Belkin is now chasing a more dubious kind of history. He’s ramping up efforts to revive his tower. But he doesn’t own the Winthrop Square garage, and he doesn’t control the redevelopment rights to it, either. City Hall bungled his last bid at redeveloping the garage so badly that he doesn’t appear to have any claim over the structure he wants to bulldoze.

THE LAST time local businessman Steve Belkin tried to raze the Winthrop Square parking garage, he was chasing history. Belkin was pushing to build the tallest structure in the city by replacing the city-owned garage in the Financial District with a 1,000-foot office tower. That was over seven years ago, and the proposal never got close to first base. But a lot has changed since then.


This lack of standing sets up a potentially embarrassing conflict between Belkin and Boston’s new mayor, Marty Walsh. But it’s also an opportunity for Walsh to put his stamp on downtown development, both by establishing his own vision for what should replace the Winthrop Square garage, and by signaling that development in Boston doesn’t work on a wink and a nod anymore.

The Winthrop Square parking garage sits downtown, off Federal Street, one block from Post Office Square. The saga surrounding the structure is really a story about the way City Hall operated under former Mayor Tom Menino, and the way Menino’s tenure continues to mark the city Walsh is trying to govern, in ways big and small.

The parking garage is low-slung and oddly shaped, and it’s been crumbling for years. In 2006, Menino picked this spot to launch a legacy-building project. He proposed auctioning off the garage to a developer, who would then build a 1,000-foot tall tower on the site. Belkin was the only person to respond to the offering.


Belkin isn’t a real estate developer; he made his money in credit cards. But he owns the building next door to the garage, and every other developer who took a look at the site concluded they couldn’t make a 1,000-foot tower work without Belkin’s property. So he won the contest by default.

The project fell apart quickly. Belkin had a falling-out with his big-name architect, Renzo Piano. Federal aviation officials said the building’s height would interfere with Logan Airport. And then the bottom fell out of the economy. Belkin’s tower proposal receded from public view, and in 2013, the city shuttered the structurally unsound garage for good.

Belkin charged back into public last week, unveiling plans to build a 740-foot-tall office, hotel, and condominium complex above the city-owned garage. But the Winthrop Square development resurfaced in a different world — a world in which Belkin doesn’t actually have a claim to the city-owned garage.

A recent outside audit of the Boston Redevelopment Authority found that, although Menino’s administration cut a deal with Belkin to redevelop the downtown garage, the deal never closed, because the city’s bureaucracy dropped the ball. (The same audit found the BRA failing to collect millions of dollars in developer fees.) The BRA voted in 2007 to recommend that the city give garage development rights to Belkin, but the city didn’t do anything after the vote. Belkin’s rights to the site seem to only exist in a press release.

Walsh’s administration is in a tough spot. Belkin has been spending money to update his doomed 2006 development pitch, and he put a credible proposal on the table last week. But at the same time, the city can’t just hand away a valuable piece of downtown real estate because the developer who wants it now also tried to claim it seven years ago. Walsh actively campaigned against the kind of fast-and-loose development politics that would call a mulligan and hand Winthrop Square to Belkin today.


Belkin didn’t ask City Hall to fumble his last bid at rebuilding the Winthrop Square garage. But he also walked away from the project. If he still wants it today, he should have to compete for it.

Paul McMorrow is an associate editor at Commonwealth Magazine. His column appears regularly in the Globe.