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kmklinger
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kmklinger's Blog
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Jun 12 2008 - 2:43pm
By Karen Klinger
In the latest chapter in the effort to save the green centerpiece of Cambridge’s Shady Hill Square from development, residents whose houses surround the horseshoe-shaped property want to buy it with the help of Massachusetts Community Preservation Act (CPA) funds.
The homeowners have applied to the city for a $150,000 grant to help them purchase the land from a development company that holds a building permit to put up a 5,000-square-foot building in the middle of the grassy common that has served as a communal front yard for the square’s dozen semi-detached Colonial Revival stucco homes since they were built in 1915.
The project was put on hold last fall by a “stop-work” order issued by the city’s inspectional services commissioner after the abutters filed an appeal of the permit, raising questions about whether it was issued properly. The homeowners also have filed a lawsuit in state Land Court, arguing that they have easement rights to the common, blocking any development.
After two hearings, members of the Cambridge Board of Zoning Appeal decided in April to put off any decision on the issue while they wait for the court’s decision. In the meantime, they...
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Jun 11 2008 - 6:02pm
By Karen Klinger
To quote a character in that old Paul Newman movie, you might say what we have here is “a failure to communicate.”
Frustrated residents affected by the protracted reconstruction of the Walden Street Bridge near Porter Square told representatives from the state and city at a meeting in early June they had not been told why it may take until March 2009 to complete work that began back in October 2006.
“My problem is that the communication has been terrible,” said Dan Bardige, who lives several blocks from the bridge on Raymond Street. “We don’t understand why these delays are happening. We’d like to know what you’re schedule is.”
He added, “We’re intelligent citizens. We can understand the reasons if you just tell us what’s going on.”
His concerns were echoed by Daniel Schutzberg, a Porter Square resident who said he has to take a daily detour around the bridge that often has traffic backed up for blocks on streets along the alternate route, including Raymond.
“I had a conversation with the on-site supervisor and he gave me information I didn’t even know existed,” Schutzberg told City Engineer Owen O’Riordan and Richard DeSantis, a construction engineer with the...
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Jun 2 2008 - 9:29pm
By Karen Klinger
City officials are poised to enact a ban on the use of artificial trans fats in all restaurants and other establishments licensed to serve prepared foods, with the new law phased in over three months starting July 1, 2009.
At a public hearing May 29, Claude Alix-Jacob, the city’s chief public health officer, called use of trans fats “unnecessary, unhealthy and a preventative health risk.” He said the health department backs the ban because of evidence linking the substance to coronary heart disease, as well as the fact people often do not know if eateries use it.
The ban will affect more than 650 establishments in the city. They include bakeries, bars, company cafeterias, daycare centers, schools and universities, in addition to restaurants. The new regulation would not apply to food items in sealed packages bearing a “Nutrition Facts” label, except for those served in K-12 public and private schools.
Cambridge’s move follows the lead of New York City, which banned trans fats in 2006, as well as Brookline and Boston. Dr. Walter Willett, a member of the Cambridge Trans Fat Task Force, said other cities also are enacting bans as studies link trans fats to heart...
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May 28 2008 - 10:53pm
By Karen Klinger
Graffiti. Just the name conjures up images of a common and hard to eradicate problem that can happen anywhere vandals wield cans of spray paint.
While Cambridge is far from having the worst graffiti problem around, neither is it immune. Often it’s the work of “taggers” who want to leave their marks in a latter day version of “Kilroy Was Here.”
In April, police reported an increase in the incidence of graffiti in North Cambridge, but Police Commissioner Robert Haas told the city council the problem is not concentrated in any one section of the city. “Clearly vacant properties” are a target, he said, but “it really doesn’t follow a regular trend or pattern.”
In the recent upsurge, he said his officers quickly arrested four adolescents, which seems to have reduced new cases, at least in the short run. “We’ve spoken to the parents” and the youngsters are going through the judicial process, Haas said.
Those alleged culprits were in their early teens, but at a community meeting with North Cambridge residents May 28, the commissioner said the police had just stopped four suspected taggers who were even younger—two were 12 years old and the other two 11 years old.
In...
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May 27 2008 - 4:42pm
By Karen Klinger
Under a brilliant blue sky with thousands of American flags flapping in the breeze in Cambridge Cemetery, the city marked Memorial Day with a parade, music, speeches and a tribute to a local aviator who disappeared in the jungles of New Guinea in 1943 and finally has been brought home.
City officials, veterans, marching bands, reenactors in Civil War and Revolutionary War uniforms, youth groups and fire, police and emergency personnel joined in the annual observance by marching from Cambridge Common through Harvard Square to the cemetery past hundreds of onlookers who clapped, snapped photos and waved flags.
At a ceremony, Mayor Denise Simmons stood with family members of Second Lieutenant Ronald F. Ward to read a city council proclamation honoring the 1937 graduate of the city’s then Rindge Technical School (now Rindge and Latin) who vanished along with 10 crewmates aboard a B-24D Liberator bomber while on a mission over New Guinea on Dec. 3, 1943.
