Boston Conservatory will rebuild a former warehouse at 132 Ipswich St. into dance, music and theater studios, according to the Institutional Master Plan the school submitted to the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
“Boston Conservatory’s proposed project . . . would replace an underutilized one-story industrial building with an attractive new addition to the streetscape and bring a new pedestrian presence to the area,” said Boston Redevelopment Authority spokeswoman Melina Schuler in an email.
The proposal is expected to revitalize the Fenway area and the Conservatory, university officials said.
The Conservatory requires specifically appropriated classrooms, studios and performance spaces for its curriculum. The new building would include those types of necessary spaces, said Boston Conservatory President Richard Ortner in a press release about the project.
“This building project will allow us to address our current needs while making provisions for future possibilities, strengthening our presence in the Fenway community and breathing new life into an area that has long been underutilized,” he said.
The school purchased the property for about $5.1 million, using a framework of tax-exempt bonds and debt structures provided by MassDevelopment, First Republic Bank and Zions Bank, according to the release.
Boston Conservatory sophomore Rory Kitchen said in an email she did not know much about the project, except that it was costly.
“I think it’s great that [Boston Conservatory] is expanding. We can always use more space,” Kitchen said. “It will definitely be put to good use.”
The Conservatory has planned “extensive neighborhood outreach” to ensure that establishments already in the area, such as Jillian’s Boston and The Lansdowne Pub, understand the impact the new building will have on the area, Ortner said in the release.
“In the Fenway area, any influx of new people would be a positive influence for business around here,” saidMichael Scottberg, assistant general manager at La Verdad, a Mexican restaurant just down the road from the site.
Business in the area fluctuates with the seasons, he said.
“When we have the Red Sox in town it’s a lot busier,” Scottberg said, “but when they’re not in town it tends to decline a little bit, so just that added amount of students around in the area . . . would be a bonus.”
Scottberg said the only negative effect of an influx of students would be a potential increase in the number of underage students trying to drink illegally, but it would not be anything the restaurant cannot handle.
He said underage drinking is “going to happen either way – we already deal with a large amount of it, so I don’t think there’s going to be a large amount added to it for the weekends.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
