Boston Mayor Martin Walsh and city hall regulators have thrown their support behind Boston-based Chiofaro & Co.’s plans to build a skyline-altering project on the Boston waterfront, but want the overall size reduced by 400,000 square feet.
Developer Donald Chiofaro has been trying for nearly a decade to redevelop the eight-story parking garage near the New England Aquarium into a mixed-use project including offices, retail, a hotel and luxury condos. His plans were stymied under the late Mayor Thomas Menino, with whom he feuded publicly. Chiofaro still needs city and state approvals to build the $1-billion project.
The Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), the city’s primary permitting agency, announced this week it will support towers up to 600 feet tall on the site.
“We’re releasing recommendations for a scenario that we believe can catalyze positive redevelopment of the harbor garage site,” BRA spokesman Nicholas Martin said. “We’re eager to get feedback from the advisory committee on this and excited to move ahead with the harbor planning process.”
Chiofaro’s current proposal calls for a pair of 615- and 538-foot towers totaling 1.3 million square feet of residential and commercial space. The BRA said it would back a maximum of 900,000 square feet of development on the site, The Boston Globe reported.
Under state Chapter 91 regulations governing waterfront development, the maximum height on the site is 145 feet. But the BRA is putting together a municipal harbor plan that would allow developers to build taller structures if they agree to pay for projects that improve public access to the central waterfront, bounded by Northern Avenue and Christopher Columbus Park.
A citizen advisory committee is scheduled to meet at 3 p.m. today at city hall to finalize their wish list for developers. The owners of the James Hook and Co. lobster pound have proposed a 285-foot-tall residential tower with a ground-floor restaurant on their parcel at the corner of Atlantic and Northern avenues.
One of the ideas floated by committee members is requiring developers to help pay for repairs to the Northern Avenue bridge, which was closed to pedestrians in December because of structural deficiencies.
The current Chiofaro proposal would include 700,000 square feet of office space, 120 residential units, a 250- to 300-room hotel and three levels of retail. Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox Assoc. and ADD Inc., the project would include a taller tower with 120 condos and a 250- to 300-room hotel on the upper floors and three floors of retail and restaurant space on the bottom. The shorter tower would contain 700,000 square feet of office space. A 27,000-square-foot public plaza with a retractable roof would be built between the towers, providing space for community events and improving views and pedestrian corridors between the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway and the waterfront.
Chiofaro, a former Cabot, Cabot & Forbes executive best known for developing the International Place skyscrapers in the 1980s, acquired the garage property in 2007 for $150 million. He told Banker & Tradesman last year that 1.3 million square feet was the minimum size needed to go forward with the redevelopment.
The trustees of the Harbor Towers I and II condo towers, which stand to the south of the site, voted last July to oppose the project, citing excessive density on the waterfront.
