HYM Investment Group managing partner Tom O'Brien watches construction crews put the finishing touches on a large amenity terrace on the 11th floor of HYM's One Congress office building on Sept. 11, 2023. The building officially opened Sept. 14. Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman staff

HYM Investment Group’s brand-new One Congress office tower officially opens today, the first in a big pulse of downtown Boston class A space being delivered over the next several quarters.

No space in the nearly 1 million-square-foot building is hitting the market, though – HYM CEO Tom O’Brien said the entire tower was already leased up a year ago. Even a handful of floors that cybersecurity firm InterSystems, which is being lured away from Cambridge, has leased but doesn’t plan to occupy right away are fully subleased, he said.

“The workplace is always evolving, but the key is you want to make the space attractive to tenants. You have to earn the commute,” he said during a press tour of the building Monday.

Anchor tenant State Street – 510,000 square feet – has had its logo in 11-foot-tall letters across One Congress’ crown for months, now, and has already begun moving into the building. The remainder of the space is split between InterSystems (420,000 square feet) and law firm K&L Gates (52,288 square feet).

One Acre of Amenities

Perhaps the most striking element of the 600-foot tower’s design: its amenities. Most of the lobby is taken up by a 9,000-square-foot restaurant and flexible workspace – “if you’re working upstairs, you might want to bring your laptop down here” for a change of scenery, O’Brien said. And the entire 11th floor – an acre of floor space, O’Brien said – is devoted to luxuries aimed at the thousands of office workers who will fill out the building over the next few months.

A cafeteria run by Aramark and associated lounge area faces a Dirtworks Landscape Architects-designed rooftop terrace that occupies what was once the top floor of the Government Center Garage, around which One Congress and the other three towers in HYM’s Bulfinch Crossing development are being built.

A crane towers over the remaining portions of the Government Center Garage under demolition as part of the Bulfinch Crossing development on Sept. 11, 2023. Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman staff

After the development’s second residential tower rises, the terrace will max out at 15,000 square feet, adding a lawn to cluster of gazebo-like meeting “pods,” outdoor bar and seating area paved with heated bricks, to melt snow and ice and extend the area’s usefulness into the fall and winter.  On the other side of the elevator banks, a 7,000-square-foot fitness center that O’Brien compared to an Equinox or a high-end hotel’s gym rounds out the amenities floor.

O’Brien argues One Congress – via one of HYM’s two capital partners on the project, Washington, D.C.-based Carr Properties – should be credited with forcing an amenity arms race among Boston’s top-tier office landlords. Carr is also managing the tower for the ownership triumvirate, which also includes National Real Estate Advisors.

“In D.C., you compete with amenities because everybody has the same view. I think that sort of upped the game here in Boston,” he said.

Since architects Pelli Clarke & Partners took the wraps off One Congress’ design in mid-2019, the tower’s competition elsewhere in Boston has also gone all-in on amenities. Even Back Bay’s venerable 200 Clarendon tower is getting what a Boston Properties executive billed as a “spa-quality” fitness center and lounge during a NAIOP Massachusetts event in March.

Garage Demo Finished by March

During Monday’s tour, O’Brien pointed out several times that One Congress is being delivered on time despite two fires during fit-out and an incident last spring when, federal safety inspectors said, an improperly-managed demolition in another part of the Government Center Garage caused a floor slab to give way and kill a construction worker.

The latter incident seriously set back demolition of the garage to make way for a second residential tower next to The Sudbury, which delivered in late 2020, and a lab tower over the MBTA’s Haymarket subway station.

O’Brien now estimates that construction crews should be able to finish removing what’s now the highest remaining part of the garage when the MBTA shuts down its Haymarket station for 25 days starting Sept. 18: five concrete beams that loom over the former Haymarket busway and John F. Fitzgerald Surface Road.

“The current leadership at the T has been really awesome about working with us on the demolition,” O’Brien said.

Once those beams, and the 7-story columns that support them, come down, workers will be able to rapidly peel back the rest of the garage structure over Congress Street by the end of March next year if not sooner, he said.

But O’Brien was cagier about whether this would mean shovels will start hitting dirt to finish Bulfinch Crossing’s remaining towers – or which tower would rise first – as the nation’s banks continue to restrict their commercial real estate lending and construction costs are still elevated. In an email, a spokesperson confirmed that HYM was keeping its options open on both counts.

Boston’s newest office tower, One Congress, officially opened Sept. 14, 2023. Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman staff