The Lafayette Place – the 90’s
Let’s start before I ever traveled to Boston let alone transferred up from New York to manage the Lafayette Swissotel. The then Boston General Manager was staying with me in New York while he attended meetings for the Master Planning of a project called Boston Crossing which was comprised of the Lafayette Place parcel which included the hotel and the moribund mall that connected the hotel to the second parcel, Jordan Marsh the landmark New England department store. The third lot and final piece was the infamous Hayward parcel across Avenue de Lafayette.
A Canadian developer, Robert Campeau had acquired separately through massive leverage the department store chains Allied and Federated that included Jordan Marsh and Bloomingdales. His vision was to have a super mixed use urban center with over 3 ¼ million square feet. The project would be bookended by Jordan Marsh and Bloomingdales with a massive atrium mall in the middle. The fledgling Hotel would abut the atrium and the rooms up to the seventh floor on that façade would be inside the atrium overlooking the mall. (this was the same era of the birth of ‘Mall of America”). The project was going to be the saving grace, the turnaround project for Boston’s notorious Combat Zone! The podiums created by the department stores would be topped by 400foot towers. Across Washington Street from the Bloomingdales site was the Avery Hotel parcel which was going to be the Federal courthouse and the adjacent, ghostly Opera House, under the leadership of Sarah Caldwell was going to be reborn. A utopian future for the downtown retail and theatre district. A real estate dream!
The problem with masterplans and real estate dreams is that they move the goalposts while you are coming down the back stretch! Joe Moakley, the congressional native son of Southie grabbed the courthouse and dragged it across the channel to his longtime congressional district. (Today we have the harborside Moakley courthouse not far from the Moakley bridge.) Sarah Caldwell a true musical genius lacked the business skill or luck to survive. I believe the electric bill was the last straw despite the intervention of the local Cardinal.
Then the economy did what economies do about once a decade and it crashed leaving Campeau’s empire drowning in a tidal wave of debt. The Bankruptcy ended the fantasy of Boston Crossing and left the Lafayette Mall parcel in the hands of Chemical Bank the receiver.
The Hotel portion was owned and operated by Swissotel a partnership between Swissair and Nestle. As the neighborhood staggered from the broken promise of the Campeau megaplan the bottom line of the hotel plumbed new depths of red ink. Zurich brought in the management consultants. Lots of reorganization and severe cost cutting and a change of leadership. That is when I got the short straw and was transferred up to Boston to turn things around. ..to be continued ....
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