A Downtown Crossing business group is shutting down the pushcart program that has operated for more than three decades, angering many of the 27 vendors who stuck it out through lean times in the shopping district, now in the midst of a dramatic makeover.
Rosemarie Sansone, president of the Downtown Boston Business Improvement District, a group of property owners in the area, said its consultants are working on plans to launch a smaller and better pushcart program next year. Meantime, the current crop of merchants — who sell fruits and vegetables, hats, handbags, and other goods — have until the end of this month to push their carts someplace else.
Comments
No pretzels at Downtown Crossing? Another out-of-touch consultant.
Our pedestrian mall relies partially on such quaint and often tacky vendors, both for locals and tourists. It's the ancient agora concept with some merchants, many citizens, some music and a real mix. Looks like this nearsighted association is pointing us away from being a Paris or New York or other mixed city and more toward a Charlotte or some dense suburb — alll malls and walls. Double boo.
Have you been to Downtown Crossing? Nobody would mistake it for Paris or New York. Frankly, it's ugly, and it was ugly before the Filenes' hole was dug. You *can* make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but it requires quite a bit of effort. And there seem to be a few people who love to shop in a slummy atmosphere. Give me a nice clean mall any day -- or a nice clean Downtown Crossing.
The city closed Washington and Winter streets years ago to create a mall-like atmosphere, but the carts are jammed onto the narrow sidewalks because of a steady stream of delivery trucks and even police cars on the supposedly closed streets. Deliveries should be restricted to after hours and the police cars should stay out so vendors could get off the sidewalks.
This is a shortsighted and unfair move on the part of the business district; and it's not only bad for the pushcart owners, but for the diversity of businesses, and the quality of the experience of shoppers, passersbys and residents. Not everywhere can or should be as sterile and pristine as Newbury Street or the Copley mall. There are two many places in Boston that have lost their charm and mix of businesses, replaced exclusively by chain stores and a streamlined experience. It would be a shame if Downtown Crossing, in trying to revive itself, became another generic place.
Downtown Crossing is already yesterdays news. Who wants to go down there and shop anyway? The pushcarts added some life to boring streets. Those same streets will be deserted when they leave. What will they do then?
Someone with some clout no doubt is causing this and I'm sure for their own benefit!
Downtown Crossing is years and years away from being the cosmopolitan mecca that these "consultants" are envisioning. In the meantime, these pushcart vendors have been gutting it out, year in and year out, helping to keep this desolate moonscape somewhat interesting as a place to be. And this is what they get? Two weeks notice after 30 years? Why doesn't Sansone or the rest of the hacks in the BID concentrate on maybe, just maybe finding tenants for any one of the crazy number of empty storefronts that these vendors are attempting to divert attention from? I have worked in DTX since 2008 and I, for one, am delighted that I can buy produce from Lambert's in front of the bombed out Filene's skeleton. The pushcart vendors deserve to live another day. If the neighborhood is suddenly going to gentrify, the market will dictate whether the vendors survive. Leave them alone and concentrate on what's important. Sheesh.
I agree. This decision is mean spirited. The pushcart vendors are the only ones to keep Dtx from being a desolate wasteland for many years. I love Lambert's anenjoy seeing the colorful displays of the other vendors.
Can the BRA decide what businesses open inside buildings? No, the market decides that. This misguided urban renewal authority should be abolished, and its vision of crony capitalism should be rejected once and for all.
Make way for the homogenization of the franchise, the HOA of retail.
Since Menino is responsible for leaving a hole in the ground where Filene's basement once was, It is not hard to imagine he has a hand in this decision .whereby Sansone will take responsibility to evict the vendors. Let's face it; Menino may run for reelection, and would not want the people of Boston to think he woud do such a thing.Oh No!
Your blind hatred makes you very ugly. Hatred is always an ugly thing. Maybe you should stop looking in the mirror so you won't feel inferior.
Very unfair to pushcart owners!!!! They were there through the hard times, and now they get booted?
