BOSTON — A trio of state lawmakers on Monday pressed transit officials over the condition of the parking garage at the MBTA’s Alewife Station, which reopened in the morning after deteriorating concrete forced a weekend shutdown for repairs and assessment.
Saying she was representing “an incredibly angry group of towns,” Sen. Cindy Friedman, an Arlington Democrat, called on the MBTA to detail its plans for the Cambridge garage, roll back a planned parking fee increase and in general “do a much better job of communicating with us.”
“Have you looked at the Alewife station? It’s being held up by hydraulic jacks. It has been for years,” Friedman said at a meeting of the T’s Fiscal and Management Control Board. “It floods. It’s disgustingly dirty, you can’t find somebody there to help you, a T employee – we assume they’ve all been reassigned – and it is in such a state of disrepair that people are frankly scared to go there, and yet it is the only place to park if you take the Red Line from those west and northwestern suburbs, so we are really in a crunch here.”
MBTA general manager Luis Ramirez said a piece of laminated concrete — which he described as “like a veneer that goes in front of the structure” — fell onto a customer’s car on the second floor of the Alewife garage on Wednesday afternoon, and engineers subsequently identified a need for spot concrete repairs in “a number of locations within the garage.”
Crews conducted repairs overnight Wednesday and into Thursday, leaving 500 parking spaces, or about 20 percent of the garage’s capacity, out of use for that time, Ramirez said.
GLOUCESTER — Firefighters say a man who donated to their muscular dystrophy drive accidentally dropped his wedding ring into their boot.
The Gloucester Daily Times reports that firefighter Lukas McRobb was collecting donations in the city on Friday when he found the plain gold wedding band.
Lt. Kevin Gargan says the person met them at the fire station later that day, telling them “I have a funny story …,” before explaining he was the one who made the accidental donation.
Gargan says they never had anything like that happen since they started the annual donation drive.
The department has collected more than $7,300, so far. Most of the money will go toward a fund that sends young people with muscular dystrophy to summer camp.
LENOX — The latest recipient of a college scholarship named for a slain Wall Street Journal reporter says newspapers have been “a constant” in his life.
Noah Hochfelder, a recent graduate of Lenox Memorial Middle and High School, has been named the 2018 recipient of the Daniel Pearl Berkshire Scholarship.
Hochfelder, who has had several journalism internships, will attend Middlebury College in Vermont.
He tells The Berkshire Eagle for a story Sunday, “It’s so important to be up-to-date in the world.”
The $1,000 scholarship honors Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in January 2002 while researching a story.
It was established by the Eagle and the North Adams Transcript, the Massachusetts newspapers where Pearl got his start. It’s awarded to a local student planning to major in journalism or music, Pearl’s passions.