Hated At Boston City Hall, New York Tycoon Revered Everywhere Else
Vornado chief Steve Roth is just the latest superstar tower builder to discover what a funny, upside-down world developing a major project in Boston can be.
The Boston Redevelopment Authority earlier this week pulled the permits for long-stalled plans by Roth’s Vornado and local partner John Hynes to build a tower in Downtown Crossing next to what was to have been a renovated Filene’s building.
The near collapse of the global financial markets in the fall of 2008 forced work to stop amid demolition, leaving a hole in the middle of Boston’s traditional downtown shopping district.
However, while Mayor Thomas M. Menino and his BRA are busy vilifying Vornado and Roth, he is being feted elsewhere.
Roth was named by GlobeSt.com as the “Top Industry Newsmaker’’of the past ten years.
“Audacious would be an understatement,’’ gushed one Roth groupie who voted for the Big Apple tycoon in a poll conducted by the commercial real estate news service. “Still making mega deals after all these years,’’ another is quoted as saying.
Well yes, but just not here in Boston.
Funny thing that Roth couldn’t find success here in Boston. After all, he managed to develop 4 million square feet worth of new office towers in Manhattan, though it did take him nearly 30 years to compile that illustrious record.
What a slacker.
Still, new towers do take time, with global recessions not typically fruitful for ambitious new projects. (It’s that mysterious connection between high unemployment and dropping demand for new office space, but I won’t bore you with the details.) Of course, that appears to be news here in Boston, with the mayor waiting impatiently for the shiny new tower he was promised.
Well, it’s going to be a long wait, with no first-class developer likely to dip his hand into what has become a snake pit of a project.
For his part, Roth need not feel all that bad, for he is in good company. In fact, he is just the latest in a long-line of big shot developers to come to Boston, only to find there is only room enough in town for one big cheese.
And he does business not out of the Hancock tower or some other glitzy high-rise, but from an office on the fifth floor at City Hall.