Avalon North Station | Nashua Street Residences | West End

So they're planning to keep some surface parking?
 
another project that seems to be on perma-hold ...



Partnering may give plan life
By Scott Van Voorhis
Boston Herald Business Reporter
Wednesday, September 20, 2006 - Updated: 09:54 AM EST


Bruins and TD Banknorth Garden owner Delaware North has begun the search for a development partner to help it build a marquee residential tower on valuable real estate holdings around its North Station arena.

Chris Maher, a top executive with the Delaware North subsidiary charged with developing the site, said he hopes to have an agreement with a partner by year?s end.

Logical candidates include companies with major residential development experience - and the capacity to team up on what is likely to be a $200 million-plus undertaking.

Maher said the hope now is that the joint venture could break ground next year on a 37-story condo and apartment tower, slated to take shape next to the Garden.

?The building is 95 percent designed,? Maher said. ?It is very close to being teed up to start.?

The move comes as the Garden?s owners, the Jacobses, are spending more to revive their flagging fortunes in Boston.

The family, which owns the Delaware North concessions empire, is laying out tens of millions to make the Bruins a contender again and jazz up the lackluster Garden.

Viewed one way, the decision to take on a development partner would appear to be another disappointing retreat by the Jacobs.

More than 10 years after the new Garden opened, little has been built on the extensive tract around it.

A residential tower is envisioned as just the first step in a grand redevelopment plan next to the arena that someday might rival the Back Bay?s Prudential Center.

Moreover, the decision to seek a partner - and try to build next year - comes after previous talk by Delaware North of starting work earlier this year.

Yet, the move to seek a real estate partner may actually be good news. It comes as the Jacobses are doing some serious thinking about how to improve their Boston holdings.

Suddenly more serious about the long-neglected Bruins, it?s possible the Jacobses are getting religion about their local real estate holdings as well.

Instead of talking up plans that go nowhere, the Jacobses are now looking at what it will take to get things done. That, anyway, is the impression one could get from talking with Maher, who oversees Delaware North?s local development operations.

While Delaware North runs a nationwide business empire, it does not have extensive experience with big residential development projects, he said.

?We were thinking we could do this on our own and ramp up and pull it off,? Maher said. ?It?s quite possible we could have. It was a strong decision to say, ?Let?s know where are strengths are.? ?

Or to put it another away, family scion Charlie Jacobs has his hands full overseeing the resurrection of the Bruins and an ambitious revamp of the Garden.

He doesn?t need to play developer, too.



Link
 
it’s possible the Jacobses are getting religion about their local real estate holdings as well.
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what the hell does that mean?
 
This project would have a dramatic impact on the skyline. A hotel at NS where Delaware North has to major league sports teams drawing crowds and other events virtually all the time seems like it couldn't lose. Deleware North has always seemed weak and wishy washy though so it's hard to believe anything will ever happen there unless they sell the development rights.



Development express not arriving in North Station
By Scott Van Voorhis
Boston Herald Business Reporter
Sunday, October 29, 2006

Plans for revamping the scrappy North Station area are once again flaming out.
Developers behind a pair of big projects seen as key for revamping the area around the TD Banknorth Garden are now getting cold feet amid the real estate market slowdown.
Delaware North, owner of the Garden and the Bruins, had talked of a groundbreaking earlier this year on its plans for a residential tower next to the sports arena.
Now the Buffalo-based food concession and arena empire is putting those plans on hold as it seeks a development partner.
Meanwhile, a Boston builder behind the proposed Avenir, a flagship condo and retail project slated to take shape a few blocks from the Garden near Canal Street, has run into serious problems of its own.
?That certainly does take away the steam from that area,? said David Begelfer, head of the local chapter of the National Assoication of Industrial Properties.
At Avenir, Trinity Financial has pulled back from a planned groundbreaking of its much-touted project, despite a groundbreaking earlier this year that featured Mayor Thomas M. Menino and other city and state offiicals.
The developer has hoped to build nearly 250 condos in an upscale complex on land recently reclaimed from the Big Dig. But a spokewoman for the company indicated it is now reviewing its sales strategy, a move that industry insiders contend came after lackluster presales.
Instead of condos, the Avenir may instead focus on rental units, though it?s not clear what the firm?s timetable for moving forward will be now, executives have said.
The Avenir sales office was shuttered midday last week after a reporter went by.
Delaware North executives have also cited a slowing real estate market for their decision to seek a partner, instead of starting construction on the planned Garden tower.
Still, the stall by these much anticipated projects comes after predictions that the North Station area might soon become Boston?s hottest new neighborhood to live in.
The end of the Big Dig, with the dismantling of the old Central Artery, freed the area from permanent shadows while creating new land to build on.
However, it is also an area that has defied expectations before, with previous plans for new Garden developments proposed, only to go nowhere.
?Let?s face it, a lot of it depends on location,? Begelfer said. ?The North Station area is a good location . . . but it?s not the waterfront.?
 
tocoto said:
?The North Station area is a good location . . . but it?s not the waterfront.?
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It's not shooting fish in a barrel ...so we're afraid to risk it !
 
The waterfront is the waterfront, and things haven't gone any better there. Plans for Fan Pier are around the quarter century mark and nothing's actually happened yet.
 
