Charles River Park | West End
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whighlander
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Padre
you lost a few zeros
They will probably rent for $1500 to $2000 per month
Westy
you lost a few zeros
They will probably rent for $1500 to $2000 per month
Westy
Padre Mike
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Just my point, Westy!
Ronwell Pudding
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KZ, what did you make of the small structure with the arched roof at the edge of the park? Is there underground parking and is that the exit? I like the red brick buildings, a unit with a deck in back facing the park would probably be pretty nice. I like that they have a lot of different entrances both front and rear to the second apt tower. I cant hate...
pelhamhall
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KZ - Thanks for the awesome photo tour! Charles River Park was pretty universally disliked, and these Equity additions don't make it good, but they do make it better.
Can somebody change the name of this thread from "CRP" to "West End Apartments" now that the CRP name can be shelved into history?
Can somebody change the name of this thread from "CRP" to "West End Apartments" now that the CRP name can be shelved into history?
kz1000ps
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Ronwell, I honestly didn't know what to make of it. I hardly paid any attention to it while there (only later when I was editing the photos did I notice it), so I can't share with you exactly what it's for. I'd assume what you suggested.
Aesthetically, it doesn't really go with anything. It seems like all small semi-public structures have to have an arched roof these days, regardless of what's going on around them.
Aesthetically, it doesn't really go with anything. It seems like all small semi-public structures have to have an arched roof these days, regardless of what's going on around them.
The new building is better than the Soviet-looking, public-housing-for-the-middle-class buildings CRP was founded on, but this "neighborhood" still gives me the willies. I'm suspicious of any high-rise that tries to have a backyard: I'd gander that in 40 years, the decidedly un-urban, faux-Harvard Yard planning principles will mean that the new building will appear as awkward and out of place as the others.
What's up with the townhouses, kz? Do they look nice in person, or just really awkward and forced into the CRP?
What's up with the townhouses, kz? Do they look nice in person, or just really awkward and forced into the CRP?
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Well those are really nice buildings.
That's definitely a nice improvement over what used to be there. That part of CRP actually looks somewhat attractive. It was such a depressing looking place with that garage and parking lot.
I'm wondering what Equity's plans are for future development in the area. I'd like to see them do something along Martha Road.
I'm wondering what Equity's plans are for future development in the area. I'd like to see them do something along Martha Road.
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Ron Newman
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The new three-story red brick buildings look to me like 1940s public housing. Bleah.
kz1000ps
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Yes, the townhouses are a bit weird. The insertion of homely red brick into CRP is startling enough as it is, but putting it up on those little boxes that have no grace to their form in that location is very alien.
At least they didn't try to do a faux mansard roof thing.
At least they didn't try to do a faux mansard roof thing.
B
bostoncitywalk
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It looks like a college campus to me.
pelhamhall
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http://www.boston.com/realestate/articles/2008/05/25/making_it_stand_out/
Making it stand out
After redevelopment, branding firm creates fresh identity for first building in West End apartment complex
By Linda Tucci
Globe Correspondent / May 25, 2008
Greg John has an exercise he does with clients that he calls Bingo!
more stories like this
John is head of Kelley Habib John, a branding firm that has put its stamp on some of the most notable real estate in the Boston area.
For the owners of the old Charles River Park, the firm's mission was to come up with a fresh identity for the apartment complex that had become an ambivalent symbol of urban renewal. John also had to find the one thing - Bingo! - that would distinguish the complex's luxe new residence, Vesta, from a crowd of upscale offerings.
The Bingo exercise started a year and a half before the ribbon cutting, with John at a white board parsing the development's attributes into four quadrants: "Me toos," or features everybody else had; "So whats," stuff that was unique but irrelevant; "Nice, buts," differences that didn't resonate with tenants; and "Bingo!" - attributes no other building possesses that tenants will like and thus would make the property more valuable.
"From a real estate standpoint, every property tries to get the most money it can. There needs to be differentiation between buildings," said John, chairman and creative director of the firm. "Branding is an expression of difference. When you are branding a building, you are branding an experience, not the bricks and sticks. It is a promise of an experience."
Such is a trait of the firm's work. Kelley Habib John doesn't just come up with some fancy or cute name and slap a logo on a property. After the dot-com bust, the firm was hired to reprogram the posh International Place offices in the Financial District. It developed a series of soirees for executives working in the building, and offered free shoe shines on Fridays as part of a campaign to keep tenants happy.
Other campaigns include rebranding the old New England Life building as the Newbry and giving the building a makeover as a Back Bay destination. It also came up with "You win," the tagline for the Kraft family's enormous new Patriot Place development around Gillette Stadium and the new slogan for the state tourism campaign: "Massachusetts - It's all here."
