Boston commercial real estate -- now officially all the way back... (Blog Post No. 2013-5)

Unshrouded at last -- Restarting work on the Burnham Building officially
signals the end of the downturn.

Faithful readers of this weblog may recall that your correspondent referred, albeit somewhat in passing, to the "Filene's Pit" in a post just over year ago about the commencement of construction on the Millennium residential project at Hayward Place. At the time, the reference was to the that fact that the Filene's Pit (a.k.a., "One Franklin") remained just that - a pit - as it had stood since the fall of 2008, when construction abruptly halted and the half-demolished rear of the Burnham Building was unceremoniously shrouded in tarp as a result of the real estate and equities market meltdown. The fact that the Burnham Building, the heart and soul of the old Filene's department store assemblage, is now being unshrouded and construction re-started on the project is the unofficial signal that, ladies and gentlemen, commercial real estate in Boston is all the way back. In the language of the CPI Index, if 2008 = 100, then 2013 = 100 as well. Mojo now restored. Allow me to explain.

Filene's department store was unquestionably the leading symbol of downtown Boston for the entire 20th century. Edward Filene is well-known for a number of innovations in the highly competitive urban department store industry, but for RTUF, his importance lies in commissioning Daniel Burnham, one of the major American architectural players of the early 20th century, to design a new home for the retailing behemoth that quite literally was the anchor for Downtown Crossing for decades. Burnham obliged with a fantastic piece of urban fabric - a building that defines its location as well as anything you're likely to find anywhere, made all the more poignant by Burnham's untimely death around the time of building's completion in 1912, leaving it his only work in Boston.

Fast forward almost a century, and Filene's fell on truly hard times in the early 2000s, losing ground to rivals and not finding its footing in the brutally discount-dominated market, and suffered the final indignity of being closed by their common parent company in favor of the Macy's (formerly the headquarters of arch-rival Jordan Marsh) across Summer Street. Still, at first, the future of the site looked bright, as local developer John Hynes, son of a former mayor of Boston and the hero of One Lincoln, brought Gale International and Vornado to the site, permitted it rapidly, and started demolition in early 2008. However, the fall of Lehman Brothers intervened within the year and construction activity halted, virtually on a dime, at the point at which (1) the incredibly crappy 2-3 story (does it matter, the thing had no windows to help us out?) modernistic concrete nonsense that stretched from the Burnham Building's side to Franklin Street, (2) the entire backside of the considerably more worthy edifice at the corner of Franklin and Hawley streets had been pulled off in a classic facade-ectomy, and (3) the resulting exposed sidewall of the Burnham Building was left to look, sadly, into the 2-3 story pit that had been dug to be the foundation of the new, cantilevering tower that was to rise above it all.

You have to admit, dear reader, that the story would be sad enough had it ended there and been picked up only this spring, but, alas, that was not so. No, in a kind of Greek tragedy-cum-nightmare, the resulting blighting influence of the Filene's Pit was made all the more acute by the resulting feud between Vornado and the Mayor over a purported quote from Vornado's chief executive to the effect (and I paraphrase) that in some cases it might strategically make sense to leave blighted sites blighted in order to incentivize the affected municipality to come to the table with more subsidy to restart development. Needless to say, this did not sit well with the current occupant (you may have seen RTUF's recent pre-valedictory to the Mayor in late March here), who took this kind of talk personally, and effectively demanded that Vornado step off the job if anything was ever going to happen once the worm turned. Well, before the worm turned, Vornado and Gale ceded control to Millennium Partners (our friends from down the street at Hayward Place), who redesigned the old cantilevered tower, making it taller and simpler, and have now, at long last, restarted construction on the Filene's Pit. Downturn now officially, for those of you keeping score at home (as Lindsey Nelson used to say on Channel 9, immediately after a play had been officially scored), OVER.

