Avalon Exeter | 77 Exeter Street | Back Bay

Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

no busted again! Storrow drive but zoom in
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

dshoost88 said:
I had a thought while walking down Boylston today and looking up at this tower, and then realized it hasn't been discussed on here yet (at least I don't think it has)...

Replace Lord & Taylor with a skyscraper!

Discuss.
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My (possibly faulty) recollection is that L and T was able to exercise a long term, sub market lease renewal option because the landlord forgot to timely decline the option.

If so, you'd have to buy out the lease at market plus relocation costs plus extortion surcharge.

Good luck, but be prepared to enjoy this little slice of downtown Westfield N.J. for a long time!
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

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Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

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Finally the sun came out and made the lighting a little less crappy.

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Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

This building is fun. Sometimes it looks to be small, and other times enormous.
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

tobyjug said:
My (possibly faulty) recollection is that L and T was able to exercise a long term, sub market lease renewal option because the landlord forgot to timely decline the option.

If so, you'd have to buy out the lease at market plus relocation costs plus extortion surcharge.

Good luck, but be prepared to enjoy this little slice of downtown Westfield N.J. for a long time!
Click to expand...

What's a long time?
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

Honestly don't remember exactly, but I thought it was a big number. 20 years plus.
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

So a 20 year lease...signed how many years ago?
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

tobyjug said:
My (possibly faulty) recollection is that L and T was able to exercise a long term, sub market lease renewal option because the landlord forgot to timely decline the option.

If so, you'd have to buy out the lease at market plus relocation costs plus extortion surcharge.

Good luck, but be prepared to enjoy this little slice of downtown Westfield N.J. for a long time!
Click to expand...

Actually it was the other way around. L&T did not timely exercise their extension option which would have given them rents well below market and the landlord was able to renew them on terms much more favorable to the landlord. There was talk at the time that Joprdan's Furniture was interested in the location. See this old entry from the old SkyScraperGuy forum:

So much for building some more towers there...

Lord & Taylor said to be staying put

By Thomas C. Palmer Jr., Globe Staff, 12/4/2002

Lord & Taylor, a fixture on Boylston Street in the Back Bay for 34 years, apparently will stay put.

Neighbors of the Prudential Center and many in the retail business community were surprised to learn recently that the colorful pair of brothers at Jordan's Furniture, Barry and Eliot Tatelman, were negotiating to take over the old Lord & Taylor spot. But the upscale clothier doesn't want to move. And it probably won't.

''Our contract has not been finalized, so we cannot comment further,'' said Sharon Batemen, spokeswoman for May Department Stores Co. of St. Louis, which owns Lord & Taylor. Boston Properties declined to comment.

A source close to the talks, however, said that May and the building's owner, Boston Properties, are ''dotting i's and crossing t's'' on a new contract that would keep Lord & Taylor at 760 Boylston St. for years beyond the 2003 expiration of its current lease.

An expensive clerical error at May - an employee entered a wrong date into a computer - caused the company to miss its deadline for another 15-year renewal of the lease at below market rates.

May challenged Boston Properties in court after the oversight came to light, but a Suffolk Superior Court judge ruled in Boston Properties' favor. Boston Properties, which owns the Prudential Center retail and office buildings, had begun negotiating with Jordan's about bringing the furniture store - known for vast suburban stores heavy on customer service and entertainment frills - to the city.

Officials at May in September said they planned to appeal the court decision but have now dropped that plan.

The post-lawsuit negotiations apparently mean that May executives believe it is worth paying a lot more money for a new lease. The retailer takes up 125,000 square feet in the two-story building, but no per-square-foot cost figures could be learned.

''It's a good thing,'' Annette Born, a principal at Urban/Born Associates, a retail brokerage firm, said of the decision to stay. ''I would be sad to see them go.''

''They service a market that is not the typical big department store chain like Filene's, and yet it's not a Neiman Marcus either,'' she said. ''It's an up market but a `bridge' market. They do a good job of servicing that.''

Jordan's, meanwhile, is shopping for a site in Boston other than at 760 Boylston.

''That's not a site any longer considered for Jordan's,'' said spokeswoman Heather Copelas.

''We are continually looking at different real estate options,'' Copelas said. ''We look at and consider a lot of them.''

The Tatelmans in 1999 sold the family business to Berkshire Hathaway Inc., a conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett that owns furniture stores elsewhere in the country.

Robin Brown, formerly of the Four Seasons, and his partners have formed CWB Boylston LLC to develop an upscale hotel, residential, and retail complex on Boylston Street just west of the Lord & Taylor building.

Lord & Taylor's aging structure could be renovated and even expanded to fit in better with the changing streetscape. The administration of Mayor Thomas M. Menino supports building housing above two or three floors of retail space on the Lord & Taylor site, Harry Collings, executive director of the BRA, has said.

No one with knowledge of the talks between Boston Properties and May could say whether renovation or expansion is being considered.

A reconfigured Lord & Taylor building could be connected to the new CWB Boylston complex via a walkway that is planned for the second level of the hotel and residences, running in back of the buildings parallel to Boylston. Star Market, located on the site of the new complex, is scheduled to close in spring, when a Shaw's supermarket being built on the Huntington Avenue side of the complex opens.

Lord & Taylor is set to renovate a former bank headquarters in Pittsburgh and turn the Classical style building into a 135,000-square-foot store, according to that city's Web site.

Born said she was training at Filene's in Boston in the 1960s when Lord & Taylor hit town, the first major New York store to invade stodgy Boston.

''We were shaking in our socks,'' she recalled. ''They were the thundering herd that were going to eat us. We had to `boutique' ourselves to be competitive.''

Thomas C. Palmer Jr. can be reached at tpalmer@globe.com.
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Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

LOL. ^^^ Just spent twenty minutes trying to find that story. You beat me by 30 seconds.
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

So they renewed the lease in 03...doesn't say how long it's for...anyone know?
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

If the L&T people feel that their sales / sq ft are meeting expectations, then they will stay. If not, they can sub-lease or a developer could buy out their lease.
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

Czervik.Construction said:
If the L&T people feel that their sales / sq ft are meeting expectations, then they will stay. If not, they can sub-lease or a developer could buy out their lease.
Click to expand...

Whenever I've been in there, it was an absolute ghost town. Sure, it's a prestigious address to have, but there's no way they can be satisfied with their sales numbers there. L&T itself is on life support. It's a stale company that has tried to reinvent itself and failed, ala Sears. They would do much better in DTX, but I'll save that wish upon a star for Nordstrom.

And 617, I'd assume since the negotiations were originally for a 15-year lease, they'd go with a 15-year lease, albeit late, so 2018 maybe the lease is up?
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

I agree, Nordstrom would be great for DTX, but I L&T would prob do well there also, at least better than they do in their current location.
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

Thanks for the correction. Just shows old dudes can't trust their memory!
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

I can't take a decent picture with my phone, but there's a tree and a flag visible on this thing from the Christian Science Center. We are topped!
 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

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Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

Here it is. Sorry it's blurry. I have an absolute TON of pictures from yesterday. I'll get around to posting them later. You can see the crane's shadow on the Westin Hotel.

 
Re: Avalon Exeter (formerly New Tower(s) Planned For Prudential Center)

Sorry for the volume. Just posting what I got.























 
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