With its rumbling subway lines, acres of parking lots and non-stop spiral of traffic, Sullivan Square is a Boston neighborhood that many pass through, but few linger.

Making the area more desirable to commercial tenants, new residents and pedestrians are central themes as city planners consider options for redeveloping the gritty jumble of parcels in the shadow of I-93.

Gone would be the traffic circle that funnels commuters toward neighboring Everett and Somerville. In its place would emerge boulevards lined with new multi-family housing street-level retail. Five publicly owned parcels – now parking lots and vacant land – could be sold to developers for office buildings and housing. And there’s much discussion of an “iconic” building to add an exclamation point to a redesigned northern gateway into the city.

Real estate experts say the focus on Sullivan Square is long overdue.

“Rutherford Avenue is atrocious coming through right now,” said Peter Bekarian, an executive vice president at commercial real estate brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle. “It’s an under-improved industrial area that could stand to benefit exponentially (from redevelopment).”

Released in December by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the Sullivan Square disposition study was compiled by Boston land-use consultants Crosby Schlessinger Smallridge after a year-long process including community meetings.

The opportunity to remake Sullivan Square focuses on six publicly owned parcels owned by the MBTA and the city of Boston that eventually would be sold to individual developers or as a group to a master developer. Most are currently used for surface parking.

In a nod to public consensus, the study recommended building taller buildings and offices on the parcels closest to the MBTA station, with shorter residential blocks closer to the residential neighborhoods in Charlestown. The larger structures would have the added benefit of shielding the neighborhood from the elevated interstate.

A Buffer

“That was one goal we heard: buffering the impact of the highway in terms of the size of the buildings, and blocking the views of the highway,” said Ted Schwartzberg, a planner for the BRA.

Under the conceptual plan, the MBTA station would get a new entrance linked to its bus and Orange Line platforms by an enclosed skylit arcade inspired by Back Bay station, Schwartzberg said. Also on the drawing board: new parking garages to replace the lost surface parking, an intermodal center with ground-floor retail and up to two mid-rise buildings next to the station for housing, offices or a hotel.

In the short term, multi-family housing is more likely to attract developers than offices or retail uses, according to a market analysis done for the BRA by Byrne McKinney & Associates Inc. of Boston.

Demand for new retail development is expected to be modest, the consultants said, with average rents in the Charlestown submarket too low to support new stand-alone construction. But the analysis said ground-level retail storefronts could help make mixed-use buildings economically viable, a view that Jones Lang LaSalle’s Bekarian shares.

“Building commercial buildings and office buildings isn’t the answer,” he said. “It’s one part of it. You need to look at retail and residential. Those things build the neighborhoods and raise the value of commercial buildings.”

Sullivan Square traditionally has been a lower-cost alternative for office tenants coming out of downtown Boston and East Cambridge. The neighborhood’s biggest commercial properties are the 956,000-square-foot Schrafft Center complex, which is owned by The Flatley Co. of Braintree, and Hood Business Park, a 1.2-million-square-foot office campus.

While office construction in the neighborhood is unlikely in the short term, the neighborhood could eventually benefit from companies forced out of Boston and Cambridge by rising rents, said Barry Hynes, a principal at commercial real estate brokerage Cassidy Turley.

One health care company recently scouted space in the neighborhood, indicating an increasing willingness of office users to consider Charlestown for relocation, Hynes said.

“It’s got to be priced right. Hopefully the city will work with developers to make it financially feasible,” he said.

Developers looking for a possible model for Sullivan Square need look no further than Station Landing in Medford, where hundreds of high-rise condos and apartments sit above ground-floor shops, health clubs and restaurants alongside a busy interchange. The 16-acre project near the Orange Line’s Wellington station was built by National Development of Newton between 2004 and 2007.

“You’ve got a very self-contained neighborhood,” Hynes said. “This is much more sprawling, but pieces of Station Landing could certainly apply to this.”

Transportation routes have helped shape Sullivan Square for centuries, tying Boston and its commercial interests to outlying suburbs.

Barges carried freight along the Middlesex Canal from Lowell to Charlestown in the 19th century, to be replaced in turn by the Boston and Lowell Railroad and subway lines. In the 1960s, the construction of the elevated I-93 cast a shadow over the neighborhood as it linked Boston to southern New Hampshire.

With the recent popularity of transit-oriented developments – and government incentives for developers to build near mass transit – the MBTA bus and subway station remains one of Sullivan Square’s key selling points.

“The viability of that location will be in no small part due to the continuing access of the property to that Orange Line station,” Hynes said.

With the conceptual study done, the Boston Transportation Department takes the lead in the next phase as it prepares roadway redesigns. The BRA’s Schwartzberg estimates it could be eight to 10 years before development begins, and market conditions might be strikingly different by then.

“This is a growth area for the city long-term,” he said.

Email: sadams@thewarrengroup.com