In this edition: Ho-hum about World Cup, Reese Witherspoon at Harvard, Eversource’s data center pushback
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Welcome back to Power Play, everyone. Jon here. I’ve long been fascinated by the challenge and the opportunity of building over the Mass. Pike in Boston. It seems like every attempt is its own protracted saga. But none of those sagas has endured quite like John Rosenthal’s, so I checked in with him now that his long-awaited deck over the highway is finally done.
Featuring: Alan Gold, J.F. White, John Fish, Steve Samuels, Reese Witherspoon, Reza Satchu, Alix Earle, Joe Nolan, John Serafini, Aba Taylor, Miriam Rubin, and more.
Stand with John Rosenthal atop his 15-story apartment complex in the Fenway, and it’s hard not to be swept up in the panorama — even if you’ve visited every skyscraper in the city.
From left to right, you see the pillars of Greater Boston’s economy. Kendall Square’s labs and university halls. The Financial District towers off in the distance. The Back Bay skyline. The Longwood Medical Area. In the foreground: Fenway Park’s Green Monster, outfield, grandstands.
And just down below, right at street level, two acres of concrete: the biggest platform to go over the Mass. Turnpike since Copley Place in the 1980s. With the recent hookup of electric utility connections, the long-awaited Fenway Center deck over the highway is finally done.
How Rosenthal got here, though, is a story as long as the turnpike itself — one that involves at least two mayors, five governors, countless meals at Eastern Standard, that stolen base by Dave Roberts, and even a friendship between a black Labrador retriever and an English bulldog.
Rosenthal’s trek began in 1992, while running his family’s real estate business. He acquired the two-story parking garage on Lansdowne Street, in the Green Monster’s shadow. The garage became lucrative for Rosenthal and his business partners with around-the-clock traffic from hospital workers, baseball fans, and nightclub revelers. Rosenthal also hoisted a 252-foot-long gun-violence prevention billboard on its side facing the turnpike, bringing national attention to that cause.
A ski buddy suggested that Rosenthal contact the Mass. Turnpike Authority about internal discussions concerning “air rights” opportunities to privately develop land and air above the highway.
This was in the late 1990s, when the authority was consumed with the Big Dig a few miles down the pike. Rosenthal eventually persuaded the MTA (later subsumed by MassDOT) to put three air rights “parcels” out to bid, including one right behind the garage. His team was the sole bidder.
The money from the garage helped pay for these development efforts. Finally, Rosenthal had thought he had a proposal for an air-rights deck with two residential towers that would satisfy then-mayor Tom Menino in the fall of 2004, when the Red Sox won the World Series. The new Sox owners declared they would stay put, ending years of speculation about the ballpark’s future. Putting up towers behind the Green Monster was suddenly no longer tenable at City Hall. (Sox principal owner John Henry now owns the Globe as well.)
So Rosenthal pivoted. What about another air rights parcel, across Brookline Avenue? (His partnership later sold the garage to the Sox, after winning the team’s support as well as permits for the new concept.) This new site had 2.5 acres of terra firma, and 2 acres of air.
Building on the dirt was relatively easy — at least once Rosenthal navigated a lawsuit from a nearby landowner and built a new state-funded commuter rail stop. It’s now home to Bower, a $240 million, 312-unit luxury complex developed with what is now known as Green Cities Co., above the Lansdowne station.
Building over the busy highway and rail line? That was never going to be easy. The deck alone would cost almost as much as the apartment building had. Rosenthal needed an investor with deep pockets, willing to bet big on Boston. Like a billion dollars big.
A chance meeting in the mid-2010s with a Gloucester neighbor, whose bulldog Aldo was friends with Rosenthal’s Lab Moxie, led to an introduction to Alan Gold, a life-sciences real estate entrepreneur in California. After launching Alexandria Real Estate Equities and then BioMed Realty, Gold was putting together a new venture and he wanted it to have a Boston footprint like its predecessors. Rosenthal and Gold hit it off at Eastern Standard, the Kenmore Square restaurant where Rosenthal once held court (and which reopened at Bower).
Along with Gold’s venture, IQHQ, Rosenthal reached a deal with MassDOT in 2020 to develop the two acres of air via a 99-year lease. All $55 million was paid upfront. Crews led by contractor J.F. White worked around the clock for months — driving steel piles more than 200 feet below the ground and laying the decking on top — all while cars rushed by on the Pike.
Now, we wait a little longer. The deck is done, but it sits empty until IQHQ can line up leases for key tenants, which would finance two big lab-and-office buildings planned for it.
At 69, Rosenthal has been through several economic cycles. Although the lab market imploded in the past three years, Rosenthal says he and IQHQ remain bullish about their prospects.
This is the heart of the country’s foremost life sciences cluster, after all, a fact clear to anyone who joins Rosenthal on that rooftop. Something else comes into focus up there: the power of patience and persistence when developing real estate in Boston.