The mayor needs to can Sansone before she ruins any more businesses.
The pushcarts are the heart and soul of what remains of the marketplace. What a shame they are being forced out. Not in somones vision! Someone who will of course benefit financially. Mayor menino how can you let this happen? One less reason to come into the city. The list gets longer every day.
This is the same thing that happened on the waterfront. Jimmy's Harborside who was there during all the lean times was pushed out for Legal Seafoods. Are we going to have big name vendors for the pushcarts with the same homogenous, high priced items that we see everywhere? Let the sole proprieter make a living - but maybe they aren't making the big political contributions.
Getting rid of Lamberts really is shortsited. Everywhere you turn, healthy eating is being pushed. And now they want to get rid of the one place in DTX where you can get reasonably priced fruit??? And why should the business association dictate who has a pushcart on a public street?
Yes why Lamberts the only greengrocer or indeed grocer of any kind in Downtown Crossing. Bad enough that the mayor won't allow a grocery store now they want to eliminate the only source of bananas and other fresh food either at lunch time or for office workers to buy on their way to the T.
The push-carts gave this area what little personality it has. It will now be a wasteland of dreary chain stores and nothing else. More Boston idiocy...
They gotta clear out to make room for more shoe/sneaker stores. The 13 down there aren't enough.
Yeah, but the 13 are there because the market can support them. No master planner went out and moved them all down there. The market speaks!
That's not the market that place needs.
This is terrible! What a mistake. They have been there all these years. They have stayed through the last several without Filene's. The pushcarts are part of the fabric that makes our downtown. There will be another "big hole" in the street. Every week I make a stop at a few of them. I buy fruits, vegetables, flowers, nuts, scarves, gloves, hats, or whatever. I buy my vegetabes for supper, and hop on the train and head home to fix it. I have never been wronged by any of them either. Think of NYC without the carts. Would it conjure the same image you know? What a shame! Where will the pushcart employees and owners find employment? I think Mayor Menino has time to fix this mistake. I hope our downtown will survive this blow!
Very unfair- they have been the heart of this pit and now they have to go? Bad move
If anyone knows of any sort of organized response to this, please post the information here. The pushcart owners need to come together to fight this. They will find easy allies as the comments here attest to. Sansone showed zero class with this decision, not to mention complete political tone deafness.
Where can people protest this injustice? Lets stop this from happening!!
This decision needs to be reversed. People's livelihoods are at stake. Without any warning? There is no excuse for such poor and shortsighted policymaking.
Well, well, now we got us a female tinpot dictator hiding in Mumbles' bigger tinpot shadow. This Sansone person wants nothing kind of grungy and genuine, she just wants glitzy and blingy, like most moonbats. Why doesn't Sansone pull her prexy hat down over her eyes and wait a while until more of the young professionals with all their money and lack of depth move in and start patronizing instead of kicking out the long-time pushcard peddlers in favor of Harvard Square-style, national chain development. Sansone doesn't want a Boston... she wants a Dubai and thinks by getting such, she becomes a world traveler instead of the cheap imitation that she is trying to force this old, storied, but still genuine town to become. Downtown crossing will become yet another cheap imitation with Sansone its cheap imitation queen of the ball in her miniskirt, at her age.
Sansone is the face of the other businesses down there. She didn't make this decision all by herself; the decision reflects the concept of the other bricks and mortar businesses. It may not be a good one, but it is not her decision alone.
If the mayor didn't want it, it wouldn't have happened!
This shows very poor business planning. Not only are they creating bad PR for themselves with this mean-spirited move, but they're planning to kick out the current pushcarts while they're merely "working on a plan" for a new pushcart program next year. In other words, they plan to allow a full year to get people out of the habit of stopping to buy from pushcarts in the DTX area, and once those customers have been driven away, then they'll try to launch a new program. Whatever.
Oh, just re-read it -- they will have an "interim program" if people can get into it. Still an awful lot of jerking people around, here.