Equity Residential Properties Trust, the Chi cago owners of Charles River Park, had a lot riding on the Bingo exercise. The Vesta was the first of five new buildings in a planned $168 million redevelopment of the complex. Moreover, Charles River Park was loaded with baggage. The complex was Boston's example of the notorious housing projects of the mid-20th century that razed neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal. Many old West Enders, some of whom still live in the Charles River Park towers, remained bitter about the redevelopment decades later.
Not the ideal atmosphere in which to market units at Vesta that rent from $2,200 to $9,900 a month.
Kelley Habib John suggested Equity rename its complex the West End Apartments, in homage to the melting pot neighborhood that disappeared.
"The negative was the perception that the former developer did something horrible to the West End. So we brought it back. We wanted to bring back all the goodness of the former ambience, that it was a close-knit neighborhood, almost like a suburban enclave right in the middle of the city," John said.
Still, Christopher Reilly, area vice president for Equity, was not convinced. "We weren't sure if letting go of Charles River Park was going to add value. Part of my job as a corporate executive is to manage risk," Reilly said. He agreed to roll out the name in phases.
Over the next 12 months, John's firm tested the new/old name with local residents, city officials, and a neighborhood museum, looking for concerns that Equity was hijacking a Boston relic for commercial gain.
Bingo! The new/old name proved a hit. It reflected a sense of place that only the West End can offer. It also dovetailed with Mayor Thomas M. Menino's efforts to brand the city's neighborhoods.
"The acceptance of the branding and the renaming is one of the things that shocked us - how readily people embraced the name and how much energy it brought to the project," said Reilly.
Next came a slogan - a teaser really - designed just for the construction phase: "The West End is Again." T-shirts, caps, and key chains with logos were given to people in earshot of the jackhammers to get them on board with the project.
The low-rise units that were designed to evoke the row houses of the old neighborhood are called the Villas. The names of the complex's existing buildings stayed the same but were prefaced with the words, West End - as in, the West End Walpole.
But the big challenge, what really mattered, was filling the Vesta. Equity wanted 70 percent of the building rented in its first six months on the market so the building would not overlap with its next property set to debut, the Asteria, Reilly said.
John's firm advised Equity to put a sales office with model units out on the street, where the foot traffic was higher than at the Vesta's location deeper in the complex. The branding firm then cranked out the obligatory brochures and bright sidewalk banners, as well as less obvious marketing details, such as scripts for the sales people. By this time, the slogan had morphed from "The West End is Again" to "Live Boston's West End."
The Vesta was 100 percent leased by the end of the year and broke a record for the highest priced rental space in Boston.
"It far exceeded our expectations," Reilly said. The speedy leasing of the units added an additional $600,000 to the bottom line, he said.
"Without Kelley Habib John, they would have filled it, but not in that short amount of time, or, I'd like to think, at that value," John asserted.
He has not always been so successful. One Boston waterfront developer rejected the firm's proposed slogan, "The World has a New Waterfront." And the firm walked away from a project in John's hometown of Lawrence, he said, because the client equated branding with just slapping on a logo.
"Before we sell you on a place to live, work, shop, or do business, we sell you on the idea of associating yourself with that place," John said. "We create the brand at every point of contact."
Andy LaGrega, a principal with the Wilder Cos., a Boston-based shopping center developer, can attest to this method. LaGrega hired Kelley Habib John after it had purchased the old Methuen Mall, with plans to turn it into an open air shopping center.
The project needed a new name, to be sure. All but two of its 85 stores were boarded up, the mall put out of business by the Mall at Rockingham Park in New Hampshire.
"It was important not to call it Methuen Mall or the new Methuen Mall or Methuen Plaza or the Shoppes at Methuen," LaGrega said.
Some 200 proposed names later, the shopping center was redubbed the Loop, a reference to the loop of highways in the area with, even better, no whiff of the old mall about it.
During the demolition, retail brokers were sent bricks embossed with the Loop logo and put on notice that Wilder "was tearing down two things: the old Methuen Mall and your perception of it," LaGrega said.
Then the firm convinced Wilder to buy a PT Cruiser, wrap it in bright yellow, and hire high school and college kids to drive it around and give away T-shirts and caps with the new logo.
"Even before we put a shovel in the ground, there was a buzz in the community and a buzz in the entire Merrimack Valley about the new Loop project," LaGrega said.
As the leases trickled in, John's firm kept the buzz going. When the Loop stores finally opened, "everybody across the board did 20 percent to 25 percent above their projected sales, and in some cases 50 percent higher store volumes," LaGrega said.
