Filene's Basement sold; could be marked down to nothing
By adamg - Tue, 04/21/2009 - 8:47pm.
Liquidator buys what's left of the chain, the Herald reports.
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The whole deal with Filene's
The whole deal with Filene's from the start stinks of sleaze. Where's the Globe on this one. All those great people lost their job, not just in the basement. Thanks Mr. Mayor and the BRA. Nice hole left in the middle if the city by the way. Let's do another deal.
Thank you, John B. Hynes III , for destroying Filene's Basement
One man is responsible for this disaster: John B. Hynes III. He was supposed to redevelop the Filene's building into an office-retail-condo-hotel complex, but instead decided to walk away from the development after digging a huge hole and demolishing two of its four walls.
As a result, Filene's Basement has been closed for the last two years and is utterly unable to return to its home. I'm not at all surprised that it appears to be going under, but I'm certainly disgusted. If you feel the same way, call Mr. Hynes at 617.350.7577 and thank him for destroying a treasured Boston retail icon.
Name that Hole ...
Hynes'End?
More creative than what I just spewed
Damn Terrible eXcavation
Downtown Crusting
Downtown Meltdown
Downtown Crater
Downtown Cratering
Filene's Subbasement
Bombed-out Crossing
Downtown Sloughing
Downtrodden Crossing
Downthere Rotting
DMZ Crossing
I like to call it the
I like to call it the Downtown Crossing Transient Housing Project.
Filene's Debasement
The Boston Ruins
The Hynes Pretension Center
A good name for stringing
A good name for stringing along tourists:
The Great Boston Fire Memorial. It's not a derelict pile, it's a statue cleverly designed to LOOK like a derelict pile!
It's not just Hines
It's the former owners of Filene's Basement too, who wanted to get rid of that embarrassing stodgy old store in an unchic shopping area and move on to exciting new opportunities in mall retail sales. Did anyone really expect the original store to reopen as anything other than a clone of the mall stores, if it was to reopen at all?
I wonder where the pension
I wonder where the pension funds went?
I'll pass on harrassing a
I'll pass on harrassing a guy over the phone, regardless of his culpability. Internet lynch mobs are not cool.
Hynes, or Vornado?
I remember reading that Hynes was at the heart of the redevelopment - but I also remember reading that Vornado Realty Trust was the developer. And if the people who reimagined Times Square couldn't fix DTX, nobody could!
What was Hynes's role, what was Vornado's, and who can we fling blame at?
Hynes and Vornado
One blows, the other sucks.
Do you really think Hynes
Do you really think Hynes intended to leave a hulking whole in Boston? Like that's good for his bottom line? Hynes couldn't get financing, and that's not his fault, that's the fault of the mess we find ourselves in. We can hold the banks responsible, the creditors responsible, but some guy who can no longer get a mortgage to build? Not sure why it's his fault. Seems to me he's one of the losers here.
Did the City agree to gamble?
How big a surprise was the funding problem, to the developers and the city?
Do developers who design financial deals for these projects know when they have funding locked in? Was this a scenario that could not have been reasonably anticipated, or was the developer gambling?
Did the City understand the risks? If so, were there agreements for this contingency, to mitigate harm to the City?
And what about harm to Filene's Basement?
This project killed off 20% of their sales, leading to their current predicament. Doesn't Hynes have some obligation to lead them out of it?
Contracts?
Businesses make contracts. What do the contracts say?
Filenes Basement
It's a shame that the Basement will soon be a thing of the past. They expanded too fast and should have kept the stores in Needham and Downtown as sole Basement locations. Greed!! After Barnes and Noble closed it would have made more sense to move the store there, instead of Back Bay. Where is the doorman now? Poor management didn't want the pretentious BB snots to take the T to Downtown? Farewell FB. It was fun pushing,clawing and elbowing for that Prada skinny jeans.