The Abbey Group could begin construction on its 337,000-square-foot mixed-use development on Boylston Street in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood as early as fall of 2012.
The developer is planning for 99,000 square feet of office space, 15,000 square feet of retail use and 211 apartment units in a 178-foot-tall building, Abbey Group representatives said at a Boston Redevelopment Authority public meeting last night.
While those uses are to be expected, members of the Fenway Community Development Corp. (CDC) and Fenway Civic Association had long pushed for a community center, and the developer plans to give them a 2,500-square-foot space to be used as such. CDC members present at a neighborhood meeting discussing the project last night said they are "very excited" for the programming opportunities for the space.
The office portions of the buildings will be three floors above the retail space, and will have large floor spaces that can be subdivided as needed.
"We think the way to appeal to the most office users is to have a large floor plate, 30,000-square-foot-plus," said Bill Keravuori, Abbey Group vice president.
Keravuori told Banker & Tradesman the total cost for the project is still unknown and no retail or office tenants have been identified.
The project is being reviewed by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and Abbey Group representatives are in the midst of public meetings to present plans to residents. The project is expected to create 600 construction jobs. The residential units are a mix of studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments "at a highly competitive rate in the Fenway marketplace," the filing states.
The site also has what the filing calls a "superblock," from Jersey Street to the intersection of Boylston Street and Park Drive. The Abbey Group plans to build a new street to connect Boylston to an alley between Boylston and Peterborough streets. This will help break-up the building’s massing, create another access point and move vehicular traffic away from the entrance to adjacent 1330 Boylston, a mixed-use project built by Samuels & Assoc.
The site is currently a surface parking lot that Abbey Group inherited from the Red Sox in exchange for a parking lot the developer owned on Van Ness Street across from Fenway Park. Under the terms of the agreement, the Sox were responsible for demolishing a McDonald’s restaurant, which once sat on the site. The Abbey Group sat on the site as a surface lot to get some income from the property as the company waited out the recession to begin construction.
