Fan Pier Developments | Seaport

City draws Cambridge drug firm to Fan Pier
Vertex deal a key in remaking of waterfront area
By Casey Ross
Globe Staff / January 25, 2011

In one of the largest office deals in recent Boston history, drug maker Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. will move into two new buildings in the Seaport District, catapulting the city?s effort to transform the waterfront into a neighborhood of technology companies, academic institutions, and medical firms.

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Yahoo! Buzz ShareThis .Vertex yesterday signed a letter of intent to relocate its headquarters from Cambridge to the Fan Pier complex in late 2013. The 23-acre development has just one tower now, but is slated to have eight buildings of offices, residences, stores, and hotel rooms, as well as parks and a marina.

The deal is a watershed in Boston?s campaign to court a biotechnology industry that has largely eluded it, with most drug companies preferring to be closer to Cambridge?s prestigious universities or out in massive suburban office parks that offer cheaper rents and room for expansion.

Vertex?s relocation is also a huge boost for Fan Pier developer Joseph Fallon, who will soon be able to resume construction after a recession that dried up funding for large-scale projects in Boston and across the country.

?This is a jump-start for the entire waterfront,?? said Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who has been trying to remake the area into an ?Innovation District?? by offering incentives to companies to locate there. ?Vertex has made the decision to be on the forefront of the Innovation District, and that decision will lead other companies to follow suit.??

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, and the company has not yet signed the lease. The lease is contingent on an unusual clause: Vertex must receive federal approval of its first major in-house commercial drug, telaprevir, a treatment for hepatitis C. US regulators are expected to act on the company?s application by June.

Vertex would occupy about 1.1 million square feet, filling a pair of 18-story buildings at Fan Pier, with an option to expand into a third to be built there. Vertex?s portion of the $2 billion Fan Pier complex is estimated at $800 million, according to state officials.

State and city leaders are providing Vertex with a substantial tax break and other inducements to help close the deal. Vertex?s lease will require it to pay real estate taxes on the new buildings. Boston will provide Vertex with an $11.8 million reduction in property taxes through 2018.

But even with that reduction, the new buildings will result in $58.1 million in additional tax revenues for the city over that period, Boston officials said.

The state, meanwhile, will provide $10 million in tax breaks in exchange for Vertex creating 500 additional full-time jobs by 2015. Massachusetts will also borrow $50 million for roads, water and sewer, and other necessary infrastructure, to be repaid with tax revenues generated from Vertex?s buildings

Any shortfall in revenue needed to pay off the state?s bonds would come from the City of Boston or from the developer.

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Yahoo! Buzz ShareThis .?This will help to launch one of the largest construction projects in the country at a time when a lot of people in that industry still need work,?? said Gregory Bialecki, Governor Deval Patrick?s economic development chief. ?It will also help ensure that the many people who work at Vertex will continue to work in Massachusetts for many years to come and will be joined by many hundreds of new colleagues.??

The offer from Massachusetts comes on the heels of the debacle with Evergreen Solar Inc., which earlier this month said it is closing a factory in Devens that was built with the help of millions in state incentives, resulting in the layoffs of 800 workers.

Bialecki said Vertex?s incentives would be subject to rigorous clawback provisions: If the firm did not meet its job creation targets, it would forfeit the tax breaks.

Vertex had previously considered moving to Fan Pier, but held off when the recession slowed work on the property. However, the parties continued talking, and closed the deal as other landlords tried to land Vertex. Neither Fallon nor Vertex would disclose its rent in the new buildings, which would be among the first to be built in Boston following the economic downturn.

The buildings will be the second and third major structures at Fan Pier, and would be between the existing 18-story tower at One Marina Park Drive and the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse. Fan Pier has been in the making for some 30 years, with several previous owners unable to get it underway. Even today the site is mostly covered by parking lots.

?When a company occupies 1 million square feet in one location, it?s an immediate game-changer,?? Fallon, the chief executive of the Fallon Co., said yesterday. ?There is no question we will see more demand for retail stores and residences in this area.??

The relocation will allow Vertex to consolidate its 1,300 workers, now divided among 10 buildings across Cambridge, into a single location.

The decision to relocate comes at a critical juncture for the biotech, which has recently hired 300 employees in anticipation of selling telaprevir, a drug it has been developing for 15 years. If it gets a regulatory nod this spring, Vertex will be the first approved, commercially available treatment for hepatitis C, a disease that has become an epidemic among baby boomers who were infected decades ago, either by a blood transfusions or injecting drugs.

