Millennium Tower (Filene's) | 426 Washington Street | Downtown

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Saw the construction lights a-blazing coming in over the Tobin tonight. This thing's going to stand out so much from there- it fills quite the gap.
 
Too bad that it will not be eclipsing the John Hancock Tower! :(
 
Jahvon09 said:
I can just imagine what the price on groceries will be like there when the supermarket opens. Through the roof! :(
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Actually, food prices in lower income neighborhoods with limited or no access to supermarkets are generally higher than for the residents of wealthier neighborhoods with access to supermarkets due to the fact that the poorer residents tend to shop at neighborhood mom and pop stores (due to the distance of the nearest full-service supermarket) where the prices are higher and the access to fresh veggies and fruits is much more limited. If the food prices are higher at this Roche Bros. supermarket, I'd attribute it, not to the wealth of the surrounding residents, but to the higher cost of rent and shelf-restocking costs of maintaining a store in such a prime urban location.
 
Jahvon09 said:
I can just imagine what the price on groceries will be like there when the supermarket opens. Through the roof! :(
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No reason to assume that. There is competition and very probably more will be coming online. Roche Brothers will not be exempt from it. From this location there are two Whole Foods a 12 minute walk, one to the northwest (Cambridge Street), one to the south (Ink block). Someone will open a grocery in the Seaport district if they haven't already and I missed it. With the tremendous amount of residential product coming online in the inner areas, more vendors will follow the demand. We could start a pool on where/when Trader Joe's finds a downtown location.

Rent issues will push pricing higher than suburban locations. The two Whole Foods spots referred to above are a tad higher in price than the two in Newton where I live. But not much. If a TJ's opens somewhere down here, I'd project those prices to be a tad higher than the TJ's in Newton. Ditto with Roche Bros

The ultra-rich in the top floors of the Millennium Tower won't care about price or location (their "people" will do the shopping), but it defies all economics to think they will by their mere presence drive Roche's pricing through the roof. We've got a handful of ultra-rich families in Newton, too, but most of us are far from ultra-rich. That percentage of ultra-rich Newton residents is too small to drive prices crazy in the Newton versions of TJ's or Wegman's or even "Whole Paycheck", as compared to those franchises in surrounding towns.

I'm confident prices at the Millennium Roche Bros will not be unreasonable.
 
I'd guess that the prepared foods (which should be primarily located on the ground floor Summer St. entrance) will be price gouged, but no more so than things already are at whole foods. Everything else, at least from what I've seen in the Wellesley store, should be relatively normal, if a bit on the expensive end.

Also, not that this is particularly relevant, but I thought I'd note that Millennium has said that similar to the Ritz and the Loews, there will be no internal access to the Burnham building from Millennium tower. Residents will have to walk around via Washington St.
 
Hutchison said:
I'd guess that the prepared foods (which should be primarily located on the ground floor Summer St. entrance) will be price gouged, but no more so than things already are at whole foods. Everything else, at least from what I've seen in the Wellesley store, should be relatively normal, if a bit on the expensive end.

Also, not that this is particularly relevant, but I thought I'd note that Millennium has said that similar to the Ritz and the Loews, there will be no internal access to the Burnham building from Millennium tower. Residents will have to walk around via Washington St.
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I shop frequently at Roche (Wellesley) and Stop and Shop (Natick) and I find prices at Roche to average about 10-20% more than S&S for the exact same items. Prepared food, meats and produce are indeed higher than most other grocery stores (Whole Foods excluded) but the quality is also higher.
 
I've always assumed that this will probably be the most expensive grocery store in Boston and thus probably all of New England. Its opening will be such a huge deal for the neighborhood precisely because there is relatively little competition in this area (albeit not zero competition, of course). Lack of competition + high income area + Roche Bros being a relatively upscale brand + what must be the highest rents for any grocery store in Boston = high food prices.

All that being said, I'm still thrilled that this store is opening where it is.
 
Today I counted 19 floors up to the protective grill. I can no longer see into that, so I don't know if they've got 2 or 3 floors built behind the grill. But they're somewhere in the low 20s, past the one-third mark on number of floors and zooming towards the halfway mark. As the base floors have much higher ceilings than residential floors, they're even closer to halfway on total height.
 
West said:
Today I counted 19 floors up to the protective grill. I can no longer see into that, so I don't know if they've got 2 or 3 floors built behind the grill. But they're somewhere in the low 20s, past the one-third mark on number of floors and zooming towards the halfway mark. As the base floors have much higher ceilings than residential floors, they're even closer to halfway on total height.
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True, but the residences above the 32nd floor have higher ceiling heights than the residences below and that needs to be factored in. According to the Millenium Tower website, the ceiling heights in "City Residences" (up to 32nd floor) are 9 feet, versus ceiling heights of 10 feet in "Grand Residences" (from 33rd to 55th floors). I'm not sure, but I suspect that the ceiling heights in the "Penthouse Units" (from 56th to 60th floors) are even higher.
 
dirtywater said:
True, but the residences above the 32nd floor have higher ceiling heights than the residences below and that needs to be factored in. According to the Millenium Tower website, the ceiling heights in "City Residences" (up to 32nd floor) are 9 feet, versus ceiling heights of 10 feet in "Grand Residences" (from 33rd to 55th floors). I'm not sure, but I suspect that the ceiling heights in the "Penthouse Units" (from 56th to 60th floors) are even higher.
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This is correct, but keep in mind that the actual total floor count is 55, which Millennium is marketing as 60 (the floor numbering jumps to 10 where the residences start).
 
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Can we surmise from all the above that the number of floors so far is 22 to 24 and that the total height so far is somewhere between 35 and 40% of the final height

Any way you look at it -- its growing by leaps and bounds and will be spectacular from many places this summer
 
At this point they have basically fully formed the 22nd floor. I expect a rise into 23 on the Washington Street side over the next day or two.
 
DZH, you're way off. They're on 26 going to 27. Maybe you need to get your eyes checked
 
Suffolk 83 said:
DZH, you're way off. They're on 26 going to 27. Maybe you need to get your eyes checked
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Suffolk -- Can we get a good count on the parts seen in the latest pix:
  • Podium
  • Already glassed-in tower
  • the part still open below the screen level

That should give us a solid minimum number and then we can guess the total a bit more accurately
 
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