It’s truly state-of-the-arts
Hub tops off $125M academy
City leaders and school officials Tuesday celebrated a “topping-off ceremony” at the $125 million Boston Arts Academy facility as the last steel beam was put into place completing the structure and marking a milestone in construction.
“Our renovation of the Boston Arts Academy is one of the most inspiring projects that we’ve had happen here in the city,” Mayor Martin Walsh said during the ceremony.
He added, “We’re building, probably, I think, the the most innovative public arts academy high school in the country right here.”
The new facility located just across the street from Fenway Park is expected to be completed in spring 2022 and will increase capacity for the school by more than 15%.
The school will have a theater marquee, rooftop green space and a 500-seat auditorium as well as dance studios, music practice rooms, fashion technology studios and workspaces.
“This new building will ensure that BAA will contin- ue to be a place of opportu- nity for Boston’s next gener- ation of creative changemakers for many many years to come,” said Anne Clark, head of Boston Arts Academy.
The ceremony gathered city councilors, school officials, union workers and others as the final steel beam signed by the leaders was set into place.
Kim Janey, city council president and acting mayor-in-waiting said, “I know how important the arts are to social development and critical thinking, and for far too long the arts have been treated as an afterthought or an add-on — but with this investment, we will have a brand new state-of-the-art facility.”
Boston Arts Academy was founded in 1998 and offers programs in fashion, dance, music, theater and visual arts. Students who wish to attend must apply via a twostep process including an audition and a virtual portfolio.
Alexandra Oliver-Davila, chair of the Boston School Committee, said the new school will be a lasting reminder of Walsh’s leadership and he prepares for his new role as labor secretary.
“As I stand here at the base of this new school building, I’m really filled with joy and excitement for what students will accomplish together when they enter this facility for the first time and every day after that,” Oliver-Davila said.
Throughout the pandemic, the press has been excoriatingly harsh on a governor who was slow to act, unnecessarily endangered the lives of the elderly, alienated experts and cooked the numbers.
It just thought the governor in question was Florida’s Ron DeSantis rather than New York’s Andrew Cuomo.
After it has become clear that Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic was not just criminal in the metaphorical sense, but perhaps in the literal sense, the press has begun, only reluctantly and belatedly, to abandon its long-running Cuomo hagiography.
It never made any sense to lionize Andrew Cuomo at the expense of Ron DeSantis, except that one had a “D” after his name and the other didn’t, and one hated Trump and the other didn’t.
Finally, the media loved the way Cuomo talked about the pandemic at his take-charge press conferences. This was taken as the opposite of Trump’s approach, which it was — Cuomo talked a good game, while utterly botching the substance of the response, while Trump talked irresponsibly about the pandemic, while handling the substance pretty well (or, certainly, not as badly as advertised).
All this meant that the press made both Cuomo and DeSantis into something they were not — a hero and a villain, respectively — when it should have been obvious all along that this wasn’t remotely justified.
From the outset of the pandemic, New York state has had the highest number of deaths of any state and still does (47,000), and the second highest deaths-permillion of anywhere in the country. In contrast, Florida is right around the national average for deaths-per-million. Journalists brushed right by these top-line numbers in the interest of their tendentious narrative-building.
They accused DeSantis of unnecessarily endangering seniors when the Florida governor took steps to protect the nursing homes, and Cuomo, infamously, ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients.
They claimed DeSantis was rejecting the “science” by, among other things, pushing to reopen the schools, an approach that has proved out. Meanwhile, experts have fled the New York public health bureaucracy in response to Cuomo’s highhandedness.
And so, the media’s anointed hero of the pandemic — who wrote a book on his own exemplary pandemic response, who won a Grammy, who was elevated to an authority with the standing to comment on how the country was handling COVID-19 — is facing calls to resign or face impeachment and is the subject of multiple investigations, while his routine bullying of critics is now out in the open.
Not only are none of these things happening to Ron DeSantis, his policy of avoiding strict lockdowns, which occasioned so much criticism, has avoided the educational and economic downsides of Cuomo’s policies. According to Florida data, the state offers more in-person education than any other state and it has a lower unemployment rate than the national average and other populous states. This matters greatly to the well-being of Floridians.
All of this said, the virus has presented enormous challenges and excruciating choices to policymakers around the country. It’s not healthy to be overly invested in red state versus blue state comparisons. But the media gleefully went all-in on this game — and managed to pump up the wrong governor and run down the wrong one, in a failure for the ages.
Gov. Charlie Baker may have botched the distribution for the COVID-19 vaccine — angering many — but he is still the man to beat.
One reason is that unlike New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Baker took responsibility for his fumble, while Cuomo has blamed everybody from Donald Trump to the janitor for his.
Another is that Baker, should he run again in 2022, has so far no serious opponent.
And right now, it is not known if the two-term Republican governor, at age 64, wants a third four-year term.
If he doesn’t run, you can count on Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito to be the GOP favorite for the Republican nomination. Polito, acting as though she has inside information, has easily outperformed Baker in fundraising. Polito has close to $2 million in her campaign account compared to $589,000 that Baker has on hand.
Yet, if Baker does decide to run, he will still be favored to win, despite his problems.
If you add that to the ongoing scandals with the State Police, the tangled web of failure at the snail rail MBTA, the personal and economic fallout from the almost year-long pandemic shutdown, the stupid remarks of a now-unemployed state climate change official — you end up with a situation made for a challenger.
Despite all the negatives, Baker still maintains his popularity with a cross section of voters who find his RINO presence and moderate approach appealing.
And, as the old political adage goes, you can’t beat somebody with nobody.
No doubt Ben Downing, 39, would disagree. He is — for now — a little-known former state senator from Pittsfield who now lives in East Boston. Last week he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for governor, becoming the first Democrat to do so.
Downing served five terms in the state Senate before leaving in 2016 to join Nexamp, a renewable energy company. Downing, a thoughtful, issue-oriented progressive, worked on issues such as clean energy, climate change and environmental protection, as well as poverty and transgender rights.
“Growing up in Pittsfield, I lived what it meant to be an afterthought in the state’s political power circles. Now, as an East Boston resident, I’m part of a new community 150 miles away but just as familiar with being written off.”
While Downing is the first Democrat to officially announce, he will not be the last. Many progressives hope that Attorney General Maura Healey will run now that she no longer has Donald Trump to kick around.
Regardless, an example of the difficulties a lesserknown candidate will face running against Baker is how the governor, with the help of an important Democrat, easily overrode Downing’s announcement.
Baker held a joint State House press conference with U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, the chairman of the all-important House Ways & Mean Committee, last week the same day as Downing’s announcement.
Needless to say, it was an easy media win for Baker as he and Neal dominated the political news.
Not only is Neal overseeing President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, but he let everyone know he had Baker’s back, by indicating that Massachusetts will get its fair share of the relief money.
Baker is counting on Neal, one of most influential members of Congress, to come through for his home state. And Neal, by his very presence and his comments, indicated that he would.
The State House public meeting, which Neal requested, was a welcome public relations boost for Baker, who has recently been hammered in the media.
It showed that a Republican and a Democrat, both moderates, can work together on issues of common interest despite the divisive times we live in.
Neal was the only member of the state’s congressional delegation, all Democrats who did not sign a letter critical of Baker for the slow distribution of the vaccine. All the signers made sure they got their shots before their constituents, however.
And Neal has a memory. Last September, Neal was challenged in the Democratic primary by Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse. Leftist icon Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez campaigned for Morse.
Republican Baker, in an unusual move, endorsed Neal in the Democratic primary and Neal won. Last week Neal returned the favor.