Boston is a small town where politics and development are intertwined. That we know. And, occasionally, old grudges still have the power to change the face of neighborhoods.
That phenomenon is currently playing out around North Station. State Rep. Marty Walz has tacked a measure onto the massive House transportation reform bill that would allow (read: push) the cash-strapped Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to sell the public parking garage it owns beneath TD Banknorth Garden. The legislation would, in one view, clean up the detritus left by a now-ancient feud between former Mayor Ray Flynn, Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs, and former Senate President William Bulger. At the same time, Walz’s gambit is reinvigorating a 20-year-old debate about government’s rightful place in the neighborhood surrounding the Garden.
Return To Form
It’s fitting that the garage’s fate may be sealed by a block of oblique language buried deep within a dense 100-page, 4,000-line bill. It was just such a maneuver that handed the garage to the T in the first place.
In the winter of 1988, the land the garage now sits on was a vacant city-owned parcel. The Boston and Maine Railroad, which had once run a dozen tracks over the parcel, had ceded it to the city decades before, and retracted its tracks to the property line. Then-Mayor Flynn had put the land out to bid in an attempt to force Jacobs to replace the aging Boston Garden with a new arena on that site.
However, Bulger was feuding with both Jacobs and Flynn at the time. (The beef with the mayor, Bulger’s South Boston neighbor, revolved around an incinerator that Flynn wanted to place in Bulger’s district; Bulger had suggested an alternate site – Wellesley.)
In Flynn’s parcel, the future site of Jacobs’ new arena, Bulger saw a chance to reshape the state’s transportation footprint while simultaneously striking a blow against both Flynn and Jacobs.
At the time, recalled former state Transportation Secretary Fred Salvucci, “You took the train in, and you’d walk across the parking lot to get to the box office. It was covered by a temporary plywood roof, but it always dripped. It was very symbolic – if you were foolish enough to take the train, you had to walk under this dripping plywood, through the parking lot.”
The cheapest way to build the new arena, Salvucci said, “would be to build the new thing in back of the old thing, flat on the ground. That would forever kill the chance to expand commuter rail service, and require us to either live with the elevated Green Line forever, or just cut off service at North Station, and forget about Lechmere and Somerville.”
‘On The Side Of The Angels’?
In February 1988, Bulger buried a measure in a $3 billion bond bill that allowed the state to seize the 136,000 square foot, city-owned parcel by eminent domain and hand it to the T. In a nod to the development Flynn had envisioned for the parcel, the bill granted the city development air rights – starting 42 feet in the air.
Multiple sources close to the maneuvering said Bulger’s primary motivation in handing the North Station parcel to the T was to poke a thumb in Jacobs’ and Flynn’s eyes. Indeed, the maneuver set off years of torturous negotiations before the new Garden broke ground. The final agreement called for the T to keep its North Station parcel, build an underground parking garage on it, and use the garage as a staging ground for commuter rail and Green Line expansion.
“Even then, people said, ‘Why is the T building a garage in the middle of their downtown system?’” said Bob O’Brien, executive director of the Downtown North Association. “It seems anomalous that they’re operating a parking garage in the middle of the city. It’s not integrally related to their transit function.”
“Bulger and Flynn had some rivalry, and there were arguments that Bulger didn’t like the Jacobses,” Salvucci said. He quickly added, “Sometimes many things are true at the same time. What Bulger did was fundamentally, overwhelmingly in the public interest. The press wanted to presume that Bulger was this back-room dealer. They portrayed him as mean-spirited. But Bulger was on the side of the angels on that one.”
A Different Power Play
Two decades later, the fight that handed the garage to the T has long since faded away. Both Bulger and Flynn have retired from public life. The T’s North Station garage served its intended purpose – it enabled the construction of a new subway station under Causeway Street and the expansion of the commuter rail, and it provided replacement parking while the old Garden and the elevated Central Artery came down. And, once more, the eyes of the real estate industry are trained on that vacant lot in front of the new Garden.
“It’s one of the major economic development sites in the area,” O’Brien said. The first major development in the area, the Archstone Avenir apartments, is set to open this summer. Three other major projects – a 286-unit apartment complex by Simpson Housing, a hotel and office complex from Boston Development Group, and a 360,000 square foot office, retail and supermarket development from Hines Interests – are queued up, but in need of financing. As those projects gain traction, they should trigger activity at the Garden site, originally envisioned as a landing spot for 1.9 million square feet of commercial and residential construction.
And when Jacobs’ firm, Delaware North, does eventually move to redevelop its old Garden lot, it’ll put Jacobs back at the negotiating table with the T. Any development at the Delaware North site will involve underground parking. City planners always envisioned this new parking being linked up with the T lot and operating as a single unit, O’Brien said. Walz’s legislation seeks to streamline development at the site by heading off any conflict over parking ownership and operations.
“It makes a great deal of sense to at least afford someone the opportunity to consolidate ownership,” O’Brien said. “From an economic development, transit and financial point of view, it makes a great deal of sense. There are tremendous economic development implications. The T shouldn’t be in the economic development business, or the parking business.”
Salvucci, who now teaches at MIT, predicts the effort to privatize the garage will run into resistance for some of the same reasons that the land was originally entrusted to the T for. “Selling an asset like that is a tricky thing to do,” he said. “There are public policy functions embedded in it. Trains running on the roof, the subway is running through the middle of it. These are tricky things to entrust to a private owner.”
He added, “Usually, it doesn’t make sense to sell a capital asset that’s producing a revenue stream. If there’s money to be gained because you’re not charging what you could, why don’t they just cut out the middle man and charge more?”
