Building ingredients
Plans for Filene's tower go beyond blueprints
By Sam Allis, Globe Columnist | October 8, 2006
Let's see, John Hynes is building a 38-floor big boy over Filene's. He's developing Frank McCourt's 23-acre plum on the South Boston waterfront for Morgan Stanley . He's building a $30 billion city for 50,000 people in Korea, the first U S -Korean real estate joint venture ever.
So, John, have we bitten off more than we can chew here?
``Definitely," he says, beaming.
The thing you have to understand about Hynes is that he was a hockey goalie. Played for Harvard. Hockey goalies are different from you and me. Their elevators stop on different floors. No sane person volunteers to stop pucks.
``The best part of every game was the warm-up," he concedes. ``At least I knew when the shots were coming. All the others were mysteries."
At 48, the grandson of the guy who beat James Michael Curley to become mayor of Boston is having the kind of run that developers dream of while pounding the treadmills like crazed gerbils. It began when he sold his first project, the $350-million One Lincoln Street, six months after it opened , for $705 million.
Smart, sunny , and lucky, he is perhaps the most attractive local face among a species considered by many to be the cousin of the moray eel. His biggest challenge here, strangely, may be his smallest effort -- the Filene's project. While Korea and South Boston are endlessly interesting packages, Filene's, which Hynes partners 50/50 with the New York developer Vornado Realty Trust, looks like the most complicated urban dance.
It is, for starters, sited on a claustrophobic block of Boston that provides no margin for error. Unlike the other two that are built from scratch to create needed density, this one straddles two historic structures and, when combined with a proposed 1,000-foot monster a few blocks away, will provide the breathing room of Hong Kong.
Hynes aims to transform Downtown Crossing into a vibrant place with a mix of retail, condos, and hotels and bridge the cosmic distance from the financial district to Boston Common and beyond. The first should be easy. Downtown Crossing has nowhere to go but up. Its core at the intersection of Washington and Summer is hard and stale and shiny like the seat on a pair of disreputable suit pants.
The second is anyone's guess. Downtown Crossing has stymied urban thinkers since it surfaced in 1978 as a pedestrian mall. The new Ritz complex further down Washington Street was supposed to close the gap. Will this unremarkable glass and steel affair do the job? Or will it simply be another piece of forgettable architecture east of Tremont Street?
The rise of Downtown Crossing depends upon the lessons learned from the failure of Downtown Crossing. Why do many shoppers give it a wide berth in favor of Back Bay and the ' burbs? What's up with the empty storefronts and the low-rent retail mix? What went wrong ?
For starters, says Hynes, it was conceived when the city core was marbled with parking garages built for suburban shoppers. The strategy was retrograde because it was geared to a Boston of the '50s and '60s. Before long, he notes, you had options like the malls in Chestnut Hill, Burlington, and on the South Shore. In town, give or take a few years, appeared Copley Place, a resurgent Back Bay, and Quincy Market.
``So why go to Downtown Crossing?" he asks. Today, he adds, ``I don't know of a department store that wants to be here. That's a market reality. If you're a city dweller, why not go out to a suburban mall in your car?"
There is another factor at play. The elephant in the living room -- pick your clich? -- is race. Everyone knows it but no one talks about it. The truth is that long before Filene's went south, droves of suburban matrons and urban whites were scared off by black kids in puffy parkas who hung out there. So what do you do about that?
Hynes steers clear of the subject but says this: ``You see people walking to the T after work with their heads down. They never look up because they don't want to be panhandled.
``I've asked women why they don't shop at Downtown Crossing, " he continues. ``They say, `I only shop there when when I need something. I usually get it close to home or I go to Back Bay.' I ask them `why?' They say, `It's cleaner. I feel safer. The shops are better.' Cleanliness and security come first, then the quality of the stores."
His project will clean up and maintain Filene's Park, the brutal brick and concrete area on upper Franklin Street favored by street people. (Like The Pit in Harvard Square, it should be demolished.) What about those folks? ``That's a social question," he says.
But it's his question, too. You can't separate it from projects like his. Nor can we pretend that in upgrading the area, Hynes will not further buttress Boston's emerging profile as a doughnut of rich and poor without a middle.
The death of Filene's means the rebirth of Downtown Crossing. But what kind of Downtown Crossing? John Hynes, I'm sure, will do a good job. But I hope he remembers that when the area really worked, all of Boston flocked there.
