Boston College Details Building Uses for Latest Land Purchase from the Archdiocese

At the BRA's BC Task Force Meeting last night (June 19, 2007), Boston College officials described the land purchase of the remaining St. John's Seminary land (and all but one building).

Boston College will not file their Institutional Master Plan Notification Form (IMPNF) until late August or early September 2007, according to Thomas Keady, Jr., BC VP for Government and Community Affairs. The delay is due to the Archdiocese recently exercising their sale option on most of the remainder of the St. John's Seminary land; while this was expected to happen eventually, the timing appears to have been more rapid than anticipated. The sale is currently slated to be completed around late August, according to Jeanne Levesque of BC's Office of Government and Community Affairs.

In particular, BC will be purchasing Bishop Peterson Hall (but not St. John's Hall), which means that they are planning moving some uses around among buildings on the Brighton Campus. Here's a map from a previous post:

Here's a breakdown of the new uses for buildings on/around the Brighton Campus:

1. St. John's Hall: remain as property owned and operated by St. John's Seminary, although its form of ownership will be re-classified as confdominium unit(s). BC will own the land under and around St. John's Hall, while the Seminary will own the building itself. BC and the Seminary will jointly run a kitchen. St. John's Hall has four floors plus a basement level.
   
2. St. John's Seminary will receive an exclusive easement for parking and access to St. John's Hall. They currently have approximately 40 parking spaces; there was no indication of the number of spaces to be included in the deal.
3. Bishop Peterson Hall will convert to BC ownership and use for offices/classrooms of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology. There will be no residential uses for the building. These offices/classrooms for WJST were originally slated for St. Williams Hall (which BC already owns).
   
4. St. Williams Hall will now be used for academic, administrative, and/or business offices. It sounds like More Hall offices, for example, will now be moved to St. Williams Hall to free up the More Hall site for a new development.
5. St. John's Library will be used jointly between BC and the Seminary; WJST will relocate their library collection into this building.
6. Chancery will remain administative offices for Archdiocese for one year after BC purchases the property, prior to the Archdiocese's move to Braintree. BC's long-range plan shows that the Chancery will eventually be razed to make way for new buildings (e.g., academic) and their new access road into the campus. Ditto for the Creigh Library, as best as I could tell.
7. Parking garage (?) and parking uses will remain for the time being.

Jeanne Levesque also announced that they would have a master plan website go public on July 16, 2007. Tom Keady said that the IMPNF and IMP would be made available on their website. Gerald Autler of the BRA said that BC Task Force meeting minutes will eventually be made available on the BC website; he planned on sending them out electronically to "everyone on his list" in the meantime.

The meeting had a lot more activity going on, though... and that will have to wait for post #2. Unless the A-B TAB beats me to it with their teaser:

"We know BC task force meetings can generate a lot of anger, but last night’s apparently took the cake is word on the street –at least as far as the amount of yelling and screaming it generated. One person apparently even felt the need to call the cops. We’ll have a story later."