Outdoor food and entertainment spot approved for Dot Ave in South Boston

The Boston Licensing Board today approved plans by the Broadway Restaurant Group to create a permanent home for the series of outdoor events they've run over the past couple of years at Core Investment's The Lot space at 383 Dorchester Ave. in South Boston.

Under the plan approved by the board, Core Investments will sell the Broadway Restaurant Group the beer-and-wine license it now owns for Cannonball Cafe there. The cafe will remain open and continue to operate as a coffeehouse, just no longer with beer and wine. Broadway Restaurant Group owns several restaurants in South Boston, and one of its owners, who will be manager of the new venture, is raising his family in the neighborhood.

Broadway Restaurant Group attorney Joe Hanley said at a hearing on Wednesday that the concern will pay $200,000 for the beer-and-wine license and plans roughly $1 million in investments to the roughly 3/4-acre lot to create a permanent stage, various food, bar and seating options and lawn games, all "celebrating the outdoors," with total seating for 440 people, on land that is at the heart of a longer-term 22-acre redevelopment called On the Dot that will include some 1,400 residential units, office buildings and life-sciences labs.

Park City will even have cabanas, according to its license application - which now goes to the state Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission for its approval.

Pattie McCormick of the Andrew Square Civic Association could not say enough good things about Core, the events the Broadway group has run and the permanent place it is planning.

She said the Lot has brought "foot traffic, baby carriages and positive energy to an area that was desolate and depressing" and that Park City will further add to Andrew Square's growing shine. "It's been a long time coming, but Andrew Square is finally a destination," she said.

The Wednesday hearing was not all exultation, however, Gregg Donovan, who owns property on Ellery Street, at the southern edge of the On the Dot site, said he is worried that children and their parents will be exposed to dangerous PCBs during a $75-million cleanup of what is now a capped area of the site that once housed a scrapyard and said Core had some nerve putting their lives - and Broadway's business - at risk just to market the area as having some "vibrance."

Also, he said, Cannonball Cafe has been a failure that nobody goes to, he said.

"I appreciate his comments, but they're not correct," Hanley said. The PCB-laden part of the overall Core site is south of Alger Street, while the Lot is well north of it, so nowhere close. "This is not the contaminated site," he said of area where the Lot is located.

Also, "Cannonball Cafe is actually very popular," he said, suggesting Donovan has not actually visited it any time recently.

Donovan retorted that the issue is not current conditions, but what happens when the cap atop the former scrapyard is lifted to allow for removal of contaminated soil and all those PCBs escape. Hanley countered by saying it's not near the Lot location and added that he wondered if "maybe he has some interest in some property" and his concerns are really related to that, not to the Park City proposal.

At a voting meeting today, licensing-board members voted unanimously to let Core sell the beer-and-wine license to the Broadway Restaurant Group.

"I think this is a great use of this space," one that will help "activate" that stretch of Dorchester Avenue. She acknowledged that Donovan had raised concerns, but said the licensing-board review of a "corporation to corporation [license] transfer" wasn't the right place to get them addressed.

Watch the hearing: