Tracking progress
Big plans for South Station, but don't hold your breath
By Sam Allis, Globe Columnist | February 3, 2008
Good news, gentle readers: no Patriots palaver here. There's nothing left to say except, forget the spread, they win in a tight one.
But the past week was traumatic for the Observer. The Internet went down from Asia to North Africa. Recession is stamping its feet on my front porch. Most unnerving, George Bush gave another State of the Union address.
This was simply too much, so I repaired to the Main Concourse of the South Station for some contemplative time. Good train stations provide great urban space and, counterintuitively, remarkable privacy. I sat in a chair, clam-like happy, as the weight of the world rose from my shoulders.
But my contentment was upended by the news that the station is finally going to be transformed, starting very soon. The second quarter of this year, to be precise. This project has not exactly been a sprint. We're talking Boston time. The Boston Redevelopment Authority finished its first study of such a concept in 1963.
For all of us who don't use the South Station, headlines about impending plans there pass across our collective consciousness like bats at dusk. We sort of know that someone is putting up a giant office building above it. Sometime. But, like everything else in Boston, this is a Waiting For Godot kind of thing.
And the US Postal Service is supposed to quit its giant annex adjacent to the South Station for a spot in South Boston owned by the Massachusetts Port Authority. Sometime. Progress, charitably put, has been glacial, but the two sides are getting close, and last Monday, the Postal Service accepted proposals from five developers for the project. That is real.
What's happening first is that Gerald Hines, the huge international developer, is at last on the move. (He is partnered with TUDC, a Tufts University subsidiary.) He is also, by the way, one of the five interested developers in the post office. Hines could end up with the whole thing - maybe 8 million square feet worth.
Hines will break ground in a matter of months on a 40-story glass-and-steel number that will rise over the old headhouse facing Dewey Square. He's also going to enlarge the bus station and connect it with the train station so that people don't have to brave the elements to get from one to another.
What about tenants? Does he have any?
"We're looking now," says David Perry, who's trailbossing the project for Hines. "We'll do it preferably with tenants, possibly without." Either way, this thing is going up this year.
This will be a three-year construction line, which will further amuse the poor drones who trudge off to their happy destiny every morning from the station. Jackhammers, dust. Yum.
Perry says virtually all of the main concourse will remain intact during construction. But its future is up to Equity Office Properties Trust, which has a 30-year lease on it and the current office space above. It was mum when I asked what it had in mind, but you just know Equity will go way up the food chain for stores and eateries to match the Hines glitter.
Next from Hines come a second building housing a hotel and condos, and a third for office space, both stretching above the enlarged bus terminal.
Question: What took Hines so long? Financing? What?
Nine years of permitting, says Perry. This project is among the most complicated that Hines has done, and he's done a gazillion around the world. Perry has been dealing with the MBTA, Amtrak, the BRA, the US Postal Service, the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, you name it. Money has never been an issue.
Separate from the Hines operation will be a huge play where the post office is now. We're talking 16 acres stretching along the Fort Point canal, dwarfing Hines's six. With any luck, this will alchemize the whole Fort Channel area into something grand.
Stay with me now. An additional six railroad tracks will be built to accommodate increased rail traffic. Whoever ends up as the Postal Service developer will build above them. Nothing happens until the Postal Service is out and in its new digs, which should take at least four years.
"That is not for this economic cycle," says Kairos Shen, the newly appointed chief of planning for Boston, about the Postal Service play. "It will be for the next one."
Whenever the post office annex space is developed, the question is this: How will these two behemoths get along? Will Hines and the player yet to be named be happy neighbors, or Montague and Capulet living cheek to jowl?
That is a valid concern, says Shen: "There needs to be a spacing and rhythm and breathing room for this to work well."
We must never forget that, first and foremost, this is a train station. Most important to its future, then, are the new tracks. How long will they accommodate new rail traffic? Commuter rail traffic rose from 5 million in 1976 to 22 million last year.
So what was the planning timeline for the additional six tracks? Twenty years out, 40 years out? There was none, the MBTA tells me. Wow.
It matters, says Shen, because as more people ditch their cars for public transit, he thinks we'll eventually need even more tracks than planned. The question is when. Oh dear.
