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A burned-out waterfront office building near Boston’s Long Wharf will be replaced by a small hotel, according to a letter sent to city officials.
The two-story 88-91 Commercial Wharf property, built on a pier attached to Boston Harbor’s Commercial Wharf, would be demolished and replaced with a 35- to 45-room hotel, the lawyer for a Cambridge development firm wrote in a project notification letter sent to the Boston Planning Department last week.
Developer Urban Spaces also wants to include a 2,000-sqaure-foot, first-floor restaurant in the 28,680-square-foot, 4-story development, the letter from Hemenway & Barns LLP attorney Johanna Schneider said. No parking will be provided on-site “due to site constraints and an abundance of publicly available parking garages in close proximity” and new portions of the Boston Harborwalk will be installed on the harbor side of the building.
Schneider’s letter states the project will be in compliance with existing zoning dimensional requirements and the state’s Chapter 91 waterfronts law, but will need a Groundwater Conservation Overlay District permit, and due to its size will need to go through the Boston Planning Department’s large project review process.
This latest proposal isn’t the first time someone has tried to redevelop the site.
The buildings on site caught fire when an employee working at late in spring 2011 “carelessly” disposed of a cigarette on a second-floor balcony, Boston Fire Department investigators concluded at the time. The three-alarm fire sent thick smoke flowing across the harbor and sent five firefighters to the hospital.
Florida-based Tavistock Development Group bought the site for $10 million in 2016, and in late 2019 floated the idea of a 140-room hotel in two buildings split between the site and the Joe’s American Bar & Grill property nearby on Commercial Wharf, which the firm had bought in 2011 for $5.6 million.
An LLC controlled by Urban Spaces bought the property for $4 million in early 2025 with a $2 million mortgage from a limited liability company that it shared an address with at the time shared an address, but which is now controlled from the offices of Boston law firm Sullivan & Worcester, property records and state corporation records show.
