Chiofaro and the BRA’s Meade are talking
The Boston Redevelopment Authority and developer Don Chiofaro are talking again.
Chiofaro has been trying for years to redevelop the Harbor Garage on the Greenway into one of the city’s tallest towers, but he hasn’t made any headway. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino can’t stand Chiofaro and the BRA has largely ignored him ever since it set a 200-foot height limit for the garage site. Last fall, when Chiofaro proposed a new, smaller building design that topped out at 615 feet, the BRA’s spokeswoman said “we will not use scarce resources to respond to the latest PR scheme for this site.”
Both sides went silent after that, although the Globe’s Brian McGrory reported last December that Chiofaro was toying with the idea of complying with the 200-foot limit by plunking 12 stories of condominiums and apartments on top of the existing 80-foot garage.
Now the two sides are talking again. Peter Meade, who took over as BRA director in April, has met with Chiofaro at least twice, once at Chiofaro’s offices and once at the BRA. Sources say nothing substantive has been worked out, but the two sides are at least talking and listening to each other.
Meade makes it sound as if it’s no big deal that he would sit down with the mayor’s least favorite developer. He says he has been meeting with everybody around town. But he quickly adds that he’s looking to find common ground with Chiofaro on the Harbor Garage site.
“I told Don that I’d like to have something reasonable built there. If we can agree on what’s reasonable, let’s move ahead,” he said.
Meade didn’t answer directly when I asked him if the city’s 200-foot height limit for the site was hard and fast. “I want to talk and see where things go,” he said.
Kairos Shen, the BRA’s chief planner, sat in on one of the meetings with Chiofaro. Meade says Shen’s presence carried no particular significance, but Shen is the person at the BRA who batted away Chiofaro’s past proposals and articulated the agency’s opposition to building a tall tower on the site.
“I’m not a person who wants Boston to stay the same, but I want it to evolve within its genetic code,” he told CommonWealth last year. “I can see the future, but I’m respecting the past. (Chiofaro) wants our DNA to be transformed into the super cities in Asia.”
The normally chatty Chiofaro took my call, but when I told him what I was calling about, he said he had to go into a meeting. One of his associates called back later to say that he would have no comment other than to confirm that he had met with Meade and the meeting had been “very cordial.”
BRUCE MOHL
