[ARCHIVED] Harbor Garage Redevelopment | 70 East India Row | Waterfront | Downtown

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And where does NS rail tunnel fit in to this 120 foot deep puzzle?
 
^ Stellar, this is great; thank you. 12 levels/120 ft deep @ this location and with these conditions would be incredibly complex. Can I throw a hybrid option in the mix? What if he saves on depth by making part of the garage (e.g., for residents of the new tower and/or harbor towers) a robotic car elevator system so that we can fit vehicles more compactly and with lower ceiling heights? A separate portion of the garage could be more traditional for non-residents/aquarium guests.

Though the hybrid would also be complex, one would think it might be technically more realistic than a 120-ft deep garage at ocean's edge.
 
tangent said:
And where does NS rail tunnel fit in to this 120 foot deep puzzle?
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Under I-93. Northern Ave. is the insertion point from the South Station approach into the cleared space under the CA/T, Valenti Way the insertion point from the North Station approach. All in between it's under the highway, which is under the Greenway.

If adjacent building pilings don't foul I-93, they won't foul anything beneath I-93.
 
bigpicture, I don't think adding complexity to an already complex site will be a solution.

For the leaning tower of San Francisco (see separate thread in the General Architecture forum) Transbay said it spent $58 million buttressing the below grade property line of MT-SF. The side of the MT-SF tower abutting Transbay is about five parking spaces in length. (There is a second part of MT-SF which is only ten floors, and I don't know whether that side is also included in the $58 million.) Transbay excavated to 65 feet, which is, IIRC, about 15 feet above the bottom of the depth of the support pilings for MT-SF. Shafts for the buttress were drilled to 240 feet which I take it was where they reached bedrock (in drilling one shaft, they discovered a mammoth tooth at 100 feet.)

I was extra generous in the slab thickness for the parking levels because I don't know how much lateral bracing of the side walls would be needed.

There is an underground parking garage built next to the Potomac River in Washington. Not nearly as deep as Chiofaro's garage will be, perhaps five? levels. If the Potomac River goes into major flood, the design solution to the increase in hydrostatic pressure is to flood the bottom level of the garage, so the garage walls don't cave. That's with a 10' flood.

The question I keep coming back to is: Given the great complexity and cost, why try to bury a 1,000 space or a 1,400 space garage? The answer I give myself is that Chiofaro is Ahab, and the buried garage is Moby Dick.
 
Just for reference, here is a link to a recent construction effort of an underground parking garage in Florida right on the Atlantic Coast, topped with a 61 story condo tower.

https://thesuffolkblog.com/2015/02/24/deep-soil-mixing-at-jade-signature/

They describe the effort as an engineering marvel in terms of construction complexity for the 425 car, 2.5 story garage (yes, only 2.5 stories underground!). Construction done by Suffolk!
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Under I-93. Northern Ave. is the insertion point from the South Station approach into the cleared space under the CA/T, Valenti Way the insertion point from the North Station approach. All in between it's under the highway, which is under the Greenway.

If adjacent building pilings don't foul I-93, they won't foul anything beneath I-93.
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Sure, but the station was supposed to go around there. Although maybe that is a positive and they can say they are enabling a station to be built with access up through the building.
 
tangent said:
Sure, but the station was supposed to go around there. Although maybe that is a positive and they can say they are enabling a station to be built with access up through the building.
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I think most observers think Central Station will be VE'd out of any NSRL project. Very costly for a questionable value connection.
 
JeffDowntown said:
I think most observers think Central Station will be VE'd out of any NSRL project. Very costly for a questionable value connection.
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Yeah, but Central Station would be built in a very constrained space whose max dimensions are set by supporting I-93 upstairs. CS may very well be a complete turkey on its supposed merits, but placement vs. theoretical adjacent building pilings has nothing to do with it. It's simply too far below ground here and too well-slotted below I-93 here to have any surface impacts whatsoever. Other than pros/cons of trying to goose the patronage of Central Station with lots of new tall dev so it doesn't look as much like a turkey, NSRL doesn't even belong in this conversation. Least of all as an engineering factor.


