South Station Tower | South Station Air Rights | Downtown

Czervik.Construction said:
I love these announcements. "I saw a trash can get moved 2 feet"

Sorry, I have been waiting for this thing to go vertical since I was in school in Boston. I'll believe it when I see a crane.
Click to expand...
Czervik -- Ah but what if it was a trashcan that could elevate with the core of the building --??? :cool:

I think South Station Air Rights or whatever address that it will eventually get is going to be like the transition from Winter to Summer in Boston -- for a long time it will still seem like Winter -- then one day -- damn there are a bunch of trees flowering on the Esplanade and then boom Summer

Come back in June and I'm sure we will have progress which can be easily seen
 
Czervik.Construction said:
I love these announcements. "I saw a trash can get moved 2 feet"

Sorry, I have been waiting for this thing to go vertical since I was in school in Boston. I'll believe it when I see a crane.
Click to expand...

Just shows how slow these developments are in Boston as opposed to almost any other city in the US. For example right now in Nashville there is one 500 footer and about 7-8 300 footers u/c. 300' are to Nashville what 500' is to Boston. The funny thing is, as rapidly as Nashville is growing, its population growth rate is actually slightly slower than Boston's.
 
KriterionBOS said:
Just shows how slow these developments are in Boston as opposed to almost any other city in the US. For example right now in Nashville there is one 500 footer and about 7-8 300 footers u/c. 300' are to Nashville what 500' is to Boston. The funny thing is, as rapidly as Nashville is growing, its population growth rate is actually slightly slower than Boston's.
Click to expand...
KriterionBOS -- That depends on how you compare things
First I always look askance at blanket statements such as
Boston as opposed to almost any other city in the US.
Click to expand...
Then I often have a problem with Syllogisms such as
Nashville there is one 500 footer and about 7-8 300 footers u/c. 300' are to Nashville what 500' is to Boston
Click to expand...

By your own logic Boston has 3 Towers that are 600 to nearly 700 feet or more currently under construction or just completed -- those would have to be compared to the 1 new 500 foot tower in Nashville. Again using your criteria Boston has 3 + Towers in the 500 foot class just in the North Station area.

Finally - -the it takes Boston a very long time -- usually applies to sites with unique historic or other special characteristics where due to the complexity of regulations it would be expected to take some time to get the necessary approvals in most major cities.

So is Boston the fastest to go from a concept to the final product -- certainly not. Is it most typically glacially slow -- also certainly not. Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium which worked for Boston for a very long time.
 
when things "move fast" in boston, you get what happened to the west end. i'm perfectly happy for stuff to take a while to get moving -- IF the end result is something special. that's the area where this city is coming up short and has been for a while. designs such as winthrop square, lomansey way, and the hub on causeway towers (the base is fine) -- not to mention all the dreg that went up in the '70s (one beacon, one federal, 225 franklin) -- should never have been approved b/c they are, at best, absolutely unremarkable or, at worst, boring/ugly as shit.
 
whighlander said:
So is Boston the fastest to go from a concept to the final product -- certainly not. Is it most typically glacially slow -- also certainly not. Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium which worked for Boston for a very long time.
Click to expand...

I would say that they are indeed glacially slow, but so much entered the pipeline in a short period that we are finally seeing some larger-scale results these last few years. The only area that seems to go extremely quick is the Seaport, depending on the project. As much as we have had going on lately it also remains true that we have only topped off 4 buildings over 500' in more than 15 years. I think the big difference is that we were stuck with only 2 over 200 meters for a 40 year stretch, and suddenly we're up to 4, with a 5th out of the ground, and South Station Tower promising to be a 6th. Visually, this is a very transformative stretch because of those projects.

However, we still seem to have an issue in the 300'+ category. Right now we only have 2 projects over 300' out of the ground and growing, but like 8-10 over 200'. I closely follow the stats on projects out of the ground and growing, and it is typical that we never have more than 2-3 simultaneously over 300', and often less than that. The best stretch lately has been 1 Dalton, Hub residential, and Wynn casino all growing at once.

