The Ethicurean put it better than I ever could have. Despite Jamaica Plain’s progressive community and seeming hunger for everything “green” and “sustainable”, they have missed the opportunity to secure Lionette’s Market at the Brewery. Apparently the problem is financing, which is a very familiar story in my industry as well. In an email Jamey Lionette said, “We are NOT moving into the Brewery.  We tried lots of different banks, lenders, and development corporations and they all felt the project was too big a risk,  so they all said no.  We got next to nothing from the city and less from the state.  I had several ‘money adviser’ type people who all thought it was a slam dunk, but alas, a Lionette’s market and year round farmer’s market at the brewery is nothing that any lending institution wants anything to do with.”

Lionette's Market has low carbon trike delivery

I was blown away when I heard this. Are you kidding me?! If ever there was a location perfectly suited for a “slow food“  business, it’s Jamaica Plain. Every condo in town would be getting deliveries from the little MetroPed trikes.

I’m on a bit of a sustainability/environmental warpath and I’m embarrassed to say that I never even thought about where my food was coming from until the last two years.

Vitoria Brokhof

This probably had a lot to do with my concern for my daughter Vitoria’s health. We saw a couple of documentaries that most of you are probably familiar with like, King Corn, Super Size Me, Fast Food Nation and then just happened to follow up with a 10,000 mile road trip which just happened to take us past some of the food we had previously been eating. We drove by one of those huge cattle yards on a cold rainy day. There were thousands of absolutely massive cows mushing around in 6 inch deep mud and manure. We slowed down to take in the unusual size of the beasts and actually witnessed one collapse under it’s own weight. This made us really get serious about our food (although we could be doing much better). Until you really start to look around, you don’t realize how hard it is to find food that is made within your state, let alone organic or at least friendly farm food.

I was at Trader Joe’s the other day trying to find foods that were localish. I was really surprised to find that they don’t put the origin of the food on the package. Obviously things that have complex ingredient lists are harder to pin down, but fish and berries, etc. should be fairly straightforward. Nope.

If you call Jamaica Plain home and you think you’d like to support a business like Lionette’s Market, then speak up. Write the JP Gazette, drop a post on Neighbor’s For Neighbor’s, or at least leave a comment here. Also, check out the links in this post and learn more about some of the factors involved.

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.

Proposed rendering for new Bella Luna location

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.

Proposed site plan for the JPNDC Brewery complex

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.