Guest Op-Ed: Time for a Second Look at Proposed Hotel

By Cheryl Delgreco and Kirsten Hoffman

Like every other neighborhood in Boston, the North End has evolved to meet the needs of a growing city. Change and development are inevitable, but recently the city has been growing at a pace that is putting pressures on residential communities, and some of these pressures come from the absence of transparent and responsive planning. 

North End Waterfront Residents Association (NEWRA) and its members feel strongly that every neighborhood should play an active role in shaping its future and that our development and growth must not be driven by project-specific proposals of developers that leave residents with little input or voice into the final projects. 

There has been much discussion regarding the many projects that violate multiple provisions in the city’s Zoning Code. Much of the city, including our neighborhood, is being rezoned not by city-wide or district planning, but by the issuance of parcel-by-parcel zoning variances. The zoning code for the North End District, like the zoning codes for other neighborhoods, resulted from district planning many years ago that included community input. Height, density and use limits and other provisions in the Zoning Code are intended to support the city’s growth while also supporting and protecting each district, residential or otherwise. 

The North End is facing impacts from large projects like the proposed Cross Street Hotel, which would replace a one-story neighborhood retail plaza with a 55-foot high, 140-room hotel with rooftop dining. 

The hotel would abut multi-family residential buildings, Vincent Cutillo Park and a heavily traveled traffic and pedestrian section of Cross Street. Our community and others could realize serious impacts directly related to the several zoning violations for which the developer seeks variances from the Zoning Board of Appeal, with little, if any, community benefit from this project proposal. These variances apparently are supported by the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA), whose board approved the hotel project this past March despite considerable community opposition and documented impacts. 

The height and massing of the proposed hotel could limit light and sky in Vincent Cutillo Park and other impacts documented in comments of the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, and park users will have to coexist with hotel and hotel restaurant operations. 

The developer proposes to convert a publicly-owned pedestrian area to accommodate hotel access and outdoor restaurant dining, narrow the two already narrow traffic lanes in Cross Street to accommodate deliveries and drop-offs/pick-up, which in turn will increase traffic and create further congestion for the North End and the city. The hotel proposal includes no parking spaces and would reduce public parking, placing further burden on existing public parking facilities. 

For these impacts, the neighborhood and the city will get two more restaurants and a hotel shoe-horned into a residential neighborhood. The North End is already home to over 90 restaurants with alcohol licenses, a surplus of visitors, and unending traffic. 

The city apparently is no longer suffering from an insufficient number of hotel rooms, as the BPDA board recently approved the replacement of a hotel proposed directly across the Rose Kennedy Greenway at Government Center Garage with a proposed lab/life sciences building, at the developer’s request. 

Boston now has a new mayor and a new Chief of Planning who have committed to putting planning ahead of development and reforming Boston’s generations-old development process. While this will take time, the time to start is now, in every neighborhood. To that end and in that spirit, we ask Mayor Michelle Wu and Chief of Planning/BPDA Director Arthur Jemison to put aside the BPDA board’s approval of the Cross Street Hotel project, so that the city can conduct, with public involvement, proper planning and potential rezoning to ensure development in the North End is fair and equitable for all.

Cheryl Delgreco is President, North End Waterfront Residents Association and Kirsten Hoffman is President, Friends of Cutillo Park.