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Downtown Crossing's One Bromfield: Is This the Year for the Giant Tower?

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New plans call for approximately 700-foot spire

Plans to replace four low-rise buildings at Bromfield and Washington streets in busy, busy Downtown Crossing with a single tower stretch back to those prelapsarian days before the Great Recession. New York-based developer Midwood Investment & Development bought the parcels in the mid-2000s and set about with plans to construct a 28-story building with around 260 apartments and several floors of retail.

Said recession made quick work of those plans, but Midwood held on to the parcels. Now the company is back with a fresh idea that is just starting to wend its way through the city's approval processes. And it's a corker of an idea: a tower with 300 apartments and 119 condos, as well as two floors of retail and lobbies, stretching to 683 feet at its highest occupiable floor and to more than 700 feet when the mechanical whatnot are factored in.

Such scope would easily make what has been dubbed One Bromfield one of the five tallest buildings in Boston, in New England, really. Its height would rival nearby Downtown Crossing neighbor Millennium Tower, whose success surely inspired Midwood to try, try again.

Yet that particular spire, which reaches around 685 feet at its highest point and which is set to open this year, took a famously long while to get going. And One Bromfield has already been stop and go for nearly a decade. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, check out the above rendering of the proposed tower as supposedly seen from Beacon Hill.