I have a question:
Why didn't the developer just accept the city 200ft proposal keep the garage as is and build on top some condo units?
There is no risk for the developer/investors for the garage to get a new face add some rental units on top. The garage would continue to block up all the space from the Greenway to the waterfront for most likely life at that point.
......
Chiofaro's original vision was for a signature building, and perhaps an iconic building (trying not to overuse the "I" word). IP is a signature building, and I think his thinking was to bookend the Greenway with two signature buildings, both developed by himself. A fine final tribute to his flair for evocative design and business acumen.
To do this, he decided he needed to bury the existing garage. Which created three problems: 1.) very significant construction costs resulted; 2.) what to do about the x number of parking space in the garage that HT residents had a 'right' to? 3.) his replacement building became subject to Chapter 91 (state law) which decrees that 50 percent of the land on which the current garage is built must be open to the sky if the current garage is demolished.
IMO -- and I don't practice law in Massachusetts so don't rely on this -- if he left the existing garage in place, and built on top, he would have a strong argument to build on the full 57,000 sf lot, not just half of it. How tall could be go? I believe he again would have strong argument in building to about the same height as HT, or 400 feet, more or less. And he could point out, that the original plan for HT called for a third 400 foot tower.
Existing garage is about 70 feet tall, so 330 additional feet (to 400 feet) gives him 25 floors @13 foot floor heights. 25 floors x 55,000 gsf per floor gives him 1.375 million gsf of new building. HT residents can't really object about a building that is of similar height to theirs.
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432 Park.
Developer paid, IIRC, $475 million for a hotel that was demolished. On the hotel site, developer built a very tall, very thin condo building. Assuming construction costs of $2,000 a square foot, and a building that is roughly 400,000 square feet total, the cost to the developer was >$1.2 billion. (Assuming no soft costs in the $2,000 per sq ft construction cost, one would need to add this to the total.)
At an average sales price of $6,000 a square foot, the condos would generate about $2.4 billion in sales revenue -- roughly double the >$1.2 billion cost to build.
Back to Chiofaro's garage: 1.) ultra high per sq ft condo sales don't happen in Boston; 2.) those who are paying the per sq ft sales prince for a condo in the Four Seasons residences don't want to see and hear the bourgeoisie frolicking outside their lobby door day and night (i.e., I'm not paying $10 million to live on top of Boston's equivalent of Times Square; 3.) the per square condo sales price for the existing HT towers is nowhere near as expensive as Chiofaro's condos would be, and many HT residences will have a better view.
