The scaffolding has gone up around 59 Temple Place, one of 20 or so hotels suddenly going up in Boston after a years-long drought of hospitality development. (We mapped them all here—actually, how embarrassing, we need to update this to include the one at New Brighton Landing!) The hotel at the redeveloped 59 Temple is due to have as many as 240 hotel rooms and to be done in a boutique style.
To give a sense of what that means, know that 59 Temple's developer, Oxford Capital, which beat out more than 100 other suitors in a bidding war earlier this year, opened the 225-room Hotel Felix in downtown Chicago in 2009 (its lobby is pictured above). The Hotel Felix, which is very environmentally friendly, bears the marketing tagline, "Happy. Naturally." Get it? The hotel also changes its restaurant's menu daily. It serves organic and free-range food, see, and you never know what's going to show up (and it serves said food on reclaimed wood from Texas farms).
The boutique hotel at 59 Temple, of course, joins all the madcap development in the Downtown Crossing area, from the mother of all new Boston towers, the 600-foot Millennium Tower, to its squatter cousin, Millennium Place. The city, too, is ponying up more than $13 million for streetscape improvements. Naturally.
· Shoe Store Doesn't Fit With Hotel [Herald]
· New Kid on the Block [GB & D]
· New-Hotels Heatmap: Checking Inn On Hub's Hospitality Boom [Curbed Boston]
· New Brighton Landing Gets Its Hotel After All [Curbed Boston]