Fenway Center (One Kenmore) | Turnpike Parcel 7, Beacon Street | Fenway

ccole said:
From today. All the retail space in both Bower buildings is very much vacant with no signs of forthcoming occupants.
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^Not for long, according to this, 20,000sf accounted for:
www.bostonglobe.com

Garrett Harker of Eastern Standard fame coming back to the Fenway with four new restaurants - The Boston Globe

Harker plans to return to Kenmore Square in a deal to launch in a new apartment building along Beacon Street, with new restaurants set to open next year.
www.bostonglobe.com www.bostonglobe.com
From therein:
Harker has reached a deal to open four restaurants in the Bower apartment building in the Fenway Center development.
...
Harker plans to carve up 20,000 square feet in the Bower’s street-level retail space and make full use of the center’s plaza, where he’ll have a sea of outdoor seating.
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explain to me the logic of building a giant lego wall that is just a total monstrosity, vs a nice tall slender tower. Good work BPDA. So averse to height, but a monstrosity like this is somehow acceptable????
 
nepatz11 said:
explain to me the logic of building a giant lego wall that is just a total monstrosity, vs a nice tall slender tower. Good work BPDA. So averse to height, but a monstrosity like this is somehow acceptable????
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Gotta love that Soviet style.
 
nepatz11 said:
explain to me the logic of building a giant lego wall that is just a total monstrosity, vs a nice tall slender tower. Good work BPDA. So averse to height, but a monstrosity like this is somehow acceptable????
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Why do you feel like this project will be a monstrosity?

I agree that the façade could be better, but I feel that Parcel 7 will be massively transformative to the area as it will cover the Pike and help re-stitch the urban fabric in Fenway-Kenmore.
 
For those that post pictures taken in portrait orientation, they're much more viewable if you grab a corner and resize them down in the reply box before you post. If you just let them max out they end up filling the width of a landscape monitor, and thus require viewers to scroll two times (or even three) to see the whole picture, which makes them basically unviewable.
 
chmeeee said:
For those that post pictures taken in portrait orientation, they're much more viewable if you grab a corner and resize them down in the reply box before you post. If you just let them max out they end up filling the width of a landscape monitor, and thus require viewers to scroll two times (or even three) to see the whole picture, which makes them basically unviewable.
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If you click into a given picture it will show it in full screen. Hit F11 to remove the start menu and search bar and see it even better. In fact, scrolling through some of these pages with F11 definitely improves the experience too.
 
nepatz11 said:
Good work BPDA. So averse to height, but a monstrosity like this is somehow acceptable????
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The notion the BPDA is "averse to height" is so obviously ridiculous. As an arm of the City, which is always seeking a larger revenue base to fund its ever-escalating pension obligations, etc., the BPDA is continuously under pressure (whether publicly acknowledged or not) to grow the City's base of new commercial property tax--crucially, not subject to Proposition 2.5--via the most politically expedient means possible.

So in fact the BPDA, acting for the City, craves height, because height sells at a premium and thus makes feasible the highest property taxes to satiate the Treasury's implacable ever-growing demands. Yet to deliver height, the BPDA must engage in continuous divide-and-conquer gamesmanship, taking advantage of spot zoning and ludicrously outdated zoning overlays, with the cohorts that actually are averse to height--the NIMBY residential civic associations/activists.
 
Well then their process is ridiculous. The proof is in the pudding. A process that takes this long and causes this much difficulty for developers is a total failure. Projects here take 10-15 years to get off the ground. That is money out of the taxpayers pockets and one of the major reasons we are in a regional housing crisis. The BPDA is worried about shadows on the commonwealth ave mall, meanwhile we are in the midst of a 5 alarm regional housing crisis. The best solution to so many of our issues is density in the urban core. End of discussion. It should take 1-2 years for a project to go from proposed to groundbreaking. Developers should be allowed within reason to build tall and dense in the urban core.
Grandstanding politicians are worried about 5 minutes of shadows on the common instead of the most effective, simple and obvious solution to so many of our regional problems: LET DEVELOPERS BUILD AS THE MARKET ALLOWS IN THE PART OF OUR REGION MOST EQUIPPED TO SUSTAIN DENSITY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
nepatz11 said:
The BPDA is worried about shadows on the commonwealth ave mall
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To quote the sublime The Tender Bar, this is exactly false.

The "Act Protecting Sunlight In Certain Public Parks" was a Legislative bill, filed by Reps. Walz & Rushing, in (entirely reasonable, as democratically-elected reps) response to their presumably vehemently NIMBYite constituencies. See its prior iteration, here.

There was an even earlier iteration from 1990, which is hard to track down online, that is cited at the start of the Winthrop Center shadow-law exemption law that got passed in 2017.

Although I'm generally in agreement with your grievances, before you commence on a rant, please research any assertions you're about to make... otherwise AB members might start to harbor suspicions that you're (aaiieeeee! no! gasp!) The Rifleman come back from the dead to terrorize the forum with depressingly fact-challenged tirades.
 
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