| Financing for Fenway Center, a fully approved 1.3 million-square-foot mixed-use development atop the Massachusetts Turnpike, is expected to be completed very soon, according to the project’s developer.
John Rosenthal, president of Meredith Management, announced at an Urban Land Institute event today that his financial partners are prepared to provide funding for the first phase of the development.
Although he would not disclose his joint venture partner or lender, he said the first phase of the $450 million project will "move forward" next year.
Phase one – labeled for an "immediate" start on Rosenthal’s slideshow presentation to the assembled audience – includes a 102-unit apartment building that will house a Harvest Co-op grocery store and more than 28,000 square feet of retail space.
Building two will be a 146-foot-tall apartment building with 216 units. The building was first slated for offices, but recently changed after Rosenthal said he couldn’t finance an office building in today’s economic climate. Another building, known as building four, is a seven-story, 102-unit apartment building. Behind that will sit a 750-space parking garage.
The second phase will begin when the first is complete, and includes a signature 27-story tower with 160,000 square feet of office space and residential units on the upper floors. All told, the project will have 550 residential units, 163,000 square feet of office space, 83,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and 915 parking spaces split between two buildings.
Critics have compared Fenway Center to the doomed Columbus Center project, which was similarly planned as an air rights project over the Mass Pike in Boston’s South End, before failing to secure financing and overcome neighborhood opposition.
But Rosenthal said a major reason for that failure is that the South End project would have been built atop only five percent land, with the rest over the Mass Pike. But a full 55 percent of Rosenthal’s project will be on terra firma, making the construction, while still a huge challenge, markedly less complicated and expensive than Columbus Center.
