POWER PLAY
SOUTHIE BRACES FOR EDISON DEMOLITION, MEGA PROJECT
The developers planning a massive overhaul of the giant pink South Boston power plant will start tearing it down by the end of the year — and they promise they won’t detonate it in a rolling dust cloud the way they did at a similar site in Chicago.
The site that’s alternatively called the L Street Power Plant, the Boston Edison Power Plant, 776 Summer St. or the “pink elephant,” as one local did Tuesday, has been targeted for years as one of the largest developments in Boston.
The mauve monstrosity that towers over South Boston’s City Point neighborhood is a longshuttered coal plant that’s to be torn down by the end of this year, per developers Redgate and Hilco Redevelopment Partners, who plan to turn it into a 1.8-millionsquare-foot development that would include 635 apartments and condos, 960,000 square feet of office and research uses, 80,000 square feet of retail space, 240 hotel rooms and up to 1,214 parking spaces.
The developers brought their plans before Southie neighbors at a virtual community meeting Tuesday night, stressing that the “deconstruction” — the word they said they prefer to “demolition” in order to sound more careful in the dense neighborhood — would be based around the mantra “safety, safety, safety,” as Hilco’s Melissa Schrock told the locals.
The Hilco side of the shop, though, has run into problems associated with this type of redevelopment before. Chaos ensued in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood in spring 2020 when Hilco’s subcontractor imploded an old coal plant, causing dust to billow across the working-class Mexican American neighborhood. Reports from last summer also show a dust cloud billowing from a Hilco coal power plant site in New Jersey.
Schrock at the community meeting did acknowledge the Chicago dust-cloud incident, which she characterized as “very unfortunate.” But she insisted that the building already had been overhauled, so there were no hazardous materials in the cloud.
She said the Chicago incident “changed the way we approach demolition in the city” — and that they no longer do implosions or explosions in urban areas.
“At 776 Summer, all structures will be fully abated before being carefully dismantled using mechanical techniques,” Schrock said.
The deconstruction process will run in phases for 20 months and will include removing most of the buildings, including the giant pink box, though some parts of the old plant will remain as part of the development.
For each building that has to go, workers will first “create an interior containment area using barriers and negative air pressure,” then remove anything toxic before moving to taking apart the structures.
City Councilor Ed Flynn, who represents Southie, called for better rodent control and said, “We also know that this is a large proj- ect that is close to residential areas and our neighbors, pedes- trians, vehicular traffic on Sum- mer Street or First Street, and cyclists.” He added, “The deconstruction process must be done right and it must be done safely.”