State Housing Assistance for Rental Production (SHARP) Subsidy Application, 1984

These records document community activism around the development of three sites in Boston, Massachusetts: the Southwest Corridor, Tent City, and Melnea Cass Boulevard. For each site, Kruckemeyer played an important role in advocating for neighborhood interests to be taken into account in the development schemes proposed by private, city, state, and federal entities. The records also document the planning, environmental impact studies, and construction of the Southwest Corridor, for which Kruckemeyer served as project manager.

Series 1. Community Anti-Highway Activism documents the community-based activism and explorations of viable alternatives to the highway in the years leading up to the Southwest Corridor Project. The records reflect Kruckemeyer’s involvement with the Tubman Area Planning Council, a group of neighborhood residents and other stakeholders who opposed the proposed highway, and with the South End Committee on Transportation (SECOT), which supported public transportation for the community. Entities such as the Greater Boston Committee on the Transportation Crisis (GBC), a coalition of anti-highway community groups across several Boston neighborhoods and neighboring towns, and The Southwest Corridor Land Development Coalition, which represented community views about how to best use the land already cleared for the highway, and of which SECOT was a member, are also represented. This series contains meeting materials, reports, studies, notes and correspondence, mainly dating 1969-1973.

Series 2. The Southwest Corridor Project was developed in the land originally cleared for the highway planned through the neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, the South End and Back Bay. A combination of public transit, open spaces and recreation areas was designed, resulting in a 4.1 mile corridor consisting of subway stations, parks, bike lanes, and more. Approved in 1972, construction began in 1979, after 9 years of planning and environmental impact work. This series documents the development of the project through reports, memos, notes, correspondence, plans, flyers, and newsletters, dating 1968-1993.

Series 3. Tent City Corporation documents community-based advocacy for mixed-income housing to be built on a cleared site near Copley Place. Kruckemeyer served on the Advisory Board beginning in 1979, and later served as President; his papers contain correspondence, memos, newspaper clippings, reports and photographs, dating 1978-2017.

Series 4. The Friends of Melnea Cass Boulevard, a coalition of neighbors and stakeholders, was co-founded by Kruckemeyer to push back against the city’s proposed redesign of the boulevard, particularly in its plans to remove mature trees that lined the boulevard. Records include design plans, notes, photographs, correspondence, flyers, hearing materials and meeting materials, dating 2007-2020.