Protest spurs city to order Gaiety Theatre work halted

Boston's Inspectional Services Department yesterday ordered a construction crew to stop work at the defunct Gaiety Theatre after preservationists claimed the developer was using an asbestos-removal permit as a backdoor ploy to tear down the theater and make way for a apartment tower near Chinatown.

The developer, Kensington Investment Co., declined to comment.

John Dorsey, an assistant commissioner at Inspectional Services, said work will stop at the project while the department determines whether Kensington needs additional permits. He declined to say how long that might take. One scenario is that additional permits could be quickly issued, he said; another is that the department could require Kensington to apply for a demolition permit. Dorsey said the department ordered work to stop on the Gaiety in response to complaints from Gaiety Theatre Friends, a group dedicated to saving the theater.

At the Gaiety building, workers have removed windows and material from the roof, exposing the interior to the elements, said Shirley Kressel, a neighborhood activist who has joined several city councilors in a lawsuit that aims to stop Kensington. Such work is outside the parameters of Kensington's asbestos-removal permit, Kressel claimed, and leaving the Gaiety's interior open to rain will cause so much deterioration that Kensington could later argue that the theater needs to be demolished for safety reasons.

At the corner of Washington and La Grange streets, Kensington proposes an apartment tower that would be about 290 feet high with 346 rental apartments, most of them luxury units. The project has been approved by the Boston Redevelopment Authority and the city's zoning commission. Earlier, the Boston Landmarks Commission declined to grant landmark status to the Gaiety, which was built in 1908 and, according to Kensington, hasn't been used as a theater in nearly 20 years.

But before construction can begin, Kensington needs demolition permits from the city and the state to tear down buildings on the site.

The site is in a neighborhood where building heights are generally limited to 155 feet for projects smaller than an acre. Developers can sometimes negotiate an exception to the height limit if the project's footprint is one acre or more. To reach that acre threshold, Kensington stretched the project's boundaries to include city sidewalks and streets.

That action prompted a coalition of city councilors and neighborhood activists that included Kressel to file a lawsuit against the city's zoning commission in state Land Court. The suit alleges that the commission violated regulations when it allowed Kensington to define its size in a way that exempted it from height restrictions.

That suit is still pending, one of the plaintiffs, City Councilor Maura Hennigan, said yesterday.

As for the Glass Slipper, which is also on the site that Kensington plans for its apartment building, the BRA has said it will try to take it by eminent domain if Kensington can't negotiate a sale with club owners.

Chris Reidy can be reached at reidy@globe.com.