Excuses, excuses and more excuses. That pretty much sums up the history of billionaire Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs’ halfhearted attempts to transform the area around North Station and the TD Garden into the center of a commercial, retail and residential megaplex.

In the late 1980s, Jacobs’ Delaware North Cos. first began pitching the idea of a sports arena surrounded by as many as three towers and millions of square feet of offices, shops and restaurants.

But what we ended up getting is possibly one of the most bare-boned, ugly-duckling sports arenas in America, with vacant lots instead of towers to adorn it.

The time has arrived for Jacobs to fish or cut bait with his Garden building plans – to either get building or sell the development rights around the Garden to someone who can get the job done.

"You would think something would have been developed," Steve Wintermeirer, a member of the Alliance of Boston Neighborhoods, told me recently. "Let’s face it. A lot of these guys do land banking. They just wait for the right opportunity to come along and they are willing to sit on these things for decades."

OK, our Buffalo billionaire, who controls a vast concessions, hotel and gambling empire, did finally manage to ante up on the payroll to help land the talent needed to win the Stanley Cup. But when it comes to developing the lots around the Garden, it appears to be the same old, same old – lots of talk, but no money down.

And the latest trial balloon – for a supermarket in front of the Garden – simply shows how far the once grand plans for the land around the arena have sunk.

A Revolving Door

Boston officials gave the "new" Garden a green light back in the early 1990s, with clear anticipation that it would soon be followed by three towers and 2.3 million square feet of commercial and residential space.

Twin towers were meant to flank what was to be a mall/grand entrance that would lead into the arena off Causeway Street. A third tower was slated for the Nashua Street side.

The rough, big box feel of the Garden’s exterior, in turn, was no design quirk. After all, a massive, Prudential Center style development was supposed to go in front, so its stark ugliness was considered a temporary problem.

But since the Garden opened in 1995, there’s been a revolving door of development plans and real estate partners, but no deals and definitely no signs of any construction.

Talk of building out that grand, twin tower entrance eventually faded, with Delaware North, by 2005, having shifted its attention to building a fashionable condo tower on the Nashua Street side of the Garden.

But that plan, in turn, has faded too as more years have rolled by, leaving us, incredibly, with the prospect of a piece of the city skyline being taken up by… a grocery store?

Jacobs’ defenders/enablers will say "Poor guy, he just missed all the development cycles."

But who really believes that one?

Tens of millions of square feet of new office, retail and residential space has taken shape in Boston and in the suburbs in the 16 years since the new Garden opened its doors. That includes quite a lot of downtown development, including a bevy of office and condo towers.

But on top of all that, Jacobs was handed advantages other developers probably would have been eager to capitalize on.

No Pressure

The new Garden was built on air-rights over North Station, freeing up the site of the old Garden for development. Jacobs picked up additional air-rights along Nashua Street for another 400 foot tower for just $3 million. State and city officials played key roles in assembling all the land and air-rights parcels for Delaware North.

To top it all off, Jacobs got a multimillion-dollar tax break on the new Garden itself.
But city officials, in what now appears to be a major blunder, never directly tied the tax break on the arena to the plans for a mega development around it.

So there was no financial penalty for Jacobs in not following through with those new towers – nor did he even have the kind of substantial carrying costs other developers shoulder when they buy a tract on the open market.

"He made such a good deal on the Garden, in essence he owned the balance without any carrying costs," said David Begelfer, chief executive of NAIOP which represents developers in Massachusetts. "It takes the pressure off of doing anything."

Instead, the incentive for Jacobs has been to sit and wait – and watch the neighborhood around the Garden steadily improve as the old Central Artery came down and other developers began to build.

Of course, Jacobs and the Garden and those rapidly vanishing tower plans were supposed to have been the engine driving the redevelopment of the scruffy North Station neighborhood.

But instead Jacobs and his Delaware North are enjoying the free ride that comes with being the caboose.