Waterside Place 1A | 505 Congress Street | Seaport

[ablarc]

^ His point, however, is well taken. They should have built this over the spaghetti and left terra firma for the fine-grained stuff.

 

[stellarfun]

^ His point, however, is well taken. They should have built this over the spaghetti and left terra firma for the fine-grained stuff.

If you Google Earth it, you can see that Waterside is being built on top of spaghetti, and the convention center -- sized as it is -- would never have fit. (Note the expansion space to the south of the current convention center too.)

And the land is Massport's, I think Drew just gets a long-term lease.

 

[Bobby Digital]

yea but was all the construction done before they started on the convention center? im not so sure.

 

[stellarfun]

yea but was all the construction done before they started on the convention center? im not so sure.

I don't follow.

Construction of the convention center began in 1999; the steel was topped out in the Fall of 2002. The convention center site is 28 acres, Waterside Place is 8.3 acres.

The I-90 Connector, the ramps of which form the spaghetti, opened in January 2002.

The Silver Line, right-of-way for which is at the northern boundary of Waterside, opened in December 2004.

 

[czsz]

If you Google Earth it, you can see that Waterside is being built on top of spaghetti, and the convention center -- sized as it is -- would never have fit.

Turn the convention center 90 degrees, then conceive it plunked atop the I-90 mess, with surface streets punching through or under it at various intervals. It's not that hard to imagine. What is hard to picture is the amount of prime, developable space it now consumes instead.

(Note the expansion space to the south of the current convention center too.)

Room to expand? Has it ever been filled? How much prime land next to the city center should reasonably be taken up by this thing?

In Germany, conventions (Messe) are a huge industry, but the convention halls (Messezentrum) are never located anywhere near the middle of German cities, on land that's more valuably subdivisible. Even in situations where there's a ton of brownfield space adjacent - when the Berlin Wall was torn down, they did not build a massive convention center. When Hamburg redeveloped its docklands, no convention center. It was perhaps an acceptable idea to do it the American way when convention halls were the size of the Hynes. No longer.

 

[czsz]

Two of the four anchor stores at the Mall of America do not yet have a Boston presence: Nordstrom and Bloomingdales,

There are two Bloomingdales anchoring the Chestnut Hill Mall alone! Nordstrom is on the way for the Natick Collection...

If you look at the list of shops at Columbus Circle, these don't strike me as being destination retail.

Not many people actually seem to shop there. I'm not even sure the Samsung Experience, for example, even sells anything. The stores seem to be more like elaborate advertising pavillions for the people who come into the center for other reasons - to gawk out the big window overlooking the park, to eat at the hideously overpriced restaurants, or to visit the extremely popular Whole Foods in the basement.

 

[stellarfun]

[quote="czsz

Turn the convention center 90 degrees, then conceive it plunked atop the I-90 mess, with surface streets punching through or under it at various intervals. It's not that hard to imagine. What is hard to picture is the amount of prime, develop-able space it now consumes instead.

If you turned the Convention Center 90 degrees, it would traverse from Fort Point Channel to the Fargo Building. The new Washington Convention Center does bisect one or two streets, which pass under. (It is also more center city than is Boston's. I suppose the Javits Center in NYC -- which is being expanded mightily -- is in the hinterlands, the same for McCormick Place in Chicago. And what about Moscone in San Francisco, where they took even more land to expand across the street, and tunnel connections between the two parts of Moscone.)

(Note the expansion space to the south of the current convention center too.)

Room to expand? Has it ever been filled? How much prime land next to the city center should reasonably be taken up by this thing?

In Germany, conventions (Messe) are a huge industry, but the convention halls (Messezentrum) are never located anywhere near the middle of German cities, on land that's more valuably subdivisible. Even in situations where there's a ton of brownfield space adjacent - when the Berlin Wall was torn down, they did not build a massive convention center. When Hamburg redeveloped its docklands, no convention center. It was perhaps an acceptable idea to do it the American way when convention halls were the size of the Hynes. No longer.

Convention centers in major American cities have never been the size of the Hynes. The Hynes was/is so small it can't compete for bigger conventions.

When the Berlin Wall was torn down, instead of a massive convention center, they built the architectural cacophony of Potzdamer Platz.

