BCEC expansion | Seaport
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Ron Newman
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It's owned by the state, not the city.
^And the surface artery runs through the city and was controlled by the turnpike but they named it after a Senator's mother. Isn't that strange? Or perhaps some of the people that work for the city and the state and the senator go to the same parties?
Just for argument's sake, do you think that next time Stratouly wants to throw up another see-through building he would find it helpful if he had just worked to get the BCEC named the Menino Center? Or do think that the Mayor might keep pushing to move City Hall to the Seaport if Jack Hart and other Southie politicians would pass a bill to do the same thing? What bureaucracy actually owns the building is minimally relevant.
Just for argument's sake, do you think that next time Stratouly wants to throw up another see-through building he would find it helpful if he had just worked to get the BCEC named the Menino Center? Or do think that the Mayor might keep pushing to move City Hall to the Seaport if Jack Hart and other Southie politicians would pass a bill to do the same thing? What bureaucracy actually owns the building is minimally relevant.
denatlanta
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The BCEC is far from a "white elephant." It's one of the most successful convention centers in the country, regularly getting awards and kudo's from various convention publications and organizations. Haven't been inside yet but I think the front is very cool, very un-Boston like. And as far as naming the Greenway after Senator Kennedy's mother, from what I understand, the Kennedy family donated a sizeable chunk of change to fund the Greenway Founation.
South Boston convention hall could double in size
By Scott Van Voorhis
Saturday, July 12, 2008
The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority is reviewing expansion plans that would nearly double the size of the South Boston hall.
Just four years after its opening, the $800 million-plus Boston Convention & Exhibition Center has its calendar packed and the project has been lauded in the industry as a huge success.
Supporters say an expansion would allow the BCEC to attract even more business and keep Boston competitive with other cities.
Watertown-based Sasaki Associates recently presented a series of expansion possibilities to the convention authority?s board.
Under one scenario, the convention hall would add hundreds of thousands of square feet of core exhibit space, boosting the total to anywhere from 800,000 to 930,000 square feet. The hall?s exhibit space now totals 516,000 square feet.
?It is a confirmation of the success we have had,? said James Rooney, chief executive of the state convention authority. ?The consultants took a look at the bookings. They were at least impressed enough to say we think you are doing the right thing to think about expanding. That is validating.?
Other ideas thrown out by Sasaki call for adding a second ballroom, possibly as large as 80,000 square feet, as well as an auditorium with up to 6,000 seats. There is also a need for as many as 50 additional meeting rooms, Sasaki found. The hall currenty has 86.
One big question looming is where such a major expansion would go, with the convention center covering two-thirds of its roughly 60-acre site.
The consultant?s final report is due later this fall. After that, Rooney expects an intensive master planning process that could take another year.
?The investment in the convention center was a major public investment,? Rooney said. ?I feel like it?s been successful.?
Link
By Scott Van Voorhis
Saturday, July 12, 2008
The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority is reviewing expansion plans that would nearly double the size of the South Boston hall.
Just four years after its opening, the $800 million-plus Boston Convention & Exhibition Center has its calendar packed and the project has been lauded in the industry as a huge success.
Supporters say an expansion would allow the BCEC to attract even more business and keep Boston competitive with other cities.
Watertown-based Sasaki Associates recently presented a series of expansion possibilities to the convention authority?s board.
Under one scenario, the convention hall would add hundreds of thousands of square feet of core exhibit space, boosting the total to anywhere from 800,000 to 930,000 square feet. The hall?s exhibit space now totals 516,000 square feet.
?It is a confirmation of the success we have had,? said James Rooney, chief executive of the state convention authority. ?The consultants took a look at the bookings. They were at least impressed enough to say we think you are doing the right thing to think about expanding. That is validating.?
Other ideas thrown out by Sasaki call for adding a second ballroom, possibly as large as 80,000 square feet, as well as an auditorium with up to 6,000 seats. There is also a need for as many as 50 additional meeting rooms, Sasaki found. The hall currenty has 86.
One big question looming is where such a major expansion would go, with the convention center covering two-thirds of its roughly 60-acre site.
The consultant?s final report is due later this fall. After that, Rooney expects an intensive master planning process that could take another year.
?The investment in the convention center was a major public investment,? Rooney said. ?I feel like it?s been successful.?
