An artist’s rendering of the Winter Garden proposed for Copley Place.
In a neighborhood where fighting tall buildings is legendary, Back Bay residents were unusually silent about the newest proposed sky-scraper to change the city skyline.
At a public hearing last week on the redevelopment of Copley Place, only one resident raised questions about the height of a proposed 47-story residential tower.
“It’s too tall,” Jacquelin Yessian, chairwoman of the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, told the development team.
NABB fought the increased height of 4-6 Newbury St., a parking garage that is soon to be transformed into an office building, and is fighting the plan for a tower at 888 Boylston.
Developers told a packed crowd Tuesday night they plan to enhance the transit-oriented project with housing, more shops and a dra-matic glass-enclosed public space.
“When Copley Place was built in the 1980s, it was a pioneering development with retail, hotel and office, and at the time there was a vision for residential,” said Carl Dieterle, executive vice president of development for Simon Property Group, the mall’s owner. “This pro-ject completes that vision by adding housing.”
The development team offered the Back Bay and South End neighborhoods its first glimpse of the project that would add a 47-story condominium tower with 280 units, a glass-enclosed winter garden, 114,000 square feet of new retail space and a 54,000-square-foot expansion of Neiman Marcus, the mall’s anchor tenant.
The Boston Redevelopment Authority’s public review process commenced at the Boston Public Library. Prior to city approval, the de-veloper is required to hold public hearings and consider comments by residents as they devise a final plan.
Jack Hobbs, president of RF Walsh Project Management, said the first public hearing was the start of the approval process. “This is your opportunity to understand what this proposal is all about,” he said.
Questions were raised about the possible loss of public space in front of Copley Place, shadows cast by the tower and whether the winter garden design fits the neighborhood.
In one light moment of the two-hour meeting, Kenneth Kruckemeyer of Walk Boston, a non-profit group dedicated to improving walking conditions in the Bay State, said, “There’s an opportunity for greatness here and an opportunity for disaster.”
