GlobeSt.com UPDATE: Red Sox Organization Partners With Fenway Developer

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BOSTON-The Boston Red Sox organization is working with a local developer to create plans for the Kenmore Square area. Janet Marie Smith, the team’s chief architect, says representatives of the ball club were set to sit down with developer John Rosenthal and the Boston Redevelopment Authority to discuss plans that include two air-rights parcels near Fenway Park.

“The reason the Red Sox are interested is because the air-rights parcels essentially sit just beyond the Green Monster so anything there will be quite visible inside Fenway,” Smith says. Team officials have been working for the past few weeks with Rosenthal, the president of Meredith Management Corp.–which holds the air and land rights to the properties–to come up with plans that will allow the developer to build on the sites while maintaining the ballpark’s skyline views of the city.

Rosenthal had hoped to develop a seven-building, one-million-sf complex that would include 500 residences on a parcel over the Massachusetts Turnpike, but he withdrew that plan last year. Smith says team officials and Rosenthal now favor a plan similar to one developed by the BRA in 2000 which calls for the creation of a 1,000-car parking structure on an air-rights parcel over the Massachusetts Turnpike. It would be hidden from Kenmore Square by a wrap-around residential building on Beacon Street. The plans call for a second low-rise 1,000-car parking garage that would straddle the Massachusetts Turnpike on Brookline Avenue. That one would be disguised by another wrap-around building housing retail and residential space.

“Now that we’ve committed to a five-year plan to renovate Fenway Park, we’re desperately interested in low-scale development,” says Smith, adding that the plans also call for improvements to the Yawkey subway stop near the ballpark. She says there are no plans at present for the team to acquire any of the properties. If the BRA approves the revised plans for Kenmore Square, construction in the area could begin soon.