By the way, no development illustrates the glacial pace of this city better than the South Station Tower. I have been waiting since seeing renders for a "new tallest" in Boston Globe, back in the mid 1990's! There have been proposals since well before then as well! So if you want to argue that development is NOT slow here, this is the wrong thread to do it!
 
DZH22 said:
By the way, no development illustrates the glacial pace of this city better than the South Station Tower. I have been waiting since seeing renders for a "new tallest" in Boston Globe, back in the mid 1990's! There have been proposals since well before then as well! So if you want to argue that development is NOT slow here, this is the wrong thread to do it!
Click to expand...
I think what the slow pace of the SST (and various Turnpike air rights parcels) shows is that we really don't know the formula to make air rights work. They are complicated, often cutting across multiple jurisdictions (rights owners), and we have not managed to streamline the process to get them out of the ground (air).
 
DZH22 said:
I would say that they are indeed glacially slow, but so much entered the pipeline in a short period that we are finally seeing some larger-scale results these last few years. The only area that seems to go extremely quick is the Seaport, depending on the project. As much as we have had going on lately it also remains true that we have only topped off 4 buildings over 500' in more than 15 years. I think the big difference is that we were stuck with only 2 over 200 meters for a 40 year stretch, and suddenly we're up to 4, with a 5th out of the ground, and South Station Tower promising to be a 6th. Visually, this is a very transformative stretch because of those projects.

However, we still seem to have an issue in the 300'+ category. Right now we only have 2 projects over 300' out of the ground and growing, but like 8-10 over 200'. I closely follow the stats on projects out of the ground and growing, and it is typical that we never have more than 2-3 simultaneously over 300', and often less than that. The best stretch lately has been 1 Dalton, Hub residential, and Wynn casino all growing at once.

By the way, no development illustrates the glacial pace of this city better than the South Station Tower. I have been waiting since seeing renders for a "new tallest" in Boston Globe, back in the mid 1990's! There have been proposals since well before then as well! So if you want to argue that development is NOT slow here, this is the wrong thread to do it!
Click to expand...
DZH -- the counter argument about slow and measured versus glacially slow is of course the South Boston Seaport:
In the absence of the low cutoff by the FAA limit due to Logan -- there would have been at least 5 and possibly 10 300'+ towers in the Seaport and all of them built in the last decade
 
No obvious major signs of construction as of Friday the 21st. I take trains to SS fairly regularly and I can't imagine how this won't have a major impact, especially during the foundation building stage. Planning is crucial to smooth transitions so it's probably best for them to start slowly.

This is another project I thought would never happen in my lifetime and should be transformative to SS and the border between DT and the greater seaport.
 
tocoto said:
No obvious major signs of construction as of Friday the 21st. I take trains to SS fairly regularly and I can't imagine how this won't have a major impact, especially during the foundation building stage. Planning is crucial to smooth transitions so it's probably best for them to start slowly.

This is another project I thought would never happen in my lifetime and should be transformative to SS and the border between DT and the greater seaport.
Click to expand...

I keep looking at the renders of this featureless, bald bullet and, boy are some folks going to be disappointed...........
 
JeffDowntown said:
I think what the slow pace of the SST (and various Turnpike air rights parcels) shows is that we really don't know the formula to make air rights work. They are complicated, often cutting across multiple jurisdictions (rights owners), and we have not managed to streamline the process to get them out of the ground (air).
Click to expand...

