How to lose friends and influence people
By: David A. Smith
This is a story with a serious point buried inside an exploding firecracker of personality.
In this corner, the perennial challenger, Mr. Confrontation himself, Don Chiofaro. As reported in the Boston Globe:
“We intend to keep the pressure up until we get honest answers from the person pulling the strings on this process, and we all know who that is.”
Chiofaro attended Harvard University and was a standout linebacker and captain of the football squad during his senior year. He remains close friends with a teammate, actor Tommy Lee Jones, who played offensive guard.
“Don Chiofaro was about the only defensive player I could never knock down,’’ Jones recalled in an interview. He said Chiofaro was a skilled football player because of his intelligence and because “he’s about as wide as he is tall.’’
Jones said he knows nothing of Boston politics, but added, “Whatever the issue is, I’m on Donny’s side.’’
Chiofaro, who once acted with Jones in the Shakespeare tragedy “Coriolanus,’’ is something of a showman.
To have been in Coriolanus is peculiarly apt, since the protagonist is a great Roman general, named for the city he conquered in Rome’s service but exiled from the city he loves and served, who when faced with opposition, complains about being bridled by commoners:
Thus we debase
The nature of our seats, and make the rabble
Call our cares fears; which will in time
Break ope the locks o’ th’ Senate and bring in
The crows to peck the eagles.
When he first pitched International Place in 1983, he entered a meeting at City Hall wearing his Harvard jersey and carrying a music player that blared the soundtrack to “Rocky III.’’
Take that, Mr. Mayor!
This time around, Chiofaro is less antic but still “on.’’ He glad-hands critics who attend his events, always seems in good humor, and likens his behavior to good sportsmanship on the field: tough while the game is on, willing to let bygones be bygones when it’s over.
In his thirty-plus years of developing in Boston, Don Chiofaro has never wanted for brass. And with a stubbornness that is both flamboyant and Italianate, he’s chosen to pick a loud and visible fight with another Boston Italian, in a manner calculated to lose friends but maybe influence people.
In this corner, Mayor Tom Menino:
“I must break him.”
The biggest show in Boston politics opened last week [May 7, 2010 – Ed] in a pink granite skyscraper at the edge of the financial district.
Two towers and an atrium: built by Chiofaro
In the lobby of International Place, the high-rise complex that he built, developer Don Chiofaro strode to a microphone and launched what many colleagues considered a self-destructive attack against Mayor Thomas M. Menino, the man whose blessing he needs to build two towers on the waterfront.
If courage is speaking toruth to power, Chiofaro certainly picked on the power – did he speak the truth?
The city review process, Chiofaro began, is a “charade.’’ Menino, he said, has put the fix in with sham zoning that would cut the height of his towers by two-thirds.
Boston being an old city, virtually every downtown use is non-conforming, meaning that every prospective use must be approved by the Boston Redevelopment Authority. If everything requires waiver of one or more requirements, then in effect there are no rules, only fiats.
And then Chiofaro bulldozed ahead as if still playing linebacker for Harvard.
“We intend to keep the pressure up until we get honest answers from the person pulling the strings on this process, and we all know who that is,’’ he said to stunned silence.
Developer Don Chiofaro (left) talks with Jackie Campos with his harbor garage in the background. He tried using unusual tactics to call attention to his plan to tear down the Harbor Garage on Atlantic Avenue and replace it with a towering glass complex that would open a new passageway to Boston Harbor. His original plan, which called for two towers – 40 and 59 stories tall – to be connected by a terra cotta “skyframe, was ruled too tall to meet zoning regulations. (Bill Greene / Globe Staff Photo)
To many, Chiofaro’s attack was a jaw-dropper, a suicidal move against a powerful politician who is known for holding grudges [And making blustering statements – Ed.] and didn’t like Chiofaro long before their latest collision.
How does one bind the sovereign? If Chiofaro is right that zoning approvals in Boston are all the decisions of one man, the mayor, and if the down-zoning now contemplated renders his property infeasible, then he has no choice but to confront.
While some celebrate Chiofaro’s willingness to take on powerful officials, others say he is merely grandstanding to try to distract from the fact that his proposed complex far exceeds existing 155-foot height limitations. The property on Atlantic Avenue now hosts a brutish concrete parking garage that Chiofaro and his financiers, Prudential, bought near the top of the commercial real estate boom in 2007 for $155 million.
Self-interest is not a de-legitimizing factor; it just means we have to examine statements in that light.
Chiofaro had a giant red X installed on the facade of the Harbor Garage to call attention to his plan to tear down the facility. “We’re trying to help people visualize what we want to create,” Chiofaro, developer of International Place, said at the time. “The existing garage blocks access to the waterfront, and we want to reopen that connection.” (Globe Photo)
Chiofaro proposes demolishing the Harbor Garage and building two towers — one 45 stories and the other 50 — that would contain offices, residences, a hotel, and 70,000 square feet of stores in a glass-enclosed arcade.
