Oxford Office Bldg. | 125 Lincoln St | Leather District

The Leather District Neighborhood Association is having a meeting tonight inside the Radian to discuss the project. My boyfriend is a property manager for one of the adjacent buildings and he got a scathing email about height, shadows, greenspace, and the need to respect the cited 100ft limit agreed to when planning the Greenway sent by the LDNA head (a partner from a law firm located in 1 Financial... the irony). The usual.

There's no mention of demanding a community benefit to re-locate and ensure the return of Hei La Moon or the C-Mart located here, but that's a top concern my partner and I have about this redevelopment. I'm worried about the constant insistence of underground parking will cut into any community benefit/anti-displacement they'll assert that they'll be able to afford. MassDOT's innapropriate and massive expansion of the South Station parking as part of the TOD-in-name-only project should be enough parking accommodation for anything built here. If there's more than 1 sublevel of parking... 🙄

I also have a college friend who lives in the Radian who was initially concerned about the shadows of a 24-storey building on his southeast-facing unit, but he's pro-density and I was able to convince him that the shadows would be cast on his building when he wouldn't be there for most of the year.

We'll see how this meeting goes tonight...
 
What kind of City can't build a highrise in its Downtown abutting sites? How long does the lunacy continue? Or do they wait 12 years when Boston hasn't built anything over ~290' in almost a decade? Then the City can proclaim, 'We're not fully out of the business of building skyscrapers. We're gonna put one down here and that's that...." and push ~690'.

Complaining about shadows on a building that cast the same shadows. wtf.
You live in a City a couple of blocks from the tallest building going up in Downtown.
If you have a problem with shadows, kindly move out of the way.
People who think they have the right to hold up development in this part of the City are anti-urban freaks.
 
^^^
So True Odurandina. What kind of city can't build highrise in its downtown?

NIMBYS need to come up with some real logic now to justify building and zoning suppression going on. Shadows, lost my view? We have real problems that are causing major issues in and around the surrounding towns of Boston because of the lack of transit investments and zoning issues Boston is having.
#1 Traffic outside the city is a nightmare
#2 Housing affordability is at an all time high
#3 the city is broke? Really property taxes a soaring to all time highs. :-x

City planners should be ready to bulldoze this site into the ground. Its absolutely dismal in this area.

:roll:
 
PNF: [pdf]

Renders look kinda like a mashup of the two Hub on Causeway buildings.
 
From the PNF

324 feet
24 storeys
625,000 square feet of space, mostly office with street-level retail and parking, I think first floor and .. down?!
 
JumboBuc said:
PNF: [pdf]
Click to expand...

Yea it leaves some height on the table, but at least its high quality. Its a new industrial type facade style, new color instead of blue glass... or white, no precast, and looks good. It has good proportions too which is important. These industrial type towers always translate really well to real life and we dont have one of these in Boston yet. Bostons skyline doesnt have height, but it has a very good color pallette and this improves on that.

I like it. Especially since this was on nobodys radar its good to get another tower when nobody expected it, its like a freebie. All the “whats left” and “were running out of room” posts missed this so its always nice to get more than we thought. This shows that theres a lot more places to build than we think.



















 
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JumboBuc said:
Renders look kinda like a mashup of the two Hub on Causeway buildings.
Click to expand...

Both are by Gensler. I guess they have really taken on the box slapped on a box or cut out of a box as their calling, but I like this a lot more in the context of this location compared to the Hub on Causeway office tower...

Also not shutting down Gensler. They've done great work before.
 
This is going to be the main face of the tower we see and its pretty nice.

 
Boston gonna be Boston. I think at this point all new developments should include some sort of housing. To me it seems the BPDA does not recommend or demand anything from these developers. Definitely selling the city short.
 
^^Or how about the City and State just promoting the Leather District for the housing already set forth in early-stage planning (from 3 years ago) Picture the extension of Downtown if 125 Lincoln St + the (3) highrises proposed in Chinatown (w/ 1 already approved) + the (2) planned 300' + mid-rises + 150 Kneeland were up? Yeah, holy shytte! Why is the State allowing the DOT sites to languish?

The Trees at City Hall are good. But, that's a costly adventure that could have waited. What's a few years tacked on to a half Century? This project and the 250' mid-rise at 150 Kneeland St is a good way to entice development for the DOT air rights' parcels 25, 26, etc, which had no takers the first time around. Time for the State to come up with a stimulus plan to get the ball rolling. And just what could that be?

1. Set and approve a plan for the massing of all the buildings. Increase the density of the mid-rises and # of units.

2. Fund a stimulus for decking w/ State $$$ + the next batch of money like what we just saw wasted on planting trees at City Hall. With construction to commence on the Pike, the Expressway will need to stay unclogged. But, get the permitting sorted for the DOT Parcels 25, 26 decking by means of drilling and pile installation on the Terra Firma for the entire site....

3. Offer the parcels for the approved massing. With the project sites prepped, and outcome far more clear, the developers will be more open to partnerships, that were slow to come the 1st go-round.

4. Repeat for Columbus Center. Boston is hotter than Texas freeway in July. Extend the approved project dates--and use a stimulus to begin the site prep.... and sell the God damned parcel for the approved density and tweak the mid-rises, and add a few units (if necessary) to make the new project work.
 
What a weird building. This is legitimately something youd see in China where theyre making full use of this structure as much of a mish mash as it is. 2.25 levels of parking between 1 3/4 levels of office on top of 1 floor of retail/blank walls/dead space?
 
stick n move said:
Click to expand...

I like the design a lot, but the proportions stink. In the above diagram, chop off 20% of the width from the right side, then make it ~550'. That's what should be encouraged. We have too many overly wide buildings already.
 
I have a really hard time explaining why, but I kind of like that screwball parking garage, and I'm a certified parking garage hater. I can imagine, in its time, it was pretty innovative in the way it combined uses. The parking levels are almost elegant, at least compared to the typical precast concrete fortifications used in modern parking garages.
 
I like it too. It's funky industrial constructivism that is all but absent in timid Boston.
 
The Garage looks like mid-century Boston/Americana.
i like the project better than the Garage.
Only wish it was at least Atlantic Wharf height......
 
DZH22 said:
I like the design a lot, but the proportions stink. In the above diagram, chop off 20% of the width from the right side, then make it ~550'. That's what should be encouraged. We have too many overly wide buildings already.
Click to expand...

Tenants prefer large floor plates (as opposed to needing to shuffle between floors, consecutive or not), so it's not that designers prefer buildings to be "fat" for no particular reason.
 
Rumor has it that the cladding will consist of leather - in keeping with the district's rich history.
 
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