Newton developer John Rosenthal and his national partner plan to build apartment buildings next to the Pike in preparation for a later phase that will include the air-rights portion of the proposal.
The Bay State may be enjoying an historic building boom, but man, there are still some real turkeys out there.
From towers that never seem to get a shovel in the ground to half-empty film studios built in hopes of turning Massachusetts into Hollywood East, we seem to always attract more than our share of pipe dreams along with real, bona fide projects.
So it’s time again for the semi-annual turkey shoot, where we take aim at all the big, fat gobblers waddling shameless about with a heathy dose of verbal buckshot.
Just a word of warning, though: Our turkeys are a special breed here in Massachusetts, and are generally impervious to logic, shame or ridicule. That means more than a few will be around for more fun at next year’s shoot!
All Air-Rights Projects, Period
I have enjoyed reading the recent headlines on gun-control activist John Rosenthal’s now two-decades-long quest to deck over the Turnpike by Fenway Park and build an apartment tower/retail complex. At least two reports in the last six months have proclaimed the project finally ready to move forward.
In fact, Rosenthal has claimed to be ready to break ground or move forward since I first began tracking his air-right tower plans in the mid-1990s. If you read the fine print of the latest story, Rosenthal isn’t ready to break ground at all on his air-rights tower – rather the Newton developer and his national partner now plan to build a couple of apartment buildings next to the Pike in hopes of preparing for a later “phase” that will include the air-rights portion of the proposal.
Scott Van Voorhis
Nice spin, but this is simply dressing up the fact that he won’t be moving ahead with this air-rights plan anytime soon.
Rosenthal’s project may be a turkey, but it’s much bigger than that. Since Copley Place and the Prudential were built decades ago, all air-rights proposals have essentially been big fat turkeys.
In fairness to Rosenthal, the Columbus Center plan may have been the biggest gobbler of them all. That air-rights proposal, which would have bridged the turnpike highway canyon, set neighbor against neighbor and triggered literally hundreds of angry community meetings and generated countless headlines. Millions were blown on legal fees, public relations nonsense and marketing. And for what? The project ended up crumping out shortly after the bulldozers began site work, leaving a big – and expensive – mess for the public to clean up.
Now a new set of developers are kicking the tires on the site and looking at giving it a go. Stop the madness! These plans are doomed from the start, no matter who the builder is. They don’t work because someone has to pick up the $20 million to $30 million tab to build a deck over the Pike and no one in state government – or for that matter at Boston City Hall – will seriously think of forking over that kind of cash.
Unless someone comes up with a solution to pay for infrastructure that doesn’t rely on sticking the developer with the entire bill, we are doomed to endless variations of the same sad song.
Hollywood Delusions
Massachusetts is lucky to have more than its fair share of movie-star talent. And Boston, Cambridge and beyond have become a stage setting for lots of films, some quite successful, over the years.
The state has a generous tax credit for movies that shoot here, which has probably helped boost activity. But attempts to turn the Bay State into Hollywood East by rolling out full-scale movie studios have hardly been a box office success, so to speak.
New England Studios at Devens, the state’s only full-scale film studio, has struggled to attract business since it opened in 2013, despite a glitzy sales pitch. As is often the case with projects like these, there is always some big unnamed movie or show that’s waiting in the wings, so eager to book the studio once some mucky muck in New York or Beverly Hills gives the thumbs up, which, of course, is always about to happen but never really does.
We’ll see. Best of intentions aside, though, three years is a long time to be looking for business. The old “if you build it they will come” definitely doesn’t seem to be working here.
Undaunted, another group is retrofitting a building at the old South Weymouth naval/air base with similar plans.
Good luck with that.
How To Destroy A Dream
Simon Properties has managed to destroy a dream with its ill-fated plans to build a condominium tower at Copley Place, the luxury shopping emporium it owns in Back Bay.
You couldn’t ask for a better location to build luxury condos – it beats the new Millennium Tower’s Downtown Crossing location and edges out the planned new Four Seasons tower’s digs next to the Christian Science complex.
Despite actually owning the development site, a huge advantage in the tough world of Boston development, the suburban mall owner has managed to get exactly nowhere after a decade of on-and-off efforts. In that time the Millennium Tower and several other new condo addresses have managed to get through Boston’s daunting permitting process and are now either open or at least are in construction
But not Simon, which recently mothballed its plans for the third time, saying the luxury residential market is getting crowded. Yes, that’s what happens when you fiddle around for a decade.
The Empty Airport
No turkey list would be complete without a mention of Worcester Airport.
MassPort has pumped countless millions into this turkey since taking it over. The airport has a shiny new terminal but just two flights a day, both Jet Blue. The state authority loses roughly $4 million a year on the airport. The money kept flowing even during one particularly low point in 2012 to 2013, when there were no commercial flights at all taking off from the airport.
The reasons the airport won’t work are obvious to anyone who has tried to drive there. It’s not on a major highway and you have to negotiate a time-consuming labyrinth of Worcester streets and pray you don’t get hopelessly lost and miss your flight.
Airport boosters say all the criticism is unfair and that someday this very expensive bet on what certainly seems like a big government boondoggle will pay off. Airlines and their customers will finally get tired of battling it out at an increasingly crowded Logan and will look west for an alternative.
But the highly successful – and easy to get to – Providence and Manchester airports already provide that alternative. And they also provide proof that a satellite airport in Massachusetts would also work, provided that people can actually get to it without tearing their hair out.
And there you have it – a small sampling of the turkeys of 2016. Perhaps some will avoid inclusion on next year’s list of terrible ideas and ill-fated projects – but no doubt those vacated slots will be filled by proposals even more awful than these.
