Bulfinch Crossing | Congress Street Garage | West End

Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

Mike said:
539w.jpg
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Wow, they should really tighten and shrink (get rid of the curved right turn lanes and square the corners!) that massive car-centric intersection there (is that how it is now?).

EDIT: this picture also shows just how much an abomination the b parcel proposal is.
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

Ron Newman said:
Besides the EPA leasing the office floors, the feds also lease one or more parking levels for their own employees. I recall being politely but firmly turned away when I tried to visit one of the upper parking levels to stare at the Big Dig demolition. I didn't even have a camera with me. Maybe they were concerned that I would plant a car bomb or something.
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Our taxes paying for Fed employee parking downtown?!!
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

Chris said:
Wow, they should really tighten and shrink (get rid of the curved right turn lanes and square the corners!) that massive car-centric intersection there (is that how it is now?).
Click to expand...

That would make a great public space if they took out a few lanes of traffic.

EDIT: this picture also shows just how much an abomination the b parcel proposal is.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's a dud.
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

congress street needs to be totally redone from that point all the way through PO square.
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

what is the 'b parcel'? If you mean the Big Dig parcel, I think that's just a hypothetical building put into the model to fill space, not any actual proposal.
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

I wasn't sure on the nomenclature for the two parts of the Congress garage proposal; the other building's more detailed renderings are at this post
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

Follow link below to BRA map with assessment/owner of land parcels in area. Didn't know the city/BRA owned so much land around this development. Interesting that BRA owns the piece of land in front of JFK (2nd ugliest building in Boston aside from CityHall), and they let the Fed block off and park vehicles on it.

The State of Mass owns the land that the hideous parking garage above Haymarket is on??

http://www.mapjunction.com/places/Boston_BRA/cgi-view/rest.pl?t=14177&p=18813

If you search the parcel ID on the city of boston assesment website you can find out the taxes paid. Redevelopment of this site could produce 15-30+ million per year for city



http://www.cityofboston.gov/assessing/search/default.asp
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

vanshnookenraggen said:
Since Boston needs more parking than office space and condos, this will probably stay a garage. But if anything was to be built, a low building, say 10 to 15 stories would be good right in Haymarket Sq, on the edge of the North End, and further up the hill you could built taller buildings, perhapse even a 30 story condo/office building.

Anything more would kill the scale.
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Holy crap, I hit the nail on the head 2 years ago.
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

OMG, I thought the parcel b building was an airshaft or prison from the looks of it, not an actual office or residential building! It's like they threw a bunch of clay into a pile of dog poop.
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

The grouping of these buildings reminds me of International Place
xcranes015.jpg
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

A lot of your questions are answered on the meeting presentations:
http://www.demolishthegarage.com/meetings.htm

each one:
October 23, 2008 - Back (West) Parcels Planning:
http://www.demolishthegarage.com/pdf/presentations/pres_2008_10_23.pdf

July 23, 2008 - Front (East) Parcel Planning
http://www.demolishthegarage.com/pdf/presentations/pres_2008_07_23.pdf

July 9, 2008 - Parking and Initial Site Parcelization
http://www.demolishthegarage.com/pdf/presentations/pres_2008_07_09.pdf

June 18, 2008 - Introduction to the Opportunit
http://www.demolishthegarage.com/pdf/presentations/pres_2008_06_18.pdf
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

The tallest is 706' to the roof, the other is 554', 1.3 million sf and 1 million sf.
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

The best part about this project is that it gets rid of the garage. I wont nitpick the aesthetic quality of the buildings.
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

Thank god this is ambitious....it is amazing how big a difference we see right off the bat compared to the Usual Suspect developers who dominate this city...

Raymond has development partners, union funds, a nice website, a master plan, and above all real big project architects bidding for the job.....

With Foster & Partners, Rem Koolhaas's OMA, SMO, Cook + Fox and Gensler all competing to design the architecture; we are going to get some interesting proposals....

Next month we will see them?

What is also great about this project is that with a well designed and dare I say iconic tower; it will really lend it self to being visible from numerous angles....the view from the Greenway, from upper Congress, Fanueil Hall, Tremont etc....

They give examples of the visibility towards the end of the proposal pdf.

I'm jacked...
 
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Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

Just do it.

P.S. That YMCA is obnoxious. Truly green space is preferable to it.
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

If this and the North Station towers get built we'll have a whole new skyline area from certain angles!
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

The new parking garage doesnt seem to be so hidden in these plans.

Why will we get more NIMBYs fighting the height than the parking spaces?
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

This says it all:

haymarket.jpg


The space has been reallocated. Public space (streets and squares) are drastically curtailed. The space thus "liberated" is assigned to "landscaped" space surrounding sculptural object buildings with footprints bigger than a block.

Suburbia.

All that's left of the previous urban pattern is the Blackstone Block and the North End.
 
Re: Congress St Garage is being sold.

^You're right, of course, ablarc. Haymarket Square was such an interesting warren of streets. Since that's been destroyed, our only hope is to improve upon what we have there now.
 
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