THE NICE thing about that terrible pit in the middle of Downtown Crossing is that we can at least blame its existence on a pack of rapacious capitalists from New York. There’s no such comfort to be found in the hole in the ground festering in the middle of Dudley Square.
This pit, which sits in the rear of the flatiron-style Ferdinand Building, is just 2.5 miles down Washington Street from its more famous counterpart at Filene’s. It’s every bit as ruinous. But you won’t find City Hall spitting venom at its owners, and you won’t hear anybody threatening to seize it by eminent domain.
That’s because City Hall already owns this little pocket of blight. It was City Hall that used eminent domain to seize the Ferdinand parcel, and it was City Hall that razed part of the historic site, blew a hole in a bustling Roxbury square, and then left it to rot.
The Ferdinand project was supposed to sink $80 million into a neighborhood in desperate need of investment and spur a new wave of revitalization projects in the area. Instead, it has sown blight, and a perception of neglect in a neighborhood that has long lagged behind others.
Ferdinand’s furniture store was a focal point in Dudley Square for a generation. Its iconic blue trim and flatiron design still dominates the square’s eastern entrance, but the building has been vacant, and darkening an entire block, for nearly three decades.
The City of Boston wound up tearing Dudley Square apart because Mayor Tom Menino became frustrated by years of inactivity and broken promises at the Ferdinand site. Successive governors had promised to redevelop the 33,000-square-foot site into a state administrative office building. In 2004, when Mitt Romney reneged on that pledge, Menino announced plans to seize the Ferdinand building by eminent domain, and said he would move 1,200 municipal employees to the long-dormant site.
The city closed on the $6.5 million eminent domain taking in 2006, and in 2008, Menino hosted a ceremonial groundbreaking at the site. The administration spoke of redeveloping the Ferdinand into the greenest government office building in the country, and believed that the new $80 million municipal building would be the catalyst for a neighborhood-wide revitalization. City Hall kick-started that revitalization by leveling the structure behind the Ferdinand Building and excavating a pit for the new office building’s foundation.
Two years later, blue boards cover the Ferdinand Building’s lifeless windows. Construction fencing ringing the site has swallowed up sidewalks along Washington and Warren Streets, forcing pedestrians to hug a row of parked cars. Once, neighbors were treated to the views of an abandoned block; now, they get to gaze upon a weed-strewn pit. It’s not much of an upgrade.
The mayor is fastidious about keeping to the promises he makes. However, within City Hall, there is uncertainty about when this long-promised makeover might be delivered. The administration is divided over the Ferdinand redevelopment project’s future, with officials on the neighborhood side growing impatient, and fiscal hawks advocating for delay in the face of looming fiscal doom.
The budget hawks are winning. A new Dudley Square police station netted financing, but there’s talk in City Hall that the project might not restart until 2015. Both the mayor and his spokeswoman have spoken recently about the need to reevaluate the project’s design (read: price tag) in light of budget woes. Officially, the Ferdinand project is under study. Meanwhile, the building site continues to rot.
The Ferdinand Building was always intended to be financed by the sale of a city-owned office building downtown. At some point, the plan to sell off the school department’s building on Court Square to finance the Ferdinand project got conflated with Menino’s plan to build a new City Hall on the South Boston waterfront by selling off Government Center. When the Southie pipe dream hit a wall, the Ferdinand went down with it.
The administration points to the depressed real estate market as justification for the Ferdinand project’s delay, but there’s no reason the city can’t pay for the Ferdinand building now through bonds, carry the interest for a short period, and then sell Court Square when market rebounds. There’s not much sense in having a AAA bond rating if you can’t put it to use when you need to.
Paul McMorrow is a staff writer for Banker and Tradesman. His column appears regularly in the Globe. 
