USPS Complex | Fort Point

Re: South Station Tower

It's still very disappointing that this fell through. The Post Office Service Facility is on some prime real estate on Fort Point. The area could be developed into something amazing.
 
Re: South Station Tower

between this tower and filenes i'm running out of patience. Any news would be good news.
 
Boston Globe - January 8, 2009
State wants postal land
A push to save rail expansion; funds for deal in question

By Casey Ross and Noah Bierman, Globe Staff | January 8, 2010

Massachusetts will try to buy the entire 16-acre US Postal Service mail-sorting facility near South Station in Boston, and use the property to significantly expand commuter rail service for the region, state officials said yesterday.

The plan comes after the collapse last month of a land deal, negotiated with a private developer, that would have given the state just a portion of the massive tract.

Massachusetts transportation officials said owning all of the Postal Service property would allow the state to build as many as 11 track lines - up from the previously planned five - and thus position it to increase passenger service on both the commuter rail and Amtrak networks.

?This is a 100-year transportation decision,?? said Peter O?Connor, head of real estate for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. ?If we decide we need eight more sets of tracks, then that?s what we?re going to try to build. We?re not going to try to squeeze them into a development.??

South Station now has 13 sets of tracks, all of which are in use during rush hour. Without additional land from the Postal Service, there is no room for new tracks, or platforms to relieve the current congestion that leaves some rush-hour trains waiting for a berth. Nor can transit officials expand commuter rail services to Worcester and the Fall River and New Bedford area.

Rail operators also need new tracks to expand service for Amtrak and on the Fairmount Line, a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority commuter rail branch that officials are planning to convert to rapid-transit.

The ambitious expansion, however, has to overcome a major hurdle: financing. No purchase price has been set for the Postal Annex, but the cost is expected to run in the tens of millions for what is prime downtown property.

Massachusetts? transportation agencies are more than $10 billion in debt, and already struggle with budget deficits operating the transit networks. State officials acknowledge they do not yet know how to pay for the Postal Annex acquisition.

?We?re not there yet,?? said Transportation Secretary Jeffrey B. Mullan. ?We?ve not figured out a finance plan. It?s too preliminary to make a comment on that.??

Already MassDOT struggles to choose which of its many priorities to fund: Hundreds of bridges are in deficient condition, for example, and transit systems need safety and efficiency upgrades.

While the MBTA was able to avert a fare increase last year when the Legislature raised the sales tax to help fund the agency, its financial situation is projected to get more difficult. Its annual debt service, $342 million last year, will balloon to $525 million in three years.

?The debt picture we laid out is very clear and the answer is not to add more debt,?? said David D?Alessandro, former chairman of John Hancock Insurance Co. who completed an outside review of the MBTA?s finances in November. The review pointed to critical maintenance projects that were not done because of a lack of money.

?I would think that there would be a great credibility problem if they would just add to their debt,?? D?Alessandro said.

If, as transportation officials assert, buying the Postal Annex is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, then D?Alessandro said the MBTA could pay for it by either selling other properties or trying to refinance debt. ?If this is critically important to them, they do have some assets that they could consider selling,?? he said.

Postal Service officials declined to be interviewed yesterday, but issued a statement with Massachusetts officials pledging to reach an agreement that will accommodate expansion plans for South Station.

The mail agency is planning to build a new facility about a mile away in South Boston. It had retained a development team to rebuild the Postal Annex into a large mixed-used complex, while selling a portion of the property to the state for rail service expansion. But that deal unraveled last month when the development team abruptly pulled out for financial reasons.

Massachusetts officials said they could not estimate how much the entire Postal Annex site would cost. Part of the state?s investment could be offset by selling rights to build on the rest of the property to a private firm. That?s how the Postal Service had initially planned to finance its own relocation, and as the agency?s experience shows, a private development deal is exposed to twists and turns of the real estate market.

