By Scot Lehigh, The Boston Globe
Nov. 14--It's an uneasy corner of the city and has been for years.
Perched on the southeast side of the Boston Common, near what was once a thriving Combat Zone, the neighborhood
seems down-at-the-curb if not quite rundown by day, edgy if not quite dangerous at by night.
For years, any number of efforts to bring a regular flow of pedestrians, customers, and commerce to the blocks
where Tremont and Washington streets run to Boylston have failed.
But now, with Millennium Partners well along in the construction of a Ritz-Carlton hotel, new theater, shopping,
and residential complex between Tremont and Washington, the promise is greater than it's been since the days when
Downtown Crossing was chockablock with department stores and specialty shops, piano merchants stretched down Boylston,
and a row of theaters drew thousands nightly to Washington Street.
The migration of those businesses either out of town or to trendier downtown venues left the area from Macy's southerly
to Boylston and Tremont a Bermuda Triangle of dashed hopes and doomed projects. Some died aborning, unable to clear
financial hurdles. Others failed the day-to-day challenges posed by the hurly-burly of commerce, and still others
suffered from the stigma of the Combat Zone, once robust but now faded to three adult stores and one small, dingy
strip bar.
So can Millennium Place -- the half-billion-dollar dream that will include 155 hotel rooms, 270 luxury condos,
85 extended-stay apartments, two restaurants and a lounge, a 100,000-square-foot health club, 50,000 square feet
of retail space, and a 19-screen Loew's theater complex -- reverse a quarter century of disappointment?
Hopes are as high as the towers that will rise 400 feet at the site. But if it's all to work, Millennium must pass
an essential test -- and heed lessons from the past.
The threshold question is as simple as it is essential: Is there a market for high-end condos in an uneasy neighborhood?
Tony Pangaro, a principal at MDA Associates, a Millennium partner in the joint venture, says that between high-tech,
bio-tech, and financial service executives, empty-nesters returning to the city, out-of-towners desirous of a Boston
base, and foreigners who send their children to college here and want a place to stay, there's a market.
"People don't find many alternatives in this town," Pangaro says, noting that Boston has only three luxury
residences with similar services: The Four Seasons, the existing Ritz-Carlton, and the Heritage. (And in Cambridge,
the Esplanade.) "There is no supply and there is a lot of demand."
Demand, of course, is an abstract idea until price comes into play. Pressed on asking prices, Pangaro is circumspect,
offering a comparison instead. At the nearby Four Seasons, he notes, condos with a view of the Public Garden sell
for $1,100-$1,200 a square foot. For rooms without a view, $600-$700 a square foot, he says. "For our location,
the number is probably in between" those figures, Pangaro says.
Although he concedes the Four Seasons starts with an established reputation, Pangaro argues the greater heights
of Millennium Place -- where residential units will start on the 15th floor and run to the 34th and 36th floors
-- could give it compensatory cachet. The Four Seasons' units are on floors eight to 16.
If it is to hit that range, however, Millennium Place will have to outperform other nearby luxury real estate.
One source at Midtown Real Estate (specialists on that section of Boston) says that in the two nearby residential
buildings that front the Common -- Tremont on the Common and Parkside -- $400 a square foot has been a more reliable
norm.
If a prospective buyer walks the troubled triangle at night -- eyeing closed businesses on one side of the street
and teenage toughs or street people drinking on the neglected Common corner on the other -- he or she might well
shudder at the thought of paying that much above market.
But developers insist that one simply can't impose current impressions on post-project projections; the very act
of building the project will change the neighborhood, they say.
Or, as Pangaro puts it: "This project will achieve a size which is large enough to transform people's impressions
of what the neighborhood is."
Millennium has done that before. Spokesman Matthew Hall points to the company's Lincoln Square project in Manhattan,
between 66th and 68th streets on Broadway, as an example that brought a similar mix of theaters, shopping, and
residential to a borderline neighborhood. Although some complain about the resulting crowds, by all accounts the
project has had a transformative effect.
Certainly having a blue-chip name like the Ritz anchor the multi-use complex will help. "When you have the
Ritz as part of the shingle, that is huge," says Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino. "That says a lot about
that site and the other attractions."
The Ritz -- and an intelligently designed project -- is why other observers think prospects are good for the project,
which is scheduled for completion in spring 2001.
