It takes a Village to raise a neighborhood

The district around the Broadway T station in Southie,­ once home to Whitey­ Bulger's Triple O's, used to be called the Lower End and more recently was considered part of the neighborhood's expansive West Side.

But the triangle along Dorchester Avenue and West Broadway up to A Street has undergone massive changes in the past decade and now a new name for the mini-district is gaining traction — Broadway Village.

If it sounds pretentious, it's not intended to be. Twelve years ago this area between the Broadway and Fourth Street bridges was primarily an industrial district. Bordered by Gillette on one side, nearby was the empty Court Square Press printing plant, a shuttered Sts. Peter & Paul Catholic Church and the closed Cardinal Cushing High School, mixed in with local hangouts such as the Cornerstone, Mul's Diner, Amrheins and the Quiet Man Pub. But there were also ramshackle auto garages, gas stations and empty lots.

Now there are hundreds of high-end condos — including those at the rehabbed church and printing press — and several new luxury apartment complexes. There's a Franklin Cafe, a Stephi's restaurant and, yes, a Starbucks. A plan for an upscale 14-story boutique hotel has been OK'd, on the site of a former gas station, a 160-unit residential project at A and West Third Streets in on the table, and there's rumors that the Cornerstone site may soon host more upscale housing.

Whoever came up with the Broadway Village name hasn't come forward. It was one of a number of suggestions sent to an email address on a billboard atop the now-demolished Quiet Man Pub that said "This corner needs a name."

"The area has changed so much" said Southie resident Dom Lange who put up the sign, and has sold real estate here for 12 years. "It deserved a new name."

Broadway Village was chosen by more than 50 percent of some 200 people who voted on a new neighborhood name on a subsequent online poll.

"I would have preferred something edgier, but I like Broadway Village," said Bill Gleason, president of the West Broadway Neighborhood Association, who bought a condo here 12 years ago. "Everything we've done here has been about making this area feel more like a residential village."

Gleason said truckers used to come over the bridges and dump trash and empty ashtrays in the streets.

"It's been about changing the mindset of what this area is now," Gleason added. "The name seems to be sticking."

But not everyone likes it. John Libonati, co-owner of Social Wines, an upscale liquor store that opened in the area several years ago, isn't having it.

"I don't like the name Broadway Village. It makes the area feel small," said Libonati, who said he'd prefer the acronym WEBR for West Broadway. "But I don't think this area needs to be renamed. It's South Boston, that's what I tell my cus­tomers."

Michael LeBlanc, an architect designing a high-end rental project at 22-26 West Broadway, uses the moniker, while acknowledging that rebranding efforts usually come from realtors trying to add value.

"But it can be a healthy way for people to ID their neighborhood and capture the spirit of a place" LeBlanc said.

He added that sometimes neighborhood names change because people want to forget. The Lower End calls up the era of Bulger and of a ramshackle district where residents were lower on the economic and social scale.

The area's new residents are more affluent and Whitey's old haunt at 28-30 West Broadway is on the market for $3.9 million.

"I hear more people using the name," said Lange, who named his new brokerage Broadway Village Real Estate. "We're not trying to impose it on people. If it sticks it's because the residents like it and that's good. If it doesn't, well that's OK too."

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The Ticker

Credit Suisse buys 400 Atlantic Ave.

Investment bank Credit Suisse bought 400 Atlantic Ave. in Boston for $50 million from New York's Colonnade Properties, according to Registry of Deeds documents filed this week. The law firm Goulston & Storrs is the sole tenant in the 99,749-square-foot office building. "We have a 10-year lease that we just re-upped, so we have no plans to move anywhere," spokesman Jeff Scalzi said.

Rhode Island Assembly urged to pass 38 Studios settlement bill

The lawyer for the Rhode Island economic development agency that is suing Curt Schilling over its failed investment in his video game company said yesterday that passing proposed legislation encouraging out-of-court settlements will help maximize any potential financial recovery.

The agency is suing the former Red Sox pitcher and 13 others after 38 Studios went bankrupt. The agency was responsible for a $75 million loan guarantee given to the company. The bill under consideration would shield any party that settles with the state from a lawsuit filed by a co-defendant over damages that co-defendant is found liable for.

