The vision thing

Two of Mayor Menino's pet projects are mired in controversy. The Fenway plan for a new baseball park is falling apart, and community opposition to the Municipal Harbor Plan is growing. Why can't he get it right?

by Susan Ryan-Vollmar

The Red Sox' plan to build a new park in the Fenway neighborhood is falling apart. Meanwhile, broad-based community opposition to Boston mayor Tom Menino's Municipal Harbor Plan (MHP) has resurfaced with intensity. At first glance, these two developments don't appear to have much in common -- but they just might. Some City Hall observers are floating an idea that can only be described as an elaborate attempt to kill two birds with one stone: build a new Fenway Park on the waterfront. Not only would such a move take the baseball-stadium project out of the Fenway (a development opposed by the Phoenix, see "Where We Stand," page 22), but it would force the surrounding waterfront construction to come in at a reasonable height.

"I think part of the allure of a waterfront ballpark, at least from some angles, is that there are view corridors to the water," says Brian Mahoney, president of the Lower End Political Action Committee (LEPAC), a South Boston

advocacy group that formed about a year ago to keep tabs on waterfront development. "That by itself affects the height of the surrounding buildings. If you put a park down there and surround it with 300-foot buildings, you would see as much of the waterfront as if you had put it in downtown Boston."

For that to work, however, the mayor's MHP would have to be significantly altered, and time may be running out.

The plan was originally put forth by the Pritzker family, which owns about 27 acres of waterfront land. It calls for 150-foot buildings as close as 140 feet to the water's edge and at least two 300-foot buildings built farther back. (By contrast, the World Trade Center is just 80 feet high; the convention center currently under construction in South Boston will be 94 feet high. A plan released last year by the city, called the Public Realm Plan, called for capping all waterfront buildings at 150 feet.)

The period for public comment on the plan ended yesterday, October 18. About 40 people turned out for a demonstration against it at Faneuil Hall on Monday. And Monday night, activists and politicos packed the chambers of the Boston City Council for a hearing on whether the council should pass a resolution urging the state's secretary of environmental affairs, Bob Durand, to order changes in the plan. Nicholas Pritzker said Monday that if his plan wasn't approved by November 15, he'd withdraw it from consideration.

Critics say the MHP violates Chapter 91 -- a state law dating back to Colonial times that mandates public access to the Commonwealth's waterfronts and waterways. Anti-MHP activists also say that the 300-foot-high waterfront buildings might be dangerously close to the flying heights of airplanes taking off from Logan Airport. And they charge that the MHP doesn't include much open space -- one even claimed that hotel lobbies will be counted as public space under the MHP. (A "myths and facts" sheet on the Municipal Harbor Plan handed out by MHP boosters at Monday's city-council hearing says that the plan will include more open space than is called for under Chapter 91. It also says that such space will be more strictly defined than required by Chapter 91.)

The MHP's critics insist they are in favor of developing the waterfront. But they say they it must be developed creatively. "We have the opportunity to create one of the most beautiful places of any major city on the planet," says Mahoney. "But these people are so short-sighted. These people want to Manhattanize the harbor, that's all they want. How much imagination is that?"

IT'S A fair question. A new Fenway Park and a revitalized waterfront will be with us for the next 100 years. Will future generations say city planners got it right in 2000 -- or that they mucked things up, à la the demolition of the West End in the 1950s and the construction of City Hall Plaza in the 1960s? The person most responsible for the stadium and waterfront projects -- and certainly the one who will be held accountable if things go wrong -- is Mayor Menino. But is Menino really up to the task? He is, after all, the politician who favored the Pritzkers' MHP over his own administration's Public Realm Plan because he believed construction on the MHP could begin faster. He is the guy who directed Red Sox CEO John Harrington to build in the Fenway and not on the waterfront as Harrington wanted -- because, it is believed, the mayor didn't want to face the wrath of Southie voters. Convenience, as opposed to vision, seems to be guiding Menino.

Developer Frank McCourt, who owns about 25 acres of land (mostly parking lots near the federal courthouse across from Northern Avenue on the waterfront), released two waterfront plans this summer in response to the MHP. The first called for at least one 400-foot building to be constructed on his property if the Pritzkers are allowed to build 300-foot buildings. (That way, some of his property will have water views.) The other plan, while still allowing for the construction of buildings taller than 300 feet, provided for more open space than the current MHP. It was endorsed by the Conservation Law Foundation -- which has vowed to block the MHP in court if it goes forward in its current form.