The end of the Menino era...and one reason, originating in God's Country, why that era was a good one for the urban fabric (Blog Post No. 2013-4)

The big news in the Hub of the Universe over the last several days has been the decision of our long-serving mayor, Thomas M. Menino, to retire at the end of his fifth term rather than seek re-election this fall. Yes, you read that right - Boston has had the same man in easily the city's most powerful position for the last 20 years. It's a long run, no matter what your frame of reference might be. And there's no doubt that this mayor in particular has been powerful in a sustained and all-encompassing way that few if any present day mayors even come close to matching. It is a cliche, but also as plainly true as such things ever are, that nothing of any significance has gone on in this town while Tom Menino has been our mayor that he hasn't known about and ultimately approved of, and the bar on what qualified as "significant" was a lot lower than the out-of-town observer might first imagine.

We can all argue over the necessarily mixed bag that that kind of tight gate-keeping entails. But one fundamental concept on which it was thoroughly right from start to finish was in first preserving and then helping to flourish neighborhood business distirct across the city through the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Main Streets program. Blog friend and Roslindale neighbor Carter Wilkie, himself a former mayoral aide in the late 1990s, wrote an opinion piece in The Boston Globe a couple of days ago -- you can find it here -- that accurately sums up the mayor's early, pre-mayoralty insight on the value of the Main Streets program in urban neighborhood settings. In the mid-1980s, with then-councilor Menino's urging, the National Trust made Roslindale Village Main Street the first urban main streets program in the country. The principal idea behind the program was and has remained that traditional, pre-auto-dominance shopping districts -- "Main Streets" understood broadly all across the country -- need and deserve the same kind of attention to overall image and basic infrastructure that privately-owned suburban and exurban shopping centers and malls have enjoyed for decades.

After the Mayor became mayor, main streets organizations were formed all across the city, such that there are now19 main streets organization from East Boston to West Roxbury and almost everywhere in between. Their combined impact is broader than their simple numbers. Collectively, they are operative symbols of the idea that a great many places, not just the big-ticket ones (the Back Bays and Beacon Hills of the world), are worth preserving and working with and moving forward. Rosindale Square (I sympathize with the old-timers who have steadfastly refused to use the word "Village" after "Roslindale" except when absolutely required) is an extremely apt poster child for this idea. I have come to love our neighborhood's walkable and lively center, yet one could hardly call it perfect. And that's the point. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be cared for and made better. It just has to be ours.

More than just re-branding on Post Office Square (Blog Post No. 2013-3)

Photo 1: The main entrance.

Photo 2: The CongressStreet -High Street corner and the former garage space, now retail.

Photo 3: Another view of the same corner, looking further down High Street.

Photo 4: The new High Street entry.

Photo 5: New retail space on the corner of Oliver Street and Franklin Street.

Photo 6: New retail space on the corner of Franklin Street and Congress Street.

The Location: 50 Post Office Square, Boston, MA (formerly 185 Franklin Street). Check out google street view to see what these frontages looked like before: HERE.

The Story: This post clearly belongs in the incremental changes category, without question, though the underlying trend here is definitely not insignificant. We are looking at the re-branded 50 Post Office Square, formerly just plain old 185 Franklin Street and more widely known as the New England Telephone Building for many years. The building itself is a relatively late period example of Art Deco, having been constructed in the late 1940s, when the style was past its prime and already yielding to the International Style. This Boston Globe piece from Casey Ross ("An Art Deco Makeover") does a great job of setting out the essentials. Verizon, the successor to NET through a couple of mergers, emphatically ended the building's first chpater in 2010 when it decided to move most of its employees to other locations and sold to a private developer, in this case a group called Commonwealth Ventures. Clearly, Commonwealth saw substantial upside in the location - across Franklin Street from Post Office Square Park - despite the loss in near-term value that would result from losing most of the main tenant.

