Chiofaro dreams big for Harbor Garage site
Don Chiofaro has a name for the seven-story parking garage he owns at the epicenter of Boston’s waterfront. He calls it “a 1,400car cash machine.”
The Harbor Garage nets him about $10 million a year … and he can’t wait to tear it down.
Chiofaro and his partners paid $150 million some years ago to buy the ugly concrete structure nestled between the Aquarium, Harbor Towers and Faneuil Hall as a placeholder for his dream of one day building a “landmark project, a premiere waterfront destination” at the center of the harbor.
For the last eight years of Mayor Tom Menino’s reign, Chiofaro’s vision of a Rockefeller Center on the waterfront was reduced to little more than architectural renderings, or “concepts.”
During those years when Menino vowed nothing over 200 feet — or roughly the height of the garage — would ever get built at that choice location, Chiofaro and his architects came up with 99 different models of what a project that blended office, condo and retail space might look like someday.
They all languished in development purgatory.
But as Chiofaro said yesterday in his office, “They were all just concepts, different ways of how we could reimagine something bold and distinctive anchoring that part of the waterfront and make the numbers work.”
Though Mayor Marty Walsh has brought Chiofaro back from exile and a new Municipal Harbor Plan has raised the height limit to 600 feet, it also capped density at 900,000 square feet, instead of the 1.1 million that Chiofaro hoped for.
Now his team must wrestle with the price tag for burying those 1,400 parking spaces underground even before they can figure out a way to squeeze 900,000 square feet into a 600-foot tower and make the numbers work.
“Making a $1 billion project happen is a matter of juggling a lot of unknowns,” he said. “Would we prefer 1.1 million square feet? Absolutely,” he said. “It would unquestionably raise the likelihood of a successful redevelopment. But I’m not looking to fight with the city, or anyone really.”
Yet, Chiofaro made it clear that the primary audience he needs to win over now is not at City Hall, the BRA, neighboring Harbor Towers or the folks at the New England Aquarium.
It’s those bankers he hopes will back his dream of transforming a sevenstory concrete bunker into something grand.
“We believe that there is so much aligned interest in this project,” Chiofaro added, “and so many other problemsolvers out there who have a stake in seeing this succeed, that we will ultimately piece this puzzle together.
“Lenders won’t finance a project that doesn’t make sense.”
In about two weeks, when Chiofaro makes his case before all the interested parties in the Municipal Harbor Planning process, it’s for sure he won’t bore them with facts and figures. No, the brash 70-year-old developer will instead dare them to dream big.
Much bigger than a 1,400-car cash machine.