Northeastern University and a private development team have resurrected plans for the GrandMarc, a privately-owned dormitory in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood.
The new proposal has lowered the height of the building, reduced the number of beds and mandates that only Northeastern students live in the dorm, according to John Tobin, the school’s vice president of City and Community Affairs.
Plans outlined in a presentation before the Boston Civic Design Commission last night showed a new 17-story tower rising 198 feet above the Huntington Avenue YMCA with 720 student beds in about 200,500 square feet. The former proposal was for a 265-foot tower with 796 beds. The development team is comprised of Lincoln Property Co. and Phoenix Property Co.
The original plan called for security operated by the developer to oversee the building, students and others that would have lived there. However, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino sent the developer packing in light of neighborhood opposition to the structure’s height and privatization, saying that without university involvement, an excess of students would be even less supervised in a neighborhood dense with colleges.
In the new plan, Northeastern would lease the property from the developer and operate it on its own, with hopes of eventually purchasing the building outright, Tobin said. If approved, the school hopes to have shovels in the ground this summer, with an opening date of September 2013. The project was sent to a sub-committee for review.
Plans for a 15-story office building on Parcel B of Joseph Fallon’s Fan Pier development were also presented at the design commission hearing. Commissioners said they were concerned over several aspects of the proposal, not the least of which was a pedestrian bridge that would cross Bond Street connecting the Parcel B building to that on Parcel A at the fifth and sixth floors. Commissioner William Rawn called the bridge the "800-pound gorilla in the room" that would have to be very carefully looked at in a sub-committee.
Also bemoaned was a change from two stories of retail space to only one floor, which makes the building look more like purely office space with ground-floor retail stuck to the bottom rather than a truly mixed use, according to David Hacin, a commissioner.
"You really want two-story retail because it’s a continuum of Seaport Boulevard," and other retail uses there, said Commissioner Kirk Sykes.
"It would be a shame if this feels like a retail street that kind of trails off," Hacin offered. "This was going to be a fairly intense retail street."
"I had been hoping there would be a real lively conversation between facades," Hacin added. "Right now it’s another office building. There’s something about this building that doesn’t encourage a lively streetscape."
The Fan Pier building, along with a project in Chinatown, was sent to a sub-committee for review. The Chinatown building, however, was largely praised by the commission and sent to a sub-committee for only minor review. The project, called Parcel 24, is a 345-unit, mixed-income development along Hudson Street. If approved, it would include 95 affordable rental units, 50 affordable condominiums and 200 market rate rentals.