"Among the changes Lathrop envisions for pushcarts is a more diverse mix, including artists, as well as higher-quality carts like those at Faneuil Hall and Copley Place. She noted that several vendors currently stationed in the neighborhood sell the same hats and bags."
As if there weren't already an oversupply of overpriced, tourist-oriented kitsch vendors in downtown and the Back Bay! If there were there too many Red Sox hat vendors in DtX, the "magic of the marketplace," whose praises the acolytes of St. Milton of Friedman love to sing, would already have weeded them out. The existing DtX vendors, I would imagine, are small businesspeople, who do not have a large enough financial backing to sustain a money-losing business for very long. Meanwhile, there are vendors such as the Lamberts, who have survived by serving customers with fruits and vegetables at a price suited to commuters whose incomes require that they care about how much they pay for groceries or sausages to those who do not care to pay $7 or $8 for a sandwich.
With the more plebeian nature of the current vendors, we get to the heart of the issue: The existing vendors have an image and aura that prospective owners of seven- and eight-figure condos and occupants of $50-per-square-foot offices would find embarrassing and consider damaging to their desired self-image. The vendors are inimical to attracting the developers' desired class of property owners and customers. In the vision of developers and, I'm sorry to say, the BRA, there is no room for the rest of us. The question is, where are the rest of us supposed to go?
As other commenters have noted, vendors received only a few days' notice of their termination, even though neither completion of the Filene's site building or a re-build of the streetscape is anywhere near imminent, leaving almost no time to re-establish their business. Others have rightly noted that these vendors have helped keep a near-dead retail stretch alive since the financial collapse of 2008, which makes the action of the business association look particularly mean-spirited and, in view of the unfinished/unstarted state of the proposed development, cruel.
All of the comments here about the treatment of the DtX vendors have been, without exception, negative. I'd love to think that this unanimity would get the attention of the business association, the BRA, and the various consultants. Thirty-four years of living in Boston and observing how the powers that be operate have disabused me of that notion. I join other commenters in hopiong to find a way to get the vendors' cause to be heard.
>>"As other commenters have noted, vendors received only a few days' notice of their termination"
I don't know what you consider a few days. I wouldn't consider a month as a few days. That's probably at least twice as long as your employer would give you if you were fired.
Agree or don't agree with what's going on, but at least be fair.
If you haven't run a retail business under conditions similar to Downtown Crossing, then you don't have a clue as to what should or shouldn't be done. Countless stores have gone out of business in recent years and I seriously doubt that the push carts draw the kind of significant foot traffic that the merchants need. They also crowd the sidewalks, so it's conceivable that they actually discourage people from shopping in the brick and mortar stores, but I'm no expert either.
It may be hard on some of the vendors, but the merchants that are left are trying to survive. They have to make decisions based on their own interests. That's what business is all about. Businesses are not charities, nor can they be expected to sacrifice themselves for others. You make a serious mistake if you think businesses should be "nice" or have a conscience.
Such short notice for these vendors! Unfair.
Their annual contracts expire at the end of March and won't be renewed. I assume that any astute vendor would know that was a possibility. In addition, they were given a months notice. These are business relationships. It seems unfortunate for the vendors but there's nothing unfair about it that I can see.
If you were being fired at most businesses, you'd be immediately escorted out of the building by security guards and be sent two weeks pay (if you were lucky).
Idiots!
The "Business" people have done a bad enough job of turning Downtown Crossing into a ghost town. I guess they need to make it even "ghostier"!
Yesterday I got nice eggplants, mushrooms, bananas and broccoli for $10 from Lamberts, and the vendor told me he's out at the end of the month. Downtown Crossing isn't ever going to be Quincy Market or Newbury St or Harvard Square -- it's a real downtown crossing, where all kinds of people intersect, and the pushcart vendors provide an important service to real people who work in Boston. I strongly support wise development in Boston, including central leadership in sprucing the place up -- but this is just mean-spirited and short sighted. As many have pointed out, these vendors have kept life in the area during the bad times, and now that things are looking up, they get the boot?