The opening of 40 Thorndike – the 475,000-square-foot, $300 million East Cambridge tower – was Wednesday, showing off a handsome remake of an unwanted former 1970s courthouse and jail that became emptied and infamous for its mold and asbestos.
Its 20 stories are still empty, but its developers are optimistic that will turn around soon for its office and retail space. Screenings are underway for its 48 all-affordable apartments, which could be filled with tenants in as soon as three months, based on how soon residents are able to move in.
Neighbors and officials came to gawk, snack, appreciate the public art throughout the lobby space, tour and hear speeches marking the decadelong slog developers Leggat McCall and Granite Properties went through to reach the day. (Leggat was chosen by the state Dec. 14, 2012, as redeveloper of the Edward J. Sullivan Courthouse; the structure wasn’t empty until June 2014.)
Rob Dickey, the Leggat executive vice president who dragged construction over the finish line, spoke first and offered words that were sometimes poignant.
“It’s truly heartwarming to see everybody here, to have this space filled with people, to see this building coming alive after what has been a long journey,” Dickey said. “In my 40 years in this business – 30 years working on projects, many in Cambridge – this has been the longest, hardest and most complex project I’ve ever worked on.”
Citywide slowdown
In describing what his team had built, with its pass-through lobby filled with vibrant public art, future first-floor restaurant and day care space (an affordable facility run by the East End House) and connections with the nearby First Street Market, for use by local vendors of produce and crafts, it was impossible to avoid the 420,000 square feet of office space starting on the fifth floor.
It hit Cambridge hard when the Boston Business Journal noted in an Aug. 5 story the city was amid “struggles with office vacancies” – and seeing a 19 percent vacancy rate – including that 40 Thorndike “is hitting the market without any announced tenants.” The Journal quotes Colliers investment managers in saying it “may be the first major office project in the Boston area to deliver vacant.”
Two months later came the opening date of 40 Thorndike, with seemingly all of Cambridge government and active civic life crowding into the daytime party, which followed immediately after a groundbreaking in North Cambridge for a $250 million project of 278 affordable homes.
“Call our partners at JLL”
As reports swirled of game maker Hasbro contemplating a move to Boston from Rhode Island, City Manager Yi-An Huang told Dickey during his time at the mic that “the city is happy to continue to support you as you look for tenants. If Hasbro comes calling and they want to look a little further north, we’re here to have any conversations they’d be willing to have. We’re really excited about this project.”
With that, Dickey took back the mic to end the speeches and lead tours of the rest of the building. He ended with a joke – it drew appreciative laughter – that wasn’t a joke.
“If any of you need office space,” Dickey told the crowd, “call our partners at JLL.”
Floor plates and views
Dickey took an elevator up with a crew to an unfinished story with vast floor plates and 360-degree views that stunned visitors. Most made a circuit, snapping photos on each side and murmuring to each other appreciatively.
Dickey, standing in the light of the windows with East Cambridge, the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge and Boston behind him, said that as of the grand opening of the building, the Boston Business Journal piece remained accurate: “We have proposals out; we don’t have any secured leases,” he said. Agents are speaking with all the kinds of tenants attracted to East Cambridge – “not banks, but technology or companies that are tied to life science and health care and medical.”
There have been discussions already with the kinds of large tenants Leggat prefers – and, Dickey, suggested, would hold out for. “Our interest is in preserving the building in part for a large tenant,” he said.
Still, part of the pitch he described was being “on the edge of Kendall,” where young companies can come to innovate – not because there’s a big price difference between 40 Thorndike and Kendall, but because of the quality of the space. “We intend to incubate many companies here in the lower floors,” Dickey said.
RTO and AI
Two trends dominating real estate nationally capture his attention for the market in general and the future of 40 Thorndike: return-to-office mandates and artificial intelligence.
“We see it anecdotally,” with Amazon and the business software company Salesforce making people come back into the office in San Francisco five days a week, Dickey said. “Technology companies on the management side will have a huge influence on people’s need for space, and in a lot of the technology work postpandemic, people have not been mandated to come into the office.”
He also looked forward to a Kendall Square Association symposium around AI, which “hasn’t been a big growth business on its own here – that’s more really in California – but it’s huge to life-science research and to a bunch of the technology companies that are here,” Dickey said. “The changes that are going on there, and the growth of that, is going to be a huge part of tenant demand in this market.”
Filling the housing
The residences are on the second and third floors, offering views of East Cambridge’s iconic brick buildings out their own picture windows. Small but not cramped, with new fixtures, dark hardwood floors and black frames against white walls, the apartments also drew envious comments from visitors.
Cambridge housing director Chris Cotter is leading the efforts to fill the inclusionary homes, screening from among some 3,500 applicants separate from – but potentially overlapping with – the bigger Cambridge Housing Authority waitlist. In the city process. applicants must have incomes between 50 percent and 80 percent of the area median income (for a single person, $52,100 to $91,200; for a three-person household, $67,000 to $117,250) and meet certain asset guidelines.
Residency is the prime preference in the city screening process, as well as finding families with kids for two- or three-bedroom units and households with an emergency housing need, Cotter said.
“They’ll move pretty quickly,” Cotter said, filling as quickly as the residents can relocate from their current living arrangement. “A lot of applicants are moving from somewhere, and so they’ve got to give notice. It might be 30 days, it could be 60 days.”
Tiebreaker for a business tower
A battle over the former courthouse was waged in 2019 as state Rep. Mike Connolly and others argued that the tower should be used for housing rather than office space – reaching a crucial point when it became clear that Leggat’s proposal was impossible without the city also granting it parking at the neighboring garage.
City councillor Sumbul Siddiqui used her power as tiebreaker to give Leggat its parking if it doubled affordable housing units to 48, reduced the number of parking spots requested and gave an additional $3.5 million to the city’s Affordable Housing Trust, for a total of $8 million.
In a HorizonMass column Aug. 8, journalist Jason Pramas noted bitterly that 40 Thorndike opened empty, “joining millions of square feet at other commercial developments currently lying fallow in Cambridge alone,” instead of becoming more than “200 units of desperately needed public housing.”
Working with developers
In the speeches Wednesday, Huang said office space and business development was “part of what allows us to make all of the investments that we’ve been able to make,” including the universal prekindergarten that rolled out this fall, services for the homeless and job training. “All of those programs are possible in this community because we have an ability to welcome developers and businesses that will work with us,” Huang said.
Siddiqui reflected that, as someone who grew up in public housing and then in a first term on the council, it was tough to make the decision she did. “Believe me, I wanted 100 units,” she said, but the possibilities of overall change helped sway her. “I remember this area. There was not much here – a lot of parking lots, not a lot of opportunity, not a lot of hope … I knew that in my heart, it was all about the people, and that is why I pushed for housing.”
“I am so grateful what we were able to get to,” Siddiqui said. “We need more housing in general, and so we’re still working on that, [but] I’m really in awe being here to see what this is.”
Connolly, who led the housing fight, was reflective, and said that getting the number of homes to 48 was significant. “It was a huge accomplishment and speaks to the hundreds of residents who came together to make that push,” Connolly said. “If I had been in office when the original disposition started, we might have been able to go in a different direction. But at the end of the day, it’s really worthwhile to celebrate the housing.”
This post was updated Oct. 9, 2024, with a sentence removed.
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