"The Ritz is as good as the Four Seasons and they have got a great concept," says Jon Gollinger, president
of Hunneman Marketing Corp., specialists in marketing high-end condos. "The difference is that they have a
location that is in transition, but there is a critical mass that can bridge the gap."
Frank Keefe, a real estate developer and former Massachusetts secretary of administration and finance, agrees that
Millennium Place has all the right elements to transform the neighborhood.
"They are going to create a critical mass that is going to be very, very positive," Keefe predicts.
But given the history of this particular neighborhood, a better question might be, how does the Millennium Place
concept measure against the lessons of the troubled triangle's past?
One lesson is that to make an area vibrant, it's not enough to have offices that close at 5 or 6 p.m., or stores
that are only open during the working day.
"A lot of downtowns bustle at lunch hour, but if you are there at 6 p.m., or on Saturday, the place just looks
dead," said Al Raine, former state development director and secretary of economic affairs. "Nine-to-five
use may work economically but it is never going to work in a civic sense."
As pleased as the neighborhood is to have had the addition of the new corporate center above the failed Lafayette
Place mall on Washington Street -- with Massachusetts Financial Services and State Street Bank as tenants -- local
merchants more regularly cite the decision by Suffolk University and Emerson College to locate dormitories in the
area, Suffolk on Tremont Street, Emerson on Boylston.
It's those students, particularly the hundreds that Emerson houses in the Little Building at the corner of Tremont
and Boylston, who lend real life to the neighborhood after business hours.
"One big change has been Emerson College, with the kids and the [college] police," says Ray Totaro, whose
Boston Organ & Piano is a few doors down on Tremont.
Millennium hopes to enhance the evening "people presence" in three ways. First, the strong residential
component offered by condos, extended-stay apartments, and the planned Ritz Hotel. Second, a healthy mix of retail
that will be open, Pangaro says, "as long as the law allows." Third, the 19-screen theater complex, which
should draw people until well into the night.
One concern: The Millennium Place complex's main official presence, in the person of doormen and valet parking
attendants, will be on Avery Street -- the narrow street that runs from Tremont to Washington -- rather than Tremont
itself, Boylston, or Washington.
A second lesson comes from the failure of Lafayette Place, next to Macy's on Washington Street. Lafayette was a
suburban mall plunked down in an urban setting, a shopping venue that all but ignored the street that brought the
shoppers. The inward-looking design didn't work in downtown, drawing neither a full complement of stores nor a
regular flow of customers. To work, retail space needs to open on, and be easily accessible from, the street.
"The one thing I hope for in whatever building, I would like to see retail on the street floor, for traffic
and feel and people coming in," says Ken Gloss, owner of the Brattle Book Shop on West Street.
That means street-level locations that draw the eye. Pangaro and Hall say that will happen.
"Everything is open to the street," Hall said. "It is one of the Millennium trademarks to show a
lot of activity, so there is a lot of glass frontage and you will be able to see activity within the building.
At night it looks very vibrant."
Indeed it does, in design anyway. Unlike forbidding Lafayette, this new complex is, in development terms, very
"porous," offering more than two dozen entrances.
Finally, any successful plan can't emphasize Tremont Street at the expense of the other less desirable streets,
particularly Washington. Area merchants say one important step for the neighborhood was the relocation last year
of the Registry of Motor Vehicle's Boston branch to the Liberty Tree building on Washington Street, at the edge
of the dying Combat Zone. That has brought people to the neglected street, which in turn has made it safer.
Menino says the city plans to use Hayward Place, the parking lot on the corner of Washington and Avenue de Lafayette,
for a middle school, but with the first floor devoted to retail, which should also increase pedestrian traffic
on the street.
There have been some worries that Millennium would stint Boylston and Washington streets in favor of Tremont, but
the developers promise that won't happen.
One reason is that Millennium Place will have no back, in the traditional sense; the cinemas front on Tremont with
another entrance on Washington; the Ritz, the health club, the residences, and the hotel lounge and restaurant
have separate entrances on Avery Street, while Boylston and Washington are filled with ground-level retail shops.
In sum, this is a project that seems designed to pass the failed tests of the past. Which is why it is hard to
disagree with Menino's conclusion when he says that the long-neglected neighborhood now faces "a much brighter
future than it has had for many, many years."
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