as I can tell. From this other angle, below, you can just see the far left edge of Shaw’s because it’s mostly hidden behind the new construction.

SketchUpAustinSt1a | Newton MA News and Politics Blog

Here’s another attempt to visualize the building, in Andre Khachuturian’s report on the last meeting at the Senior Center for NewTV, although they didn’t have quite the right perspective of the building to work with, since the front of the building should be parallel to Austin Street, a little bit closer to the street than Rockland Trust (not angling away), judging by the illustration in the last Austin Street post.

NewTV AustinSt | Newton MA News and Politics Blog

And here’s the view from page 47 of the Austin Street Partners document that Adam linked to.

ASP birdseyeview | Newton MA News and Politics Blog

For anyone who’s saying, well, this height is okay because the Masonic building and the church are already that high, I would note that just because one tall thing is nice, doesn’t mean lots of tall things are nice. And there is a tendency for each incremental big build to be used to justify the next. We’re seeing that with the luxury townhouse-ification in my part of West Newton that I wrote about previously, and the teardowns in Oak Hill Park and elsewhere. What starts out as an anomaly becomes the new normal. Would you like a five-story building on the Rockland Trust lot and the Shaw’s lot as well? Because if one developer does it, the next developer will argue they should be able to as well.

Addendum: Here are a couple of additional views, which include top floor indentations, the abutting church on Highland Ave, and the 16-unit building at 25-31 Highland Ave (far left foreground below), although I think they overstate the bulk of 25-31 Highland, which, looking at the Assessor’s Database photo, is a 3-story building but the third floor has a sloped roof with gables and turrets.

Austin4 | Newton MA News and Politics Blog

Here’s a view looking east:

Austin5 | Newton MA News and Politics Blog