The big convention center in Berlin is 15 minutes by S-Bahn from the center of the city. Thats like putting the Boston Convention Center in Westwood Station. Its also in the middle of big exhibition grounds, which I suppose you'd have to go to Springfield to find the equivalent.

There are two Bloomingdales anchoring the Chestnut Hill Mall alone! Nordstrom is on the way for the Natick Collection...

Nordstrom is building other stores in the Boston suburbs, e.g., they've taken over the old Macy's (Jordan Marsh) store at North Shore Mall. My point is that if you are looking for a big anchor tenant that does not yet have a presence in downtown Boston, then Bloomingdales and Nordstrom are the only 'destination-type' stores available. When Federated bought the May Co., that consolidated the industry big-time. Perhaps you might get Holt Renfrew or the Bay to cross the border,

 

[Ron Newman]

Are there any large regional department-store chains elsewhere in the US that could usefully expand into Boston? Something from Chicago or SF or LA?

 

[stellarfun]

Are there any large regional department-store chains elsewhere in the US that could usefully expand into Boston? Something from Chicago or SF or LA?

Ron, the repercussions of the Federated May Co. merger are staggering. Here is a list of antecedent store chains that got folded into Federated.
From Wiki (and it forgot Jordan Marsh) (I bolded a few of the more prominent names affected.:

Abraham & Straus (Macy's in 1995)
D. M. Read
Bamberger's (Macy's in 1986)
The Bon March? (Macy's in 2005)
The Paris (The Bon March? in the early 1980s)
Bullock's (Macy's in 1996)
Bullocks Wilshire
Burdines (Macy's in 2005)
Maas Brothers
Carter Hawley Hale Stores (merged into Macy's West 1996.)
The Broadway (Southern California). Headquartered in Los Angeles.
Emporium-Capwell (Northern California)
Capwell's (East Bay)
The Emporium (San Francisco and South Bay, North Bay)
Hale Bros. (San Francisco and Sacramento)
Weinstock's (Sacramento and Reno)
Davison's (Macy's in 1986)
Famous-Barr (Macy's in 2006)
William Barr Dry Goods Co.
Famous Clothing Store
Filene's (Macy's in 2006)
G. Fox Co.
Foley's (Macy's in 2006)
The Denver Dry Goods Company
Scruggs, Vandervoort & Barney
Z.L. White
May-Daniels & Fisher
Daniels & Fisher
May Company Denver
Sanger-Harris
A. Harris
Levy's
Sanger Brothers
Goldwater's
Goldsmith's (Macy's in 2005)
Hecht's (Macy's in 2006)
Castner Knott (Hecht's in 1998)
Strawbridge's (Macy's in 2006)
Thalhimer's
Wanamaker's
Woodward & Lothrop
I. Magnin owned by Federated 1965-1988 and R.H. Macy Co. 1988-1994; most stores closed 1988-1993, remainder of stores converted to Macy's West and Bullock's or sold to Saks Fifth Avenue. San Francisco Union Square location eventually incorporated into adjacent Macy's.
The Jones Store (Macy's in 2006)
Kaufmann's (Macy's in 2006)
May Company Cleveland
O'Neil's (department store)
Sibley's
William Hengerer Co.
Strouss-Hirschburg
L.S. Ayres (Macy's in 2006)
Stewart's
Pogue's
Wolf and Dessaure
Lazarus (Macy's in 2005)
Shillito's
Rike-Kumler (Rike's)
Liberty House (Macy's in 2001)
Marshall Field's (Macy's in 2006)
Dayton's (Marshall Field's in 2001)
Frederick & Nelson (Defunct in 1992)
The Crescent (Defunct in 1992)
Lipmans
Halle Brothers
Hudson's (Marshall Field's in 2001)
J.B. Ivey & Co.
Meier & Frank (Macy's in 2006)
ZCMI (Meier & Frank in 2001)
O'Connor Moffat & Co. Purchased by R.H. Macy in 1945, renamed Macy's in 1947. Their San Francisco Union Square location is Macy's flagship west coast store and headquarters of Macy's West.
Rich's (Macy's in 2005)
Robinsons-May (Macy's in 2006)
May Company (Robinsons-May in 1993)
Hamburger's
J.W. Robinson's (Robinsons-May in 1993)
Stern's (Macy's in 2001)

Up-market department store chains remaining:

> Carson Pirie Scott (Midwest, closed its flagship Chicago store last year)

> Dillards (South, Southwest)

> Lord and Taylor (already in Boston)

> Macy's Group (Macy's and Bloomingdales)

> Neiman Marcus (already in Boston)

> Nordstrom

> Saks Fifth Avenue (already in Boston)

That's it. Beyond these are mid-market stores (e.g., Kohl's, JC Penny) and big box low priced retailers (e.g., Wal Mart).