Unless the height fetish on AB has gotten so out-of-hand some folks won't settle for anything less than a 1 World Trade Center clone here. :rolleyes:
 
Great points, as always, stellarfun:

you (& colleagues) are making a convincing case for a drastic garage reduction, but we shall see whether Chiofaro is truly chasing Moby Dick or not...
Maybe we will see a 600-space garage, with 300-spaces buried and 300-spaces tastefully ascending in to the podium/base of tower...maybe that would be a viable compromise

stellarfun said:
There is an underground parking garage built next to the Potomac River in Washington. Not nearly as deep as Chiofaro's garage will be, perhaps five? levels. If the Potomac River goes into major flood, the design solution to the increase in hydrostatic pressure is to flood the bottom level of the garage, so the garage walls don't cave. That's with a 10' flood.
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These types of engineering decisions make me cringe because of the potential fragility (e.g., are all other design attributes properly tuned so the thing floods quickly enough to avert structural failure?). This reminds me of assumptions I've seen for glass-roofed atriums/solariums where the design only supports a reduced snow load instead of a full snow load because it is assumed heat loss through the glass will be sufficient to melt some snow and avoid full snow load (the design I refer to dates to the '80's, so I am not sure if such assumptions are still used). But it's crazy because what if the heat is turned down lower than expected (e.g., power outage/backup power) at the time of a snowstorm? I understand the cost of making designs robust to all situations, but Id be scared to sign up to some of these assumptions.
 
OK, time to shut it down again until we see a proposal.
 
bigpicture, as it was, on the garage by the Potomac, several years ago, the new owners (who had just bought the property from Prudential) were told by a restaurant tenant that they didn't need to erect the steel flood barriers, they could just sandbag. The river tore through the sandbags and flooded the property. They were very concerned that the four buildings on top of the garage would collapse, because the upper garage levels were not designed to hold the weight of water flooding the garage. As it was, they were able to dike the opening as the river subsided, and prevent a catastrophic failure.

As the saying went at the time, the garage was designed to flood from the bottom, not the top. All the utilities were on the upper levels of the garage, moved away from the lowest level which was designed to be deliberately flooded. That didn't work out so well, because they had to cut the power to the pumps at the bottom level.
 
mdd said:
Are people not allowed to discuss it? Why do you care?
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The non-sense just sucks you in. Then Stellarfun posts kick-in ----like on how nothing can be done concerning this site--Because of all the Rules, Laws, Regulations in place.

Then after that being said--- it's another 5-posts of Chiofaro Bashing.

Curious Stellarfun, you ever have a run in with CHIOFARO during your career?
 
Don Chiofaro loses fight on tower’s size, but waterfront war is just beginning

Sure, Chiofaro may have cleared a big hurdle in winning over City Hall last year when Mayor Marty Walsh gave his blessing for the developer to blow past waterfront guidelines and build up to 600 feet high.

But new opponents have joined the fight against the developer whose last major project was International Place. It’s no longer about placating the garage’s next-door neighbors, the residents of Harbor Towers.

Now the Aquarium is worried about construction that will drive away visitors and harm the health of its marine animals. The Conservation Law Foundation is raising concerns about the compromises City Hall is making on the amount of public open space. Then there is the influential Barr Foundation, which is warning that Boston waterfront is in “jeopardy” with parcel-by-parcel planning.

Without a specific design, however, it’s hard for those who don’t like Chiofaro’s $1 billion project to immediately shoot it down.
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Boston Globe Sept 20th, 2016
 
Boston Globe - Sept 28, 2016
Aquarium’s pitch to developer Don Chiofaro: Help build ‘Blueway,’ we’ll back high-rises

The New England Aquarium may drop its challenge to Don Chiofaro’s bid to redevelop the neighboring Boston Harbor Garage if the two sides can agree to create a park that would stretch from the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway to the water’s edge.

The park, which would be part of a plan to open up dramatic views of the harbor, is a crucial piece of a broader vision that the aquarium expects to unveil Wednesday to a group that is advising city officials on planning that part of the waterfront. The aquarium is willing to move its stand-alone IMAX theater, which opened 15 years ago, to make the park possible.

This vision goes beyond the proposed open space, an area as long as 1,000 feet and up to 85 feet wide that aquarium officials refer to as “the Blueway.”

Chief executive Nigella Hillgarth would like to see the aquarium building’s size grow significantly in phases over the next decade or so as public amenities are added: a promenade, two restaurants, a man-made island.

Taken together, the project would represent the biggest physical changes to the facility since it opened in 1969.
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Per Steve Adams of B&T, Chiofaro has filed his LOI with the BPDA:
  • Demolition of the garage.
  • 28,000 SF of new waterfront public open space.
  • Destination outdoor gathering space seamlessly integrated into the Aquarium's "Blueway".
  • Up to 900,000 SF tower, up to 600 feet in height, containing retail, dining, office, residential and/or hotel components ringed with active ground floor uses (so, a building that could be for any purpose under the sun).
  • A new state-of-the-art below-grade parking facility.
I'm a little confused how he's at the LOI stage if he doesn't know what use the building will have.

Mods, please decide whether to reopen the thread and delete this one.
 
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