Link
kz1000ps
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The Middle of Nowhere
Boston's convention center wants to be somewhere, but the neighborhood around it still lags
By David Scharfenberg
Globe Correspondent / December 14, 2008
Nearly five years after Messrs. Romney and Menino cut the ribbon on the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, there is much to recommend the cavernous hall.
The building, cast in glass and steel, cuts a striking figure on the South Boston waterfront.
Management is aglow about a 2007 Convention Center of the Year award the complex won from an industry group.
And the roasted turkey sandwich served up in the food court is not half-bad.
But the $850 million complex, whatever its culinary triumphs, is still a work in progress.
Billed as the face of the new Boston, an economic engine par excellence and an ego boost for a city desperate to maintain its world-class status, the building is a bit isolated. A bit unrealized.
The publicly financed center has produced just half the economic benefits projected by city- and state-commissioned consultants: Hotel-room bookings lag, and conventioneers are spending far less on scallops and key chains than hoped.
And the building, which stirred hope of new life in the long-moribund Seaport District, still has the look of a shiny space station on a lonely lunar landscape.
Arthur Young, a chatty environmental consultant in town from San Francisco for the recent Greenbuild conference, said the windy warren of parking lots and exit ramps that ring the center just doesn't scream "Boston" to him.
"This could be Kansas City," he said. "This could be Dubai."
Of course the building is, in some respects, a victim of overheated expectations.
No single structure could be expected to lift the fortunes of an underdeveloped area like the Seaport District. And as decades of false starts on the waterfront suggest, the growth of a new neighborhood can take, well, decades.
Moreover, convention center officials suggest that consultants inflated the anticipated benefits to drum up political support for the project in the late 1990s, as consultants are wont to do.
But as critics are quick to point out, the center was sold to the public on the promise of those benefits - trumpeted by politicians and hotel developers and writ bold in the city's newspapers. And the taxpayers put up quite a bit of cash in the pursuit of a big payoff.
"It's just not what it was supposed to be," said Jim Stergios, executive director of the Boston-based Pioneer Institute, a conservative think tank that questioned the center from the outset.
But only the most dedicated Luddite could deny the pleasures of strolling among acres of consumer marvels at the center's sprawling shows.
At the Greenbuild event: environmentally friendly lighting, energy-saving roofing, and, in aisle 2800, solar-powered trash compactors.
The complex, to be sure, is no white elephant.
Run by the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which also operates the Hynes Convention Center, the waterfront building "puts Boston on the map as a desirable destination city for some of the largest conventions in the country," Mayor Thomas M. Menino said in a prepared statement. And the building's business has grown every year.
In 2007, the complex hosted 125 events, drawing 528,000 conventioneers who paid for 365,000 hotel room nights and generated an estimated $306 million in economic activity - half in direct spending on restaurants, cab rides, and hotel rooms and half in recycled dollars dished out by the waitresses, cabbies, and bellhops who benefit from conventioneers' largesse.
Big numbers. But the March 1997 report commissioned by the city and Commonwealth projected about double that economic impact: $764 million in economic activity and, by the fourth year of operation, 654,000 hotel room nights.
James E. Rooney, who took over as executive director of the convention authority in 2003, dismisses the report as foolish hyperbole.
"In the '90s, you probably won't find a consultant report that didn't tell a county, a city, or state government that [a convention center] is a good idea and you're going to get every event in the United States," he said. "It's ridiculous."
Rooney said he created his own business plan a year before the building opened. The complex, he said, is meeting targets.
"We're competing and we're winning," he said, calling the convention center one of the most successful in the country.
Officials are so bullish on the future, in fact, that they are discussing an expansion to accommodate larger events.
But the economic crisis gripping the country has cast some doubt on the growth plans. And with far-flung cities like Jackson, Miss., and Anchorage opening new centers these days, there are more than enough places for the American Urological Association to gather for its annual discussion of kidney ailments common and obscure.
Between 1989 and mid-2008, exhibit hall space at US and Canadian convention centers soared from 47.3 million square feet to 79.9 million square feet, according to Tradeshow Week, an industry publication.
Officials acknowledge the glut, but they insist a city as attractive as Boston has a competitive advantage. Anchorage, whatever its charms, cannot offer visitors an afternoon at Fenway Park or an evening in Copley Square.
Of course, the ball game and boutiques are some distance from the grand, rounded bow of the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. And critics say the city might have done better to build closer to the urban core.
