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WILL FIGHT MAKE OLD EDSEL PLANT A LEMON TOO?

By James McCown

City officials and developers say a mixed-use development with some big boxes is the only way to save this long-barren site. But a neighborhood group fights on.

Some could be forgiven for thinking that the Assembly Square Mall site, on the banks of the Mystic River overlooking downtown Boston, is jinxed.

Assembly Square gets its name from the Ford assembly plant that was there, at which the automaker in the late 1950s built the ill-fated Edsel. After that marketing fiasco, Ford folded up shop and left Greater Boston. The 145-acre parcel languished until the late ’70s, when the city of Somerville pinned its hopes on redeveloping the site into a mall.

The mall never found its market, however, and now the city has aligned itself with a development consortium that has proposed a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly redevelopment along New Urbanist lines as well as an interim component of big-box retail.

But the Mystic View Task Force, a powerful community group that opposes the big-box component, has dragged the matter into court.

“The community group thinks doing big boxes on the site is a deal with the devil,” said Jeffrey R. Levine, director of long-range planning for Somerville, a hitherto downscale industrial city that has gradually acquired a certain cachet, mostly because of its proximity to downtown Boston and Cambridge.

The joint venture of Taurus New England Investments, a Boston-based real estate investment company, and Gravestar, a Cambridge-based real estate asset manager, bested another team in November 2001 to win the city’s nod as site developer. The long-range, phased plans call for 2 million square feet of office and laboratory space, 1.1 million square feet of both affordable and upscale housing, street-level retail, a $3.6 million arts center, a $25 million transit station and a linear park along the waterfront that would link up with Boston’s Emerald Necklace, a regionwide belt of open green space.

Somerville Mayor Dorothy A. Kelly Gay, whose election in 1999 was the impetus for considering alternative developments for Assembly Square, asserts that the Mystic View Task Force is selfishly obstructing a vitally needed development that would be the city’s largest source of revenue.

“We’re being held hostage,” the mayor said, describing her frustration. “I was originally not pleased with the idea of big boxes on the site. But we can tolerate them for a while. As the area is developed, I think we would see a transition.”

Kelly Gay and other city officials have said from the outset that their hands are tied by a deal that was made more than two decades ago in part to draw top retailers to the site. Kmart was granted a 75-year lease at $4 per square foot and control over any future alterations on surrounding land.

The retailer, whose Big K store is the only one that succeeded at Assembly Square, has committed to keeping the store open despite its bankruptcy proceedings. But it has nixed any adjacent nonretail usage, making big boxes the only alternative. Under the current proposal, an existing Home Depot on the site would be relocated adjacent to Kmart, essentially razing what remains of the assembly plant.

But Bill Shelton, president of the Mystic View Task Force, counters that The Home Depot’s ground lease is for 99 years. “Doesn’t sound temporary to me,” he said, arguing that the joint venture is making the mistake of giving Home Depot the same kind of sweetheart deal that Kmart got, one that will come back to haunt the city later.

The community group has filed a lawsuit charging that the city planning commission approved the Home Depot move without environmental review. More specifically, the lawsuit claims that the 173,000-square-foot Home Depot requires a site plan review, not the special permit the city gave it.

Rubbish, said the mayor. The move was exhaustively researched and concluded to be “perfectly legal. Everything was above board.” At press time the matter was in the hands of a judge in Middlesex County District Court. In late October the group rejected a $2 million offer from Taurus and Gravestar to settle, in which the venture offered to set up a trust fund that would have helped create some elements in keeping with the group’s vision of the site. Opponents called it “a bribe.”

Some in the group insist that the Taurus-Gravestar joint venture is overly beholden to Home Depot for buying the $18.5 million note that the developers used to purchase the land. Further, they assert that the developers’ day-to-day development and community relations costs are being funded by prepaid rent from Home Depot, to the tune of about $6.5 million.

The battle has gotten increasingly personal. Taurus President and CEO Peter Merrigan was furious when, at the behest of Mystic View, an urban design studio at his Massachusetts Institute of Technology alma mater studied and presented to local media some alternative approaches to the project. Merrigan charges that the school had thus “allowed itself to be manipulated” by the group. He fired off a letter to the school in which he threatened to cut off fund-raising.

Merrigan said the venture has already invested more than $40 million in the project and is still years away from any financial return. Though he declined to describe exactly how capital would be raised for the phased build-outs if and when the venture prevails in court, he did say that the site’s 20-year scenario envisions improvements totaling more than $1 billion, including substantial sums from wealthy individual investors, “mostly Europeans.”

Two local urban planners epitomize the divergence of opinion that exists on Assembly Square’s fate. At one end there is Anne Tate, associate professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and a Somerville resident. Tate prepared an alternative master plan for the Mystic View Task Force that shuns big boxes in favor of a very dense urban fabric with a cluster of office and residential high-rises.

“What’s most interesting here is that you have a community that is pushing for more development on a site,” Tate said. “These are not your usual [not-in-my-backyarders].”

David Dixon, who heads urban planning at Boston-based Goody, Clancy & Associates and who has charge of the developer-generated Assembly Square master plan, opines that the opponents hold some fundamental misconceptions about the project.

“This could be the poster child for transit-based, infill, ‘smart’ development,” he said. Though employed by the developers, Dixon credits the Mystic View group with “reshaping the way people conceive of Assembly Square.” The street grids and the placement of buildings, he insists, assume that the big-box parcels will eventually be filled in. Like the city of Somerville and the joint venture itself, he calls on the community group to tolerate big boxes as a temporary usage.

“This is not one to go to the ramparts on,” he said, arguing that by fighting the proposal the neighborhood could be losing out on a major opportunity to turn an eyesore into a development that not only will look better, but will provide some valuable economic sustenance to the city as a whole.

Meanwhile, all eyes are on the district court to see whether the developers and the city prevail, or whether the project ends up sharing the Edsel’s fate.

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