To realize that upside, however, Commonwealth needed to do more than simply give the building a new address and hire brokers. They needed to do things that may seem like common sense (at least to this blog, they do), but that still required vision and a willingness to take a certain amount of risk. Because the building had been a single-tenant affair since its construction, there had been little impetus to do more than accommodate the arrival and departure of the employees of that single tenant. Thus, the only entrances were the front entrance on Franklin, admittedly marked by an impressive and distinct architectural expression, and the rather sad couple of doors on High Street denoted by a forlorn canopy more appropriate for an early 1970s bus station than an important regional corporate player. In other words, while not a hostile building, certainly not playing the part it could in the urban ensemble. You occupy a whole city block in the heart of Boston, you need to do more than 2 entrances on the front and back. Commonwealth recognized that imperative, and, as the Globe aritcle indicates, hired Elkus Manfredi to manage the building's renovation, including, among other things, new retail space on basically 1/3 of the ground floor frontages and a new lobby on High Street. Nothing earthshattering here. Just another strand in the fabric doing a lot more than it used to, and clearly reflecting the trend that the level of urbanistic expectation is getting higher every day. And, to bookend the discussion, by snagging a consolidating Brown Brothers Harriman as the tenant that will take almost all of the old Verizon space, Commonwealth has seen their risk taking rewarded, which is a nice bit of positive reinforcement for other downtown landlords that might want to follow their example.

Blog Post No. 2013-2: Launching the Substation Redevelopment

Photo credit: historicbostonblog.org.

NOW, this is how you do two things: FIRST, design a context-sensitive, mixed-use redevelopment project in the heart of Roslindale Square; and SECOND, run a community meeting rolling out and setting the tone for public review of said project.

Loyal and active members of RTUF Nation will recall that less than a week ago, this weblog did a brief update piece on recent developments in Roslindale Square (a.k.a., God's Country). Included in that update was a reference to a then impending community meeting in which RVMS, Historic Boston, and Peregrine Development, their for-profit joint venture partner, would present the design for a proposed redevelopment of the combined MBTA Substation and Higgins Funeral Home site at the southeast corner of Washington Street and Cummins Highway. Well, that meeting happened at the Knights of Columbus last Wednesday and it was impressive in both the ways described above.

The proposed project (you can access it here) is about as responsible, in the very best sense of the word, urban design behavior as you're going to find out there. The existing Higgins funeral home structure comes down and the substation is renovated for a signature restaurant space. In place of the funeral home, we have a wrap-around 41-unit apartment building with ground floor office on the Washington Street frontage and liner residential units on the Cummins Street frontage that hide the parking behind. The design on each frontage appropriately differs. On Washington Street, it's a more commercial feeling, flat-roofed building. On Cummins, the building reads more as a larger, gabled residential building, similar to a number of such buildings around the intersection of Cummins and Florence just up the street. I am particularly fond of the way the designers have found a way to pull the ground level of the new building back slightly from both Washington Street (which unfortunately has no on-street parking in this block) and the substation to create a small courtyard with a handful of tables that will provide outdoor seating for the ultimate restaurant tenant. It's just one indication of the high level of skill and care that has gone into this design. Yours truly could readily imagine himself seated at a table sipping a finely crafted IPA from Substation Brewing Company on a crisp evening come fall 2014.

Of course, this being the real world, there are non-trivial issues to be surmounted, including driving the parking ratio down further (it's close to 1-to-1 on the residentail units, which really isn't necessary for as transit- and desination-rich a site as this) and dealing with the floor height of the ground level residentail units on Cummins. Probably the most significant challenge will be coming to a mutually satisfactory arrangement with the neighboring Roslindale Congregational Church, which runs a day care and pre-school in their adjacent complex in addition to their worship activities and multiple community-oriented events. The church building is a handsome, late 19th century edifice in the Romanesque-Shingle Style and listed on the National Register. Anyone with half a brain, and the collective redevelopment team and their designers clearly have more than that, would want to be sensitive to that adjacency and seek in good faith to address the church's concerns about shadow, traffic, parking and construction-period impacts. That appears to be happening already.