The Postal Service still wants to build a new facility on a 25-acre site on Summer Street, part of which is owned by the Massachusetts Port Authority and part by the US Department of Defense.

But Postal Service officials have told state officials they will not move unless several conditions are met. One is that the Postal Service incur no cost in moving and building the new mail-sorting facility; another is that the state must pay fair market value for the land.

Casey Ross can be reached at cross@globe.com; Noah Bierman can be reached at nbierman@globe.com.
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Eleven new track lines as opposed to five in the state plan? A quick measurement on Google Earth seems to show how that would bring the tracks very close to the edge of the channel and probably preclude development (unless it's built over the tracks).
 
statler said:
Massachusetts transportation officials said owning all of the Postal Service property would allow the state to build as many as 11 track lines - up from the previously planned five - and thus position it to increase passenger service on both the commuter rail and Amtrak networks.

?This is a 100-year transportation decision,?? said Peter O?Connor, head of real estate for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. ?If we decide we need eight more sets of tracks, then that?s what we?re going to try to build. We?re not going to try to squeeze them into a development.??
Click to expand...

statler said:
Massachusetts officials said they could not estimate how much the entire Postal Annex site would cost. Part of the state?s investment could be offset by selling rights to build on the rest of the property to a private firm. That?s how the Postal Service had initially planned to finance its own relocation, and as the agency?s experience shows, a private development deal is exposed to twists and turns of the real estate market.
Click to expand...

This makes it sound like the decision is between the mutually exclusive options of 1) developing the land with a private developer and having fewer tracks, or 2) having the State buy it and using it all for railyards.

That ain't cool. IMO Boston's biggest problem is that half of it is taken up by above-ground transport infrastructure -- and that that infrastructure usually divides one otherwise-vibrant neighborhood from another. That leaves all too little actual city, and makes going from one neighborhood to another an ugly proposition. So you have the Pike dividing the Back Bay and South End, the highway around the Rose Kennedy Lawn dividing the North End and the various broken neighborhoods around City Hall, the railyards near BU dividing Brookline from Allston, railyards and 93 dividing the North End/West End, Charlestown, and Cambridge from one another (and dividing the West End in on itself), and so on. And here you have the SE Expressway and railyards dividing Chinatown from the Fort Point area and South Boston.

All of these deadzones should be developed if possible, and the neighborhoods stitched back together. That would make for a much more livable, coherent city. Instead, the State is unbelievably trying to demolish buildings to create more deadzones, and widen the gulfs between the areas of the city that are, er, occupied, as opposed to transport deadzones. Not only are they making amends for bad practices ... they're resuming those bad practices. **Bangs head against wall. Repeats.**

Is there even any need for these additional tracks? Are the trains overflowing? There's, what, 4 or 5 commuter lines? Does anything beyond an "eco-trendy" mindset justify tearing up the city to lay down a large number of new tracks?
 
South Station has 8 commuter rail lines (9 if you count the Stoughton branch as separate), plus Amtrak. That's a lot of trains. Amtrak may someday want to add more, and the state wants to add new service to Fall River and New Bedford.

To some extent the T just wants to reclaim the track capacity that existed there decades ago when private railroads (New Haven, New York Central) operated the service.
 
That's what I was getting at when I was looking at google earth...

I don't think even the state is dumb enough to squander the development opportunity. I think that to some extent this is lazy journalism: just because the state official said the site could accomodate up to 11 tracks (a perfectly reasonable datapoint to mention) doesn't mean that's the plan.
 
Aside from all those ligistics, what I really don't understand. Why does a dying federal branch such as the post office, need more land at their new location? According to those articles, they are proposing to relocated form a 16 acre parcel to a new 25 acre parcel.

Does that sound ludicrous to anyone else? Would the new location be shorter and more sprawling? Why does no one ever learn? Why am I asking these questions?
 
