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Redgate Capital and Hilco Redevelopment Partners have proposed a 1.9 million-square-foot mix of condominiums, apartments, hotels and retail space on the site of an old power plant in South Boston. Courtesy Spagnolo Gisness & Assoc.
A 2.1-million redevelopment of the 15-acre former Exelon Corp. power plant property in South Boston would include eight new buildings with residences, offices, a hotel and retail space, developers say.
Boston-based Redgate Capital Partners and Hilco Real Estate notified the Boston Planning and Development Agency of its preliminary development plans following a community planning process.
Ralph Cox, a Redgate principal, said the first phase would likely include office space, residential, restoration of the turbine halls along with creation of a 1-acre waterfront plaza along the Reserved Channel. Other remnants of the site’s former life as a power plant would be retained, including a long-disused gantry crane, Cox said.
“There’s a few artifacts like that we’re going to keep on the site as a nod to its history,” he said. “It won’t be a one-room museum. It’ll be throughout the site, within the buildings and outside in the parks and plaza.”
And space will be reserved for arts and cultural groups in a neighborhood where exhibition and rehearsal areas are growing scarcer amid spiraling real estate prices.
Developers are still studying options for the hotel format, Cox said.
“At peak times, it would facilitate some convention business,” he said. “We’re analyzing that right now. We’d like to see a full-service hotel but we have to do further analysis.”
Redgate and Hilco acquired the decommissioned plant at 776 Summer St. in late 2015. Redgate will submit detailed plans to the BPDA and state environmental officials in four to six weeks, Cox said.
The entire development would be built out over a 10- to 15-year period, developers stated in their letter to the BPDA. The project would require zoning relief under a planned development area, a type of overlay district for large or complex parcels.
