Chinatown Infill and Small Developments

Please have street level retail. Please have street level retail... please have street level retail.
 
Please have street level retail. Please have street level retail... please have street level retail.

From the Letter of Intent:

The new building will be contemporary in style, featuring facade, fenestration, and materiality elements that will relate to the surrounding area. The hotel is expected to be twenty (20) stories high, with a height of approximately two hundred fifteen (215) feet, and efficient floor plates of approximately 4,700 square feet. The Project will contain approximately 94,000 Gross Square Feet with a Gross Floor Area of approximately 88,500 square feet. In addition to guest rooms it will include lounges, meeting spaces, and other amenities as well as a dramatic, double height ground floor with publicly accessible food and beverage. No on-site parking will be provided. The site benefits from multiple nearby parking options including adjacent lots and garages. These alternatives will be finalized as part of the BPDA and community process.[Emphasis added]
 
This project (20-story tower; double-height ground level retail) definitely deserves its own thread.

Mods, can you please extract posts #18-22 and start a new thread for this?
 
Please have street level retail. Please have street level retail... please have street level retail.

As a reminder, the other side of Kneeland Street looks like this.

And the state's attempt to sell those MassDOT parcels has gone exactly nowhere. So that corridor is going to be blighted and desolate for many many years, if not decades, more.

So, with exactly zero pedestrian traffic per hour, on the fringe of a rather... bleak... quasi-industrial badlands, who, pray tell, will said retail be "activating" the street for?
 
As a reminder, the other side of Kneeland Street looks like this.

Lofts at Smokestack Crossing ?



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Those parcels havent gone anywhere (yet) but the air rights parcel next to one greenway had some steam for a little bit (no pun intended).
 
So that corridor is going to be blighted and desolate for many many years, if not decades, more.

So, with exactly zero pedestrian traffic per hour, on the fringe of a rather... bleak... quasi-industrial badlands, who, pray tell, will said retail be "activating" the street for?

Not really true - I live not too far away and it's not uncommon to find oneself walking down Kneeland to get to South Station or the Leather District, especially given how the lights work out with the greenway and ramps. This is a good step
 
Thanks for the rip Beeline. As a resident and not a tourist, I'd rather this be housing but people keep posting that we also have a hospitality crunch so sure, build it. I'm sure the first rendering won't be anything like the final product so just going off massing, seems fine.
 
Not sure if this is the correct thread, but we seem to have something (site prep?) going on at this site on Kneeland. Oops! I've moved to 150 Kneeland thread.
 
Looked like a soil drilling rig on the tiny parking lot of Clay Pot Cafe at corner of Hudson and Kneeland. I'm not aware of any project for this site do maybe it's just a land owner doing a geological study to see what's feasible?
 
Does anyone know what's happening at the 103 Hudson St. property? There's been construction fencing around it all year, with frequent worker activity on-site, but nothing built above the fence so far. I also can't make sense of why that small portion of the existing building was retained.

For some recent historical context:
Chinatown Families Weather Housing Storm
Who Owns Chinatown? One Immigrant Family's Gentrification Fight
Chinatown creates land trust

And what the site looks like as of this week:
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Some framing is coming up now!
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I walk past this site biweekly....it always feels like one person is slowly building an apt building.
 
A few more floors since my last photos.

It is now the height of its neighbors.
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From other angles, you can see the garage on the left.
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Some information about the work
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It says floors "1,2,3,4, and 5" - any idea if this is likely to get a whole additional level above the other row houses? I wasn't able to find any plans or renders.

E: From a permit by Arthur Choo:
Combine lots at 103 103a;hudson street (parcel id#0305155000) with 101 hudson street (parcel id# 0305154000) address to be known as 101 hudson street and to have eight apartments. See alt467775
 
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Not to get hopes up (because I have no inside info on a plan), but there was a soil testing rig on-site at the surface parking lot for Tai Tung Village, Harrison Avenue and Marginal Road.

CCBA (who manages Tai Tung Village) has talked about a large scale expansion project there over the past few years.
 

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