Jan. 3, 2003 - When the new Hotel Commonwealth opens in Kenmore Square in two months, it will live in two worlds. 
 

Its semi-ornate French Second Empire architecture will recall a rich era when stately hotels shared space with residences along the outer reaches of Boston's Commonwealth Avenue.  But its extensive internal network of communications gear, providing wireless Web access to guests anywhere within the six floors -- even under the awnings on the sidewalk bistro -- will put it on the edge of the future.

Hotel Commonwealth 650 Beacon St Boston, Massachusetts

Besides embracing both tradition and change, says developer Frank Keefe, a partner with Great Bays Holdings and a former Massachusetts secretary of administration and finance, Hotel Commonwealth will accomplish something yet more difficult: It will launch an overdue cleanup and renewal of Kenmore Square, a crossroads that has slowly fallen into seediness in the decades since the 1920s, when it was known as Governor's Square. 

Nearby Boston University owned eight of the 12 adjoining buildings on the south side of Commonwealth at Kenmore Street, backing up to the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension, that were assembled to make room for a modern four-star, 150-room hotel. 

"They worked for 30 years to revitalize Kenmore Square," Keefe said of BU officials, who joined Keefe and his two partners, Terrence I. Guiney and Dennis Callaghan, as limited partners to develop a hotel that would attract parents of students and other campus visitors. 

Guiney, a neighbor of Keefe's in Dorchester, developed hotels for the Sheraton Corp. for 10 years. Callaghan refurbished the Equinox, a historic hotel in Manchester, Vt. 

Not everyone will be content to see the downscale flavor of Kenmore Square disappear. 

Hotel Commonwealth displaced not only the International House of Pancakes but also the Rat, which closed in 1997 after a 23-year run as one of Boston's best-known music clubs. You were likely to need a hearing aid and a bath when you left there in the early hours after a show, but groups as well known as the Police and the Runaways -- and as obscure as Buzzkill and Unnatural Axe -- have lost a friendly venue. 

Pam Beale, co-owner of Cornwall's restaurant, across the square from the hotel, thinks it's a big improvement. "It's really the thing that will knit the community back together," Beale said. 

BU executive vice president Joseph P. Mercurio said universities that invest in their neighborhoods get along better in general than those that don't. "This has been an effort to bring some urban renewal to an area adjacent to our urban campus," said Mercurio, describing how the university bought buildings to keep them from deteriorating. 

Great Bays Holdings' original plan was to gut the existing five-story buildings, retain the facades, and "bookend" the old fronts with new construction. But the city didn't like that plan. The buildings were not as valuable as, for example, the old Kenmore Hotel to the east, now Kenmore Abbey residences. So most of the block was demolished. 

Two neighboring buidings have recently been fixed up, even as Hotel Commonwealth -- several months behind schedule -- has yet to open its doors. "The hotel is already having a tremendously positive effect on the neighborhood," Keefe said. 

But nothing compared with the changes that are to follow the Commonwealth's opening. 

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and state have set aside $21 million for an end-to-end makeover of Kenmore Square's streetscape. MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said a contract to eliminate the brick bus shelter and replace it with a dramatic cantilevered glass structure will be advertised this spring. The new bus facility is part of a squarewide redesign by Frank DiMella of DiMella Shaffer Associates Inc. of Boston. 

By the end of 2004, Kenmore Square will feature realigned curbs, brick sidewalks, and gaslight-style lights like the ones that lit the way a century ago for patrons of the old Somerset Hotel, on the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Charlesgate East, or the old Braemore, across the Muddy River on Charlesgate East. (The Somerset and Braemore are both now condominiums.) 

The hotel's architect, Kevin Schopfer of Ahearn Schopfer & Associates of Boston, employed the Mansard-roofed style popular in France during the late-19th century reign of Napoleon III, which soon made its way to the eastern United States. Hotel Commonwealth's facade is somewhat less detailed than its predecessors, the predominant hue of the modern precast panels brighter than the exterior of its antecedents. 

