Curse, continued
It is one of those maddening "only in Boston" moments we know all too well: A developer wants to build a school to make his megaproject more appealing, and the mayor turns it into class warfare.
This is a school we're talking about, and Tom Menino is not happy -- again. This is not just any school that John Hynes, president of Gale International, is talking about, but a private international school that could be a lure for the kind of global companies and executives that Hynes hopes his South Boston development will attract.
Hynes, the charismatic, sometimes tone-deaf grandson of a former mayor of Boston, will be at City Hall today, pitching his plans to transform 23 acres of mostly parking lots into a $2.5 billion project with 6.5 million square feet of offices, housing, hotels, and interesting public spaces. With no real waterfront of his own, Hynes, like Frank McCourt before him, is talking about building a new Back Bay.
But it is the private school that has Menino's goat.
"It will be only for the rich. I have real concern for that," the mayor says. "Let him build a public school."
In an effort to attract companies and families to his Seaport Square, Hynes wants to finance and build a private school, kindergarten through 12th grade, for 1,500 kids that will focus on language and science. Buy a condo, or rent an apartment, in his 2,500-unit project and have priority for a spot in the school -- if you can pay the tuition.
The companies that call Seaport Square home will also have priority for their employees. The concept is modeled on the two schools Gale is building as part of New Songdo City in South Korea, a $25 billion project grandly billed as "the Hong Kong of the 21st century."
But Hynes got himself in trouble, as he is sometimes apt to do, when he stated the obvious last week in a downtown meeting of the real estate community. He had the audacity to say that people sometimes move to the suburbs for the schools.
"Unfortunately, 200 to 300 young families leave the city annually because they don't want to send their kids to private school, can't get into the public school of choice, or don't want their 7-year-old spending two hours traveling to a private school, so they move to the suburbs," Banker & Tradesman reporter Thomas Grillo quoted Hynes saying.
The mayor, of course, sees that as dissing the public schools. "He has never been in a Boston public school," Menino told me yesterday.
Hynes, who lives in the Back Bay, replies that he will make about 10 percent of the school's spots available free to Boston students. He calls the international school a "great differentiator" for his project and for Boston itself. "We think it is going to be highly sought after," he says.
And so it goes. Boston is a big city, or at least is supposed to be. Good schools, public and private, are essential to a community's quality of life. If we are going to attract global companies to Boston, amenities like an international school are just what those families will want. And plenty of Boston area families will be interested, too. Build it, and they will come. Or so we hope.
This is cursed land, this barren McCourt property. Will the curse never end?
. . .
Neighborhood news: I'm on WRKO-AM every morning with former House Speaker Tom Finneran. Giving Finneran a cohost was a good idea; WRKO was just considering the wrong rogue as a partner. Bad idea: former Don Imus sidekick Bernard McGuirk. Much better idea: convicted former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci, who used to have his own talk show and has lined up a job at the luxury Beacon Hill hotel Fifteen Beacon. What would Howie say?
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902. 