The market to treat hepatitis C is expected to be worth billions of dollars annually over the next decade. Vertex is trying to beat out New Jersey-based Merck & Co., which is seeking approval of a similar drug.

Real estate specialists said the firm?s relocation stands to have a huge impact on the future development of the South Boston Waterfront. Until now, the area has lacked a major tenant to give credibility to the city?s effort to transform it into an Innovation District.

?You couldn?t script a better company coming to the waterfront,?? said Tom Hynes, chief executive of the real estate firm Colliers Meredith & Grew. ?One company can really make a huge difference, and this transaction is an example of that.??

http://www.boston.com/realestate/ne...draws_cambridge_drug_firm_to_fan_pier/?page=2
 
"State and city leaders are providing Vertex with a substantial tax break and other inducements to help close the deal. Vertex?s lease will require it to pay real estate taxes on the new buildings. Boston will provide Vertex with an $11.8 million reduction in property taxes through 2018."

So we are giving tax breaks to companies to relocate from one side of the city to the other. That makes sense.
 
^Equilibria

I've heard a variety of arguments on this board, but rarely has anyone defended the planning. Other than GreenwayGuy of course.

In fact, the reason that the residential element isn't the first thing being built here is because it would never be financed or occupied right now, or at least it's not as good a bet.

Planning Failure #1: You don't hand out the candy store in rezoning unless you have secured some assurances that the elements of the plan making it a "mixed-use" district can be financed.

I'm sick of hearing about what is possible regarding financing while a pot of gold is loaded on U-Haul after U-Haul every time the BRA rezones and the property owner flips and skips town. Do people understand that the pots of gold being hauled away could have helped finance the project on which the rezoned land sits?

The Pritzkers secured their variances, flipped the upgraded parcels and left town, and now the new owner is sitting on a property that has 3x the density in rezoning than the property had 10 years ago. Why was all that rezoning approved if the property owner was allowed to sit on it? Rifleman showed you today with Vertex that the City of Boston is the gift that keeps on giving.

They aren't building stumpy office buildings because they like them and want to cover the city in them (well, not all of them are...) they're building them because that's what there's a demand for.

No. They are building stumps because maximum FAR (floor area ratio) is what the property owners demanded during the final phase of the Seaport planning process. That contradicted all the urban design teams operating at the time. See Briv's post above and tell me those parcels in the BRA's plans aren't going to produce stumps. The BRA never had set a goal for tall buildings as you state... the FAA cut Fan Pier heights from a maximum of 350' or so on Fan Pier (prior to the FAA's involvement) down to max 300' (after FAA weighed in). On Hynes parcels, the BRA anticipated a maximum height of 400' before and after the FAA weighed in. Narrower streets and slimmer footprints, even at 300' might have been less profitable but they were seen as the better choice by urban planners. Given the BRA's power to award lucrative variances, they were in the drivers seat to make the best choice and they failed to do so.

See the Massport area of the Seaport and tell me that is well designed. It is an abject failure of planning. Horrible to walk around. Disgraceful. I'm being kind.

It's the execution you hate here, not the planning.

The planning was a failure, but the execution has been worse than the planning. I made many points about failures in execution.

Lastly, for the record, I never supported a stadium. I supported the planning and rezoning to accommodate a dense mixed-use neighborhood with a strong residential component. The BRA hired an urban consulting team to determine the highest potential for the land and that is what they agreed would allow the land (and Boston) to achieve its highest potential. But the BRA isn't coming close to meeting their recommendations.
 
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Re: Rt 128 By The Sea

Rt-128-By-The-Sea

vertex_fan_pier.jpg

I just got back from DC and this is exactly what their "downtown" business area looks like. It was depressing.
 
^vanshnookenraggen

Note how the cornice line of the courthouse is carried through Fan Pier. As if the 150' height of the courthouse is now a sacred marker in the Seaport worthy of communicating through its architecture. Please.
 
And MMC, allow me to be equally blunt. If there stadium had been built there (not a horrible idea if it was a retractable roof and thus usable for other events besides football games) we would have a Patriot Place-like project on the drawing board (it's way easier to build that in Foxborough) and this entire website would be ablaze with hatred of it. Heck, there's a whole thread devoted to hating Patriot Place as it is. I'm not saying you or I would have felt that way, but it's a suburban lifestyle center. That's not what should be going in South Boston.

Leave the Biotech in Cambridge in my opinon.

I will probably get some negative views and believe me I open for debate on this one.

I actually like the idea for a Patriots Stadium and place with a new Fenway Park in the Seaport & Fanpier areas. Which should have included huge neighborhood presence like Wrigley Field in the area.