Starbucks sales cool off

Starbucks Corp. yesterday reported that sales at established stores in its U.S.-dominated Americas region cooled more than analysts expected in its latest quarter as consumers spent more time holiday shopping online than at physical stores. Global sales at Starbucks cafes open at least 13 months were up
5 percent, versus analysts' average estimate for a
5.9 percent rise, according to Consensus Metrix.

Today

 Procter & Gamble and Samsung Eletronics report quarterly financial results before the market opens.

THE SHUFFLE

Wayfair, the largest online retailer of home furnishings and decor, appointed Christiane Lemieux, above, as executive creative director. In her new role, Lemieux will provide creative vision and counsel across the company's growing portfolio of home brands including Wayfair.com, AllModern, Joss & Main and DwellStudio.

 General Catalyst Partners, a Cambridge, Palo Alto, Calif., and New York-based venture capital firm that makes early stage equity investments, has named Donald Fischer as its newest venture partner. In this role, Fischer will identify and lead investments in early stage enterprise companies.

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A million Neiman customer cards hit

The FBI is warning retailers to be on alert for more cyber-attacks involving malicious software used to steal customers' credit and debit card data as luxury retailer Neiman Marcus yesterday disclosed that more than 1 million customers' cards may have been compromised.

A Jan. 17 FBI report describes risks posed by "memory-parsing" malware that's infected companies' point-of-sale systems in about 20 hacking cases in the past year, Reuters reported yesterday.

"We believe POS malware crime will continue to grow over the near term, despite law enforcement and security firms' actions to mitigate it," the FBI report said, according to Reuters. "The accessibility of the malware on underground forums, the affordability of the software and the huge potential profits to be made from retail POS systems in the United States make this type of financially motivated cyber crime attractive to a wide range of actors."

Neiman Marcus disclosed Jan. 10 that hackers may have stolen its customers' credit and debit card information. The company, which has Boston and Natick stores, hasn't yet informed the state how many Massachusetts customers were affected.

As of yesterday, Visa, MasterCard and Discover had notified the Dallas company that about 2,400 cards used at Neiman Marcus and Last Call stores were subsequently used fraudulently, Neiman Marcus Group CEO Karen Katz disclosed in a letter on the company's website. "It appears that the malware actively attempted to collect or 'scrape' payment card data from July 16, 2013, to October 30, 2013," she said.

Target Corp. said last month that the credit and debit card data of up to 40 million customers had been accessed by hackers in a malware attack, and this month said personal information of 70 million customers also was accessed.

Consumers can expect more merchants admitting breaches in the near future, because their Internet protocol addresses, logins and passwords are being sold on the black market, said Dan Clements, president of IntelCrawler, a cyber-intelligence firm.

"It has a level of sophistication where the Target (breach) would not have shocked you," he said. Criminals are advertising them for as little as $25, and throwing in malware already loaded on merchants' systems for $100, according to Clements.

"It's very, very low-risk and a high return," he said. "It's just simple economics."

Herald wire services contributed to this report.

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Chain targets part-timers

Target's decision to move its part-time workers from its own insurance program to Obama­care likely marks the opening of the floodgates for other com­panies to do the same, potentially pushing tens of thousands of Bay State part-timers onto government-sanctioned health care by this summer, experts said.

"Before June of this year, you're going to see a migration of 100,000 to 200,000 Massachusetts residents" said Bill Fields, an employer consultant, describing the expected shift from employer-sponsored insurance to the state Health Connector.

Target announced this week it will no longer provide health insurance for its part-time employees.

"Health-care reform is transforming the benefits landscape and affecting how all em­ployers, including Target, administer health benefits coverage," said Jodee Kozlack, Target's executive vice president of human resources, in a statement. "Our decision to discontinue this benefit comes after careful consideration of the impact on our stores' part-time team members and to Target, the new options available for our part-time team, and the historically low number of team members who elected to enroll in the part-time plan."

Target says fewer than 10 percent of its 361,000 part-timers are enrolled in its plan. The statement said if Target continued to offer health in­surance for part-time em­ployees, some workers could be disqualified from Obamacare subsidies they might otherwise be entitled to receive.

Fields predicted there could be a ripple effect.

"Once they see their neighbor doing it, you're going to see a lot of copycats," Fields said about companies that employ part-timers.

Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, said Romneycare prompted a similar trend.

"Around 2008 or 2009, we recommended to all of our members that they drop coverage for part-timers. It rapidly happened," Hurst said.

But Fields said he advises his clients to keep insurance for part-timers, and he said companies that do not are making a cold, fiscal decision.