SST at least had its own clearinghouse dept. within the ownership of South Station to act as a go-between on the planning. Yeah, it took over 30 years to get anything moving and we're still conditioned to fear some 11th-hour snag rearing its ugly head at the last possible moment...but something is actually about to get moving there while we're still utterly stymied trying to do anything with the very easiest of Pike air rights parcels, let alone all else around SS/South Bay ripe for stacking. While the thought of layering more bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy is properly scary on its face...MassDOT, the City/BDPA, and private developers have proven so perennially inept--and far moreso than other cities--at engaging around the jurisdictions here that maybe we do need to think about creating some sort of Air Rights Authority layering just to push paper around and keep the primary stakeholders from reverting straight to form and going completely catatonic. It's starting to become the elephant in the room that the absolute choicest parcels for knitting hot new development together--Pike between Back Bay Station and the Ink Block, the South End/Seaport/Southie "triangle" between uppermost Dot Ave. and Albany St., and Boston 2024's most infamous planning bellyflop Widett Circle--have to basically be skipped over in conversation in the pursuit for more game-changer parcels because "can't-do" attitude has been so heavily reinforced after so many failures. And it's starting to relegate us to diminishing returns. Really...an Ink Block that's never contiguous with Chinatown because one 83,000 sq. ft. rectangle induces total brainlock? Umpteen tries and counting to infill one annoying 30,000 sq. ft. triangle keeping Mass Ave. stuck with a jarring frontage break from the Back Bay? Nothing whatsoever being able to trudge east of Clarendon St. to close the incomplete South End interface with the Back Bay? No hope of the post-USPS relocation restitching of upper Dot Ave. behind SS and subsequent Ft. Point infilling by the Gilette lot having any coattails to Broadway or the Ink Block because the two east-west bridge superblocks are too hard to even talk about conceptually? Should we really have to be tying one hand behind our own backs when envisioning the next 25 years of CBD redev by treating these crucial crossroads-knitting parcels as born self-defeats whose odds of institutional will are so intrinsically poor that we're discouraged from even talking about them in non-fantasy sense??? How depressing is that!

Not to underestimate just how hard it is to build on air rights...it's hard alright. But even NYC with its utterly anti-perfect construction cost controls has managed to trundle forward on a couple far bigger and way more jurisdictionally fraught AR projects than the medium-small size cookie-cutter covers we haven't been able to plug over the Pike. This pretty clearly seats at the foot of total institutional failing rather than a logistical failing of the (admittedly higher) degree-of-difficulty. If 50 years of the same staring contest between state + city institutions and private developers spooked by said staring is all we have to look forward to in continuation, then maybe changing up the incumbent bureaucracy for different bureaucracy's sake isn't a bad thing to try. See if a go-between staffed with a little more expertise in cutting deals amongst infrastructure-crossing stakeholders can do better. If it fails by the same too-many-chefs syndrome as today...hey, no change from present conditions and at least we can say we tried something different for a change.
 
Last edited:
Expect to see some signs of physical work this week. You’ve seen a few, there will be more.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
SST at least had its own clearinghouse dept. within the ownership of South Station to act as a go-between on the planning. Yeah, it took over 30 years to get anything moving and we're still conditioned to fear some 11th-hour snag rearing its ugly head at the last possible moment...but something is actually about to get moving there while we're still utterly stymied trying to do anything with the very easiest of Pike air rights parcels, let alone all else around SS/South Bay ripe for stacking. While the thought of layering more bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy is properly scary on its face...MassDOT, the City/BDPA, and private developers have proven so perennially inept--and far moreso than other cities--at engaging around the jurisdictions here that maybe we do need to think about creating some sort of Air Rights Authority layering just to push paper around and keep the primary stakeholders from reverting straight to form and going completely catatonic. It's starting to become the elephant in the room that the absolute choicest parcels for knitting hot new development together--Pike between Back Bay Station and the Ink Block, the South End/Seaport/Southie "triangle" between uppermost Dot Ave. and Albany St., and Boston 2024's most infamous planning bellyflop Widett Circle--have to basically be skipped over in conversation in the pursuit for more game-changer parcels because "can't-do" attitude has been so heavily reinforced after so many failures. And it's starting to relegate us to diminishing returns. Really...an Ink Block that's never contiguous with Chinatown because one 83,000 sq. ft. rectangle induces total brainlock? Umpteen tries and counting to infill one annoying 30,000 sq. ft. triangle keeping Mass Ave. stuck with a jarring frontage break from the Back Bay? Nothing whatsoever being able to trudge east of Clarendon St. to close the incomplete South End interface with the Back Bay? No hope of the post-USPS relocation restitching of upper Dot Ave. behind SS and subsequent Ft. Point infilling by the Gilette lot having any coattails to Broadway or the Ink Block because the two east-west bridge superblocks are too hard to even talk about conceptually? Should we really have to be tying one hand behind our own backs when envisioning the next 25 years of CBD redev by treating these crucial crossroads-knitting parcels as born self-defeats whose odds of institutional will are so intrinsically poor that we're discouraged from even talking about them in non-fantasy sense??? How depressing is that!