The city should have brought Patriots and Redsox ownerships together to develop that part of the city with their visions and unique neighborhood presence.

The economics make plenty of sense and the area would have had an economic boom. Could you imagine. Connect the T underground with the Orange or Blue line. No more long rides to Foxborough.

I understand if people have a different vision of South Boston but in the end it comes down to Economics and Boston is such a small city that I feel the only shot that area had was to let our sports teams mold the vision of the area. AKA (make sure they also don't commericialize the entire area.)

Just think Monday Night Football recap looking over the Seaport District Stadium then a shot of Downtown. This location would have been PERFECT.

I just hope this area Doesn't become a bunch of Box buildings because I will never go down to check it out.
 
I don't get why these neighborhood groups don't demand quality in their stumps
 
Fixed that for you. So to summarize, jobs / year-round liveliness / saving lives < football once a week during the season and a mall. Okay.

Somehow, cities, including Boston, are able to build dynamic, engaging neighborhoods without (and often thanks to the lack of) football stadiums. Actually, it's hard to think of many great urban neighborhoods that have grown up around football stadia anywhere. And yet this is apparently the only thing that could have prevented the "downfall" of development in the Seaport.
Pharmaceuticals don't cure diseases last time I checked.


http://www.thepeopleschemist.com/view_learning.php?learning_id=12

| How the Drug Industry Deceives Doctors |

Following doctor?s orders has become synonymous with danger. Every year, FDA approved drugs kill twice as many people as the total number of U.S. deaths from the Vietnam War.[1] Death by medicine flourishes because deceit, not science, governs a doctor?s prescribing habits. As an ex-drug chemist, I witnessed this first-hand.

This deceit comes in many forms. Medical ghostwriting and checkbook science are the most prominent.

Doctors rely on peer-reviewed medical journals to learn about prescription drugs. These journals include the Lancet, British Medical Journal, New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. It is assumed that these professional journals offer the hard science behind any given drug. This assumption is wrong. Medical journals can?t be trusted thanks to medical ghost writing.

Medical ghostwriting is the practice of hiring PhD?s to crank out drug reports that hype benefits and hide negative side effects. Once complete, drug companies recruit doctor?s to put their name on the report as authors. These reports are then published in the above mentioned medical journals.[2] The carrot for this deceitful practice is money and prestige. Ghostwriters can receive up to $20,000 per report. Doctors receive prestige from having been published. Ultimately, patients get bad drugs disguised as good medicine.

As deplorable as medical ghostwriting sounds, it is more common than you think. Dr. David Healy, of the University of Whales, predicts that 50% of journal drug reviews are written by ghostwriters.[3]

Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor for the New England Journal of Medicine, insists that he cannot find drug review authors who do not have financial ties to drug companies. As a result, the journal had to relax their conflict-of-interest rules in 2000.[4]

The editor of the British Journal of Medicine has acknowledged that medical ghostwriting has become a serious problem for his publication: ?We are being hoodwinked by the drug companies. The articles come in with doctors? names on them and we often find some of them have little or no idea about what they have written.?[5]

Consider the testimony from deputy editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association: ?This [journal articles] is all about bypassing science. Medicine is becoming a sort of Cloud Cuckoo Land, where doctors don?t know what papers they can trust in the journals, and the public doesn?t want to believe.?[6]

Other weapons of mass deception exist ? checkbook science. As defined by Diana Zuckerman, PhD, checkbook science is research intended not to expand knowledge or to benefit humanity, but instead to sell drugs. It has stolen the very soul of University research, scientific method, and the patients who serve as human subjects.[7]

Drug companies use checkbook science to sponsor their own drug research via the halls of academia and government institutions. Money is used to design their own studies, interpret the results, and stuff negative data under the drug-rug. The drug-rug is a behemoth rug. It has to be. A myriad of negative drug data exists.

Like medical ghostwriting, checkbook science is more common than you think. A third of academic professors have personal financial ties to drug makers.[8] Called the ?Stealth Merger? by the LA Times, top scientists at the National Institutes of Health also collect paychecks and stock options from the drug industry.[9] This has been going on for over 20 years.[10] Known as the Bayh-Dole Act, U.S law was amended in 1980 to allow for these flagrant conflicts of interest.

This calculated deceit is scandalous. Hopefully the line at the pharmaceutical trough gets shorter as this scandal becomes public. Though, drug makers have an insurance policy for this ? Direct-to-Consumer advertising. The oft repeated ?ask your doctor? ensures that the herd instinctively embraces drugs, drugs and more drugs.