SHIRLEY’S TAKE
HEARD AROUND TOWN
ELLE WOODS RETURNS TO HARVARD
Now this is how you launch a podcast – with Reese Witherspoon as your first guest. Harvard Business School this week debuted “The Founder Mindset with Reza Satchu‚” focusing on pivotal moments in an entrepreneur’s journey. Satchu, a senior lecturer and serial founder, interviewed the Academy Award-winning actress who founded Hello Sunshine, a media company that tells women’s stories and has produced hit shows like “Big Little Lies.” Witherspoon — who dropped out of Stanford to pursue acting — sold Hello Sunshine in 2021 for a reported $900 million. She knows business, enough that HBS once did a case study on her company. The biweekly podcast comes out of HBS’s newly-launched Foundry Initiative, an AI-native platform designed to help founders build companies. Upcoming guests include “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary and Tik Tok influencer Alix Earle.
PLUGGING IN
Who likes data centers? Not the executives at Eversource Energy, apparently. Chief executive Joe Nolan told analysts on an earnings call this week that he’s happy about new electricity resources connecting to the New England grid: the NECEC line through Maine to bring Canadian hydropower, and the Revolution Wind and Vineyard Wind offshore wind farms. “Couple that with the fact that we are resisting data centers,” Nolan said. “I’m really not interested in [them] coming here. It’s of no value to our residential customers, actually any customer. It’s only going to drive up the price of energy.” (Coincidentally, Massachusetts officials just released regulations for a new sales tax break to encourage data-center development.)
WHAT WORLD CUP?
Close to $100 million is being spent to make sure soccer fans and tourists have a good time when World Cup mania descends upon the region next month. Gillette Stadium will host seven games, including matches involving global soccer powers England and France, and a quarterfinal. Yet many of us could care less. An Emerson College Polling survey conducted this week found that only 15 percent of 1,000 Massachusetts voters are very interested in Boston hosting the World Cup, 35 percent are somewhat interested, and half of respondents — 49 percent — are not interested at all. Sounds like Boston could use a Ted Lasso.
FLYING AWAY
Hawkeye 360 is the kind of company the Healey administration would want to keep in Massachusetts, as part of its push to build up the defense-tech sector. The business was born in Boston. But the 400-person satellite-tech company flew away years ago, to roost in Herndon, Va., near other government contractors. This week brought a big milestone for CEO and Hingham native John Serafini: its IPO. On Thursday, the company’s stock soared some 30 percent in its debut, to a valuation of $3 billion. The Virginia location, the company said in its initial IPO filing, provides “access to a deep pool of talent.” Serafini once told us he would probably consider an outpost in Boston, but the IPO filing makes no mention of that great idea.
SHIRLEY’S TAKE II
Five years ago, in June 2021, I wrote a column titled: “A working mother’s manifesto: Pandemic provides a once-in-a-generation chance to course correct how we work.”
When I wrote that piece, we’d been working from home five days a week for more than a year. That didn’t feel right. Yet I also couldn’t imagine going back to the office Monday through Friday like we did before the COVID pandemic.
What I really want to do is rewrite the rules of work. It was true then. It’s true now.
Have we done that?
No.
We thought we did when many companies adopted a hybrid work schedule that balanced in-office time with working from home. But big employers including Fidelity Investments are now mandating workers back into the office five days a week.
As I wrote last week, going back to the way we were disproportionately hurts working parents – in particular working mothers who still bear the brunt of childcare. (Full-time working mothers log 92 more minutes per day than working fathers, according to research by the Women’s Foundation of Massachusetts.)
So if you care about the challenges working mothers face, join YW Boston CEO Aba Taylor and Listen to Your Mothers CEO Miriam Rubin in a year-long, call-to-action for employers to do right by them. Their organizations have written an open letter that requires all of our attention:
“Supporting mothers is an economic necessity, a public health imperative, and a collective responsibility,” their letter says. “It is not a ‘family issue’ or a ‘woman’s problem.’ ”
YW Boston and Listen to Your Mothers, a Boston consultancy founded by four mothers to advise employers on family-friendly workplace policies, calls on action from Boston’s major employers, from big companies to hospitals to universities.
“No sector is exempt. No mission statement replaces action,” the letter says. “We are urging Greater Boston’s employers, institutions, and leaders to take it as an opportunity to be even bolder, think differently and recognize that what is good for the mothers of this city, is also what is good for business.”
More than flowers and brunch — which, don’t get me wrong, are much appreciated – working mothers need allies to improve our conditions at work and at home. Don’t let us be in this fight alone. Sign the letter here.
YOUR TURN
Take our news quiz here, and we’ll share the results on Tuesday.
POLL RESULTS
The results surprised us. We’re all over the map on returning to the office.
BONUS: Larry Edelman and Shirley Leung continue their return-to-office debate. Larry remains firmly in the five-day-a-week camp, arguing it’s key to the recovery of downtown Boston. Shirley says hybrid work is the way to go. Watch the video. Listen to the podcast. Are you Team Larry or Team Shirley? Tell us at powerplay@globe.com.
THANKS FOR READING POWER PLAY.
Today’s edition was edited by Greg Huang and Tim Logan, and produced by Diamond Naga Siu.
Have a question for the team? Email us at powerplay@globe.com.
Delivered Tuesday and Friday.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto. Shirley Leung is a Business columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com.