Tag Archives: Faneuil Hall Marketplace

The more things change . . .

Larry DiCara remembers his first encounter with Mayor Kevin White. It was 1971. DiCara was newly elected to the Boston City Council. The mayor phoned. Would DiCara meet with him?

The young DiCara, outfitted in his best suit, entered the mayor’s office at the new city hall. White stood at the window overlooking Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. White said he had two goals—depress the Central Artery and fix Quincy Market.

White accomplished one goal while still in office. In 1975 Quincy Market and later the North and South Markets opened to immense excitement, bolstering Boston’s downtown success.

But accomplishing that task was much like the Olympics effort today. The knives were out. Pessimism ruled. Doom was predicted. Costs rose. A bold, perhaps transforming plan was mocked, scorned, condemned and denounced.

What saved it was a visionary, a prime mover, a deadline and a tough mayor.

Architect Benjamin Thompson articulated his vision for a successful city when his contemporaries were designing big empty plazas.

“Of all the pieces in the urban puzzle, the marketplace is the most fundamental, most civically important—and most neglected,” he wrote in the Boston Globe, July 4, 1971. “Historic marketplaces, springing up at intersections of navigation and trade routes, were the seed and heart of cities.”

Thompson cited the “natural pageantry of crowds.” He predicted that the crumbling Quincy Market and its flanking buildings could be brought back to life, recreating their original purpose in a contemporary way.

After a false start with one developer, Thompson found the Rouse Company. Rouse developed shopping malls, but also had created Columbia, Md., where housing was built around old-fashioned town centers instead of the usual suburban sprawl.

James Rouse was the prime mover. The Globe’s real estate reporter Anthony Yudis quoted him: “We should always examine the optimums and forget about feasibility. It will compromise us soon enough. Let’s look at what might be and be invigorated by it.”

White was excited by the plan. He wanted Quincy Market completed by Boston 200, the city’s bicentennial celebration, set to begin in 1975. Rouse would fund a portion of the celebration. Out-of-towners Chase Manhattan Bank and what is now called TIAA-CREF put up half the money or $10 million. Boston banks would provide the rest.

The critics erupted.

The meat, cheese and produce purveyors that occupied Quincy Market complained they would be displaced, and the renovated building would be unaffordable. Rouse’s promise they could return for three years with the same rent they were paying in the old building did not move them.

White’s own staff put up a fight. DiCara remembered that Herb Gleason, White’s corporation counsel, supported a scaled-down proposal by Roger Webb, admired for his reclamation of Old City Hall.

As city property, the markets needed approval from the city council for any deal. Yudis reported there was little interest in either proposal. Only three councilors attended the hearing at which the two were presented. The councilors were too busy fussing over the proposed Park Plaza. Yudis wrote, “Some urban experts think the Faneuil Hall-markets plan is the ‘sleeper’ in the future Boston that could have just as much significance as, if not more than, the Park Plaza concept.”

DiCara said it was a tough sell. Dapper O’Neill, Joe Tierney and Freddie Langone opposed the market’s redevelopment, but the proponents were finally able to get six councilors, including DiCara, to vote for it, mainly because of Rouse’s good reputation.

Remarkably, the BRA worked against the Rouse proposal even after the company was designated in 1973.

It took the BRA two years to sign a lease. The BRA board chair predicted the whole enterprise was foolish. “Only one sour note was expressed — several times following the lease signing,” Yudis reported. “The chairman of the BRA, Robert T. Farrell, made it clear to those connected with the project that, in his opinion, the project never will be carried off. Time will tell whether this was an astute observation.”

The BRA director, Robert Kenney, had no faith either in Rouse’s plan. Three months before the market opened he was still working to change it, trying to get a Hyatt Regency hotel into the mix, with the lobby in the rotunda, reported Ian Menzies, a Globe columnist. Rouse was having none of that.

Thompson said putting a hotel into the market was like the recently completed Harbor Towers on the harbor—a way to keep the public out.

Then there was the money problem. Boston banks refused to come up with their share of the financing. By early February 1975 Mayor White had had it. He called the heads of the local financial institutions to his office, recalled Budge Upton, Rouse’s project manager, who, with Rouse, was at the meeting. White told the banks they had 24 hours to arrange the local financing or he would pull the city’s money from their institutions. By the next day White had $10 million from the First National Bank, John Hancock, New England Life, State Street Bank, New England Merchants, National Shawmut, Charlestown Savings, Union Warren, Commonwealth Bank and the Mass. Business Development Corp.

