Faneuil Hall: Reimagining Boston’s Famous Landmark – A Guest Post from Llenrock Group
Oct 1, 2014
This post from Eric Hawthorn is part of our Llenrock Group guest post series and originally appeared on the Llenrock Group blog.
A while back, Travel + Leisure published a ranking of America’s most-visited tourist attractions based on each location’s annual number of visitors. The number one attraction in the United States is, no surprise, Times Square in Manhattan, with over 40 million visitors per year. That’s the population of Argentina!
Yes, that’s a lot of people, so it should be no surprise that retail real estate on and adjacent to Times Square is wildly expensive. Few places in the world host even a fraction of Times Square’s foot traffic.
The Travel + Leisure article names other tourist hot spots as well, including Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, Disney Land, Central Park, and the Las Vegas Strip, all of which see millions upon millions of visitors each year. At number eight on this ranking, in a tie with Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, is Boston’s famous and historic tourist attraction Faneuil Hall. The Boston landmark is located near the city’s waterfront and has operated as a market place and meeting hall since 1742, making it a crucial community center during the colonial days and in the early years of the United States. In 2008, Wikipedia reports, it was America’s fourth most visited tourist site according to Forbes Traveler (which may have ranked tourist sites according to different criteria than the Travel + Leisure article that came out several years later).
In addition to the actual Faneuil Hall historic site, this property is an incredibly active real estate center that hosts upscale retail offerings and office space in the form of Faneuil Hall Marketplace.
Now, the property’s owner, New York City-based Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp., plans to capitalize on the tourist and commercial hub’s central location by building the property into a world-class mixed-use development.
Commercial Property Executive reports,
Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp. has filed a master plan with the city of Boston for a bold transformation of Faneuil Hall Marketplace, one of the nation’s premier retail properties.
… New York City-based Ashkenazy acquired the property nearly three years ago, and has been working with noted architect Howard Elkus of Elkus Manfredi Architects to develop a renovation plan that would appeal to the young professionals and families of downtown Boston.
Currently, Faneuil Hall Marketplace features 70 retailers spread out over 200,000 SF, Commercial Property Executive reports, as well as 40 office tenants. It’s a massive mixed-use property as it is, but Ashkenazy plans to develop a new hotel, “retail pavilions,” and a wide variety of public area features such as updated lighting and water features, improved landscaping, and “electronic wayfinding” (which I assume means electronic store directories or maps).
One thing that is essential to Faneuil Hall Marketplace’s current popularity (the site sees more than 18 million visitors per year) is its array or outdoor entertainment and other activities, and Ashkenazy plans improvements that will further drive this sort of outdoor community. This is wise, in my opinion, as it will help to maintain the site’s status as an entertainment destination for families and young professionals in the area–as well as out-of-towners–rather than simply a collection of stores with little to differentiate themselves from any other supermarket or online vendor.
Retail developers and operators recognize that their core commodity is no longer simply merchandise–they must sell an experience. Ashkenazy clearly understands this concept, and its updates, if approved by the City of Boston, will surely heighten the Marketplace’s popularity.
Author: Raymond T. Cirz