Blog Post No. 2012-12: Making the Hynes behave on Boylston Street

Photo 1: Looking east on Boylston Street, Hynes in the midground, and
the Hancock Tower in the far background.



Photo 2: Looking diagonally across Boylston Street, at Hynes' NW corner
and The Capital Grille.



Photo 3: towne restaurant, at the NE corner of the Hynes
Convention Center (sorry for the delivery trucks).

Photo 4: The eastward facing entrance of towne, shot from the
sidewalk in front of the courtyard adjacent.

Photo 5: The courtyard adjacent, with towne's outdoor seating.

The Location: 900 Boylston Street, Boston (Back Bay), MA.

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2010.

The Story: We have spent no insignificant amount of time and digital ink here at RTUF talking about the many changes, large and small, that have been made over the last decade at the Prudential Center (of which the Hynes Convention Center is not technically a part, though it is directly adjacent), including in both Blog Post No. 2009-3: The Mandarin Oriental Hotel (discussing the Mandarin's success in replacing what had been a particularly lifeless cluster of auto access drives along Boylston Street between Essex and Fairfield Streets), and Blog Post No. 2010-21: Seizing the presently available opportunity to continue the campaign to bring the Pru out to meet its neighbors... (highlighting a then-proposed residential rental tower that filled in a major gap along Essex Street, and also pointing to the still-proposed 888 Boylston Street tower that would fill in the last plaza space next to towne as well as several other changes around the complex's perimeter such as 111 Huntington, the Belvidere residences, and the two-story section along Huntington to which Shaw's supermarket was moved). It has been an impressive string of improvements, and one to which Cityscapes of Boston itself pointed with anticipation even as far back as 1992. After lamenting the "wasteland of grim towers and empty plazas" by which "Boston's Prudential Center blights everything around it," Robert Campbell expressed hope at the then-new ownership's plans for "filling the worst of its dead plazas with new shops and offices," concluding that "[i]f all goes well, the Pru may some day be a revitalizing agent for the very street frontage it now kills." (pp. 208-209)

That day can now be said to have fully arrived, two decades on. So much so that even publicly-owned buildings are getting in on the act. Your RTUF correspondent will stipulate that we are looking in this case at a fairly subtle, kind of small bore change to the formerly long, blank Boylston Street frontage of the Hynes Convention Center. For our non-Boston readers, the Hynes is the erstwhile main convention center for the Boston region that ultimately became too small and was replaced by the massive Boston Convention and Exposition Center (or "BCEC") out in what is now the Innovation District in South Boston. (Of course, there's already a proposal floating to expand the BCEC beyond its current footprint because it is already in danger of becoming too small itself, less than 10 years after it was completed (!), but I digress...)

Now, to return to the Hynes and the subject of this blog post. The convention center authority has retained the Hynes and kept it operating as a venue for smaller conventions and meetings that don't compete with the BCEC. At least one source from around the time of towne's opening ("towne makes Hynes tastier") indicated that the authority's impetus for bringing in both towne and The Capital Grille was to improve dining options for visitors/convention-goers. I also suspect that part of the discussion around keeping the Hynes open after the BCEC came online might have included running some numbers and trying to figure out a way to enhnace non-event revenue, including from such things as then underutilized space along the Boylston Street frontage. Whatever the reason, the insertion of both restaurants within the existing footprint of the building at its two corners was a very good move. No, not earthshattering, but a smart decision and one recognizing a couple of key imperatives in creating a workable urban fabric: first, avoid long blank walls along important street frontages, whatever is going on behind them, and second, pay special attention to corners. The result is that this stretch of Boylston now has activity on both sides of the street, something that almost has never been the case (recall that before the Pru was built, there were extensive railroad yards all the way from Mass. Ave. to Dartmouth St.), but which Campbell rightly pointed out in Cityscapes (at p. 208) is critical for a successful commercial street, though being located opposite the Hynes was never quite as bad as being located opposite the un-reconstructed Pru's plazas. Note also that both restaurants have extensive outdoor seating, which used to be dismissed in Boston as simply incompatible with a region that has as long a winter season as we typically do, but is now recognized as a highly desirable amenity for any urban eatery.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric:

Blog Post No. 2010-21: Seizing the presently available opportunity to continue the campaign to bring the Pru out to meet its neighbors...

...in the Back Bay and South End

A rendering of Avalon Exeter viewed from Boylston Street over the Lord & Taylor building (credit: Boston Properties, Elkus Manfredi).

Ted Siefer, a Boston Globe correspondent who's been writing recently on a wide variety of home and real estate-related topics as well as producing content for The Phoenix and WBUR, did a fine job in Saturday's paper in describing how a current development proposal does both in "Apartment building ready to rise". AvalonBay Communities is predicting construction start on Avalon Exeter, a 28-story rental apartment building located on the Prudential Center complex (MAP) that straddles the border of the Back Bay and the South End, in the spring of next year.

