Boston Globe — "Developer Offers A Vision To Get Kenmore Square Moving"

“Robert Korff, who owns the Citizens Bank building at the junction of Commonwealth Avenue and Beacon Street, unveiled the bold plan Tuesday night at a community meeting.

Drawings show a flatiron-shaped tower — designed by prominent Chicago architecture firm Studio Gang — soaring nearly 300 feet above the square, with a spacious plaza at its base that replaces what is now largely asphalt. Most significantly, Korff wants to cut a new street behind the hotel that would connect Commonwealth Avenue and Beacon Street and allow much of the traffic that now passes through the five-way intersection to be diverted around it….Now Korff has responded with a grander idea, making the building taller but also locating it closer to the center of the square while steering Beacon Street into a sort of dogleg behind it. The result would shorten crosswalks, make room for protected bike lanes, and trade asphalt for almost a half-acre of new sidewalk. It also would put a striking triangular tower, which Korff hopes to fill with a four-star hotel, as a bookend on the square’s western edge.

The building would be the tallest in Kenmore Square itself, part of a westward expansion of the city’s so-called High Spine that includes a potential 305-foot-high tower above the Massachusetts Turnpike near Fenway Park and the 378-foot-tall Pierce Boston condo tower nearby at Boylston Street and Brookline Avenue.

‘This is truly going to be a transformational project,’ Korff said. ‘It will tie the whole square together.'”

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