Developer files formal plans for Lewis Wharf hotel even as residents continue to fight proposal

JW Capital Partners this week filed detailed plans with the BRA for its proposed five-story, 277-room, two-building hotel on what is now a parking lot and rotting pilings at the end of Lewis Wharf.

The proposal, which would also include a revamped marina and a new 1.25-acre park, would replace an earlier plan by another developer for a six-story, 335-room hotel. The BRA approved that plan in 1990, but the project was never built.

Nearby residents, who say the proposal would ruin the North End waterfront, flooded a fundraiser for Mayor Walsh last night to express their concerns to Hizzonah, which include the negative impact of a hotel on a residential neighborhood and the way they say the project will cut the North End off from the harbor.

In its filing, JW Capital responds:

The current site presents a surface parking lot along Atlantic Avenue that extends to, and occupies much of, the waterfront. This large, paved area greatly inhibits any connection to the waterfront. Similarly, the Harborwalk along the site’s waterfront consists of painted lines across pavement, much of it squeezed between the water’s edge and the bumpers of parked cars. The Project will eliminate both of these undesirable conditions by replacing the parking lot with a 1.25-acre waterfront park extending from the street to the water’s edge on both sides of the intervening Granite Building. The waterfront park will include both pathways and signage directing pedestrians on the sidewalks of Atlantic Avenue to a new Harborwalk running along the waterfront perimeter of the entire site. Multiple pedestrian pathways will invite pedestrians, guests, and tenants and workers in the existing nearby buildings to enter the park for a leisurely stroll, to sit and relax by the water’s edge, to pass around the Granite Building, or to follow the Harborwalk out and around the rehabilitated pile-field to waterfront plazas at the end of the piers, affording extensive vistas out into the Harbor.

Lewis Wharf project notification form (21M PDF).