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Plan may disrupt Garden of
Peace Tucked into the corner of a quiet plaza between the State House and City Hall, the Garden of Peace was meant to be a haven for families of homicide victims, a place to reflect on the loved ones memorialized there. Since the garden's dedication last year, families have come from across Massachusetts to sit among the river rocks, carved with some 500 names of murder victims, and mourn their loss. So it came as an unpleasant surprise to the garden's founders when they learned that Suffolk University is considering a plan to turn a nearby nine-story state-owned office building into a 31-story tower that would house a 792-bed dormitory and student center. Evelyn Tobin, a cofounder of the garden, said that adding a dormitory with hundreds of students passing through each day would wreck the atmosphere of the memorial they worked for years to build, and that many consider a special place. ''This is totally not compatible with the spirit of the garden," said Tobin, whose daughter was stabbed to death in Lexington in 1992 by an unknown assailant. Suffolk University officials say they have met with representatives from the Garden of Peace to discuss their concerns. But they say that adding dormitory space would alleviate the pressure on the housing market in a city where universities abound and student housing is scarce. Mayor Thomas M. Menino and other Boston officials have spent years badgering universities to add dormitories to free up housing for residents. Though many institutions have responded, adding more than 6,000 beds between 1998 and 2004, unmet demand for dormitory space in the city could be as high as 17,200 beds, according to a Boston Redevelopment Authority study published last year. Suffolk's initial proposal for the project would roughly double the number of dormitory beds the university has for its 4,300 Boston undergrads, said Pat Meservey, the university's provost and academic vice president. ''We have limited housing for our students at this point, and we feel that it is in both the students' and the city's best interest to increase the number of beds we have available," Meservey said. After a competitive bidding process last spring, the state chose Suffolk's proposal to redevelop 20 Somerset St., which until last year housed the Metropolitan District Commission. The development team is now conducting engineering studies to determine whether its plans would be feasible for the site. The scale of the tower project, which would cost more than $100 million, remains uncertain and would take several years to complete, Meservey said. If a sale goes through in January, the university would still have to secure approvals from the BRA, which will include opportunities for public input. Molly Sherden, vice president of government affairs for the Beacon Hill Civic Association, said that she had not seen plans for the project, but that she is concerned that it could threaten the Garden of Peace. ''I know how valuable memorials are to people who have lost loved ones for different reasons, and as I understand the project currently, I think it would have a very significant negative impact on the Garden of Peace," Sherden said. A decade in the planning, the garden is on state land set aside through legislation during the redevelopment of 100 Cambridge Street, formerly the Saltonstall building, a state office building plagued by environmental problems, Tobin said. Families of homicide victims who have a connection to Massachusetts can request to have their loved one's name inscribed on one of more than 1,000 river rocks that together represent a dry riverbed; among them are John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. At one end of the riverbed is a symbol of hope and rebirth: a cast bronze sculpture of three ibis soaring skyward by Judy Kensley McKie, whose son was stabbed to death in Cambridge in 1990. Tobin said that she and others involved with the garden understand the need for dormitories in Boston and have nothing against college students. But she said they believe that the Suffolk project ought to be located somewhere else and not only because of the noise and hubbub it could create. The tower's landscape architect, she said, believes that the structure could create wind effects and cast shadows that would harm the garden's vegetation. ''They were very polite, but they gave us really no assurances that we would have any input at all into the plan that they have," she said. Meservey said the university would take every precaution to mitigate the proposed tower's effect on the garden, including locating the entrance on the opposite side of the building to limit student traffic and offering landscaping to shelter it.
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