Municipal Zelig

Why John Drew is Fidelity's go-to guy

City Player by Yvonne Abraham

John Drew strides into the luxe lobby of the new Seaport Hotel, across the street from the World Trade Center, on opening day. He greets the invited guests and press photographers as if he owns the place, which he does.

All around the hotel is Big Dig blight, huge craters in which grinding machinery pumps the air full of dust and noise and the sense that the huge project will never, ever end. The land that surrounds the hotel is Boston's last big frontier -- a thousand acres of mostly private waterfront property that will become the new South Boston Seaport. It has lately become a focal point for flush developers determined to erect hotels and office blocks and apartment buildings with nice views. It's land that has also been marked by controversy: several of those same developers have squabbled with the city, the state, and each other, which has stalled their developments seemingly indefinitely.

But not John Drew. He partnered with Fidelity Capital in 1984 to turn Commonwealth Pier into the World Trade Center before all the fuss about South Boston's waterfront reached the newspapers. And his Seaport Hotel (again developed with Fidelity) got out of the starting blocks at the same time as the Pritzker family's Fan Pier project, but today the Fan Pier is still mostly parking lot and the Seaport Hotel is, well, the Seaport Hotel.

That is partly because of luck. But it is also partly because of Drew himself. He wasn't in charge of construction on the hotel, but he was the one who got it built, handling the government and the community. He built a career as an important player in city and state government, then used that to build a more lucrative life -- and arguably an even more significant role in the city -- as a developer. If corporate behemoth Fidelity wants to get something done in Boston, Drew, who has made himself something of a municipal Zelig, is the go-to guy.

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Drew poses for photographs by an epic flower arrangement in the Seaport Hotel lobby and chats with other harbor hoteliers invited to view their newest competitor. Left hand firmly fixed in his trouser pocket, right hand free for the shaking, Drew makes the rounds.

"Is this your first hotel?" one of the hoteliers asks him. It is. "Isn't it exciting?" It is.

Drew is a solid, gray-haired, ruddy-faced man in his mid-50s. He looks like a local from nearby South Boston, but with a much, much more expensive tailor. In fact, he grew up not far from the Seaport Hotel, on East Fifth Street, just a few blocks from the L Street Beach. He was a St. Brigid's, then a BC High, boy. His father was a commercial printer and president of his union. His mother was a telephone operator in City Hall.

Drew would also become something of an operator in City Hall. That, and his Southie pedigree, would eventually stand him in very good stead as a developer. But his first stop, after degrees from Stonehill College and Boston University, was then-governor Frank Sargent's State House in 1970. There, Drew presided over a slew of local military base closings ordered by President Nixon, setting up a state-city government commission to cope with displaced workers, find new uses for the former bases, and court federal assistance in both endeavors.

That introduced him to then-mayor Kevin White, who hired Drew in 1975 to coordinate the city's dealings with the state and federal governments. His job soon moved well beyond that, though.

White says Drew was among the most important people in his administration, one of the handful of folks who actually ran City Hall. "I was not a hands-on or day-to-day manager," recalls White. "They were given great power." So un-hands-on was White as mayor that, in an interview, he has some trouble remembering exactly what Drew did. He puts down the phone and, whistling away, looks for a book on his own administration to jog his memory.

It turns out that Drew was crucial to White's enduring image as city-builder. He was in charge of the Boston Plan, a proposal to draw a huge block grant from the federal government for specific city-building projects. Drew helped put together one of the city's first public-private partnerships, which drew up plans for projects at Lafayette Place, Columbia Point, the Charlestown and South Boston navy yards, and Blue Hill Avenue, among others. The package competed with proposals from other cities to have the Carter administration cough up enough aid to get it all going, and won. The Boston Plan brought almost $1 billion of federal aid into the city.

"John was masterful at bringing those contributions to Boston," says Micho Spring, who was one of White's top advisers. "He spearheaded that effort."

Drew himself oversaw some of the projects, and he helped coordinate others. His government work was making a developer out of him and introducing him to many politicians and business folk who would make the course of his second career run more smoothly. He left City Hall for a stint at Brandeis, where he helped set up the Center for Public Service, an applied-research program that conducted studies on youth unemployment and the revitalization of Watertown Square. In 1979, he cashed in his chips and became a vice president at Corcoran Jennison. There, he was a partner and codeveloper of the Bayside Exposition Center. In 1983, he started his own eponymous company, and went in on the very successful Great Woods Center in Mansfield with Sherman Wolfe and eventually Don Law (Drew no longer owns a share of the venue).

