South Station Tower | South Station Air Rights | Downtown

F-Line to Dudley said:
Brake dust is still going to make that a cleaning issue even with electrics, albeit over longer intervals.
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Great point. Brake dust is my nemesis when it comes to keeping my car wheels clean. For whatever reason, I never think about the trains braking system while jumping on or off the commuter rail. But as suspected, the rotors, pads and calipers on a modern train are massive and fitted to every wheel.
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I'm enjoying looking at all of these photos. Anything that hides One Financial Center even a little bit is a win.
 
type001 said:
It’s so famously horrendous.
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Back in college I took a bus to visit a friend who was going to pick me up at the PABT. I couldn't find them for hours... they managed to fall and stay asleep on the floor of the PABT. That stuck with me.
 
Kathryn Friedman, an architect who lives in the neighboring Leather District, shares that frustration. While she’s “thrilled to have more people living in the area,” she worries about the tower’s insular design. The project is “just so internally focused on every level,” she told me. “People can drive right into the garage and go straight up to their units. They can go to their own private park. They can really live their lives there and literally not cross Atlantic Avenue or Summer Street.”
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I mentally call these things apocalypse shelters lol, although I don't think south station has anything on the Causeway complex where you can live, buy groceries, eat out, see a concert/game and go to work without moving more than 500 feet laterally lmao. Funniness aside I like them lmao, resident park on top of the station looks nice too

Those frustrations echo throughout Chinatown, where the city is pursuing yet another rezoning plan. Lowe worries that all the talk about density and mixed-use development is just Boston’s long history of unequal development playing out again. “Chinatown has gone through two and a half decades of luxury development,” she says. “This very small-scale, low-income neighborhood has been overwhelmed by high-rises.”
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Unequal development? No building = chronic underinvestment in a low income neighborhood, building = changing neighborhood charm of a low income neighborhood.
 
I get the complaints, but what is it that people want? This is a new build high rise on extremely expensive land that was always going to fetch top dollar. If the amenities (parking, direct unit access, etc) were worse then they'd sell more slowly and we'd have complaints about empty luxury towers. South Station Tower is a net good and it'll allow a lot of other positives to spin off it, including a new bus station (not a Ritz amenity), covered train platforms and in the future phases a hotel and maybe more offices. For god's sake, the public apron around South Station is the first thing millions of people see when they come to this city, and when it's a wasteland and filled with people sleeping on the sidewalk it is much worse than when it's the site of 30+ stories of office and a few hundred residences.

This also really irks me. Chinatown should absolutely have a say in their own rezoning, and I don't believe the current Mayor or Ed Flynn are going to bend over to developers to allow Chinatown to get bulldozed. Conflating neighborhood philanthropic efforts with some guy buying an $1,800/sf condo have nothing to do with each other and exacerbates resentment and class warfare feelings that are not at all helpful.

Back at Reggie Wong Park, Lowe’s Land Trust is working with the Friends of Reggie Wong Park to raise $3 million for badly needed upgrades—cooling pavement coating, water misters, shade trees, and a children’s playground for Chinatown’s some 7,000 residents. Three million dollars for a neighborhood park, compared to $3 million for a two-bedroom condo in South Station Tower: This is the mind-boggling math of contemporary Boston.
 
Justbuildit said:
I get the complaints, but what is it that people want? This is a new build high rise on extremely expensive land that was always going to fetch top dollar. If the amenities (parking, direct unit access, etc) were worse then they'd sell more slowly and we'd have complaints about empty luxury towers. South Station Tower is a net good and it'll allow a lot of other positives to spin off it, including a new bus station (not a Ritz amenity), covered train platforms and in the future phases a hotel and maybe more offices. For god's sake, the public apron around South Station is the first thing millions of people see when they come to this city, and when it's a wasteland and filled with people sleeping on the sidewalk it is much worse than when it's the site of 30+ stories of office and a few hundred residences.

This also really irks me. Chinatown should absolutely have a say in their own rezoning, and I don't believe the current Mayor or Ed Flynn are going to bend over to developers to allow Chinatown to get bulldozed. Conflating neighborhood philanthropic efforts with some guy buying an $1,800/sf condo have nothing to do with each other and exacerbates resentment and class warfare feelings that are not at all helpful.

Back at Reggie Wong Park, Lowe’s Land Trust is working with the Friends of Reggie Wong Park to raise $3 million for badly needed upgrades—cooling pavement coating, water misters, shade trees, and a children’s playground for Chinatown’s some 7,000 residents. Three million dollars for a neighborhood park, compared to $3 million for a two-bedroom condo in South Station Tower: This is the mind-boggling math of contemporary Boston.
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Preach (y)
 
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