Chiofaro has a valid point; about the single least appetizing structure one can build along the waterfront is an eight-story garage, occupied by no one but metal, blocking visuals in both directions. Tearing it down would enhance the waterfront, and that is the prerogative of the owner, not the mayor. So we have a standoff; the mayor cannot force Chiofaro to destroy his ugly garage, but Chiofaro cannot force the city to approve his rising towers, which would themselves be a visual intrusion.
A closer look at the rendering for the towers under the original proposal, which featured an unusual flourish at the top: a 770-foot rectangular bracket, or skyframe, as Chiofaro called it, linking the two towers. (Kohn Peterson Fox Architects)
At its tallest, Chiofaro’s complex would be 625 feet, comparable to his International Place.
A recent City Hall review of building rules on the Greenway would increase the allowable height on Chiofaro’s property, but only to 200 feet.
The developer has released a study by a financial consultant stating that those limits would render development economically infeasible. Due to high construction costs, the study found that a complex of at least 500 feet would be needed to make the project feasible.
For well-located property, the value of urban land is a direct function of how high one can build upon it. This is a fight about money, and a fight about the city’s future.
His current fight with Menino has become an open spectacle in the city’s real estate community. But it is not just an entertaining battle between two determined men: It is a debate over the future of a crucial corner of the city between Boston Harbor and the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway — a swath of the city that taxpayers have spent billions of dollars to protect.
It’s also a spotlight onto the approval process itself. Even a self-interested property owner can be civically inclined.
Chiofaro’s filing with the city generated allegations he had a “tin ear,” prompting Chiofaro to employ a bit of self-deprecating wit by handing out a doctored image of himself dressed as the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz” during a meeting with Boston Redevelopment Authority officials. (Courtesy Donald J. Chiofaro).
“What would be terrible is for everyone to know that one man controls the process, and then to just sit there and watch it happen,’’ Chiofaro said. “I think we have an obligation to talk about these subjects.’’
Forget whether Chiofaro’s property should or shouldn’t be developed. (Mayor Menino has shown himself to be a fan of tall buildings, even proposing a 1,000-foot tower to replace a parking garage, one owned by the city.)
The Winthrop Square tower would have dwarfed everything else.
Chiofaro is suggesting that there are no standards, nothing by which property owners can make informed. If so, it would be a breach of the principles of transparency and rule of law.
“Don’s arguments are so out of whack,’’ said Menino spokeswoman Dot Joyce. “He wants to be treated differently than everyone else. If he wants to talk seriously, he should follow the proper procedures, which he has failed to do.’’ Joyce said Chiofaro has not responded to repeated requests from city officials for more information about the environmental impact of his complex. “Until he does, we’re not going to have anything to say about a project that does not exist at this point,’’ she said.
Politicians, let us recall, are not disinterested; they like to wield power.
“He has trivialized or ignored the significant issues raised by many,’’ said Ann Thornburg, a faculty member at Harvard who serves on the Greenway’s leadership council and lives in Harbor Towers, the complex adjacent to Chiofaro’s property.
Harbor Towers, we should note, is 400 feet tall, and has unimpeachable water views.
“Sadly, his lack of flexibility and compromise does not bode well for any constructive dialogue.’’
Harbor Towers, with Chiofaro’s parking garage in the foreground and the Greenway barely visible at lower right
Perhaps it’s only I who finds ironic that the status quo is being defended by a resident of Harbor Towers. Built in 1971, it was crowbarred into the waterfront, over the neighbors’ objections, by the same BRA now blocking Chiofaro, and was for many years considered a Brutalist eyesore. Now it’s part of the landscape.
Where Chiofaro goes from here is unclear.
If your deal dies, it dies
He and the mayor seem locked in a long-range standoff, and he is so radioactive in Menino’s eyes that it seems unlikely a third party — a civic leader or union boss — will attempt to get the two to reconcile.
We’ve put your files in storage
Many other developers in Boston said Chiofaro has all but sealed his doom. The optimist in him makes no such admission. Still, at times, he seems to acknowledge the odds.
For example, last week the Boston Redevelopment Authority held a meeting on the new zoning recommendations, where officials said they will not budge on the 200-foot height for his property.
If they will not budge, then the property is worth a tiny fraction of what Chiofaro paid – and it will suffer the curse of too much purchase price. (Four and a half years ago, I posted about the Far Pier development, which even today remains uncompleted because a series of owners overpaid to take it off each other’s hands.) If Chiofaro is radioactive, and if the price is sustainable only with new development much higher than 200 feet, then there is only one solution – Chiofaro to sell to the mayor’s favored developer. Making himself obnoxious might be part of a shrewd strategy to create pressure for a sale.
Chiofaro choose to skip the meeting — and the chance to engage city officials—saying its outcome was a foregone conclusion.
Study up, Don, on the meaning of that good Italian word, vendetta.
Chiofaro prevails?