Only in 2004 did investigators from the Department of Defense finally locate the plane’s wreckage after receiving a report from New Guinea hunters who spotted it in 2000. After military forensics experts spent years...
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May 22 2008 - 4:36pm
By Karen Klinger
When work began on the reconstruction of the Walden Street Bridge near Porter Square on Oct. 10, 2006, it was just days after Catholic Church theologians announced they were reconsidering an aspect of Limbo, which Dante depicted as the outer circle of Hell.
A coincidence, to be sure, but to residents and business owners near the bridge who have suffered through the seemingly interminable rebuilding only to learn that the completion date now has been put off another six months, it may seem oddly appropriate.
With the bridge closed and Walden Street traffic to and from Massachusetts Avenue diverted, one restaurant dependent on drive-in patrons shut its doors and the owners of the Thistle and Shamrock store adjacent to the bridge saw their business drop in half. Occupants of nearby homes have complained of noise, dust and worst of all, a rat infestation.
At the start of May, City Engineer Owen O’Riordan released a project update with the news that J.F. White, the contractor for the Massachusetts Highway Department, which owns the bridge, now estimates it will take at least until the end of March 2009 to complete the project.
In the meantime, this eyesore is a jumble...
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May 21 2008 - 4:21pm
By Karen Klinger
Outside the Cambridge Home & Energy Fair, James Staunton discussed the differences among the biofuels arrayed in jars on a Volkswagen Rabbit the way a chef might explain variations in types of cooking oils, from olive to canola to corn.
Not surprising, really, because the fuel the VW runs on is cooking oil and the diesel vehicle is one of a growing number of “greasecars” rolling around Massachusetts.
With the cost of gasoline and diesel fuel on a steep upward trajectory, greasecars are models of thrift: the used vegetable oil that powers them is free, given away by restaurants happy that they don’t have to pay someone to dispose of it.
Staunton works with Patrick Kearney, co-founder of the small Brighton firm Green Grease Monkey (http://www.greengreasemonkey.com/), which converts diesel cars to run on the restaurants’ unwanted grease and also turns batches of the grease into refined biodiesel.
Greasecars have a few drawbacks, Staunton conceded, among them that the exhaust from the veggie fuel tends to “make your car smell like a Friolator.” But in a country that’s been called “Fast Food Nation,” who would notice?
He and Kearney were among more than two dozen...
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May 20 2008 - 6:46pm
By Karen Klinger
It was “Astronomy in the City” night at MIT’s Stata Center and the stars were shining brightly.
In this case, the stars were middle and high school students showing off projects they had created during the past year as participants in programs sponsored by the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
At the May 16 community showcase, the students from Boston and Lynn demonstrated what they’d taken away from three innovative programs funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA and designed to bring science learning into their communities.
“This has produced huge gains in student performance,” said Alex Stryker, a teaching fellow with Boston’s Citizen Schools who has worked with educators at Kavli and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge to bring the “Kids Capture the Universe” apprenticeship to four middle schools.
Standing nearby was 12-year-old Kaitlyn Noll, talking to visitors about the “Galaxies Galore” exhibit she and her team at Boston’s McCormack Middle School created using images from an internet-controlled network of robotic telescopes called MicroObservatory.
“The students received the images they wanted (...
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May 16 2008 - 4:53pm
By Karen Klinger
Using an orbiting X-ray telescope whose day-to-day science and flight operations are controlled by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, researchers have discovered the youngest known supernova in the Milky Way--a star that exploded near the center of our galaxy about 140 years ago.
The scientists, who announced the finding May 14, used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, along with a radio array observatory in New Mexico, to identify the remnants of the star dubbed G1.9. Previously, the most recent known stellar explosion in the Milky Way was thought to have occurred around 1680.
Although the earlier explosion of the star Cassiopeia A may have been visible from Earth, scientists said the death of G1.9 could not be detected in optical light because it was obscured by dense clouds of dust and gas. In other words, as spectacular as the explosion might have been, no one living then could see it.
Stephen Reynolds of North Carolina State University, who led the Chandra team, said that while optical telescopes can observe supernova explosions even halfway across the universe, "when they are in this murk, we can miss them in our own backyard." But X-...
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May 5 2008 - 5:43pm
By Karen Klinger
As a teenager, Jerome Friedman was a talented painter who turned down a scholarship to an art school against the advice of his teacher to study physics at the University of Chicago.
It proved to be the right choice.
Friedman, an emeritus professor at MIT, shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics for research establishing the first solid evidence for the existence of quarks, building blocks for protons and neutrons--two main components of atoms.
In a talk at the MIT Museum during the Cambridge Science Festival, he reflected on his long career and his belief that with developments such as the recent completion of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, "I think we're coming into a new era of cosmology and particle physics and it's a very, very exciting time."
He was referring to the Large Hadron Collider, a colossal 16-mile ring of superconducting magnets built well below the earth's surface on the Swiss-French border near Geneva by CERN--the European Organization for Nuclear Research--which will allow researchers, including a number from MIT, to explore questions such as whether a "mirror world" of particles exists and if nature has dimensions beyond what we...
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