Not to underestimate just how hard it is to build on air rights...it's hard alright. But even NYC with its utterly anti-perfect construction cost controls has managed to trundle forward on a couple far bigger and way more jurisdictionally fraught AR projects than the medium-small size cookie-cutter covers we haven't been able to plug over the Pike. This pretty clearly seats at the foot of total institutional failing rather than a logistical failing of the (admittedly higher) degree-of-difficulty. If 50 years of the same staring contest between state + city institutions and private developers spooked by said staring is all we have to look forward to in continuation, then maybe changing up the incumbent bureaucracy for different bureaucracy's sake isn't a bad thing to try. See if a go-between staffed with a little more expertise in cutting deals amongst infrastructure-crossing stakeholders can do better. If it fails by the same too-many-chefs syndrome as today...hey, no change from present conditions and at least we can say we tried something different for a change.
Click to expand...
Question: Aren't the Mass Pike parcels between Back Bay and Ink Block jurisdictionally complex? Don't MassDOT, MBTA, Keolis, Amtrak and BPDA all have a say?
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
SST at least had its own clearinghouse dept. within the ownership of South Station to act as a go-between on the planning. Yeah, it took over 30 years to get anything moving and we're still conditioned to fear some 11th-hour snag rearing its ugly head at the last possible moment...but something is actually about to get moving there while we're still utterly stymied trying to do anything with the very easiest of Pike air rights parcels, let alone all else around SS/South Bay ripe for stacking. While the thought of layering more bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy is properly scary on its face...MassDOT, the City/BDPA, and private developers have proven so perennially inept--and far moreso than other cities--at engaging around the jurisdictions here that maybe we do need to think about creating some sort of Air Rights Authority layering just to push paper around and keep the primary stakeholders from reverting straight to form and going completely catatonic.
Click to expand...

It's the difference between allowing something and encouraging it. If you just allow the parcels to be developed, the financers will balk at not building on easier terra firma. Successful air rights in other cities (and in Boston) has been something the government actively sought and shepherded along.

Also, building decks over the Pike, as you know, is non-trivial in terms of traffic impacts. AFAIK, Manhattan does not feature many expressways, much less decks above them. Decking storage tracks seems simpler to me, not least because the impacts won't be directly seen/felt by the public.

(...and Hudson Yards is a success essentially only insofar as it exists. It fails at everything else...)
 
Equilibria said:
Also, building decks over the Pike, as you know, is non-trivial in terms of traffic impacts. AFAIK, Manhattan does not feature many expressways, much less decks above them. Decking storage tracks seems simpler to me, not least because the impacts won't be directly seen/felt by the public.
Click to expand...

This is a good point. Are there any cities that have done extensive decking over an existing interstate? I've been to places like Atlanta, Philly, and DC and don't recall any...
 
Not sure where to put this, but great boston.com article about history of the South Station clock and interview with the guy who winds it. That's right, it has to be wound manually.
"At South Station, a reminder of the past that keeps ticking through the present" LINK
 
Don't forget the promises made about the YMCA, the Boston History Center, the Garden under Glass projects that were to be built over the entrance/exit ramps on the Greenway! None were ever built, just too damn expensive to deck over those ramps. And they were just ramps, how wide, two lanes? Two lanes, that could easily have been closed off during construction. Frankly, I'm thrilled that there are a few projects that are actually going to get built over the Pike. It ain't easy, or inexpensive, to build over an active highway and train line.
 
Rover said:
This is a good point. Are there any cities that have done extensive decking over an existing interstate? I've been to places like Atlanta, Philly, and DC and don't recall any...
Click to expand...

There are cities doing deck parks over freeways and cities (mostly outside the US) doing deck buildings over train tracks. There are very few examples of cities successfully building large private air rights buildings over operating freeways, as Boston repeatedly tries to do. I think that if Parcel 12, Viola, and Fenway Center succeed, they will be basically unprecedented.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top