Long before there was such a thing as the Silver Line, the so-called Fan Pier development would have been built (and built much taller) some decade ago if Anthony Athanas and his partners hadn't gone to war with each other. Can't blame NIMBY's for that one.
 
Also depends what you mean by 'the waterfront', since Battery Wharf is busily under construction, the Intercontinental Hotel is well on its way, and Russia Wharf should start soon.

The one development that everyone around here wants to see is a new supermarket in the Bulfinch Triangle. I hope it's still on track.
 
ablarc said:
xec said:
The waterfront is the waterfront, and things haven't gone any better there.
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How do you explain that?
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Grandstanding politicians, uncompromising activists, egomaniacal control freaks, self-serving NIMBYs; smallminded backward-focused vision, smug self-satisified complacency; too much debating and analyzing and planning and too little actual doing.

Ron Newman said:
Also depends what you mean by 'the waterfront', since Battery Wharf is busily under construction, the Intercontinental Hotel is well on its way, and Russia Wharf should start soon.
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By the waterfront I meant the South Boston waterfront, specifically Fan Pier. Battery Wharf and the Intercontinantal are infill projects, and Russia Wharf not even that. The Bulfinch Triangle has enough empty space to move development there out of the infill category and make it more comparable to developing Fan Pier.
 
Greatest neighborhood

I stumbled upon the "Greatest Neighborhood" line yesterday and was very confused by it. One of those mysteries of the city. Looking for an answer to why it's there, I stumbled upon these forums-- which are very informative, by the way. I finally found an answer to what this concrete imprint is doing hidden beneath a Big Dig offramp in a 1997 Globe article in, of all places, the City Weekly section.

Here's the pertinent part that might answer the mystery for anyone who, like me, had no idea what this was referring to.

----
After the flare-up over the Williams name, subsequent Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel projects have been much more carefully attuned to neighborhood concerns. This is true even when the neighborhood doesn't exist anymore. A long concrete viaduct, which will take traffic from the yet-to-be-built cable-stayed bridge by North Station onto Storrow Drive, effectively marks the northern limit of the old West End neighborhood, gobbled up by a combination of Massachusetts General Hospital expansion and 1960s urban renewal. (One of the few remaining West End landmarks is the old Boys Club building on Blossom Street, just south of the Mass. General complex.) The public art for the pedestrian walkway between the viaduct and Nashua Street and the Charles River Park condominiums is an eerie but affable memorial to the vanished West End. Designed by a Yale art professor, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, the foundation walls of the viaduct will bear indented images of the old neighborhood, stoops and doors and windows of the vanished houses. De Bretteville calls them "streetscape echoes." Quotations from the reminiscences of former residents will be cast into the concrete, including the once-proud boast: "The greatest neighborhood this side of heaven." There are subtler images and icons as well, including embedded nameplates for long-gone streets and ironwork that resembles, or reflects, the wrought-iron work of the late 19th century.
 
^^ Cool. Thanks for doing the legwork on that. Very interesting.

And welcome to the forum!
 
Nashua Street Residences will be awesome if they ever do it!!!
It truly will transform that area, and the skyline from Zakim Bridge. There are no tall buildings over there, only behind it in downtown. Boston will look even more stunning with a tower like NSR sitting there right when you enter the city!
This thread died, but as far as I have read, it says that this project is still a go.
Anyone got any news on what is going on over there???
 
As far as I know, this thing is dead. Unless someone knows otherwise.
 
dirtywater said:
Not dead. Just in hibernation.
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Perhaps it's waking up from it's hibernation. From today's Globe:
Garden growth expected

A portion of the long-awaited build-out around Boston Garden, now a decade-plus in the planning stages, appears to be creeping closer to reality. According to Charlie Jacobs, the Bruins executive vice president, his father's Delaware North Companies soon hopes to finalize plans with a co-developer to construct a 37-story hotel/residential tower on the adjacent Nashua Street parcel -- often referred to as the lot "behind" the Garden.

The building, said Jacobs, would house a hotel and residential condos, with the first five floors dedicated to a parking garage. The "lobby" of the building would line up approximately with the roof line of the Garden. The single-tower project also would include ample convention and banquet space.

"We've had a few dance partners on this," said the junior Jacobs, whose father, Jeremy, jetted from Boston to London Thursday for this weekend's grand opening of the 90,000-seat Wembley Stadium (its concessions part of the Delaware North empire). "Frankly, given how long it has taken, I'm a little nervous to say we're near the end on this, but I think we're close."

The project has been fully permitted by the city, said Jacobs, and he is confident that construction could be completed within 36 months.

Meanwhile, the two large building parcels that run along Causeway Street, the area where the old Garden stood for 60-plus years, have yet to be permitted. Jacobs said Delaware North hopes one day to build two office and retail towers there, serving as a grand entrance to the current home of the Bruins and Celtics. Without the permits in hand, there is no telling when those projects take flight.

Why has everything taken so long? "My involvement has been about five years," said Jacobs. "Given the complexities involved -- the design, the review, the need to gain the Boston Redevelopment Auth ority's stamp of approval -- it's just the pace these projects move."
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http://www.boston.com/sports/hockey/bruins/articles/2007/05/20/awrey_is_no_bauble_head/?page=2
 
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