"It's a bottom-line argument," Fields said. "You don't have the morals you normally have in these situations."

The total number of part-time employees in Massachusetts was not immediately available.

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Local life science companies flex muscles at conference

Life science com­panies — one of Massachusetts' key sectors — are coming off a week that showcased them at their strongest, according to local industry in­siders who attended the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.

More than 240 biotech companies — many of them from Massachusetts — made presentations to about 500 investors at last week's conference, said Donna LaVoie, president and CEO of the LaVoie Group, a Cambridge health-care communications company.

About 25 companies already are in line to go public, said Bruce Booth, a partner at Atlas Venture in Cambridge, and by the end of the year, the number likely will reach 30.

"There is a shift," said Ron Renaud Jr., president and CEO of Idenix Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge. "We used to talk about (only) 15 or 20 profitable biotechs."

Immuno-oncology companies — those that focus on getting the immune system to attack a cancer — are among the hottest, Booth said.

But not every investor is waiting for an IPO, he said; the pharmaceutical industry is embracing innovative new start-ups, wanting to get involved with them at the earliest stages.

"The discussion is about launching these great new drugs," Booth said. "Many of them were born in small biotechs."

The "build-to-buy" struc­tured deal — one in which you create a company, already knowing who the buyer will be — is here to stay, he said.

"You know exactly what your return curve is." Booth said.

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Website woes seen months before launch

State officials overseeing the Health Connector website knew as early as February 2013 — some nine months before launch — that parts of the $69 million Obamacare gateway would probably be delayed, public records obtained by the Herald last night revealed.

"It opens another whole can of worms of questions about how early did these issues start," Joshua Archambault of the Pioneer Institute said about the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority Board. "At what point did they know it was not going to work on Oct. 1 and still decided to go live?"

University of Massachusetts Worcester spokesman Mark Shelton said the memos reveal just how closely the state has been monitoring the performance of CGI, the website's developer.

"The university, the Connector and the commonwealth have been actively managing this process since work began on this immensely complex project in 2010," he said. CGI declined to comment last night.

The latest documents reviewed by the Herald indicate that as early as February last year, state officials and CGI discussed "deferring some scope" of the website after the Oct. 1 launch, according to a memo from Dr. Jay Himmelstein of UMass Medical School to Peter Ihrig of CGI.

By late April, "CGI expressed concerns that it could not meet the February Plan timelines for code development, testing completion and go-live for October 1, 2013," according to the memo. On June 21, CGI was "at least two weeks behind and up to seven weeks behind its projected code development pace," the memo said.

The July 1 memo concludes "there is a substantial and likely risk that CGI may be unable to deploy into production the scope of HIX/IES functionality on October 1, 2013."

Since launching on Oct. 1, the disastrous site has frustrated customers trying to enroll. Several key deadlines have been pushed back or bypassed with stopgap fixes. State officials, who have stopped paying CGI, have been forced to create manual workarounds to enroll Bay Staters by March 31.

But a later memo from Himmelstein dated Oct. 25 — three-and-a-half-weeks after the embarrassing launch — revealed exactly how consequential state officials feared the website failures could be. Himmelstein complained to CGI's Ihrig that the state had "already incurred substantial costs to develop and implement operational workarounds" for the site. He also warned CGI's failures could prevent Bay Staters from accessing Obamacare, "suffer harm" to the state's reputation and "incur additional costs."

Gov. Deval Patrick insisted on Nov. 14 the state site "gets better every day" and called the bugs and glitches "nothing unexpected." He also said the site's slow speed was "because there's been just a lot of demand for it."

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Tempo thermometer kinda cool, and that’s just how it leaves us

Tempo Bluetooth Smart Thermometer ($47, Bluemaestro.com)

The latest edition to the "smart home" movement comes to us from U.K. startup Blue Maestro. This app-enabled temperature sensor can alert your smartphone when the temperature of a room is outside a designated threshold and keep a running log of how cold or hot it has been.

The good: Do you often check on your children and pets during those extremely cold winter nights to make sure they're not exceedingly cold or hot? Then this product seems like a good idea. Plus, it's sleek and simple.

The bad: You have to be in Bluetooth range to be alerted to a temperature emergency, which is a giant bummer. This product would be much better if it could shoot you an email.

The bottom line: This seems like a good idea, but it's got a very limited application. I'd wait for something better.