One City Hall insider says that the mayor should support McCourt's alternate plan to develop the waterfront and that McCourt should work with the new owners of the Boston Red Sox to build a park there. "People are beginning to recognize what most of us have known all along: the Fenway site is not the right site," this insider says. "We need the right people to go to McCourt and encourage him to . . . work something out with the Pritzkers . . . and work with the Red Sox or the new owners. It just makes so much sense."

Since Harrington announced on October 6 that he was putting the Yawkey Trust's majority stake in the team up for sale, the whispering campaign to relocate the site of the team's planned new park to Boston's waterfront has become a roar. That shows just how fragile the Sox' Menino-orchestrated plan to build a park in the Fenway really is. Last week, Boston Globe columnists Joan Vennochi and Brian McGrory wrote that the waterfront -- specifically, Frank McCourt's property -- was a logical place for a new park. The Boston Herald reported October 13 that some neighborhood activists in South Boston might be open to the possibility. And Boston city councilor Maura Hennigan weighed in with a Globe op-ed column saying that the Fenway proposal is unworkable and calling for an "honest assessment" of new sites.

Although the waterfront plan McCourt released this summer does not have a ballpark on it, word is that he has been quietly showing just such a plan to a handful of political players. But Charlie Kenney, a spokesman for McCourt, denies that the developer has any such plan. "I don't know what they're talking about, because we've been out there for the past year focused on this six-acre parcel [for a convention-center/hotel development] and not talking about anything else," he says.

That said, nearly every news report naming potential Sox owners has included McCourt. So let's just play along and imagine the possibilities: a ballpark with views of the water, like San Francisco's Candlestick -- er, 3Com -- Park. Downtown office workers could easily catch a game after work, getting to the park either by walking or by hopping on the T. When the game finished, they could walk back to their offices or parking lots, get in their cars, and head home -- thus splitting up the post-game traffic to minimize gridlock. And a ballpark -- which could anchor one side of the new waterfront development, much as the convention center will anchor the other side -- would keep the height of the surrounding office towers reasonable, as LEPAC's Mahoney points out.

There is another advantage to a McCourt-owned Red Sox and/or Fenway Park: money. If McCourt did purchase the Sox -- or strike a deal with a new owner to swap some of his land for an ownership stake in the team -- the Sox wouldn't have to buy land for a new park. That could save $140 million right off the bat, so to speak. Moving the location from the Fenway to the waterfront could also save another $100 million, according to one City Hall observer.

"I think $40 million of the costs are specific to putting the ballpark 35 feet below ground," he says, referring to the Sox' need to keep the new park from overshadowing the largely residential Fenway neighborhood. "If you are adjacent to the World Trade Center and the new convention center, that's not a problem. People can go up rather than go down. They can build it at ground level." As for the rest of the savings he envisions, McCourt's property has probably already been vetted for environmental problems related to development (Kenney describes the six-acre parcel slated for the hotel as "nice, clean property"), and construction costs would be lower on the waterfront than in the Fenway: the neighborhood is less dense, and there is space to store construction materials and equipment. "It's a much easier part of the world to do construction," says the City Hall observer. "You have construction all around you." These reductions, on top of the land savings, could cut the current $652 million proposal back to about $412 million.

Taxpayers would also benefit. In addition to saving the $140 million Menino has promised the team in site-acquisition funds (the actual costs may be as high as $450 million -- see "Fenway Neighborhood May Be Too Expensive for the Sox," News and Features, May 26), the city would also save about $72 million on the parking garage Menino agreed to build.

Surely the state would also save millions of dollars. Legislation passed in July and signed by Governor Paul Cellucci promises $100 million in public funds to finance infrastructure costs related to a new ballpark for the Red Sox. But that legislation, which mentions Yawkey Way and Kilmarnock Street, is site-specific and wouldn't apply to a location other than the Fenway. Total public money saved under this scenario? At least $312 million.

But Kenney says McCourt has no plans to purchase the Sox or strike a land-swap deal: "He has absolutely no plans to step into the baseball fray at all. Obviously there's fevered speculation. We're leaving that alone. We're focusing on our project right now -- that's a real, tangible process."

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Susan Ryan-Vollmar can be reached at svollmar[a]phx.com.