The 150 luxury rooms on the upper floors are situated above a first-floor lobby -- raised a half-floor from street level -- and 25,000 square feet of retail space, plus seven meeting rooms. There will be two restaurants, which seem to animate the developers' conversation more than any other element of their project. 

"A five-star restaurant in a four-star hotel" is the way one of them described a 900-square-foot space, with 18-foot-high windows, at the corner of Kenmore and Commonwealth. To be called Great Bay, it is the third Boston restaurant of chef Michael Schlow, who owns Radius near South Station and recently opened Via Matta at Park Square. The restaurant interior is being designed by David Manfredi of Elkus/Manfredi Architects Ltd. of Boston. 

Keefe said the intended 2002 opening didn't happen because "hotels are the most complex kind of development. You're picking toilets. You disagree about which mirrors. 

"We're overly optimistic on all sides." 

Likewise, trying to lease upscale space in a downturned economy has been a challenge. Keefe said about three-fifths of the retail space is signed for, including a flower and wine vendor, a Century Bank branch, and Commonwealth Books, a seller of antique volumes. 

At one point last fall Keefe thought it was 100 percent leased, he said, but some prospective tenants fell away. "We're in detailed conversations with about 12 other prospects," he said. 

A person close to the negotiations, who asked not to be identified, said that Schlow and his partner, Christopher Myers, are seriously considering owning and operating not only Great Bay but also the second restaurant, a French-style bistro along the Commonwealth Avenue face of the building. 
 

Perhaps the biggest news announced by the development team so far has been that Timothy P. Kirwan will be managing director. Kirwan opened the Westin Hotel in Providence in 1994. Before that, he managed the new Bostonian Hotel in Boston, opened the Hyatt Regency Cambridge in 1976, and oversaw the reopening of the Copley Plaza Hotel in 1972.  "We can't wait to get it open," Kirwan said this week. "We're actually sold out for graduation. We've started to book '04."  BU is the closest but is only one source of patrons the hotel owners believe are underserved by neighborhood hotels. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Longwood Medical and Academic Area, Northeastern University, the Fenway cultural institutions -- "It's all our market, we've got it to ourselves," said Keefe.

Timothy P. Kirwan is a 27-year veteran of the hotel and restaurant industry. Mr. Kirwan was responsible for opening and managing the award winning Westin Providence.  He is well known in Boston for opening and managing the Bostonian Hotel, through the eighties. Mr. Kirwan began his hospitality career, as Manager of The Last Hurrah at the Parker House Hotel in Boston. He went on to the Copley Plaza Hotel, where he was Assistant Food and Beverage Director, opening the acclaimed Copley's Restaurant.  Over the years Mr. Kirwan has worked with Hyatt hotels, independent luxury hotels in the USVI, and Greenwich, CT, as well as President of Signature Concepts International. In  addition he partnered with Brauer Management to develop and manage hotels and luxury residences in New England.

The phone system itself is the first of its kind in the Northeast. 

With electronic infrastructure by the French company Alcatel and telephones with visual displays made by Woburn-based Pingtel, hotel guests will have information on weather, airlines, and Red Sox tickets, among other things, at a button's touch. A cordless extension phone in each room will function anywhere in the hotel. 

But the communications piece that is most advanced is a free wireless connection to the Web through fast-developing Wi-Fi technology on any Palm-like device or laptop computer equipped with a receiver card. 

"This is one of the most heavily `wired-capable' hotels I've ever seen," said Stewart B. Randall, president of Communications Design Associates Inc. of Norwood, who is advising the developers on communications. 

With public spaces increasingly friendly to wireless devices, Randall said BU students -- if not yet as many parents -- expect to be able to send and receive e-mail or tap in a Web site from a cafe or hotel lobby. 

Employing BU's huge pipeline to the Net, a Hotel Commonwealth guest will have have Web access three times as fast as with a standard home cable modem connection. 

On the other hand, can a technologically challenged hotel guest figure it out? Guest-Tek of Alberta, Canada, has been hired to coordinate the communications systems and make sure patrons aren't overwhelmed. 

"You could ignore all the other stuff, pick up the phone, and dial the phone number," said Randall. "It's a real phone." 

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