Eduardo Lozano, a Watertown-based architect who pushed for an expansion of the smaller Hynes center in the Back Bay, said the city lost an opportunity to set visitors rambling through its most attractive quarters - popping in and out of museums, theaters, and restaurants.
"Choice is an urban characteristic, a wonderful characteristic," he said. "This is what we enjoy, rather than sitting on an island, eating fruit and watching cockatoos."
But it is the rare American city that has a large convention center at the heart of its downtown. Indeed, a remote redoubt - sans cockatoos - is generally required for a structure as large as the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, with its 2.1 million square feet of exhibit space.
There were practical considerations, too. City officials wanted to limit the displacement of local business, for example, and identify easily assembled lots.
The Seaport District, no longer a bustling port, filled the bill. And there was considerable excitement about a neighborhood with potential - excitement that still enlivens the city's civic and business leadership.
The arrival of the Silver Line and the Massachusetts Turnpike has improved access to the area. The Institute of Contemporary Art has added some cultural cachet. And a small army of young financial types is moving its fleet of Bose stereo systems and Keurig coffee makers into the Seaport District's new apartments bit by bit.
Moreover, developers insist they will make good in the next decade or so on long-discussed plans for the Fan Pier, Waterside Place, and Seaport Square developments - building acres of hotels, condominiums, parks, and retail shops.
"That convention center location, although it seems a little fringe at the moment, will be in the heart of it all in another five or 10 years," said John B. Hynes III, the developer behind the Seaport Square project.
But if the district takes off, can the convention center claim much credit?
Heywood Sanders, a professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who is perhaps the nation's foremost critic of convention centers, said the buildings generally have a marginal impact on their surroundings - pointing to anemic growth around those structures in New York, Atlanta, and Dallas.
"These things are not development boons or panaceas on their own," he said. "They are often a bridge too far."
Rooney, the convention authority director, said he has never viewed the center as a panacea, but rather as one piece of a larger public investment in the area - alongside the Boston Harbor cleanup and transportation improvements - that will help to energize the neighborhood.
"I would submit that if we look back on this area in 25 years, we'll say, 'wow,' " he said.
But Susan Silberberg-Robinson, a lecturer in urban design and planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the center could be an impediment to the sort of walkable neighborhood city planners would prefer.
"I think that the convention center as a building, as an object, is a good one - it's light, it's airy, it's got some nice detailing," she said. "It's got some insurmountable problems, though."
Her chief concern: The center is massive and inward-looking, with long walls and a rim of loading docks that do not encourage what she calls a "finely grained," human-scale community.
And with the Seaport District already developing a corporate-tourist feel, she said, the city will have to make a concerted effort to bring in affordable housing, cafes, and the other building blocks of a true neighborhood.
Kairos Shen, the city's chief planner, said the amenities are on the way.
City Hall is planning bicycle lanes, wider sidewalks, and trees for three of the area's major east-west thoroughfares: Summer Street, Congress Street, and Seaport Boulevard. A series of green spaces is also in the works.
And developers say retail shops and drugstores will come in time, presenting a livelier face to the doctors from Duluth and programmers from Pittsburgh flocking to the convention center.
The verdict on the center - as economic stimulus, neighborhood anchor, symbol of a city - may be a decade or two away.
But for now, the center is a lonesome, if busy outpost.
"We built a great big box," said the Pioneer Institute's Stergios. "And now, we're stuck with it."
Link
Boston's convention center wants to be somewhere, but the neighborhood around it still lags
By David Scharfenberg
Globe Correspondent / December 14, 2008
Nearly five years after Messrs. Romney and Menino cut the ribbon on the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, there is much to recommend the cavernous hall.
The building, cast in glass and steel, cuts a striking figure on the South Boston waterfront.
Management is aglow about a 2007 Convention Center of the Year award the complex won from an industry group.
And the roasted turkey sandwich served up in the food court is not half-bad.
But the $850 million complex, whatever its culinary triumphs, is still a work in progress.
Billed as the face of the new Boston, an economic engine par excellence and an ego boost for a city desperate to maintain its world-class status, the building is a bit isolated. A bit unrealized.
The publicly financed center has produced just half the economic benefits projected by city- and state-commissioned consultants: Hotel-room bookings lag, and conventioneers are spending far less on scallops and key chains than hoped.
