Developer wants out of hotel plans

Fallon: Fan Pier parcel ‘not economically feasible’

The Fallon Co. is hoping to back out of plans for a hotel on its 21-acre Fan Pier development on the South Boston waterfront.

The original Fan Pier development plan approved by the Boston Planning & Development Agency required at least one parcel on which a hotel use is permitted to be developed in whole or in part as a hotel. Two such parcels remain undeveloped — Parcels E and H.

Fallon originally targeted Parcel H as a residential and hotel building with 23,557 square feet of city- and staterequired civic/cultural space on the first two floors, and street-level retail. The parcel is between the Public Green and 100 Northern Avenue office building primarily occupied by the Goodwin Procter LLP law firm.

But in a notice of project change filed with the BPDA, founder Joe Fallon said a hotel project is not economically feasible.

“We have struggled for almost 10 years to make economic sense of the hotel requirement,” Fallon said. “Our planning efforts for a hotel on Fan Pier have looked at both a limited-service hotel and a more full-service hotel, with space dedicated to a ballroom and meeting rooms and related support space. Neither has proved economically feasible.”

Instead, Fallon wants to construct a residential building — 155 to 170 condos or 225 to 245 apartments — with the required civic/cultural space.

He said his company first requested eliminating the hotel requirement in 2015, when it was trying to accommodate an expansion of the Institute of Contemporary Art into 100 Northern Ave.

“The economics have grown worse for Parcel H, primarily because the costs of providing space for civic/ cultural use in that building have increased substantially,” he said.

The BPDA’s and state Department of Environmental Protection’s recent request that Fallon provide a significant build-out and tenant improvement allowance for the civic/cultural space “would add millions of dollars in additional and previously unanticipated cost to that building,” Fallon said.

Fallon also wants to eliminate the proposed laboratory use for the originally planned office/lab building on Parcel E on Fan Pier Drive — between One Marina Park Drive and 50 Liberty — and instead build an office building with streetlevel retail.