You have to hand it to John Hynes. With the kickoff of the latest piece of his multibillion-dollar Seaport Square project, Hynes is well on his way to pulling off one of the more remarkable comebacks in the storied history of Boston development.
Frankly, Hynes looked like he was toast back in 2008, when his plans for a landmark redevelopment of the old Filene’s shopping complex stalled out with the Great Recession.
The debacle left Downtown Crossing with a gaping hole in the ground and an irate Mayor Tom Menino breathing down Hynes’ neck.
I wasn’t alone in thinking then that it was only a matter of time before Hynes lost control of his hugely ambitious plans to build a new, 23-acre neighborhood in Boston’s emerging Seaport district. The career of one of Boston’s most successful tower builders looked to be all but over.
But the death watch was for naught. Hynes somehow managed to hang onto the multibillion Seaport Square dream, keeping his investors on board and the now-late mayor at bay.
Now, as he pushes ahead with construction of the $600 million One Seaport Square, a centerpiece of his massive new waterfront development, Hynes has a chance to earn a place in history as one of Boston’s master builders.
“It look us a long time to get here, but we are underway,” Hynes said, in quite the understatement.
Yes, it sure did.
The breadth of what Hynes is building on the waterfront is truly amazing. By the time it’s all complete, the $3.5 billion development will boast more than 6 million square feet of commercial, residential and retail space. It’s twice the size of much-ballyhooed Fan Pier, which can be found literally right across the street on the other side of Northern Avenue. Backed by Morgan Stanley’s deep pockets, he is teaming up with various developers on various parts of the Seaport Square development.
Critical for a city starved for new housing, 3,000 new condos and apartments will be built by the time the massive project is complete.
One Seaport Square alone is a formidable project, with its 832 apartments in twin high-rises the largest single residential project in recent Boston history. And that’s before we get to plans for 250,000 of retail space – the largest block of shops yet for the Seaport, including a Showplace Icon cinema complex and a Kings bowling and entertainment venue. The new stores and retail are being designed with a Main Street feel, with entrances facing the sidewalk.
Lifestyle center WS Development and Berkshire Group are Hynes’ partners on the One Seaport Square project.
Other projects are also underway on the Seaport Square grid, bringing the total of new commercial, retail and residential space under construction to about 2.5 million square feet, or just under the halfway point, Hynes said.
Looking ahead, Hynes is now gearing up for a big push in 2015 for an international school that will provide a magnet for families to settle in his new neighborhood. Preliminary plans call for roughly 1,000 students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
“It’s on my priority list for next year,” he said. “We all know of young families who made the choice to move out to the suburbs because the schools are more convenient to their homes. We are trying to add one more alternative to that decision-making process.”
An Independent Streak
Getting to this point has hardly been easy for Hynes, who faced some unique challenges in Boston’s notoriously tricky and tempestuous development market.
Hynes hit center stage in the Boston development scene with his blockbuster development of One Lincoln Street, a previously failed tower development that Hynes built and then leased out to State Street for its new headquarters. His later sale of the tower reaped hundreds of millions of dollars.
On the international stage, Hynes was making even bigger waves, overseeing the development of a $40 billion, entirely new city in South Korea.
But the Great Recession – and the crippling blow it dealt to his Filene’s redevelopment plans – looked like it was going to send Hynes’ star crashing back to earth – and the epic economic collapse of 2008 wasn’t the only obstacle Hynes faced.
Hynes’ ambition and independent streak turned out to be major handicaps in Menino’s Boston, where petty jealously and insecurity often ruled when it came to the late – and yes, beloved – mayor’s relationships with hard-driving builders with a mind of their own.
Hynes’ unique pedigree as the son of beloved local newscaster Jack Hynes and grandson of one of Boston’s best mayors in modern times didn’t help, either.
Hynes was forced to sell off his Filene’s project to Millennium Partners, a Menino favorite, after his New York backer, Vornado, decided it was putting the project on the shelf.
But Hynes lost the battle only to win the war, for he managed to convince Morgan Stanley, the main investor behind his Seaport Square gambit, to stay the course. That couldn’t have been easy, with Menino and City Hall, in the wake of the Filene’s mess, heaping additional demands onto Hynes’s Seaport project.
In fact, before he could start building any cash-generating shops, apartment or offices, Hynes was first required to build an innovation center, now called “District Hall,” as well as new parks.
Hynes huddled with Morgan Stanley and came up with the millions in additional equity needed to finance and build these adornments first, rather than after the commercial pieces of the project started to come on line.
Of course, it was all on top of the more than $200 million spent to acquire the Seaport development site back in 2006 and the millions more spent to shepherd plans through the city permitting process.
Along with extra cash, it also cost Hynes an additional two years, nothing to sneeze at in the time-is-money, don’t-miss-the-development-cycle world of major real estate projects.
The bottom line is that Hynes was prepared to start construction of One Seaport Square back in 2012. Had he been given more flexibility in the roll-out of the public amenities, we might be getting ready to celebrate the project’s opening, not its groundbreaking.
“It was an added burden to the cost of our land,” Hynes recalled. “It just became an obstacle we confronted head-on.”
But all that is in the past now, including the Filene’s chapter, with Millennium moving forward with the landmark redevelopment Hynes had hoped would be his own.
Yet a decade from now, no one is going to remember Hynes’ ultimately unsuccessful effort to get the Filene’s redevelopment project off the ground in the midst of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. There are more than few towers on the Boston skyline that were built by entirely different developers after the original owners struck out, for one reason or another. If Seaport Square turns out to be the grand slam it certainly looks to be so far, Hynes will surely be remembered for that, not Filene’s.
Email: sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com