And the building, which stirred hope of new life in the long-moribund Seaport District, still has the look of a shiny space station on a lonely lunar landscape.
Arthur Young, a chatty environmental consultant in town from San Francisco for the recent Greenbuild conference, said the windy warren of parking lots and exit ramps that ring the center just doesn't scream "Boston" to him.
"This could be Kansas City," he said. "This could be Dubai."
Of course the building is, in some respects, a victim of overheated expectations.
No single structure could be expected to lift the fortunes of an underdeveloped area like the Seaport District. And as decades of false starts on the waterfront suggest, the growth of a new neighborhood can take, well, decades.
Moreover, convention center officials suggest that consultants inflated the anticipated benefits to drum up political support for the project in the late 1990s, as consultants are wont to do.
But as critics are quick to point out, the center was sold to the public on the promise of those benefits - trumpeted by politicians and hotel developers and writ bold in the city's newspapers. And the taxpayers put up quite a bit of cash in the pursuit of a big payoff.
"It's just not what it was supposed to be," said Jim Stergios, executive director of the Boston-based Pioneer Institute, a conservative think tank that questioned the center from the outset.
But only the most dedicated Luddite could deny the pleasures of strolling among acres of consumer marvels at the center's sprawling shows.
At the Greenbuild event: environmentally friendly lighting, energy-saving roofing, and, in aisle 2800, solar-powered trash compactors.
The complex, to be sure, is no white elephant.
Run by the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which also operates the Hynes Convention Center, the waterfront building "puts Boston on the map as a desirable destination city for some of the largest conventions in the country," Mayor Thomas M. Menino said in a prepared statement. And the building's business has grown every year.
In 2007, the complex hosted 125 events, drawing 528,000 conventioneers who paid for 365,000 hotel room nights and generated an estimated $306 million in economic activity - half in direct spending on restaurants, cab rides, and hotel rooms and half in recycled dollars dished out by the waitresses, cabbies, and bellhops who benefit from conventioneers' largesse.
Big numbers. But the March 1997 report commissioned by the city and Commonwealth projected about double that economic impact: $764 million in economic activity and, by the fourth year of operation, 654,000 hotel room nights.
James E. Rooney, who took over as executive director of the convention authority in 2003, dismisses the report as foolish hyperbole.
"In the '90s, you probably won't find a consultant report that didn't tell a county, a city, or state government that [a convention center] is a good idea and you're going to get every event in the United States," he said. "It's ridiculous."
Rooney said he created his own business plan a year before the building opened. The complex, he said, is meeting targets.
"We're competing and we're winning," he said, calling the convention center one of the most successful in the country.
Officials are so bullish on the future, in fact, that they are discussing an expansion to accommodate larger events.
But the economic crisis gripping the country has cast some doubt on the growth plans. And with far-flung cities like Jackson, Miss., and Anchorage opening new centers these days, there are more than enough places for the American Urological Association to gather for its annual discussion of kidney ailments common and obscure.
Between 1989 and mid-2008, exhibit hall space at US and Canadian convention centers soared from 47.3 million square feet to 79.9 million square feet, according to Tradeshow Week, an industry publication.
Officials acknowledge the glut, but they insist a city as attractive as Boston has a competitive advantage. Anchorage, whatever its charms, cannot offer visitors an afternoon at Fenway Park or an evening in Copley Square.
Of course, the ball game and boutiques are some distance from the grand, rounded bow of the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. And critics say the city might have done better to build closer to the urban core.
Eduardo Lozano, a Watertown-based architect who pushed for an expansion of the smaller Hynes center in the Back Bay, said the city lost an opportunity to set visitors rambling through its most attractive quarters - popping in and out of museums, theaters, and restaurants.
"Choice is an urban characteristic, a wonderful characteristic," he said. "This is what we enjoy, rather than sitting on an island, eating fruit and watching cockatoos."
But it is the rare American city that has a large convention center at the heart of its downtown. Indeed, a remote redoubt - sans cockatoos - is generally required for a structure as large as the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, with its 2.1 million square feet of exhibit space.
There were practical considerations, too. City officials wanted to limit the displacement of local business, for example, and identify easily assembled lots.
The Seaport District, no longer a bustling port, filled the bill. And there was considerable excitement about a neighborhood with potential - excitement that still enlivens the city's civic and business leadership.
