On Wednesday, March 19^th, CREW Boston’s Design & Development Group hosted members for a Hard Hat Tour of 421 Park Drive with Alexandria and Boston Children’s Hospital.
 
Back in 2021, in Boston’s Fenway area, Alexandria pioneered a new life science submarket with the creation of the Alexandria Center for Life Science – Fenway mega campus – consisting of three buildings; the renovated 401 Park Drive, the new 201 Brookline Ave, and the now being constructed, 421 Park Drive. This foundational campus, developed in partnership with Samuels & Associates, boasts a wealth of amenities with critical proximity to both Cambridge and the Longwood Medical Area.
 
In 2023, Boston Children’s Hospital purchased 268,000 RSF of 421 Park Drive. 421 Park Drive is a 13-story,  highly sustainable state-of-the-art laboratory development that has been designed to significantly enhance the foundational campus and surrounding neighborhood through the addition of new open space, direct connections to the MBTA Fenway station, bicycle and pedestrian paths, and retail destinations on the building's ground floor.
 
Alexandria with its Development Manager, Samuels & Associates, is overseeing the core and shell development with Boston Children’s Hospital and Northstar Project and Real Estate Services, BCH’s Owner’s Project Manager. Alexandria will operate the entire building and manage the more than 2 million RSF highly amenities life science mega campus. 421 Park Drive core and shell is expected to be substantially complete in 2026. 
 
During the tour led by Suffolk Construction, attendees were offered a sneak peek at the unfinished spaces of several floors in the building, including the rooftop mechanical penthouse, which would have offered some spectacular views if not for the dense fog that had rolled in just as we began the tour. It was very exciting to walk through the building mid-construction and to see first-hand the incredible amount of coordination that is needed to execute a project of this magnitude complexity on a dense urban site. 

Special thanks to Kerry Logue, Olivia Pedro, Katherine Kenney, John Townsend, Bret Edwards, Jared Brewer, Domenic DiCenso, John Rourke, Melissa Aureli, and David Figgins for providing the project overview and showing us around this impressive development!