Boston officials tried to get Vornado to fill the Filene’s pit by issuing a torrent of threats and name-calling. The city threatened Vornado with an eminent domain taking and yanked Vornado’s development permits. At various times, Menino called the company scurrilous, greedy, and reprehensible. None of it worked.
For all the hot rhetoric Boston officials shot at Vornado, the developer moved forward at Filene’s on its own terms. Since Vornado first put the Filene’s block up for sale, the developer’s goal has been to hold on to a piece of Filene’s, minimize its losses, and keep the hope of a future payday alive. That’s exactly what its deal with Millennium does.
Vornado will keep its 50 percent stake at Filene’s, and if Millennium succeeds in building the iconic project its executives talked about last week, Vornado will be in line to reap a potentially significant windfall. Ending the standoff with City Hall also removes a potential hurdle between Vornado and a gold rush in the form of a casino at Suffolk Downs in East Boston.
■ The mayor really can work with people he hates.
There’s no way it was easy for Menino to announce a Filene’s deal that left Vornado with a sniff at a profit. The animosity between the mayor and Vornado is deep, and it’s personal. This is because the blight at Filene’s was not inevitable. Vornado stopped construction when other developers built into the teeth of a recession. When its construction financing collapsed, Vornado could have used its own substantial balance sheet to finance the Filene’s tower, as Boston Properties did with Atlantic Wharf. Menino rages against Vornado because the developers made a conscious decision to blight Boston’s downtown. Yet there was Menino, standing at a podium and crowing about a deal that’s about as good as Vornado could’ve hoped for.
