A developer wants to turn the quarter-mile-long Ropewalk Building near the Tobin Bridge into 68 townhouse-style apartments.
As you'd expect, the conversion may prove particularly knotty (O.K., we'll stop). The building has been vacant since 1971, when the rope factory shuttered; it was damaged in a fire last decade; and it could take as much as $6,000,000 just to bring the building up to normal, before any of the conversion really starts. And! Per Chris Cassidy in The Herald, a stipulation of the conversion, given the building's historic nature, is the creation of a 6,600-square-foot rope-making museum ("Not the box factory again, Seymour!").
Still, developer Frontier Enterprises is going for it, saying the community "will be ecstatic" if the Ropewalk Building can be saved and, undoubtedly, taking advantage of myriad tax breaks for said saving. Construction could start before the end of the year and take about 14 months. Time to update our Residential Heatmap.
· Developers Face Knots in $25M Restoration [Herald]
· Our Updated Residential Heatmap: 66 Projects and Counting [Curbed Boston]