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Image courtesy of City Realty
A Brookline developer is designing an Allston apartment tower to open a connection from the Packards Corner area to the MBTA’s planned West Station.
City Realty Group says it will sell part of its 76 Ashford St. property to the state for a bus, bicycle and pedestrian corridor to the future commuter rail station, which is planned as part of the Allston Multimodal Project including realignment of the Massachusetts Turnpike. On Tuesday, City Realty notified the Boston Planning & Development Agency that it will seek approval for a 16-story tower containing 262 apartments.
City Realty bought the 0.8-acre parcel bordering the MBTA tracks in 2018 for $6.7 million from a medical device manufacturer. Clifford Kensington, a City Realty acquisitions manager, began attending meetings of the task force advising state transportation officials on the Interstate 90 project.
“One of the slides talked about North-South connections and the preferred option for placement, and it showed it going through our lot,” Kensington said. “I had to raise my hand and said, `I might be able to help with that.’ ”
City Realty would sell a 16,545-square-foot section of the property to the state for the approximately 62-foot-wide corridor including center bus lanes – critical to any effort to connect West Station to areas north and south of the Turnpike via public transit – bike lanes and a pedestrian path leading to the station site, Kensington said. The sales proceeds could be granted to a nonprofit for an off-site affordable housing project, Kensington said, and the tower would include 34 affordable units.
The new corridor also would provide bicycle and pedestrian access through the station site to the Charles River, which is cut off by the tracks from the neighborhood for a 2.6-mile stretch from the BU Bridge to Cambridge Street. Designs by Boston-based architects Embarc also include potential retail space facing the train station.
The property is zoned for industrial use, and the project will require variances from the zoning board of appeals for height and residential use.
The timing, design and funding of West Station as part of the $1 billion redesign of the Massachusetts Turnpike’s Allston viaduct is still in the planning phase, but could prompt a building boom dwarfing recent construction near the new Boston Landing MBTA station.
Harvard University is planning a 36-acre enterprise research campus on the former Beacon Park rail yard it acquired from CSX Transportation. In December, the university selected New York developer Tishman Speyer to design the first 14-acre phase of the project including office and lab space, housing and a hotel-conference center.
A new four-track design for West Station released in June would allow future passenger rail service connecting to East Cambridge along the Grand Junction line, which is currently used for freight service.
