For Frank DePasquale, new ventures are old hat. The prominent restaurateur owns more than a half-dozen establishments in the North End, where he is known as the neighborhood’s unofficial mayor.
But sipping an espresso at Dolce, his gelato shop, on a brisk autumn morning, DePasquale said he’s been baffled and frustrated by the criticism swirling around his latest, biggest, and possibly last project — a building some critics have panned as jarringly modern, an eyesore, and worse.
“Anybody could critique it right now,” he said. ”They look at it and they see an empty building. That’s like you’re putting a T-shirt on, and you still haven’t put on your suit and tie."
The project at the entrance to the North End on Cross Street will bring shops, restaurants, and an Italian culinary school to what until recently was a block of blighted and vacant storefronts.
Its look, while still incomplete, has sharply divided residents and tourists over whether the contemporary facade of matte stucco and metal siding fits the character of Boston’s oldest neighborhood.
Construction began last year, but the controversy erupted after a local food influencer posted a video on social media with a photo of the half-finished building provocatively titled “Why the North End’s new entrance is so ugly.” The video has earned more than 10,000 likes.
Will Watson said his account, @willeatsboston, usually focuses on food-related content. But as a former resident and frequent visitor to the neighborhood, he said he feels the new building, as it stands now, is a “missed opportunity.”
“The North End is very warm, inviting — you know, brick but also colorful,” Watson said in an interview. “You walk down Prince Street and you have those really beautiful, old-school, oxidized sides on the houses ... it has a great patina to it.”
“A very modern, strip mall-esque, gray building with neon lights for the signage just doesn’t really match,” he said.
Many commenters agreed, heaping scorn on the design and color scheme.
Some residents aren’t sold either.
“I feel like most of the places in the North End are all old buildings, and the people who live here are fine with living in old buildings because it has that charm,” said Emily Newton, 26, gazing up at the unfinished structure. “And this just doesn’t.”
DePasquale has bristled at the uproar over a project that he views as part of his legacy in the neighborhood where he and his family have lived for decades. But he’s confident the critics will come around.
“I forgive them,” he said. “Because they haven’t seen the final product, you know. Because when they see the final product, they’re going to say, ‘Wow.’”
This stretch of Cross Street has long been described as the unofficial gateway to the North End. When the Big Dig opened the neighborhood to the rest of the city by tearing down the old Central Artery, the project’s backers said that keeping local business on Cross Street was “crucial” to preserving the neighborhood’s character.
That has been easier said than done.
At various points, this stretch of Cross Street has hosted a liquor store, a juice bar, and a nail salon. Bread & Butter, a bakery-cafe, closed in 2015. A proposed Starbucks stalled in 2018 after fierce community opposition. For years, the property sat vacant.
Tom Damigella, president of the North End Historical Society, said anything would be better than such an “eyesore.”
“You have to uplift the neighborhood. You’ve got to keep enhancing it, keep improving the infrastructure,” he said.
Other locals said they are perfectly happy with the design.
“There’s just so much brick down here; to try to replicate that would just look artificial,” longtime resident Vincent Marasa said. “He went in a completely different direction, which I think is really great.”
DePasquale’s plan, revised after community feedback, was approved by the city in 2024.
“Right now, my goal is to make everybody happy,” he said.
Last week, painters began replacing the dark grey exterior with a warmer shade of brown, a change DePasquale said was always part of the plan. Builders are installing striped awnings over the windows and marble wainscoting.
Once the building is done, DePasquale said, there will be plenty of signs of the neighborhood’s heritage: falling vines, flower boxes, a repaired Freedom Trail sidewalk, and patio seating to rival “any piazza in Italy.”
Renderings show a building less at odds with its surroundings, and publicizing them might have blunted some of the criticism. But DePasquale said he was reluctant to ”show the whole world what I’m doing before I do it.“
“If you come to one of my restaurants, you’re not going to show the steak uncooked; you wait till the steak is done, and then you taste it and say, ‘Wow.’”
If people are looking for a postcard-style image of the past, they will be disappointed, DePasquale said. “But for an entrance coming into the greatest inner-city Italian community in the country, this is what it is.”
Lucy Maulsby, a historian of architecture and urbanism at Northeastern University, said that these kinds of tensions are “almost always present when you insert something new into the historical fabric.”
“The ‘new’ is never going to be the ‘old,’ so there is inherently a conflict there,” she said. For Americans who might imagine Italy as somehow insulated from the modern world, it’s not just a matter of what an Italian American neighborhood should look like, it’s also a question of what it means to be Italian American, she said.
”The debate is perhaps less about the building and more about a whole set of other issues that are being projected," Maulsby said.
DePasquale, for his part, says he simply wants the new building to be worthy of the neighborhood.
“Why should just the Seaport have these beautiful buildings? Why not the North End as well?” he said. “You know, the Back Bay, the South End — why should they be the only ones to say welcome?”
Camilo Fonseca can be reached at camilo.fonseca@globe.com. Follow him on X @fonseca_esq and on Instagram @camilo_fonseca.reports.