Developer Don Chiofaro bowled over some members of a key advisory committee yesterday with newly unveiled renderings of his proposed $1 billion, twin-towered office and hotel-condo complex on the site of his Harbor Garage, but he also attracted stiff backlash from the trustees of two neighboring residential buildings.
“I have never seen anything more masterful in my entire life. The pictures were beautiful,” Vivien Li, a member of the Downtown Waterfront Municipal Harbor Planning Advisory Committee, said of Chiofaro’s presentation yesterday during which he also announced several “offsets” — or public benefits — including developing a BRA-owned parking lot on Long Wharf into a park to counterbalance building on the waterfront.
But the trustees of the 400-foot-tall Harbor Towers next door to Chiofaro’s concrete eight-story parking garage fired off a letter yesterday to the Boston Redevelopment Authority objecting to the size of the planned 1.3 million-square foot development: a 600-foot tall residential tower and a 537-foot office building to be constructed over an underground parking garage.
“We believe the proposed development is historically and contemporaneously inappropriate in scale, height and density for a location adjacent to two Boston treasures, the Rose Kennedy Greenway and the Harbor,” Marcelle Willock and Neal Hartman, chairmen of the two towers’ boards, wrote in an eight-page letter.
The trustees questioned Chiofaro’s plans to meet the state waterfront development requirements of devoting at least 48 percent of the footprint to “open space” by primarily creating “Harbor Square,” an enclosed 70-foot wide atrium covered by a glass retractable ceiling and removable doors that could house a skating rink in the winter and a great lawn with flower shows and farmers markets in the summer months.
“Would it be truly be open 24/7/365? Is it very hard to imagine a space fully enclosed in the winter being accessible to all at any time of day or night,” they wrote. “What is portrayed today as open space could in fact become largely private and policed, like the lovely but significantly restricted atrium space in (Chiofaro’s) International Place” buildings.
Chiofaro said that his project, with his glistening towers and five-star hotel, will increase property values in the area and transform the entire neighborhood.