A few months later, Faneuil Hall Marketplace opened. Among many last-minute snafus, said Upton, was awaiting the delivery of 80 wheels for the pushcarts. They arrived at Logan three days before the opening. No one knew if the rehabilitated market would attract any notice.

But on the first day 125,000 people showed up. Menzies then started writing about how the Central Artery had to go—another effort fraught with negativity. It goes to show—conventional wisdom is sometimes just conventional. It isn’t wisdom at all.

The more things change . . .

At Faneuil Hall Marketplace, an out-of-town manager doesn’t understand how to run a Boston business. Local businesses are ousted to make room for chains. The manager believes the pushcart vendors, with their dubious tchotchkes, bring down the tone of the place. The vendors, however, accuse the manager of shutting them out of decision making and imposing unsustainable restrictions on them. Accommodating tourists sometimes conflicts with attracting locals.

These conditions could describe Boston’s festival market at this point, as it was revealed at a Boston City Council hearing in December. On the one side was the poised and articulate Kristen Keefe, general manager of the marketplace, who described plans for the market’s renovation. On the other were a pushcart vendor, a sandwich shop owner who is being pushed out, and Jane Thompson, who with her husband, Benjamin, envisioned and designed the repurposed market in 1972. Thompson decried the mall atmosphere of a market she said was formed with the public trust, since the BRA and the City of Boston own the buildings.

But the first paragraph actually describes Faneuil Hall Marketplace when it first opened, according to Deborah M. Hanley, whose retail development and marketing company, Todreas/Hanley, worked with the original leasing team and helped put in place such local purveyors as Hebert Candies, the Bear Necessities, start-up restaurants, and the old meat and cheese purveyors who first occupied Quincy Market, the central building.

Hanley said her company was the only Boston-based firm working with the Rouse Company, a shopping mall developer based in Baltimore. Within a year it was clear the market was a success, she said, but it had already started to change. By the time the South Market opened, chains were replacing local businesses. Tensions between the pushcart vendors and the management company were constant. Eventually the Rouse Company got rid of the old cheese and meat purveyors, who weren’t bringing in enough money, and moved in fast-food places. Hanley was disappointed with the ultimate result, which became more like a traditional shopping mall. “It’s always been about the big bucks,” she said. “There’s no reason to go down there.”

And Bostonians claim they don’t go to Faneuil Hall Marketplace. I confess I sometimes do. Once in awhile, we’ll meet at a restaurant. Our grandchildren love the street performers and the ice cream shops, located a short walk from the Greenway’s carousel.

Hanley, though, points out that her daughter, Amanda, 26, does not meet her friends at Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Instead they go to the Back Bay or Central Square.

Keefe said at the hearing she wanted to attract more Bostonians. But judging from the pictures she showed, it is not ALL Bostonians. The architects’ renderings show the renovated rotunda of the Quincy Market building with a bar featuring up-to-date architecture and young, fashionable people Amanda’s age.

Luring Bostonians back to the market doesn’t seem to be the only goal. Ashkenazy plans to install a small hotel along a side street that could use some vitality. Not a bad idea, but it will bring more tourists, not locals.

Quincy Market, which is the middle building, does look dowdy, and Ashkenazy’s refurbishment is welcome. The pushcart vendors accused Keefe of planning to eliminate them, since architectural plans showed no pushcarts. Keefe claimed that was not the case. They said she was secretive, deceptive and refused to let them participate in a planned redesign of their carts. She sidestepped these accusations at the hearing, and did not answer emailed questions for this column, so maybe they are right.

Keefe’s plan for the market seems to be to increase the number of chain merchants. Uniqlo, for example, an international chain featuring cheap clothing, will expand into a second floor space in Quincy Market.

Increasing the number of chains could be risky, said Jesse Baerkahn, a retail specialist. Local is fashionable in more than just food. He said the best idea would be to find businesses “that are unique to Boston and offer something you cannot get anywhere else.”

But taking that route has problems too. Chains pay their bills. Keefe reported that 40 percent of the merchants at Faneuil Hall Marketplace are in arrears. Keefe did not credibly explain why her company has allowed so many merchants to get behind on lease payments. Nor was it clear why the merchants could not afford their rent.

After all, apparently Faneuil Hall Marketplace attracts more visitors than the Great Wall of China. Travel and Leisure magazine reports that Faneuil Hall Marketplace is the eighth most visited attraction in the United States with 15 million visitors. Wikipedia says it is the seventh most visited attraction with 20 million visitors.

Whatever the number, and whether Bostonians go there or not, it is probably a good idea not to mess too much with success.