Don Chiofaro laid out a six-year construction schedule for his downtown Boston Harbor Garage project and asked for some zoning relief in a project notification form filed with the Boston Redevelopment Authority Wednesday.
The filing was met with harsh words from Chiofaro’s Harbor Towers neighbors. But the developer fired back, saying that he can only knock down the garage if he replaces it with something dense enough to replace the garage’s revenue.
“The garage is an economic venture,” he said. “It has cash flow. The only way to knock it down is to replace it with something with a chance to make money. It’s simple.” He said the project’s height is being driven primarily by the towers’ slender footprints, adding, “To be sure, we’ve got a big building. It isn’t written anywhere that you shouldn’t have tall buildings in cities.”
The filing fleshes out a six-year construction schedule for erecting two towers that would total 1.5 million square feet of office, hotel, residential and retail space. The proposed towers – a 40-story, 560 foot tall office building and a 59-story, 690 foot hotel and condo tower, to be connected by a 770-foot tall frame – would go vertical between 2014 and 2017. That construction would be preceded by a phased demolition of the existing garage and construction of the first phase of the towers’ underground parking.
Chiofaro eventually plans to replace the existing 1,475 above-ground parking spots with 1,200-1,400 below-grade spots.
The trustees of neighboring Harbor Towers released a statement Thursday in which they described themselves as “vigorously opposed to Mr. Chiofaro’s plan for redevelopment as presented to the city.”
The Harbor towers statement labeled Chiofaro’s $900 million proposal as “simply too large and imposing for this unique and valuable block near both the water’s edge and the new Rose Kennedy Greenway, and utterly inconsistent with the surrounding neighborhood.”
The trustees also charged that Chiofaro has not engaged them “in any meaningful way.”
Chiofaro said that he has been meeting with residents from the surrounding neighborhoods, and said that the BRA review process would provide a forum for dialogue with the project’s critics.