Of course, addressing those concerns in an overall context of strong community support for the project would be a plus, and...you guessed it, that's what we had last Wednesday. To describe the meeting as a love-fest would perhaps be slight, but really only slight, hyperbole. The speakers, who included your humble correspondent, were overwhelmingly in favor of the project and even those speakers who expressed concerns did so in a manner suggesting that they understood the value of the project and wanted only to make sure that certain issues were properly considered and addressed. I can honestly say that I was very surprised at the uniformity of support, which, upon reflection, stems most likely from 3 sources:

1. The long-standing community good will and trust that Roslindale Village Main Streets has engendered through its almost 30 years of advocacy for the Square, including its most recent major achievement, the phenomenally successful farmers market;
2. The manifest skill of the meeting's organizers (you know who you are, but you especially include Steve Gag, board president of RVMS); and
3. The worthiness of the design.

These are listed in their relative order of priority. You get nowhere without community trust, and in Roslindale, as in Boston generally, you have to pay your dues by putting in the time. When it comes to development issues, there is a LOT of distrust. Then, even if you have trust in your corner, you can mismanage it. And finally, you can blow your first two indispensible advantages with an awful design. None of that is happening, so we can look forward with at least somewhat justifiable confidence to the not-too-distant day when the substation is finally brought back to life and Roslindale sees another piece of its urban fabric restored.

Blog Post No. 2013-1: Updates on Roslindale Square

First of all, happy 2013 to the members of RTUF Nation! It has been a busy January for your faithful correspondent, so this month's post is coming later than is typical, though it may be followed quickly by an update to this update.

Now, with the formalities out of the way, here's the latest urban fabric news from God's Country (a.k.a, Roslindale Square):

"Traffic" Sculpture Installed

So, it took almost 3 years, but the public art that I referenced in a truly vintage April 2010 post about Alexander the Great Square's almost pitch-perfect traffic improvements has finally arrived. You can see photos of the installation last month here at Wicked Local, and you can view a video from the sculptor here: George Greenmayer Video. RTUF management has a policy against commenting on art and architectural style, but I will say that I am fond of it and it can certainly stay. Public art is, in and of itself, a powerful statement about a community's respect for itself.

Substation Redevelopment Proposal

Meanwhile, redevelpment of the former trolley substation that is, for all intents and purposes and despite its derelict state, the architectural heart of Roslindale Square, looks poised to take a very major step foward toward reality, though much changed in focus since last it crossed the old radar screen. Instead of the stand-alone substation, done on a shoe-string as a kind of event-space-in-the-raw, we are now looking at a much more substantial project and project site that now includes redevelopment of the adjacent F.J. Higgins Funeral Home on Washington Street, with the attendant parking lot that wraps around the substation onto Cummins Highway. To say that the mixed-use project now proposed is right up your correspondent's alley would be an understatement. How the urban design responds to this site, which is critically important for the square, will be a very big deal. That design will presumably be available at the upcoming community meeting, and I'll do a follow up then.

Blog Post No. 2012-18: In which we finally visit the High Line

The Photos:



Photo 1: Looking east across W. 23rd Street.

 

Photo 2: View northeast with Empire State Building in background.



Photo 3: Looking north along the High Line from W. 23rd Street.

Photo 4: View southwest toward Hudson River.

Photo 5: View south from around W. 23rd Street.



Photo 6: Detail of water fountain. Sticker: "Out of service for winter season."



Photo 7: View north along 10th Avenue.

 

Photo 8: Terroir Cafe near W. 16th Street.


The Location: The High Line, between Gansevoort Street and West 23rd Street, 9th and 10th Avenues, New York, NY. Map here.


The Story: And so, to close out the year, we return to New York and the signature product of landscape urbanism, American-style: the High Line. Though I remain a sceptic of LU, you may consider me a fan of this particular piece of urban fabric restoration and you can put this in the category of "by their fruits shall you know them, urbanism-wise." When a project works, and the High Line unquestionably does, you give credit where credit is due. All at once, this former elevated freight railroad line on Manhattan's lower west wide is a piece of industrial art, a pedestrian travel corridor, and a promenade. The level of attention to detail and curatorship is extraordinarily high. Even putting aside the multiple pieces of contemporary art that have been installed along the route, the entire High Line itself is given great care in all of its details. Thus, to take just one example, the sticker on the water fountain in photo 6. I can assure you as a native New Yorker, that I have never seen a public water fountain in the city provide any information whatsoever, let alone accurate information as to why it is not presently in service.