The company has since opened three Loop shopping centers in Florida with more planned there and in Massachusetts. Bingo!
? Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
Making it stand out
After redevelopment, branding firm creates fresh identity for first building in West End apartment complex
By Linda Tucci
Globe Correspondent / May 25, 2008
Greg John has an exercise he does with clients that he calls Bingo!
more stories like this
John is head of Kelley Habib John, a branding firm that has put its stamp on some of the most notable real estate in the Boston area.
For the owners of the old Charles River Park, the firm's mission was to come up with a fresh identity for the apartment complex that had become an ambivalent symbol of urban renewal. John also had to find the one thing - Bingo! - that would distinguish the complex's luxe new residence, Vesta, from a crowd of upscale offerings.
The Bingo exercise started a year and a half before the ribbon cutting, with John at a white board parsing the development's attributes into four quadrants: "Me toos," or features everybody else had; "So whats," stuff that was unique but irrelevant; "Nice, buts," differences that didn't resonate with tenants; and "Bingo!" - attributes no other building possesses that tenants will like and thus would make the property more valuable.
"From a real estate standpoint, every property tries to get the most money it can. There needs to be differentiation between buildings," said John, chairman and creative director of the firm. "Branding is an expression of difference. When you are branding a building, you are branding an experience, not the bricks and sticks. It is a promise of an experience."
Such is a trait of the firm's work. Kelley Habib John doesn't just come up with some fancy or cute name and slap a logo on a property. After the dot-com bust, the firm was hired to reprogram the posh International Place offices in the Financial District. It developed a series of soirees for executives working in the building, and offered free shoe shines on Fridays as part of a campaign to keep tenants happy.
Other campaigns include rebranding the old New England Life building as the Newbry and giving the building a makeover as a Back Bay destination. It also came up with "You win," the tagline for the Kraft family's enormous new Patriot Place development around Gillette Stadium and the new slogan for the state tourism campaign: "Massachusetts - It's all here."
Equity Residential Properties Trust, the Chi cago owners of Charles River Park, had a lot riding on the Bingo exercise. The Vesta was the first of five new buildings in a planned $168 million redevelopment of the complex. Moreover, Charles River Park was loaded with baggage. The complex was Boston's example of the notorious housing projects of the mid-20th century that razed neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal. Many old West Enders, some of whom still live in the Charles River Park towers, remained bitter about the redevelopment decades later.
Not the ideal atmosphere in which to market units at Vesta that rent from $2,200 to $9,900 a month.
Kelley Habib John suggested Equity rename its complex the West End Apartments, in homage to the melting pot neighborhood that disappeared.
"The negative was the perception that the former developer did something horrible to the West End. So we brought it back. We wanted to bring back all the goodness of the former ambience, that it was a close-knit neighborhood, almost like a suburban enclave right in the middle of the city," John said.
Still, Christopher Reilly, area vice president for Equity, was not convinced. "We weren't sure if letting go of Charles River Park was going to add value. Part of my job as a corporate executive is to manage risk," Reilly said. He agreed to roll out the name in phases.
Over the next 12 months, John's firm tested the new/old name with local residents, city officials, and a neighborhood museum, looking for concerns that Equity was hijacking a Boston relic for commercial gain.
Bingo! The new/old name proved a hit. It reflected a sense of place that only the West End can offer. It also dovetailed with Mayor Thomas M. Menino's efforts to brand the city's neighborhoods.
"The acceptance of the branding and the renaming is one of the things that shocked us - how readily people embraced the name and how much energy it brought to the project," said Reilly.
Next came a slogan - a teaser really - designed just for the construction phase: "The West End is Again." T-shirts, caps, and key chains with logos were given to people in earshot of the jackhammers to get them on board with the project.
The low-rise units that were designed to evoke the row houses of the old neighborhood are called the Villas. The names of the complex's existing buildings stayed the same but were prefaced with the words, West End - as in, the West End Walpole.
But the big challenge, what really mattered, was filling the Vesta. Equity wanted 70 percent of the building rented in its first six months on the market so the building would not overlap with its next property set to debut, the Asteria, Reilly said.
John's firm advised Equity to put a sales office with model units out on the street, where the foot traffic was higher than at the Vesta's location deeper in the complex. The branding firm then cranked out the obligatory brochures and bright sidewalk banners, as well as less obvious marketing details, such as scripts for the sales people. By this time, the slogan had morphed from "The West End is Again" to "Live Boston's West End."
The Vesta was 100 percent leased by the end of the year and broke a record for the highest priced rental space in Boston.
