This conversation keeps going around in the same circles. Let me state it as clearly as I can: There is nothing happening on Bromfield Street that requires demolition of multiple buildings. Period.
The key words are "nothing happening".
Yep, that's right. Many stores have been out of business for a months-years and nothing new is moving in. So yes, nothing is happening on Bromfield. Definitely the most boring street in DTX.
29 storefronts is the operative word here. 29 storefronts in a one block stretch (or two block stretch depending on how you view bromfield). They ain't making new streets downtown, like Bromfield, which are ideal for small local retail/commercial use these days. Boston should be doing everything it can to preserve the pockets of intimate scale that remains in DTX/Financial District while encouraging more development/density where it is most appropriate.
That's showing the nice, new part out front of Millennium Tower. Not Bromfield Street.
even just pouring concrete sidewalks would make a huge difference.
And that's likely going to happen precisely never, because of a fiendishly simple/complex paradox involving many of Boston's older commercial districts that are filled-up with pre-WWII mercantile-style buildings:
1.) The area beneath the sidewalks is hollow vaulting (former storage space for the goods--furs, cotton, you name it--that the merchants stored). Go into the nightclub basements of 49 Social on Temple Pl. or Stoddard's across the street and you'll be able to walk into hollow vaulting--you'll be stepping underneath what is clearly sidewalk.
2.) Thus, "All that has to happen" for the paving to take place is for the property owner to make the necessary stabilization measures to fill-in the hollow vaulting, then a City engineer has to certify that, then the property owner can convey the sidewalk to the City so the City can pave it.
3.) That presumably costs a lot of $ in hiring engineers and doing the work.
4.) Oh yeah, and every single property owner along a sidewalk frontage with consecutive hollow vaults has to agree to it.
5.) Thus: precisely never.
Boston's pre-WWII infrastructure is glorious in many ways. In many other ways, it continues to haunt us. I'd nominate this as an exquisite example.
i can't be sure, but it seems the BCDC really screwed the developer here by giving a far too negative, if not vague response and lacking the proper guidance such that the right changes would come in a relatively short time frame.
Looking from where this has evolved, or the lack thereof, it would take a lot to change this opinion.
No way the design was so flawed that the only reaction was to kill the whole tower.
Boston development really took a step back to Flynn/Menino era thinking with this fiasco.
Seattle has underway in greater Downtown:
--one at 849'
--three around 520'
--two just under their block's 484' limit
--nine just under their blocks' (pre-upzone) 440' limit
So let's say 15 buildings underway at about 420' or taller.
That's nothing compared to New York, but we're 20% their size by CSA, and a smaller percentage of our construction is tall buildings.
What's remarkable is that we've been booming at this pace for a while. Another 14 buildings of 398' to 660' have completed during the current.... Projects (shorter ones) started breaking ground in mid-2010.
No way the design was so flawed that the only reaction was to kill the whole tower.