I would also put this in the urban revivication category alluded to in the recent post about the Islanders moving to the borough of Kings. According to the Friends of the High Line website, the High Line was originally built above old surface tracks serving the West Side waterfront in the 1930s as a means of eliminating grade crossings and the attendant hazards of frieght trains running down active urban avenues. However, with the demise of shipping from the Hudson River piers in Manhattan and the rise of trucking in the 1950s and 1960s, the facility rapidly declined in use and all train service was eventually ended by 1980. Thus, the High Line stood as a symbol of industrial decline for over 20 years, becoming a target of efforts to completely demolish it and eliminate the easement rights it embodied so the space could be privatized. In other words, the High Line had no future, which should sound familiar, since around that time the conventional wisdom was that all of urban America, as a concept and as a group of places, had little to no future itself. I exaggerate only slightly.

It took a railroad enthusiast with the quixotic and ultimately unsuccessful notion of restoring rail service to save the High Line early on until a small, but determined group of citizens joined together and saw in it an opportunity to create a unique urban amenity. Thus, a structure left for dead and surely seen as a symbol of blight and decay was transformed into something that adds to its surrounding neighborhood and has become a focus for new investment, even to the point where the Whitney Museum of American Art is expanding with a new, Renzo Piano-designed building directly adjacent to the southern terminus of the High Line at Gansevoort Street. From any perspective, the High Line is a remarkable achievement for its organizers working through Friends of the High Line, the City of New York (which remains the structure's owner), and for James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the LU designers who were chosen to bring the High Line to life. The High Line's take-away, perhaps, is that people who care about their own cities, towns, and neighborhoods and what happens in them might do well to contemplate what they presently see as physical negatives -- abandoned buildings, structures, and areas -- and consider them as opportunities to enhance their surroundings. Yes, we're looking at you, Old Northern Avenue Bridge in Boston...

Blog Post Script: The walk from 23rd Street down to the end of the High Line in the West Village gave your correspondent the opportunity to stop by and snap a photo in front of 555 Hudson Street, the house immortalized by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.



Photo 9: In front of 555 Hudson Street.



Blog Post No. 2012-17: What McMorrow said about the Financial District in Boston

Regular readers of this weblog may have noticed that I link to Paul McMorrow stories from time to time. And for good reason - he's focusing on many of the issues near and dear to our hearts here at RTUF and he's always a good read. His recent piece in Boston Magazine is another example of why that's the case. It's called The Empty Quarter: Boston's Financial District is hollowing out. That's a big problem - but it may also be an opportunity. I encourage you to read the whole piece as I suspect that the shifts in demand for office space that McMorrow describes may also be happening elsewhere in the US. I think I have it right when I say that McMorrow seems to suggest that one part of the emerging solution is to convert much of what became Class B or Class A- office space when the new towers were built -- the smaller existing office buildings built principally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- to apartments and condominiums. Those buildings are better configured with smaller floor plates that allow conversion to residential much more easily. The other part seems to be to re-brand the boiler room-style lower floors of the major office towers of the 1970s and 1980s, which are structurally ill-suited to residential use, as tech/start-up office space. You may recall that this was the topic of a blog post last year in Blog Post No. 2011-14: Shedding light on the boiler room...has to be one of the keys to making it at least potentially rentable in today's economy. Paul believes such space is well-suited to the open office configurations preferred by those companies and approximate the layouts, if not the aesthetics, of the old industrial space in places like East Cambridge and Fort Point Channel that have been the preferred locations for those companies. How it all shakes out remains to be seen, but it does seem clear that change is coming even to the Financial District.