Officials discuss changes to intersection
Gather at site where 4-year-old was fatally struck
Lindsay Fertitta heard the screams echoing down narrow Sleeper Street.
Notifications on her cellphone soon provided details about the tragedy that had unfolded nearby last Sunday: A young girl had been fatally struck by a pickup truck just down the street from where she, her daughter, and her friend were playing in Martin’s Park near Fertitta’s Seaport home.
The girl, Gracie Gancheva, was 4 years old — just like Fertitta’s daughter.
“She’s been almost hit before,” Fertitta said Saturday morning of her daughter, wiping away tears. “This intersection just isn’t safe.”
Fertitta was one of a couple dozen people who gathered at the corner of Sleeper and Congress streets Saturday morning to talk about avoiding future tragedies. City officials took questions and pledged change: poles, signage, possibly speed humps in the near term on Sleeper Street, followed by an already planned $9 million project to calm the streets in the area.
“This is an almost unimaginable tragedy,” Jascha FranklinHodge, Mayor Michelle Wu’s chief of streets, told residents Saturday morning.
He said the changes to Sleeper Street should be underway in the next few weeks. Officials already have removed one parking spot on Congress Street near the intersection and plan to replace it with a box of flex poles, allowing visibility but making drivers unable to cut the corner quickly. The city also will look at the narrow partial sidewalk on one side of the road, with an eye toward potentially expanding it to a full sidewalk.
The broader redesign of the area’s streets is on track to start next year, he said. That will include a raised crosswalk at the intersection where the girl died.
The tragedy occurred as Wu’s administration continues to grapple citywide with the tug of war over making Boston’s streets safer, adding bike lanes, and slowing measures that are often met with pushback from some drivers who say traffic is already bad enough and business owners who say they need the parking.
But that disagreement was not on display Saturday in the Seaport neighborhood of Fort Point, where City Councilor Ed Flynn, who has fought the Wu administration on various other policy fronts, and Tom Ready of the Fort Point Neighborhood Association both stood beside Franklin-Hodge and said streets need to be safer.
“It needs to happen tomorrow,” Ready said. He said it’s important that these changes be in place by school vacation week in April.
Gracie Gancheva’s family was visiting from Colorado when she was struck by a 2015 F-150 Ford pickup truck around 5 p.m. on March 24 near the intersection of Congress and Sleeper streets. No criminal charges or citations have been issued to the driver, who remained at the scene.
A memorial has sprung up on the corner, with stuffed animals and flowers surrounding a picture of Gracie smiling.
The crash was around the corner from the Boston Children’s Museum, though it was closed at the time. It was also near Martin’s Park, a public area named after Martin Richard, the 8-year-old victim of the deadly 2013 Marathon bombings.
Charlayne Murrell-Smith, a museum spokesperson, said it’s not clear whether the family had been at the museum earlier in the day. But Gracie’s parents met with museum leadership in the past week, she said, with a message “that Gracie not be forgotten.”
She said the city should treat the area around the museum and the park the way it does schools, with more signage and tighter laws.
“The museum and the park need to be thought of differently,” she said.
Franklin-Hodge said the laws around school zones are strict about where the zones can be used, but the city will look at creating some sort of separate “safety zone” around the area.
He and Flynn, who represents the neighborhood, took questions from residents who expressed a range of concerns, looking for more police enforcement, speed humps, and answers to why scooters continue to be seen speeding down streets and sidewalks alike.
Flynn, who’s advocated for stronger traffic-safety measures and more police for years, said he will continue to push to hire more officers. He said police officials have told him they plan to have a larger presence in the area. “This is a neighborhood,” Flynn said. “We need to do more traffic enforcement.”
Lisa Varela, who attended the street-corner meeting, said she had considered asking a question but knew she’d choke up.
The North End resident grabbed a stroller holding her 2year-old son, Santana, and began to walk away, tears in her eyes. She said they come down to the area every week, but Santana — she placed her hand protectively on his knit-capped head and held it there as she spoke — isn’t allowed out of the stroller when they’re out on the busy streets.
“These residential neighborhoods are changing fast, and the city’s not keeping up with it,” she said, referring to both the North End, where she said she once hurled an egg at a speeding motorcyclist she thought was endangering local kids, and Fort Point.
Speed humps or any other measure that would slow cars down on side streets could help, she said.
“Boston is encouraging all these new people to move in,” she said. “But it’s not protecting them.”