There was no such back-history. The building dates to 1970 when free-falling Boston & Maine RR still owned all that land and there was no such thing as MBTA Commuter Rail. That was only 12 years after Draws 3 & 4 got torn out, when re-increase in train traffic was a prospect beyond reliable prediction. The blueprints were drawn even before the Highway Moratorium killed the Innerbelt and I-95 North. You can't draw a straight line to "maliciousness" from such divergently different era conditions. Besides, the state would've had no say in the matter to begin with even if it did see something future-worthy that no one else did.
At any rate, the building is wholly expendable with that fact being up-front understood by everyone who's transacted off of it for the last 10 years. And because the parcel touches on the NS parking lot and underpassing 93/Storrow connector tunnel the state will have full say in baking in any transit ROW provisions on the backside, because the adjoining Big Dig infrastructure already makes them a mandatory party to how it gets carved up. Brokering it for redev would only involve a few-foot linear strip on the backside for Draw 3 reinstatement (basically, no more than moving a would-be service driveway a few feet in), as 3 mirror-image NS drawbridges would have more total capacity today than the 4 NS draws of pre-1958 which were built for the steam era and unidirectional ops that burned a matching in/out yard trip & turnaround for every matching revenue trip. Being able to reverse on-platform gives the NS surface complex more total capacity with fewer platforms than it ever had 1928-58 at its greatest former physical extent. Future expansion platform berths are pre-reserved from the back of the TD Garden, and only serve to drag that rear-easement provision linearly under the Leverett ramps. A 150,000+ sq. ft. rectangular parcel framed by that rear easement, Nashua St., Nashua St. Park, and the ramps is total jump-ball for redev...or, rather, 2 equal-size parcels divided by a plaza at the midpoint where the 93/Storrow ramp is underpassing. It's highly unlikely anything would ever reach behind the Leverett ramps to air-rights cover the train station on the very inaccessible rear parcel which does not have any plausible street-grid access points and is complicated on the cover-over by the 93/Storrow underpass bisecting at an unfavorable angle. But only the most maniacial SimCity completists would ever be disappointed by that fact.
Again...this was not the most valuable real estate parcel in the neighborhood, nor the most valuable one under Jacobs' indirect control until the Garden Towers and all associated coattails redev along Causeway were 100% completed and leased first. Nashua St. is still "in the back" any which way, so it did not make sense to rush anything on the Spaulding site until the prime-most real estate in front of the Garden was all filled. You'll have a gripe that it's a cynical land-parking if nothing gets proposed before decade's end because now the spotlight is going to turn to Nashua as the next great slab in the neighborhood. But not until now, because it was always a long game re: which slabs got tapped first for max value and the Garden Towers went through their own frustrating 15-year-long land-park period before eventually getting built so Spaulding's timetable doesn't become "late" simply because the Garden Towers were late. Its current configuration is interim all the same until there's some evidence to point to that someone (like repeat-offender Jacobs) is artificially trying to slow down the real estate market for tactical advantage.
