By now everyone knows that Bella Luna has been working on a new space in Building D of the Brewery complex owned by the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation (JPNDC). The new restaurant consists of over 100 seats, a more substantial bar than the current location, a small area for live entertainment and a great outdoor seating area under the historic Haffenreffer smokestack.

As a neighbor of the Brewery complex I’m really excited about Bella Luna coming to our neighborhood. We’ve always been big fans of Bella Luna & the Milky Way. I’ve probably eaten my weight in pizza there. I’ll miss the old basement watering hole, but the new space looks great and appears to have a lot of potential. The idea of having a real bona fide bar to belly up to sounds great. I hope they get some good draft beers from local breweries.

At a community meeting on Dec. 2^nd, Kathy Mainzer unveiled some of the interior design and materials for the new restaurant. It appears to be a very eclectic mix of materials and textures befitting of Bella Luna’s neo-hippy style. Mainzer seemed a tad bit miffed at The JPNDCs construction/project manager, Andy Waxman. It seems that maybe the size of the restaurant has been widdled down a bit by the girth of the foundations that hold up the massive structure. Mainzer quipped, “we’ll still be paying the same rents, though”. Mainzer just received a variance from the city to stay open and serve liquor till 1 am seven nights a week. A few residents in the Brewery District, especially those on Merriam Street sounded some displeasure with this. They are not only concerned about the noise from the business itself, but the “bwerp-bwurp” from car alarms as folks come and go, and the slamming of the dumpster very early in the morning. They are justified in their concerns, I think. However, Mainzer and her crew have a pretty good track record of working with the neighborhood to satisfactory resolve issues.

Mainzer outlined a plan that included (nightly?) jazz trios and such as well as dare-I-say, bluegrass and country brunch? Country music and eggs – my favorite!

The big questions for me as a neighbor, a Brookside Neighborhood Association board member, and a nosy environmentalist all have to do with the parking/traffic/landscaping related issues revolving around the Brewery renovations in general. None of these issues are the responsibility of Bella Luna or Mainzer other than being a party to the process and a local business and home owner.

The current plan [shown here - click image for larger view] calls for the main pedestrian and vehicular traffic to utilize the Amory Street entrance. The plan shows some 99 parking spaces between the combined parking lots. My concerns are with the impact of traffic and parking outside of the Brewery property in addition to the environmental impacts of that much asphalt.

In a meeting with Andy Waxman and many of the JPNDC folk early on, long before this restaurant was even a twinkle in someone’s eye – it was pitched to the neighbors that many of the people who use the Brewery would be coming from the train and on foot from other parts of JP. It turns out this was at least partially true. The main foot traffic comes from the diagonal Southwest Corridor path that leads from Stony Brook T station to Amory Street. The problem is that this area has been neglected for so long that none of the sidewalks are compliant in any way. They are cracked and falling apart including the light poles. The bases are literally falling apart and have crumbled away. There has been a conversation taking place for about two years now to have a crosswalk here. The traffic uses this stretch of Amory as a racetrack. My dog actually got hit by a car here and the guy didn’t even stop. My wife had to recoil in order to avoid being hit.

Secondly, the JPNDC has given us the gift of asphalt. I’m no surveyor, but I’d say they’ve probably added a good solid acre of asphalt. Not to mention they have almost no foliage in their plan. For the sake of a visual barrier for the lot on Merriam and for heat island effect mitigation, there needs to be a lot more thought involved with the landscape architecture for this project. It seems to me that the JPNDC, and all contemporary developers, need to spend more time thinking about the less obvious ramifications of 6 acres of asphalt on the environment.