A grand plan for remaking Government Center Plaza has been developed by the Trust for City Hall Plaza and the Boston Redevelopment Authority. The plan calls for bisecting the Plaza, keeping one portion for the public and ceding the remainder to the construction of a new street, a 350-room hotel and a 650-space parking garage. The JFK federal building, once integral to Government Center, would be cut off from the Plaza. In the name of revitalization, the plan has been pushed by the developer-dominated trust and now stands just a hair’s breadth away from approval.
It’s time to catch our collective breath and rethink this idea. The notion of forever losing half of the Plaza’s public space is unnerving.
Almost no one likes Government Center Plaza. It’s ugly and plain, a place people cross rather than visit. When Mayor Tom Menino first proposed remaking the Plaza into a vital, urban space, he captured the imagination of many. The city sponsored an ideas competition which attracted enthusiastic entries from world renowned architects, children and everyone in between.
The Mayor then created the badly-named Trust for City Hall Plaza (it’s actually Government Center Plaza, as the folks from the federal buildings that abut it are eager to point out). The chair of the trust is Norman Levanthal, a prominent real estate developer who built the Boston Harbor Hotel, Center Plaza (which abuts the Plaza on Cambridge Street) and, most notably, Post Office Square, a marvel of an urban park that relies on parking revenues from an underground garage to pay for the graceful green space above.
Membership on the trust was confined to significant Boston-area businesses, including Suffolk Construction, the Beacon Properties, Doubletree Hotels, and New England Development. Each firm had to pay $15,000 annually to be a member of the trust. Abutters such as the GSA are not members of the trust. Nor are residential groups, preservationists, public space advocates or other environmentally concerned organizations. The trust was granted the authority by the BRA not only to plan the development of the Plaza, but also to run and manage the Plaza after it is developed.
And now, to paraphrase Claude Raines in Casablanca, we are shocked, shocked to discover that a bunch of developers and financiers want to … develop a hotel on the Plaza. Ostensibly the reason for the hotel development is that some sort of economic engine is needed to generate enough cash to subsidize the other, more public parts of the Plaza. In addition the trust argues, a hotel development would bring life to the Plaza and people into an area that is otherwise desolate.
And so the notion of the hotel, which was originally advanced by some as a small component of the revitalization, now dominates the new Plaza, as the schematic adjacent to this article shows. Indeed, the hotel is the only thing that the trust has settled on; it has even gone so far as to select a developer. Meanwhile, the plans for the remainder of the Plaza are sketchy at best.
As far as the trust and the BRA are concerned, the hotel is a done deal. I disagree. Under the relevant urban renewal plans that first created the Plaza as well as under state law, major modifications to the Plaza require the approval of the City Council. Incredibly, the BRA has tried to argue that Council approval is unneeded, that a hotel, parking garage and new street are minor modifications to the Plaza.
Last year the Council deliberated carefully and publicly over the sale of Boston City Hospital to Boston University Medical Center. It was a decision that all involved treated seriously. So too should we deliberate over this remaking of the Plaza. A decision to sell off half of one of the city’s most important public spaces is one that must be made carefully and publicly. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.