"It far exceeded our expectations," Reilly said. The speedy leasing of the units added an additional $600,000 to the bottom line, he said.
"Without Kelley Habib John, they would have filled it, but not in that short amount of time, or, I'd like to think, at that value," John asserted.
He has not always been so successful. One Boston waterfront developer rejected the firm's proposed slogan, "The World has a New Waterfront." And the firm walked away from a project in John's hometown of Lawrence, he said, because the client equated branding with just slapping on a logo.
"Before we sell you on a place to live, work, shop, or do business, we sell you on the idea of associating yourself with that place," John said. "We create the brand at every point of contact."
Andy LaGrega, a principal with the Wilder Cos., a Boston-based shopping center developer, can attest to this method. LaGrega hired Kelley Habib John after it had purchased the old Methuen Mall, with plans to turn it into an open air shopping center.
The project needed a new name, to be sure. All but two of its 85 stores were boarded up, the mall put out of business by the Mall at Rockingham Park in New Hampshire.
"It was important not to call it Methuen Mall or the new Methuen Mall or Methuen Plaza or the Shoppes at Methuen," LaGrega said.
Some 200 proposed names later, the shopping center was redubbed the Loop, a reference to the loop of highways in the area with, even better, no whiff of the old mall about it.
During the demolition, retail brokers were sent bricks embossed with the Loop logo and put on notice that Wilder "was tearing down two things: the old Methuen Mall and your perception of it," LaGrega said.
Then the firm convinced Wilder to buy a PT Cruiser, wrap it in bright yellow, and hire high school and college kids to drive it around and give away T-shirts and caps with the new logo.
"Even before we put a shovel in the ground, there was a buzz in the community and a buzz in the entire Merrimack Valley about the new Loop project," LaGrega said.
As the leases trickled in, John's firm kept the buzz going. When the Loop stores finally opened, "everybody across the board did 20 percent to 25 percent above their projected sales, and in some cases 50 percent higher store volumes," LaGrega said.
The company has since opened three Loop shopping centers in Florida with more planned there and in Massachusetts. Bingo!
? Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
Last edited:
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Jesus, these are the same douche bags that come up with names like SoWa.
Lets take shit and call it gold; BINGO!
All that talk about having the townhouses emulate the row houses of the West End makes me want to just punch this guy. This is about as bad as naming a mall after the farm it was built over.
Lets take shit and call it gold; BINGO!
All that talk about having the townhouses emulate the row houses of the West End makes me want to just punch this guy. This is about as bad as naming a mall after the farm it was built over.
Exactly. Charles River Park is unforgivable and unsalvageable. Rather than get rid of the name and call it the West End Redux or "Old Timey Boston, Kinda," the city needs to get rid of the whole wretched waste of space and rebuild a neighborhood worthy of replacing what was lost (in the sense of architectural diversity, urban planning merit and organic-ness more than the smut, crime and unsanitary conditions... though that would also be kinda cool).
Many European cities that were decimated by WWII have done this, especially in Germany. Berlin in particular has done this in the last 10 years after the capital moved back from Bonn. There is precedent -- and there have been great success stories (especially in the non-Sony Center/Potsdamer Platz parts of Berlin, where modern, dense and very urban environments are being built today). Calling CRP "the Places at West End" or whatever is not a success story.
Many European cities that were decimated by WWII have done this, especially in Germany. Berlin in particular has done this in the last 10 years after the capital moved back from Bonn. There is precedent -- and there have been great success stories (especially in the non-Sony Center/Potsdamer Platz parts of Berlin, where modern, dense and very urban environments are being built today). Calling CRP "the Places at West End" or whatever is not a success story.
atlantaden
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The Vesta was 100 percent leased by the end of the year and broke a record for the highest priced rental space in Boston.
"It far exceeded our expectations," Reilly said. The speedy leasing of the units added an additional $600,000 to the bottom line, he said.
Sure as hell sounds pretty successful to me! And hopefully, because of this success, Equity will build on this success by adding even more buildings (and desnity) to CRP. Won't be for a while since Equity, as a concession to the residents, cannot build again for 5 years, but build they will if they feel they can mirror the success of this latest addition.
The Vesta was 100 percent leased by the end of the year and broke a record for the highest priced rental space in Boston.
"It far exceeded our expectations," Reilly said. The speedy leasing of the units added an additional $600,000 to the bottom line, he said.
Sure as hell sounds pretty successful to me! And hopefully, because of this success, Equity will build on this success by adding even more buildings (and desnity) to CRP. Won't be for a while since Equity, as a concession to the residents, cannot build again for 5 years, but build they will if they feel they can mirror the success of this latest addition.