 

[atlrvr]

Also Belk, the country's largest, privately held department store chain, but they are really concentrated in the South...I doubt they will expand this far north anytime soon, but they would do well I think. They are somewhere between a Dillard's and Nordstrom, and definetly a step above Macy's.

All that said, the sound of this new mall is ridulous. It seems like it's just going to be a huge, connected power-center. There is no need for a grocery store there, and I agree would be much better suited in the Hynes proposal, which will be surrounded by residential development.

I'm predicting a glorious failure for this "mall", while I think much of the smaller street level stuff in Seaport Square and Fan Pier will do marginally well.

IF, they would build Phase III of the silverline, and upgrade it to LRT, then the area could take off, but until then, I can't see how this site will be attractive to any potential shopper. The average conventioneer probably lives less than a 5 miles from all this crap back home in Anytown, USA.

 

[justin]

When the Berlin Wall was torn down, instead of a massive convention center, they built the architectural cacophony of Potzdamer Platz.

^What's wrong with architectural cacophony? Not that I think Potsdamer Platz is great, but it's really not bad either, and parts of it, like the three skyscrapers or the reconstruction of Leipziger Platz, are pretty good. I could only wish that SWB had half the sense of scale and architectural variety.

justin

 

[jass]

Gottschalks is another department store chain, based in California with stores in the pacific northwest. Theyre slightly above JCPennys, but wont be in Boston (or east of the Mississippi) any time soon

International is the best bet. IKEA, H&M, Zara, what are other big chains?

 

[stellarfun]

Waterside Place and Seaport Square are to have a combined 2.3 million sq ft of retail. Fan Pier is to have 300,000 sq ft of retail Pier 4 is to have 35,000 sq ft of retail.

Mall of America, the nation's largest, has 2.5 million square of retail, with four anchor department stores. (Mall of America also has 1+ million sq ft of entertainment space.)

So if you replicated Jordan's Furniture Reading store (260,000 sq ft.) , IKEA's Chicago store (350,000 sq ft.), and the LL Bean store in Tysons Corner VA (77,000 sq ft), you could fill Waterside Place.

To fill Seaport Square, you simply replicate Westfield Centre in San Francisco. It has a Nordstrom (350,000 sq ft) and a Bloomingdales (340,000 sq ft) as the anchor department stores, plus 400+ other retail establishments. Westfield Centre is in the heart of downtown San Francisco, right on Market St., and has 1.5 million sq ft. of retail (a bit smaller than Seaport Square's proposed retail).

Westfield Centre store list here:
http://westfield.com/sanfrancisco/ourstores/index.html

But the difficulties in finding a steady and ultimately profitable customer base can be daunting. Sony and Millennium Partners (the very same) built a futuristic retail and entertainment complex in San Francisco next to the Moscone Convention Center, and not too distant from Westfield. It is called the Metreon, and included a 15 screen movie complex. Sony and Millennium sold Metreon last year to co-developers of Westfield, as it was failing.

The movie theaters flourished. But Sony didn't receive any revenue from the theaters and in 2002 rebuffed a quiet proposal by the theaters to expand into the by-then-vacant fourth floor.

One industry observer said the complex ended up with a mostly teenage clientele that alienated the upscale families whom Sony had intended to attract.

"Sony envisioned a much higher-end customer than ultimately wanted to be there," Taylor said.

"The tenants they put in originally were very unique and esoteric. The Discovery Channel* had unique things, but they were for affluent people with lots of disposable income for cute knick-knacks. The most successful tenants were ones who catered to the teenage moviegoing crowd, like the pinball arcades. They intimidated the more affluent crowds looking for a more museumlike experience."

San Francisco Chronicle Feb 23, 2006
* The Discovery Channel has now closed all its retail stores.