The arrival of the Silver Line and the Massachusetts Turnpike has improved access to the area. The Institute of Contemporary Art has added some cultural cachet. And a small army of young financial types is moving its fleet of Bose stereo systems and Keurig coffee makers into the Seaport District's new apartments bit by bit.
Moreover, developers insist they will make good in the next decade or so on long-discussed plans for the Fan Pier, Waterside Place, and Seaport Square developments - building acres of hotels, condominiums, parks, and retail shops.
"That convention center location, although it seems a little fringe at the moment, will be in the heart of it all in another five or 10 years," said John B. Hynes III, the developer behind the Seaport Square project.
But if the district takes off, can the convention center claim much credit?
Heywood Sanders, a professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who is perhaps the nation's foremost critic of convention centers, said the buildings generally have a marginal impact on their surroundings - pointing to anemic growth around those structures in New York, Atlanta, and Dallas.
"These things are not development boons or panaceas on their own," he said. "They are often a bridge too far."
Rooney, the convention authority director, said he has never viewed the center as a panacea, but rather as one piece of a larger public investment in the area - alongside the Boston Harbor cleanup and transportation improvements - that will help to energize the neighborhood.
"I would submit that if we look back on this area in 25 years, we'll say, 'wow,' " he said.
But Susan Silberberg-Robinson, a lecturer in urban design and planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the center could be an impediment to the sort of walkable neighborhood city planners would prefer.
"I think that the convention center as a building, as an object, is a good one - it's light, it's airy, it's got some nice detailing," she said. "It's got some insurmountable problems, though."
Her chief concern: The center is massive and inward-looking, with long walls and a rim of loading docks that do not encourage what she calls a "finely grained," human-scale community.
And with the Seaport District already developing a corporate-tourist feel, she said, the city will have to make a concerted effort to bring in affordable housing, cafes, and the other building blocks of a true neighborhood.
Kairos Shen, the city's chief planner, said the amenities are on the way.
City Hall is planning bicycle lanes, wider sidewalks, and trees for three of the area's major east-west thoroughfares: Summer Street, Congress Street, and Seaport Boulevard. A series of green spaces is also in the works.
And developers say retail shops and drugstores will come in time, presenting a livelier face to the doctors from Duluth and programmers from Pittsburgh flocking to the convention center.
The verdict on the center - as economic stimulus, neighborhood anchor, symbol of a city - may be a decade or two away.
But for now, the center is a lonesome, if busy outpost.
"We built a great big box," said the Pioneer Institute's Stergios. "And now, we're stuck with it."
Link
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This is actually kind of fitting since the entire South Boston Waterfront was filled in on inflated hopes of increased trade (which never materialized).
JimboJones
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It is stunning that the actual financial impact is only half of what was estimated.
Oh, I know how we can fix that ... we just need to expand it!
Oh, I know how we can fix that ... we just need to expand it!
underground
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^The estimates aside, the argument for expansion is based on the fact that the convention center is booked pretty solid and could expand bookings if it was larger. That's a seperate problem from the over estimation of the center's economic benefits at the time it was proposed. I think another thing to keep in mind is, the estimates were based on the idea that there would be actual things to spend money on it this area. To date.... we've got 2 hotels, a couple of restraunts/bars, and one (1) museum. That's a far cry from the massive shopping mall and entertainment district that we all thought would be there by now.
czsz
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I question whether anyone visiting Boston would have really spent all that much money on the dull "shopping mall and entertainment district" that was even proposed for the area rather than spend their precious time here in the North End or Back Bay. What is the point of having a conference in a place like Boston, anyway, if all anyone will do is spend their time in Minneapolis-by-the-Sea? Of course they'd want to see the culture and history instead. The ICA maybe the one thing I'd see in the Seaport if I were a conventioneer coming to Boston. Waste my precious time at Waterside Mall or strolling the precast tower parks of Fan Pier? I think not.
Oh, as for the convention center: it's booked solid until Phoenix or Atlanta build one twice the size and half the age, and then the city is shopping around for another 20 acres to dump their next silver bullet white elephant on. That game never ends.
Oh, as for the convention center: it's booked solid until Phoenix or Atlanta build one twice the size and half the age, and then the city is shopping around for another 20 acres to dump their next silver bullet white elephant on. That game never ends.