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New mayor embraces digital technology

For the first time ever, there is a computer on the desk of Boston's mayor, just one of several signs that a new digital era has arrived at City Hall.

Mayor Martin J. Walsh has not one, but two iPhones — an iPhone 5 as his personal phone, and a shiny new iPhone 5s for his office phone. Mayor Thomas M. Menino, Walsh's predecessor, was a notorious technophobe — though he hired people who did a ton to bridge the city's digital divide. He knew social media was important but he didn't really get how it worked.

Walsh does. He pushes himself to learn. Walsh uses apps on his iPad to read the news and to capture images of business cards.

He posts from the social media dashboard Hootsuite and even uses Twitter, just yesterday sending out the pregame message: "Go Pats!!! MJW" which is how his personal tweets are signed. And he does another thing that Menino never quite mastered.

"Yes, I check my own email," Walsh told the Herald. "I texted a 'LOL' today. I talk to my girlfriend's daughter to find out what all those sayings mean."

What will having a digitally literate mayor mean? Here are some of the ideas being floated:

• Monthly mayoral webcasts.

•      Virtual community meetings, letting citizens weigh in from home.

• A city app to promote independently owned businesses.

•  A public schools/startup community connection.

•   A high-tech overhaul for the city's neglected public access channel.

"We have an incredible opportunity here to firmly insert technology throughout city government and to make doing business with the city easier and more common sense," Walsh said.

Walsh has already discussed ideas for new city apps with the Office of New Urban Mechanics, the small civic innovation department he wants to expand. And he's promoted a 33-year-old expert in constituent services, Justin Holmes, to the position of interim Chief Information Officer, a job that could easily have gone to a veteran of the perfunctory world of IT, a sign Walsh knows City Hall departments can be laboratories for new ideas.

As Menino's director of constituent engagement, Holmes more than doubled the number of residents who interact with the city, launched the first Twitter feed for constituent services, helped get the Citizens Connect app off the ground and dramatically improved the satisfaction rate of residents who asked their government for help.

"When you think about municipal technology, it's not the ends, it's the means," Holmes said. "Mayor Walsh knows this, so the opportunity to drive change is 
incredibly exciting."

Added Nigel Jacob, one of the city's two research and development gurus: "With Mayor Walsh, it's just a new day."

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Casino applicants wary about trade secrets

Lawyers for the state Gaming Commission are poring over a slew of casino application filings marked "confidential" to judge the merits of developers' claims that they include critical trade secrets — but City Hall suspects they may be overreaching.

In petitions to the commission, the city of Boston — which is studying if it can argue it is a host community to casinos in either Everett or Revere — says sections of a Wynn Resorts application for an Everett casino "exclude information which has been provided to the commission, certain elements of which are relevant to the city's review." Mayor Martin J. Walsh said he's particularly concerned with 77 pages he said are under seal in the Wynn application Boston received.

"There's a lot of questions I have about that proposal," Walsh said. "Wynn having 77 pages missing is alarming."

Gaming Commission spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll said of the legal review: "The commission will continue to make every effort to ensure a transparent process while also balancing our statutory obligations to certain privacy rights and competitively sensitive information." She said the commission will either allow filings to remain confidential or release them.

The casino application form includes a list of 47 filings the Gaming Commission presumes applicants will consider confidential, such as audited financial statements. Applicants can check a box to agree or disagree, and request that even more answers be hidden. Wynn requested an additional 38 filings be withheld, including how its Everett casino will fit the "Massachusetts brand," plans to work with minority- and female-owned businesses, and how staff will be trained to identify signs of gambling addiction.

Company spokesman Michael Weaver said Wynn, a publicly traded company, is obligated to protect "sensitive financial and strategic company information."

"The documents available to the general public are consistent with the type of information made available by a company, for example, to individuals considering investing in the company," Weaver said. "We believe there is ample information to enable the public to understand the scope and impact of the proposed project and the clear difference between Wynn and Mohegan Sun."

Mohegan Sun, which is proposing a casino at Suffolk Downs in Revere, only asks that two additional filings be confidential, items referred to in the application as "Land" and "Site Plan." A spokesman said the items are attachments to a confidential lease agreement. Mohegan filed several site plans that are public.

"Mohegan Sun believes openness is important in the licensing process, and our application allows not only the Gaming Commission but our host community, surrounding communities and the public to examine and understand our proposal," the company said in a statement.

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