The owner of a small but prominent parcel on Boston’s Cambridge Street will likely begin redeveloping the fenced-off site into an office building this fall.

Charles Talanian has drawn up preliminary plans to build a five-story office building at the 290 Cambridge St. site, across the main thoroughfare from Massachusetts General Hospital.

Talanian, who owns Boston-based C. Talanian Realty Co., plans to replace the old Grampy’s gas station, currently penned-in behind a chain-link fence at the foot of the city’s tony Beacon Hill neighborhood, with a 28,000-square-foot office property, along with retail on the first and second floors.

One of those retail spaces will house a new eatery from well-known local restaurateur Thomas Kershaw, famous for operating the old Bull & Finch Pub that has been renamed Cheers after the TV show it helped inspire. Kershaw has told Talanian he plans to open a restaurant tentatively named 75 Cambridge, which will likely be similar to his 75 Chestnut eatery on Beacon Hill’s Chestnut Street.

If that happens, Kershaw will join a growing group of new restaurants that have opened on Cambridge Street in the last two years, including the Tip Tap Room and Fin’s Sushi and Grill. To date, there are no vacant storefronts along the Beacon Hill portion of Cambridge Street, according to Randi Lathrop, director for business development for the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

One reason the street is so full of ground-floor merchants is because the rents are far more affordable than some parts of downtown Boston, about $50 to $60 per square-foot. Granted, retail real estate on the side streets of Downtown Crossing can be anywhere from $20 to $50 a square-foot, but along the main drags, like Washington Street, those number are more like $100 to $200. And those side streets don’t get nearly the amount of foot traffic of the main streets, Lathrop said.  

“Any active ground floor retail we can bring to Cambridge Street is a great addition,” said Melina Schuler, spokesperson for the BRA. “MGH’s medical history museum is really an outstanding, unique building on the Cambridge Street corridor. It really paves the way for these new businesses.”

Music To His Ears

That must be music to the ears of Talanian, who bought the gas station 15 years ago, “for future inventory,” but knowing it would be a parcel that could someday be redeveloped because the gas station was “under-utilizing the land,” he told Banker & Tradesman.

So, around 2004, Talanian got nearly all the approvals he needed from neighbors and the city to build a 26-unit condo project on the site. However, with the parking spaces he would have needed to provide onsite driving the costs too high, as well as the condo market itself that was starting to tank with the housing bubble that created the recession, he decided to abandon that plan.

Plans for the building, and the architectural drawings, like the one featured in this article, are far from finished. Talanian has kept the building permit alive for the project for about eight years. He received approval for the project change to offices from condos from the Boston Redevelopment Authority board of directors, as well as from the Beacon Hill Civic Association, a neighborhood group that reviews area development projects. He has not yet approached lenders for project financing because the budget is still being decided.

However, Talanian said lenders he has had preliminary discussions with would be willing to finance a small, speculative office building at the site, likely because there is so little office vacancy in the immediate area, whose offices are full of tenants like MGH, Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary and spinoff doctors’ groups from those institutions.

The neighborhood’s civic association has an agreement from MGH, across the street in the city’s West End, that the hospital will not expand its operations to the south side of Cambridge Street. That does not, however, preclude small doctors’ offices from moving to Beacon Hill, according to the civic association’s zoning and licensing committee co-chair Tom Clemens.

But MGH wouldn’t have much reason to expand its footprint across Cambridge Street, at least not for lack of land – not when it already owns a small parcel of land between the West End’s N. Anderson and Blossom streets that could be redeveloped. The site, a former Gulf gas station that has been demolished, is now fenced-in and cleaned up, but Beacon Hillers have been trying to convince MGH to activate the space with a farmer’s market, basketball  courts or other uses. MGH has not yet filed plans with the city to build anything on the parcel. MGH representatives did not return calls at press time. 

Email: jcronin@thewarrengroup.com