Itchy: The land under South Station had always been created for train tracks. Historically there was no "vibrant neighborhood" there, only water. The plans for the South Station Tower for back more than 20 years and as it's been proven time and again it is very difficult to build over large train yards (look at NYC with the Hudson and Atlantic Yards projects). These state officials know that buying this land for longterm transportation use is still a better idea than waiting for a developer to come along, find financing out of nowhere, and give them less space than if they would have just bought it themselves.

It's not like that area is in dire need of development space, that's what the whole South Boston Waterfront is for. Building air-rights over the entire South Bay is a very nice dream but, at least for a long time to come, it is just that.
 
The tracks have been in the area about 150 years. Stone and Webster and the Post Office occupy what had been station/track area up until what, 40-45 years ago?

The separation of neighborhoods was not created by the rail lines and highway. Those man made features mimic the natural terrain, long since obliterated. This part of the city developed its pattern around the original topography of large waterways.

The only real changes to the area in the last 60 years have been the construction of the highway, which wiped out the New York streets, and the gradual filling and elimination of much of the Fort Point Channel and South Bay. (People forget why it is called South Bay...it was a bay.)
 
Weren't the New York Streets eliminated by the urban renewal efforts that created Castle Square and the Boston Herald? Did the New York Streets extend farther towards the Broadway Bridge?
 
I don't know on the first; yes to the second. Do you remember the project that was to be squeezed in between Chinatown and the Expressway? (It was on the BRA agenda right before the discussion of Druker's folly, and a bunch of us were there that evening. I sat next to B.B.) I just can't recall the name, but there was a thread on it. Anyway, I recall that in the thread there were newspaper accounts from former residents of the New York streets that told the whole tale.
But don't mind me. It is after lunch, if you get my meaning.
 
I thought the 'New York Streets' were entirely south of what's now I-90 (and was then a railroad right-of-way).
 
Ron Newman said:
I thought the 'New York Streets' were entirely south of what's now I-90 (and was then a railroad right-of-way).
Click to expand...

They were. Take a look at this map. It places them between Harrison and Albany Sts south of where the present train tracks are (and were) and north of roughly what's today Berkeley St. So, essentially what is now the Herald, Mediaeval Manor, and the Planet Storage.
 
Ron,

You might be right. Anyway, here are some maps, the latter two "zoomification enabled". Map 1, circa 1800, gives an sense of the natural topography. Map 2 (1912) shows the track area, and I assume the New York streets are in the area of the upper left. Map 3 (also 1912) shows the project parcel to which I referred on the lower right (I think). The New York streets are on the lower left.

I think these show that whether through action of nature or intervention of man, there has always been a "gash" (if that is what you could call the original features) through this area.

Toby

http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/maps/bostonmap/enlargement.html

http://www.communityheritagemaps.com/boston_1912/boston_1912_zoomify/13.html

http://www.communityheritagemaps.com/boston_1912/boston_1912_zoomify/14.html
 
And it's true that even if this side of the channel is developed, the development would still be separated from Chinatown by the tracks. I've always envisioned a future development there connecting into the upper level of the bus station...
 
IMO this would be a baller, proactive move by the state whether or not it precludes development. Developing more rail capacity is potentially better for urbanism in the region as a whole; the immediate surrounds of S. Station are a secondary concern. The pressure it takes off parking might even open up more development opportunities downtown in the future.
 
An acquaintance familiar with the dealings told me that all this does is "eliminate a difficult, unnecessary middleman." I don't know enough about what is happening to analyze the statement.
 
Toby, are you referring to the Parcel 24 project in Chinatown? The one meant to redress damages caused by construction of the "Great Wall of Chinatown". I recall someone posting a nice story about growing up on Hudson St, back Chinatown was a coherent 'hood.

And...

Rail operators also need new tracks to expand service for Amtrak and on the Fairmount Line, a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority commuter rail branch that officials are planning to convert to rapid-transit.
Click to expand...

lol wut? indigo line ftw?
 
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