JimboJones
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I was just being cynical. I have to say, all things considered, I'm impressed with the success of the convention center, and I can still see potential in the entire Seaport area.
SeamusMcFly
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I'm going to answer this from my limited out of state convention time. I just went to my first in Long Beach, CA. All in all. Not bad. The reason convention was in Long Beach? Because it was cheaper. The organization would love to do one in Boston, but can't afford it. Mostly due to the cost of hotel rooms. The group holding the convention will typically buy up large blocks of rooms at reduced prices. Boston does not have this glut of hotel rooms, particularly around the BCEC, so therefore the hotels do not cut the same breaks. Supply vs. demand at it's finest. Long Beach, despite the word beach in the name, is really not a great destination. But they do have a sizable convention center, and lots of hotel rooms, plus 2 or 3 local airports.
As to whether money would be spent in the area. That's a big yes. Boston is a great historical city that people will want to check out, but that takes time. Not always altted time due to tight convention schedules. Although there may be arranged "excursions" that the convention will put on to hit up the major Boston tourist spots. Whether you're a day tripper to an auto show, or the guys who have to be there for 10 hours, typically you are looking for something local and easy to get to for your meals. Maybe, at night you will want to go out and get a nice meal, and will take a cab. But, the out of towner does not really know that many places to go, so if Morton's is available and close to the hotel.... let's go.
People know there is great things to see in Boston, which is the appeal of the convention location in the first place. Conventions are also usually 2 - 5 days in length, which means maybe one day is set aside for site seeing. The rest of that time is spent close to your hotel or the BCEC.
This selling point leads to the solution to losing business to Phoenix and Atlanta. Boston has that history that they cannot compete with. It's more about what the convention itself can afford that leads to where the convention is held.
kennedy
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That is what I'm trying to say, conventioneers may spend some time in the rest of the city with excursions and what not, but most of the time they are confined to a few blocks around their hotel. That is why this area of Boston should not have this local flair that the Back Bay, the North End, and Beacon Hill have. It should be made easy for the businessmen and women to find a hotel close to the BCEC and find a restaurant within walking distance that they are familiar with. Throw in a few more big name business hotels (Renaissance is one) and some national restaurants that are recognizable and often cater to this crowd (Morton's, Capitol Grille, Maggiano's, ESPN Zone, McCormick and Schmick's). They'll be full a lot of the time, and then those who know the city, or know someone who knows the city, will go into the North End or Fenway or wherever they want to get a taste of the local atmosphere. Again, this is a void in Boston. It won't detract from the rest of Boston, and it won't isolate visitors.
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So what you are saying is we should build a sterile business zone full of all the crap stores and restaurants you find in an "Anywhere USA" mall off in an undeveloped section of the city so the rest of the city can still be "authentic" Boston?
That is genius.
Cuz seriously, how many people here have been traveling, say to Europe, and said F-it, I'm going to McDonalds?
That is genius.
Cuz seriously, how many people here have been traveling, say to Europe, and said F-it, I'm going to McDonalds?
czsz
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If we fight the chains in the Seaport we won't have to fight them at home. Bring 'em on!
Really, I think Seamus has a point. Convention-going isn't like leisure travel - people don't always have the time/energy to seek out the most authentic experiences in the midst of their busy day. And yeah, I've been to American chains abroad. Where else but Starbucks was I going to find a free bathroom in Istanbul?
Really, I think Seamus has a point. Convention-going isn't like leisure travel - people don't always have the time/energy to seek out the most authentic experiences in the midst of their busy day. And yeah, I've been to American chains abroad. Where else but Starbucks was I going to find a free bathroom in Istanbul?
kennedy
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This is America. Scratch that, this is Earth. McDonald's is a fact of life. Hopefully, you're just using that as an extreme example to portray the chain restaurants I mentioned. You know what? I'd say 80-90% of the people the Seaport will attract (with the BCEC, generic hotels, and office buildings) are going to be the ones who say "F-it, I'm going to (insert generic chain restaurant here)." Even the tourists, if here for a week, will likely patronize these "crap stores and restaurants" because if the urban design and architecture is done right, it will be a new environment. Like cz said, he went to Starbucks in Istanbul.
So yes, I want a business zone. Not sterile, not solely business, but overall yes-a business zone, albeit with flattering architecture, urban residential, modern office space, and fairly generic shopping and dining, catering toward the tourist set.