Businesses reopened last week to a nearly empty marketplace and a pile of past-due rent bills. To save the local character of one of Boston's landmarks, renters will need help.
Faneuil Hall Marketplace “reopened” last week, but in a different city than the one it has helped to define since 1976.
Businesses were open, but customers were few. That’s what happens in a tourist-driven destination in the days of coronavirus — a time of little travel, limited tourism, and lingering fear of public spaces.
But the landlord — New York-based Ashkenazy Acquisition Company — still wants its money. That has set the stage for an increasingly intense battle between the real estate giant that controls the property, the city agency that owns it, and the merchants fighting to stay afloat.
I wrote in April that merchants were protesting demands that they pay rent on shuttered businesses, which could easily have forced them under. Under pressure from Mayor Marty Walsh, the developer quickly backed down and agreed to defer April and May rent payments to 2021.
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Here’s the problem: Even though the stores and shops are back, the customers are not. And no one knows when the marketplace will return to anything like normal.
“Normal? I’d say give us at least a year, or a year and a half,” said Sara Youngelson, who owns three shops in the marketplace. “It’s going to be very hard to say things are normal until a vaccine is out.”
The developer has agreed to a set of half-hearted rent deferments. But the Boston Planning and Development Agency, which owns Faneuil Hall Marketplace, rightly maintains that tenants need more help to survive, and that the developer is insensitive to the marketplace’s importance to Boston.
Brian Golden, director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency, said the developer is shirking its responsibility.
“You knew you were taking on a historically significant property that in many ways is the beating heart of retail in downtown Boston and a place that occupies a place in our sense of ourselves as a city,” Golden said, speaking of the landlord. “There is a moral obligation to Boston and to those tenants who make it a special place, and not just Anymall, USA.”
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To say Ashkenazy has a sweetheart deal is an understatement: It holds a 99-year lease on the property, and makes a token rent payment of $10 a year. It also makes payment to the city in lieu of taxes, though merchants are quick to point out that the money for those payments comes from their rent.
The deal is a relic of its time. When Faneuil Hall was revitalized in the 1970s, urban malls had been in a long decline. To entice a developer to this uncertain venture, the city gave a lot away.
But in exchange, supporting small local businesses was also supposed to be a priority. This dispute is especially painful, because Ashkenazy is threatening the very qualities that make Faneuil Hall what it is. Some 70 percent of the businesses in the marketplace are local.
So far, Ashkenazy has refused to budge. An executive for the company wrote to Golden in June declaring, basically, that the company has done enough. A spokesman for Ashkenazy told me the company had nothing further to add.
Here’s what the tenants say they need: first, a much longer period to repay rents for the period with no money coming in. (The BPDA is giving its tenants in the Marine Industrial Park up to five years to pay their rent that has fallen behind.)
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They say they returned to buildings with lesser custodial and other services than they left. That should be fixed, immediately.
They also want an opportunity to sit down with their landlords and talk through how to resolve their financial issues in ways that don’t threaten their survival. Surely a $4 billion company operating a rent-free facility owes them that.
A marketplace full of vacancies isn’t good for anybody.
“They’re in a hole, too,” Youngelson said of Ashkenazy, generously. “All their properties have been closed. But work with us.”
In this battle between small merchants and a giant developer, it isn’t hard to see who has more ability to give. Boston has been good to Ashkenazy. Now it is time to help the people who make their property great.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at adrian.walker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Adrian_Walker.
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Faneuil Hall merchants open for business, but still need help to stay afloat - The Boston Globe
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