Multifamily development, especially in a rental market like Boston's with its high built-in demand, high rental rates, and low vacancy with little new product coming online, is the current conventional wisdom's financing fair-haired child. Almost nothing else is moving forward right now in a meaningful way -- certainly not general office given the employment situation, not ownership residential given the continued inability of that market to find a positive direction several years into the subprimte/foreclosure meltdown, and also not retail development given continued softness in the consumer economy (though there are some isolated bright spots). No, ladies and gentlemen, the smart money right now and for the foreseeable future is on multifamily rental and that counts as our "presently available opportunity" for today's post.

Which brings us to the "bring the Pru out to meet the neighbors" part of the post. That's the way the design of the new tower and, equally as importantly, its location continues the multi-year effort by the owner of the overall Prudentail Center complex -- Boston Properties -- to fill in the exterior edges of the massive complex and make it act more like a piece of the urban fabric in this critical urban location, rather than a sealed-off enclave behind vacuous and little used open spaces. This trend was cited in one of the first posts on this blog -- No. 2009-3 just over a year ago -- about the Mandarin Oriental building on Boylston Street and how it had quite elegantly filled in a gap in the Pru's exterior on Boylston Street. Boston Properties has been doing that all over the place -- with the curving Belvedere residential building on that street's frontage, the office tower at 111 Huntington Avenue (famous for its crown, reportedly the brain-child of the Mayor himself), new one- and two-story connections along Huntington Avenue itself with a relocated and upgraded Shaw's supermarket, and a more open design to the Lord & Taylor store on Boylston Street.

All of these changes have made the Pru a far better neighbor than it has ever been, and Boston Properties has a plan approved already to fill in the last big gap on Boylston with an office building dubbed "888 Boylston." The office market being what it is, it may be some time before that building moves forward. But, as noted above, the multifamily rental market is still going well and AvalonBay, having taken over ownership and management of the pricey but frankly urban design-deficient residential towers at the Pru, is now finally ready to break ground on a residential building that will fill in the exterior gap on the east, along Exeter Street between Huntington and Boylston. The rendering in the article doesn't have much detail but it does seem to show the new building creating a strong street edge and ground-level uses on Exeter. And below, some context...

In order: 888 Boylston Street (the proposed office tower further up Boylston (credit: Boston Properties)), 1960s-vintage postcard showing the under-construction Prudential as object building resting on its low-slung podium (credit unavailable), the residential towers on the eastern end of the site as originally built (note the surrounding plaza space (credit: Boston Properties)), the curving Belvidere residential building that encloses the Belvedere-Dalton Street frontage (credit noted).

Blog Post No. 2009-3: The Mandarin Oriental Hotel

A luxury hotel holds up its side of the street


Location: Mandarin Oriental Hotel, 776 Boylston Street, Boston (Back Bay), MA (MAP)

Year(s) of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2008

Photos: Walking along Boylston Street, heading from Copley Square toward the Hynes Convention Center.

The Story: The massive Prudential Center complex, to which the Mandarin Oriental is the latest addition, didn't require the clearing of formerly useful urban fabric when it was built in the 1960s. Instead, it actually helped cover the multi-modal transportation corridor that slices through the Back Bay diagonally from the Charles River on the north to what used to be South Bay on the south. That corridor was first developed as a railroad causeway across the Back Bay in the mid-19th century and eventually expanded to include an extensive rail yard that took up the south side of Boylston Street from Massachusetts Avenue to Dartmouth Street for several decades. The first and most ambitious air rights/decking project built in Boston, featuring what is now the second tallest building in town, the Pru presently sits atop the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension, several MBTA commuter rail lines, the main Amtrak Northeast Corridor line, and part of the MBTA Green Line subway. However, consistent with its era -- the mid-1960s, that is -- the complex as originally built didn't pay much attention to the street level around its superblock. Its tall buildings were pulled back into the interior of the site, leaving essentially dead, vacant spaces along all of its street edges that were used for vehicular access and, theoretically, park and plaza space for pedestrians. Since acquiring the Pru in the 1990s, Boston Properties has been steadily filling in the blank spaces around the complex's periphery. Completion of construction of the Mandarin Oriental building (including the hotel itself, associated luxury residential condominium units, and retail/restaurant at the street level) last year represents only the latest piece of the puzzle, and subsequent posts may focus on other edges of the Pru that have been productively filled in over the last decade. At this point, there is really only a single developable streetfront site left at the Pru, located just a bit further out on Boylston Street. As can be seen in the photos, the building makes a strong street edge along the equivalent of a full block of the Pru's Boylston Street frontage. There have been complaints about lack of stepping back in the building as its height increases, leading some to label it yet another step in the "Manhattanization" of Boston. Of course, the twin facts that I grew up in New York and that I like the building may be definitive proof of the accusation. From an urban fabric standpoint, though, I think there is little doubt that the south side of Boylston Street's urban fabric has been improved by the Mandarin Oriental's development.


[Added November 18, 2009] RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: See below. You can see clearly that there's basically one gap left in the Boylston Street frontage for the Pru.