The Grey Lady gives a big wet kiss today to local developer Steve Samuels, who’s responsible for most of the recent building boom in the Fenway area.

From the Times Business section’s Square Feet column:

Fenway Park’s Neighborhood Changes, but Keeps Its Character

BOSTON — The Fenway neighborhood is most closely associated with Fenway Park, the Red Sox and baseball-themed taverns.

But according to Steve Samuels, the chairman of Samuels & Associates, a Boston development firm, the neighborhood character is better represented at the Tasty Burger walk-up window on Boylston Street around 2 a.m. on weekend nights.

“There you have the kids who’ve been drinking at the nightclubs on Lansdowne Street, medical residents in their scrubs who just got off their shifts, and the transvestites from the gay bar up the street — all standing in line for a burger,” Mr. Samuels said. “That is the Fenway. It’s a unique and funky area, and it’s got great personality.”

Not to mention rents in new developments like Fenway Triangle Trilogy  that “start  at about $2,700 for a studio and range to more than $8,000 for a three-bedroom.”

And that’s just part of what Samuels has done, as Times reporter Lisa Prevost notes.

Since 2004, his company has built nearly 950 rental units in the neighborhood in three residential towers featuring landscaped terraces, rooftop decks and ground-floor retail. With the help of Chinese investors, it recently broke ground on a fourth, the 30-story Pierce, which will add another 240 rentals and 109 upper-floor condominiums in sleek glass towers marking the gateway to the neighborhood.

Here’s one development she overlooked, though (via the Boston Herald).

Family reels in anguish after Thanksgiving murder outside Fenway bar

A family is mourning the murder of a young commuter rail conductor, shot down around 2 a.m. outside a bar across from Fenway Park in a hail of gunfire that left three other young men wounded.

Jephthe Chery’s mother, flanked by loved ones, howled “My son!” in anguish on the quiet Hyde Park street this afternoon where he lived with her as well as a younger brother and sister. Car after car of mourners arrived in tears to embrace on the sidewalk.

“He’s the breadwinner in our family,” said a cousin, who identified himself only as Melvin. “Everything he did was positive, nothing negative. The good does die young and he’s a good man that died young.”

(To be fair graf goes here)

To be fair, the murder of Jephthe Chery is not entirely representative of the Fenway area.

Then again, neither is the Times piece.