Developer proposes replacing Circle Cinemas with hotel
By adamg - 9/7/10 - 8:39 am
The Herald reports (bottom of article) that Boston Development Group of Newton wants to replace the vacant movie complex with a 150-room hotel and retail space. No word if guests will be required to watch a short video with blinking arrows showing the best way to exit onto Beacon Street.
Comments
Or...
...have crucial bits of whispered dialogue drowned out by the rumbling of the Green Line trains!
phew
I was worried they'd replace it with something nice.
Not nice?
Depending on the cost of the hotel rooms, this is a great boon to the area. First, it gets rid of the dead building which is pretty prominent in the area. Second, there's very few hotel options in this section of town.
The Best Western on Comm Ave is probably the closest. There's the Courtyard in Coolidge Corner and the Holiday Inn at St. Paul and Beacon in Brookline. Otherwise, you go to what? The Crowne Plaza over the Pike in Newton? A hotel right in Coolidge Corner on both the C & D lines is a good idea and a good place for it.
But this is not "in Coolidge Corner" at all
This is in Cleveland Circle. (Still seems like a good idea, though.)
CC
Si si. Just a mistype. I'm constantly correcting myself in real life between the two and I've lived within a mile of both for the past 10 years.
A hotel seems good.
A hotel seems good. I just thought it would be a great spot for an Alamo Cinema and Drafthouse.
But why?
Other than people who have some involvement with BC (parents on parents' weekend, out-of-town fans for football games), who would stay there? Having lived in Cleveland Circle, sure it's a decent place, but I can't see tourists or business travelers going there routinely.
I anticipate the eventual fate of the site to be yet more apartments / condos.
Price point
It's going to totally depend on the price point, but basically either you stay downtown for hundreds a night or you stay out in Peabody for a more reasonable amount. There's few in-between hotels.
If you stayed there, you could easily go to Fenway (tourist), Back Bay (also tourist), Longwood (hospital visit), and even BU (student/parent/visitor) and Harvard (take the 86). It's a location served by Route 9 as well as a short trip to the Pike down Washington St so it's pretty convenient for people arriving by car.
It's a great place for a hotel and I bet it'll be packed most of the time.
I think you've got this
I think you've got this right. I've always enjoyed staying in perimeter hotels when I travel for the vary reasons you cite. I've had friends stay at a hotel in Chestnut Hill near the D-Line, but that area is kind of uninviting due to route 9. Cleveland Circle would be a much better place.
A hotel here would make a fortune for several reasons.
Any hotel near a college like BC is going to do well, and like Kaz said, any hotel this close to Boston is going to do well.
The problem here is that residents of Chestnut Hill are going to probably shoot down any proposal for a hotel in that area. You have the rich Brookline, Newton and Brighton people who would fight it all at the same time!
I believe Marriot wanted to put a hotel on Comm Ave near Mountfort St. right across the BU bridge in Brookline. They had a whole plan with plenty of parking but the residents of Brookline basically were able to shoot down any plan they could come up with.
I didn't see the proposal so I have no idea what kind of traffic issues it may or may not have caused.
Not Newton
The proposed hotel site is partly in Brookline and partly in Brighton, but blocks away from Newton. So they don't have any say in the matter.
I do not think that a CC hotel will be very controversial
I live in the neighborhood behind the old movie theater (although I am certainly not rich). I can tell you that the people there would much rather see a decent hotel in that space rather than some of the other possible uses, including anything like a movie theater, whose patrons used to routinely raise hell in the parking lot (only 2 T tracks away from the neighborhood) on their way out of the late night showings.
My guess is that so long as the traffic problem I mentioned elsewhere is addressed, a reasonably sized hotel will generate very little controversy.
Hotel in Cleveland Circle
I think a hotel would do well also, but the problem is going to be in the permitting process. You have three jurisdictions in play here - Boston, Brookline and the T (as abutter, but the developer will almost certainly need to play ball with the T, particularly during construction).
Traffic will be the biggest issue. I think that the Town and City will insist on the Chestnut Hill Ave. side being enter only, and everyone will be forced to take that long route around the park in the back so that they can exit onto Beacon St.
Some additional good could come of this - perhaps getting all of these jurisdictions together will improve the situation with that orphan traffic light that is on Chestnut Hill Ave. just south of the main lights in Cleveland Circle. That light does not appear to be well synchronized with the main lights, and it becomes a total debacle each time a T has to go around the corner from Beacon and into the yard.
Frankly, I'd like to see Cleveland Circle restored to exactly that, but that would probably require putting the ingress to the T yard underground, which, how do you say, "ain't gonna happen."
Traffic
I tend to recall the cinema letting out onto Chestnut Hill Ave; even worse than a hotel would, the cinema used to let people out in clumps. The restaurant next door (it's an Applebee's now, right?) lets out onto Chestnut Hill Ave without a problem.
Just cleaning up the lanes with a little informative paint on the ground would go miles towards solving most of the traffic issues through those 2-3 blocks of Chestnut Hill Ave.
Chestnut Hill Ave....just had to say it one more time.
Frankly,
It would be good to replace the Circle Cinema with affordable residential housing, if they replace the cinema with anything at all, since there's a real dearth of affordable housing here in Boston and Brookline for those who really need it.