 

[czsz]

Speaking for Potsdamer Platz: I've occasionally compared SBW unfavorably to it, but I think that in both design and architecture it's emerged the far superior development. The most unfortunate aspect of its design is its seeming isolation from the rest of the city, but the architects and planners couldn't help that it was cut off by the Kulturforum or the Landwehrkanal...and who was going to raise the hue and cry against the Holocaust Memorial putting yet another institutional barrier between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate area? Leipziger Platz's completion should help alleviate the disconnect.

And yeah, I really would prefer to have the convention center out on 128 with a 15 minute S-Bahn-equivalent connection. The only things that make that impossible are the fact that the Boston metro isn't one consolidated metropolis as is Berlin and that the North American convention business is predicated on outside-the-front-door access to the city, although this is already somewhat of a joke in Boston's case as the new convention center is isolated on a SBW overpass with nothing interesting in sight other than the hotels and upcoming mall built to serve it. Come to think of it, there's no reason anything on the SBW right now (except for maybe the courthouse, ICA, and the BoA pavillion) couldn't be part of some completely self-contained, suburban development. There's no relation to Boston whatsoever.

 

[briv]

That spaghetti under Waterside Place didnt have to be there. If there was a plan for the Seaport, it couldve been designed around. But for some reason in this town, highway engineers, urban planners, architects, developers and politicians cant coordinate with one another.

And just because the site is above a labyrinth of roads and ramps doesnt mean good, worthwhile design is impossible. If you can build a mall, you can build whatever. Far greater feats have been achieved in Boston.

What's more difficult to build over: A 10 acre parcel partially sited above a highway or 450 acres of muddy, festering marshland?

 

[NIMBOB]

That spaghetti under Waterside Place didnt have to be there. If there was a plan for the Seaport, it couldve been designed around. But for some reason in this town, highway engineers, urban planners, architects, developers and politicians cant coordinate with one another.

And just because the site is above a labyrinth of roads and ramps doesnt mean good, worthwhile design is impossible. If you can build a mall, you can build whatever. Far greater feats have been achieved in Boston.

What's more difficult to build over: A 10 acre parcel partially sited above a highway or 450 acres of muddy, festering marshland?

Part of the spaghetti includes the I-90 extension. How would you divert the extension and still be able to connect the Mass Pike, an I-90/93 interchange and Logan Airport without leveling half of South Boston and Dorchester? The whole point was to minimize eminent domain.

 

[briv]

Part of the spaghetti includes the I-90 extension. How would you divert the extension and still be able to connect the Mass Pike, an I-90/93 interchange and Logan Airport without leveling half of South Boston and Dorchester? The whole point was to minimize eminent domain.

Hmmm. Thats a tough question. We certainly dont want to level S. Boston and Dorchester. Im sure this very problem kept many a highway engineers up late at night, and the brilliant solution they came up luckily spared us that fate.

Granted, Im not one of those engineering geniuses. But off the cuff, here's what I wouldve done after looking at Google Earth for 30 seconds:

What we have

Better than what we have

 

[castevens]

Very ironically, I just watched the episode of Modern Marvels on the Big Dig today (available on ITunes...I paid 1.99 for it). It seems like they had enough problems putting the Ted Williams tunnel and the Fort Point tunnel in, I doubt that your idea would have been even feasible.

The main problems were the instability of the soil, the ability of the highway tunnel to coexist with the Red Line, and the ability of getting the pieces of the tunnel to the place where they were needed considering the low height of the bridges on the Fort Point Channel

 

[NIMBOB]

It cost $1 billion to build the tunnel sections under that tiny sliver of Fort Point Channel (0.1 miles) and you want them to build a tunnel the entire length of the channel instead? On top of that, you want to put 2 hairpin turns on a stretch of interstate highway....under water? Can I have what you're smoking?

BTW, how many of the people that lose their homes in your "So what if we flatten some poor peoples' houses?" scenario can move in with you? 10? 11? 100?

 

[czsz]

BTW, how many of the people that lose their homes in your "So what if we flatten some poor peoples' houses?" scenario can move in with you? 10? 11? 100?

Room for them and more in the now spaghetti-covered regions alone.

I can imagine some more plausible routings for the 90...what about south of the convention center? What about a tunnel that starts further to the west (under the WTC) or Pier 4)? What about just burying the thing slightly deeper, forseeing overhead development?