Boston needs a new mayor, not another developer-in-chief.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino was at his best setting ambitious goals for others to meet, such as his recent call for tens of thousands of new apartments, condos and homes.
But Menino couldn’t leave well enough alone. Having accrued over the years almost dictatorial powers over Boston’s development scene, Boston’s longest-reigning mayor couldn’t help trying to play real estate mogul himself.
The results sometimes were sometimes amusing, as with the “baby bottle” tower that graces the Back Bay, or astoundingly clueless, as with the ill-fated Tommy’s Tower.
Here are my favorite Menino development brainstorms – each uniquely flawed and occasionally potentially catastrophic in its own way.
Tommy’s Tower
That was the name the Boston Herald gave to Menino’s proposal, unveiled without warning back in 2006 at a meeting of Boston’s top business leaders, for a 1,000 foot tower that would top the city’s skyline. The name stuck long after it became clear Menino’s vision of a multibillion-dollar skyscraper was completely out of whack with any sort of economic reality, let alone conditions in the Boston office market.
Steve Belkin, a travel company owner with no building experience, had quietly pushed the plans for years, but no matter. The mayor took the plan and ran with it, relegating the would-be novice tower builder to the back seat and calling for an international architectural competition. The results were certainly fun to write about – Renzo Piano designed a tower on stilts that would have had five acres of open space below and a park in the clouds at the very top. Yet the plan was so unrealistic as to verge on the completely inane, which may be another reason name Tommy’s Tower stuck.
For starters, there was simply no bank or financier ready to risk billions on such an endeavor. Experienced builders were struggling at the time to finance even modest, mid-rise towers in the 20- to 30-story range, let alone the 80-story monstrosity that Menino was pitching. (By comparison, the Hancock tower is 60 stories.) But say the mayor had succeeded. The result would have been an unmitigated disaster for Boston’s ailing Financial District, sucking a million square feet of tenants and leases from the suddenly shrimpy towers around it. Even without Menino’s fantasy tower, the amount of vacant space surged well past the 20 percent mark in the aftermath of the Great Recession. We could easily have been left with ghost town.
Selling City Hall
Back when I penned a column for the Herald’s business section, I urged Menino to sell City Hall and bring in a few hundred million the city’s cash-starved coffers. It was back during the bubble years and everything related to real estate was hot, hot, hot. I had even talked with a downtown developer eager to buy, demolish the East German style fortress that has long fouled the prime site, and build a mixed-use mega project with a new city headquarters in it.
Imagine my surprise when, driving to work a few weeks later, I got a call from my editor. Menino was about to give a speech laying out plans to sell City Hall, and it quickly became apparent the mayor had added his own twist. Not only would he sell City Hall to a developer, but he would also build a shiny new city headquarters on South Boston’s waterfront.
Selling City Hall would have been difficult enough. But coupling it with construction of a new municipal palace along the waterfront – in South Boston no less – all but doomed this long-shot idea. Fortunate for Boston, and Menino as well, the Great Recession put this idea out of its misery. If not, we might all be reading about Boston’s folly. Just imagine, a new waterfront City Hall, just in time for global warming, rising sea levels and epic storm surges!
The Baby Bottle Tower
As legend has it, Menino threw a fit one day back in the late 1990s after seeing plans for Boston Properties’ newest addition to the Back Bay skyline. The 36-story tower had a flat roof, like the Prudential tower. Apparently Menino never thought much of the Pru, or at least towers with flat tops. The mayor wanted a hat.
“Guys, flat roofs don’t make it,” Menino recounted to the Globe back in 2009.
The developers dutifully trotted over to City Hall, miniature tower tops in hand, taking them on and off a model of 111 Huntington until the mayor found one to his liking.
To be fair, 111 Huntington has done just fine, becoming a premiere corporate address and winning a prestigious award a few years after it opened.
Even so, Menino the architect has earned mixed reviews. The tower, thanks to its silly top, has earned such nicknames as “The Baby-Bottle Building” and even “The R2D2 Tower.”
Seen from a certain perspective, one can find some phallic symbolism and even a hint of a prophylactic device, though I guess it’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Demolishing Fenway Park
OK, to be fair, this wasn’t Menino’s idea, but rather the brain child of former Red Sox chief John Harrington. Still, it is shocking to look back and remember that Menino went to bat for this now clearly foolish plan to tear down the country’s oldest and most beloved ballpark – and a good part of the neighborhood’s commercial core as well – and replace it with a soulless new stadium.
Today the neighborhood around Fenway Park is the hottest development zone in Boston, and maybe on the East Coast, with apartment and condo towers filing up the neighborhood. But if the plan to knock down Fenway Park had gone through, we could very well have ended up with another West End tragedy. Just imagine what the Fenway would be like now, dominated by a huge, half-empty stadium devoted to a team that is struggling to reconnect with its winning ways.
Email: sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com
