A decades-old initiative of former University President Jean Mayer will soon reshape a major Boston transportation hub and add a new fixture to the city's skyline.
After a prolonged tussle over zoning, a Tufts subsidiary helped secure the go-ahead last August to begin building a 621-foot tower at South Station. The lengthy construction process will likely start later this year.
The tower will cost $800 million to build and nearly $40 million will be spent to make other transportation-related improvements to South Station.
When completed, the tower will include a 200-room hotel, condominiums, office space and room for parking.
The project is the fruit of a Tufts subsidiary, the Tufts University Development Corporation LLC (TUDC), an arm of the university created to develop and manage the project. Architect Cesar Pelli, in partnership with Hines Interests LP, is handling the design for the tower.
"Construction will start when the plans and financing are complete," Hines' Senior Vice President David Perry said in an e-mail. "We are working on both right now. We hope to start construction late this year."
But how did Tufts set its sights on such an ambitious project? That motivation, said former university provost Sol Gittleman, came from former president Jean Mayer.
"He was an idea person, and transformed this university," Gittleman said.
Mayer originally envisioned the tower as an epicenter of high-profile medical research. "He had a vision of pharmaceutical companies coming into Boston and attaching themselves to the Tufts medical school," Gittleman said. "And we would build research facilities for them in airspace over the turnpike."
This tower was not Mayer's only groundbreaking idea. During his tenure he helped create the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, the nutrition school and the veterinary school. Though all these institutions have since gone on to be quite successful, they appeared far-fetched for a modest New England liberal arts school that had previously taken very few risks.
"He was so far ahead of everybody [on this project], but he was so far ahead of everybody on everything," Gittleman said.
But while the nutrition and veterinary institutions turned out to be very influential in their fields, plans for the research tower were stalled.
Tufts created the TUDC in the 1980s and secured the air rights for construction in 1991, however, which helped to breathe life into the project.
According to Tufts Vice President for Finance Tom McGurty, the TUDC was established as an outlet for tower plans. "This was done to create a separate entity for discrete activities somewhere off the task from standard university activities," he said.
Even so, the full scope of the project "got to be too much for the trustees," Gittleman said, and the project lagged.
TUDC's board of directors reports to Tufts' Board of Trustees with progress, said Linda Dixon, the secretary of the trustees. "The trustees have been regularly informed of progress on the site," she said.
While all of the applications for permits were under discussion, "the project was laying fallow," Dixon said.
Tufts, a specialist in developing minds rather than skyscrapers, needed a partner. "[We] needed to engage a firm with the expertise needed to develop the project, which was frankly beyond the experience of the university," McGurty said.
Perry, the senior vice president at Hines, further explained the process. "TUDC competed for and won the development rights on its own in 1991. In 1997, TUDC elected to bring on a development partner and after soliciting proposals from a few developers experienced in similar projects, TUDC selected Hines," he wrote in an e-mail.
Dixon said that the agreement has been fruitful. "It's been an excellent partnership that both parties are extremely happy with," she said.
Capital for the project came both from the university and from Hines, as well as from a loan from the state funneled through the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, McGurty said.
With the help of Hines and ongoing negotiations, the project will finally progress.
But Tufts' stake in the product will be mainly financial, McGurty said. "I don't foresee that Tufts will have any presence on the property," he said, but he does expect to see returns from the building for the university.
According to Perry, the future of TUDC's stake in the building is still somewhat uncertain. "TUDC is committed to seeing the project completed," he said. "The university will not have a presence in the finished building. TUDC may or may not maintain an interest in the property over the long term."
Despite its history, the building will be modern in its construction. With an emphasis on sustainable development, it will be certified to silver Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, as is now compulsory in Boston.
Those at Tufts who are familiar with the project are excited about its future.
"Let's be honest, the project has had its ups and down," Dixon said. "But now there is something to be optimistic about. The market has turned around. It's a very viable project that's coming very close to reality."
"There's lots of pride that we've stuck with it and seen it through to this point," McGurty said.
"This thing, to my astonishment, is going to happen," Gittleman said. "But not the way Jean envisioned it. What he really wanted was to endow the medical school, and have it permanently settled and secured. That was his dream. But I think he'd be happy just to see the project coming to a kind of fulfillment."
