Market Street corridor showcased as part of Lynn vision plan

LYNN – The third of three strategy meetings focused on creating a new vision of downtown Lynn offered several suggestions Tuesday for quick and relatively inexpensive improvements.Consultants from Watertown-based Vanasse Hangen Brustlin recommended the city implement a retail store facade program, which might give downtown merchants up to $10,000 each to enhance the exterior of their businesses. Typically, such programs require matching funds, but given the sour economic climate, a 100-percent grant would be more effective, said RKG Associates senior consultant David Gsottschneider.Consultants Ken Schwartz and Geoffrey Morrison-Logan painted a vision of Market Street as a boulevard, with plantings giving it a more defined edge and intersections bumped out to make them more pedestrian friendly.Discussion also centered on how to make the railroad bridge over Market Street more inviting to pedestrians, since it currently serves more as an obstacle than a gateway, Schwartz said.Painting murals on the bridge, adding artwork or decorative lighting were among the suggestions. The consultants listed as a priority making Market Street a downtown corridor that leads openly and handsomely from the intersection of Broad Street to City Hall Square. Doing so would make traveling along Market Street “a very different journey,” said Schwartz, noting that Belmont and Northampton are both struggling with how to integrate railroad bridges.Upgrading property values, establishing an in-fill program to reduce the number of vacant lots in the downtown business district and linking the waterfront were also among the recommendations. “There are a lot of really good dots in Lynn that need to be connected,” said Schwartz.Gsottschneider said Lynn must change its zoning laws so that industrial enterprises are not allowed downtown because they are incongruous with residential development and gentrification. The present zoning code detracts from the overall goal of encouraging market-rate housing development downtown, he said.Gsottschneider added that the city must complete the groundwork for private development because not enough public funding exists to rehabilitate downtown Lynn. “You need private investment. We’re trying to set the stage,” he said, citing the ongoing plan to demolish electrical power lines along the Lynnway to create acres for development along the waterfront.”Somewhere down the road that waterfront is going to transform Lynn,” he said, recalling that Revere’s waterfront was once honky tonk.Bill Bochnak from the Lynn Economic Development Industrial Corp. (EDIC) introduced the consultants and, along with Norman Cole from the Lynn Housing Authority and Neighborhood Development (LHAND), explained that the Vision Plan by Vanasse Hangen Brustlin dovetails with the waterfront master plan by Sasaki Associates and other city-funded studies. The first Vision Plan hearing on June 30 highlighted issues and opportunities for downtown Lynn. The second on July 14 discussed vision alternatives and the last on Tuesday the preferred course of action.”The real focus is on implementation,” said Morrison-Logan. “We pride ourselves on plans that are implementable.”