1,000-foot tower or public park?
By Steve Bailey, Globe Columnist | December 22, 2006
Our Mayor for Life, Tom Menino, has created a big buzz in town with his Big Ideas to build Boston's tallest tower and sell City Hall. That kind of public dialogue is not a bad thing, of course, although MFL's proposal to move City Hall to Oshkosh is about the worst decision to come along since Dan Duquette decided Roger Clemens was all washed up. City Hall, like Clemens (156-67 in the regular season since leaving Boston), still has a lot of life in it.
When MFL surprised the town in February with his plan to build "Tommy's Tower" on the site of a city-owned garage in Winthrop Square, city officials were predicting developers would be beating down their doors to compete. "We expect proposals from around the world," Susan Elsbree, a spokeswoman for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, said at the time. "Dozens."
As it turned out the city got exactly one proposal -- that coming from Boston businessman Steve Belkin, whose ownership of an adjacent building gave him a considerable edge over potential competitors. There was, however, a previous serious -- though undisclosed -- alternative proposal for that old city garage: the idea of building a complement to Boston's fabulous Post Office Square park.
The concept came not from a bunch of tree huggers with good intentions and no money, but from Equity Office Properties, the nation's largest publicly held office building owner and manager. According to a plan sitting here on my desk, Equity Office was considering tearing down the garage, putting the parking underground, and building a new park for downtown Boston modeled on developer Norman Leventhal's masterpiece in Post Office Square.
Like Leventhal before them, the Equity Office executives were motivated at least as much by self-interest as altruism. Fifteen years ago Leventhal was not anxious to see an old garage replaced by a hulking tower that would diminish his adjacent properties, including what was then Le Meridien, the hotel. Equity Office owns three significant buildings surrounding the Winthrop Square garage, and it saw a park as the best way to protect those interests against a similar threat.
The plan developed last year for Equity Office by Chan Krieger & Associates, the Cambridge architecture and planning firm, called for putting the current 875 parking spaces underground in a five- or six-level garage and building a 1.1-acre park that would "break through the Financial District's largest super block and provide a new east-west pedestrian pathway between the area of Downtown Crossing and Federal Street," according to the plan. The plan also included a modest cafe and retail component.
An executive who worked on the plan said Equity Office's financing concept was also similar to the one behind Post Office Square: Equity Office wanted to control the property through a very long-term lease, build the garage and the park, and then eventually give it back to the city. The executive estimated the project would cost about $40 million.
Equity Office, which was then headed in Boston by Maryann Gilligan Suydam, presented the proposal in the spring of 2005 to BRA director Mark Maloney, who gave it a cool reception, according to the executive who worked on the deal. Equity Office never asked again.
"This proposal was not financially feasible," Equity Office said in a statement yesterday. "We did not pursue it any further, and no formal submission was ever made." Said the BRA in a statement: "The BRA issued an RFP for the Winthrop Square Garage. Equity Office Properties did not submit a response. We are currently reviewing the proposal that we did receive."
Whether Boston needs another park in the area is open to question. Post Office Square is nearby, and we're spending a fortune on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway not far away. On the other hand, it is also an open question whether the densest part of the city is the right place for a 1,000-foot tower. Or whether we should be directing future demand for office space downtown or to the city's new frontier, the Seaport District.
So let the debate begin on the merits of a 1,000-foot tower or selling City Hall. But if we are to debate, we all need access to the same set of facts. These are, after all, public assets we are talking about.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at
bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.