Understanding medical ghost writing and checkbook science explains why medical doctors have been hypnotized into drug worship ? they only see the positive. It also explains why modern medicine is more deadly and lucrative than war ? the danger has been silenced with the pen and money.

Drug companies do not take responsibility for the wonton prescription drug deceit. Instead, victims have been made invisible - dehumanized. They are not recognized as children, or men with significant contribution to society. Their deaths are simply shrugged off and attributed to sickness or aging.

Those who profit from prescription drugs should hold some sort of record for the having the most reckless disregard for human life. If the deceit continues the prescription drug leviathan will silently kill more people than Napalm dropped on Vietnamese villages.
 
Yep, each one of those cities was attracted by sugarplum visions of downtown development guided by football stadia, and instead got ballooning white elephants empty for most of the year, surrounded by parking lots.

But of course it's worth it if you can get your cool five second pano shot during Monday Night Football...
 
Re: Rt 128 By The Sea

I don't think these are the current renderings... i am pretty sure i have seen newer ones or even a model somewhere.

This was posted with the latest Globe article. But I hope you're right. This is atrocious in so many ways--least of which are the ribbon windows. I mean, come on, they might as well rename Fan Pier as Seaport Office Park.
 
Pharmaceuticals don't cure diseases last time I checked.


http://www.thepeopleschemist.com/view_learning.php?learning_id=12

Please understand that I HATE the company that has kept me as a temp agent for 4 years. But what Genzyme makes saves lives. And I find this article hard to believe. That over 100,000 Americans die each year directly from using a drug and the FDA just lets that happen. Genzyme had to shut down for over 2-3 months (not too sure exactness but well over a month) when they found minor contamination (from a supplier) at the Allston plant. The FDA got all up in there sauce after that. This contamination didn't even affect the final product, but still caused enourmous waves at Genzyme. They already sold off Genzyme Genetics, doing a "retooling" (which is CEO for thousands of lay offs), and in all likelihood will be bought out. And it all stems from the contamination of a factory that makes 3 drugs that world wide only affect 10,000 people. So this article needs some salt. I'm sure there is truth to it, but the FDA is pretty strict.
 
Re: Rt 128 By The Sea

This was posted with the latest Globe article. But I hope you're right. This is atrocious in so many ways--least of which are the ribbon windows. I mean, come on, they might as well rename Fan Pier as Seaport Office Park.

Combine this with the insipid street names (someone else brought that up) and it's kind of where imagination went to die. :(
 
Yep, each one of those cities was attracted by sugarplum visions of downtown development guided by football stadia, and instead got ballooning white elephants empty for most of the year, surrounded by parking lots.

But of course it's worth it if you can get your cool five second pano shot during Monday Night Football...
Thank you for proving my point!

Look, whether or not you woule like to admit it, there is SOME good that comes out of football stadiums in major locations. I'm not saying by any means that stadiums are the sole saviors of an area. But just like Lowe's or any other anchor store in a shopping complex, there is some economic value that comes out of NFL teams in major cities. In fact, sometimes these franchises can help draw the major drug profitors into major markets.

I don't know if you're a sports fan (and quite frankly I don't really care either way), but nevertheless, when the Pats (at their height of championship fame) had their rallies in BOSTON. Despite playing 40 minutes south of the city, and there were restaurants packed with red, white and blue shirts and #12 jerseys. Same with the Sox and C's.

Imagine if Mumbles were to tell the Bruins, Celtics and Sox to take a hike. You would see the economic collapse in the short and long term.
 
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Big difference, though. Sox play 81 games a year (plus playoffs most years). Celtics and Bruins together fill the New Garden 82 times a year (again plus playoffs).
 
Big difference, though. Sox play 81 games a year (plus playoffs most years). Celtics and Bruins together fill the New Garden 82 times a year (again plus playoffs).
True,

But Gillette doesn't just hold football games; revs, summer concerts, hs football

Also (plus playoffs most years)

The "once every sunday" argument is weak. A sellout stadium crowd that hold nearly 60,000 a week, will be as much a benefit as fenway which isn't even 40,000 capacity.

This isn't even debatable. Don't even try. It was a missed opportunity that I hope South Boston becomes part of in the future.
 
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"State and city leaders are providing Vertex with a substantial tax break and other inducements to help close the deal. Vertex?s lease will require it to pay real estate taxes on the new buildings. Boston will provide Vertex with an $11.8 million reduction in property taxes through 2018."

So we are giving tax breaks to companies to relocate from one side of the city to the other. That makes sense.
They'll be out of the Seaport and out of Mass by Nov.
 

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