In 1984, John Drew & Company joined forces with Fidelity to develop the World Trade Center. "The World Trade Center took foresight on his part," says Boston Redevelopment Authority director Tom O'Brien. "When he convinced Fidelity to locate there, the seaport district was not what it is today. John was much more of a pioneer. The fact that he's established an anchor presence clearly helps us in convincing other private-sector tenants to go there."

As president and CEO of the World Trade Center, Drew carries some serious heft. He's vice president of the city's chamber of commerce, sits on a bunch of boards, and was recently appointed by Menino to head Boston 2000, the group directing the city's celebrations of the new millennium. By now, Drew has become such a prominent presence in government and development in Boston that when he talks, people listen. When he publicly expressed concern that the new convention center might take away from his business, the city and state amended the convention center legislation to ensure that no "gate events" like boat and flower shows, which normally would be held at the World Trade or Bayside Expo Centers, would be held at the new facility.

The Seaport Hotel was envisioned as part of the original Drew-Fidelity plan for the World Trade Center. By the time its development began in earnest in 1993, the South Boston waterfront's capital had risen enormously, its potential becoming clear. A decade after the World Trade Center was conceived -- and partly because of it -- the stakes were higher, the community was more jittery, and government was growing more cautious.

Fidelity Capital managing director Mike Fox was in charge of construction on the hotel. Drew's job was to get the project through the approval process and to sell it to the community. "He was the focal point in terms of our communication," says Fox. "We relied on him to make sure our story was told."

The Pritzker family, Chicago-based owners of the Hyatt hotel chain, began working on their own Fan Pier development, just west of Commonweath Pier, at around the same time as the Seaport Hotel was conceived. But they soon hit snags: legal problems with their original partners stalled the project the first time; then, having found a new partner in Boston Properties, they had trouble negotiating the approvals process; then, earlier this year, community pressure finally forced the BRA to put the brakes on the project. Save for the new federal courthouse, the Fan Pier is still a pothole-strewn surface parking lot.

But the Seaport Hotel is shiny and new and, above all, finished. That's partly because Drew was viewed much more favorably by locals as he was getting his project built than, say, the Pritzkers were. He grew up in this neighborhood, after all, in the stereotypical working-class, Catholic Southie family. "I'm comfortable there," he says.

Other developers have quickly alienated the already suspicious locals. Drew knew enough of Southie culture to take the time to court them personally, meeting with people in community halls and at open houses to assure them that there would be jobs for them at the hotel.

"He was very sincere," says Southie activist Tom Driscoll. "He honestly said he wanted residents of the neighborhood to have the best opportunity to have positions in the hotel."

But having a Southie past doesn't guarantee entirely easy relations: lately, some locals have soured on Drew. Driscoll and other South Boston residents say his promises were not fulfilled, that locals who applied at the Seaport Hotel were treated badly. "And if that's what's happening at the Seaport Hotel, and with John Drew, a former resident of the neighborhood, then our prospects of securing positions in other developments becomes even more questionable," says Driscoll.

Drew counters that, although the hotel could have kept applicants better informed along the way, he has followed through on his pledge to involve locals, hiring 60 of the hotel's 250 new employees from Southie. "I don't know if anybody could equal that," he says.

Local politicians are, by all accounts, much more impressed with Drew than some of their constituents have been lately. His years of political experience and position as head of the World Trade Center have cemented his relationships with congressman Joe Moakley, state senator Stephen Lynch, state representative Jack Hart, city councilor Jim Kelly, and a whole slew of folks in City Hall and the State House. (None of the politicians contacted for this story returned calls.)

Drew knows how government works, and whom to go to to get things done. And when you're trying to get a big project like the Seaport Hotel off the ground, that's extremely useful. But Drew says being politically wired doesn't get him special treatment. He just knows the terrain better than a lot of others. "I couldn't just call [those politicans] up," he says. "And I wouldn't do that. I look at my time in government as an asset. I try to understand how [government] looks at things. As we approach a project, I can put it in a framework they can appreciate. It's their job to help get projects done."

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.