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Redevelopment of the One Post Office Square office tower could cost its neighbor, the Langham Hotel, approximately $13 million in annual revenues, an attorney representing the hotel warned as the Boston Planning and Development Agency prepares to vote on the project tonight.
A proposed 18-story addition on the Oliver Street side of the tower would replace the existing 6-story parking garage. Projected to take two and a half years, the project could threaten the structural stability of the 96-year-old luxury hotel and infringe on its property rights, with new retail space proposed in a shared breezeway owned by the Langham, attorney Arthur Kreiger wrote on behalf of the hotel.
“Simply put – and rather remarkably – the applicant has proposed to build part of the project on property the Langham owns without even discussing that proposed encroachment with the hotel,” Kreiger wrote in a letter to the BPDA.
Boston-based Anchor Line Partners and JLL, who are developer advisers to owner Morgan Stanley, dispute many of the hotel’s assertions.
Morgan Stanley is updating the 41-story One Post Office Square as Putnam Investments relocates to 100 Federal St. later this year, leaving behind 240,000 square feet in the 832,000-square-foot tower.
The project calls for a new glass facade and demolition of the garage, which would be replaced by 13 stories of office space totaling 268,000 square feet atop a 5-story automated garage.
The Langham was built in 1922 as the original Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and converted into a hotel space in the 1980s. The building connects to One Post Office Square and leases its ballroom in the tower’s garage building and function rooms which are located above the breezeway between the two properties.
The ballroom would be demolished and function spaces would be converted into retail space as an amenity for office tenants. Although the lease gives the landlord the right to demolish the ballroom and rebuild it within one year, disruption associated with the project would threaten the Langham’s status as a luxury hotel, Kreiger wrote.
In a response letter by Anchor Line and JLL, developers dismissed the notion that the project would pose a risk to the Langham. They noted the skyscraper was originally built with no damage to the neighboring structure.
They acknowledged that closure of the breezeway is subject to the hotel’s agreement and approval from the Boston Transportation Department and Public Improvement Commission.
Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Audubon Society said the glass facade and planned new outdoor terraces will form a deadly combination for migrating birds.
“The placement of plantings in close proximity to large expanses of glass increases the risk to birds attracted to the plantings and unable to distinguish the glass reflections from a continuation of the planted oasis in the urban environment,” wrote John Clarke, Mass Audubon’s director of public policy, noting that 91 species of birds have been observed in Post Office Square.
