B8 Business The Boston Globe FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2019
to be here, in the building, part of
it all — but not necessarily in a
fixed seat.”
That’s a big part of the thinking
behind the 60,000 square feet of
space the Garden was able to add
as part of the massive Hub on
Causeway project next door. There
are expanded concourses with
huge bars and big-screen TVs;
roomier club areas, in various
price tiers, for those who might
want to entertain while they take
in a game; and food upgrades,
with more food-truck fare and
uBRUINS
Continued from Page B
“signature cocktails” to supple-
ment Garden staples like pizza
and Bud Light.
All of it is built around the idea
that the Garden, which hosts
roughly 200 events a year, can be
more than just a place where you
sit and watch sports.
“We want people to come ear-
ly,” Latimer said. “And we want
them to stay late.”
Of course, boosting “dwell
time,” as Latimer calls it, is also a
way to boost revenue. Food and
drink are key to a modern stadi-
um’s bottom line, and many sports
teams are experimenting with newways to capture concession reve-
nue, from the Red Sox’s ever-
more-elaborate bar areas at Fen-
way Park to the Golden State War-
riors, who last year sold passes for
$100 a month that let fans simply
hang out in the concourse during
games and buy $12 beers. The Raf-
ters Club is a higher-end take on
the same concept. For $1,600 a
year, fans can buy a membership,
allowing them to then buy “access
passes” to individual games.
And as half-owner of the broad-
er Hub on Causeway complex, Del-
aware North has even more ways
to turn a night at the arena into abig event. The street-level food
hall can host pregame noshing, for
instance. The concert venue will
hold before-and-after parties for
big shows at the Garden. And
Charlie Jacobs, the CEO of Dela-
ware North’s Boston Holdings, en-
visions fans heading to the enor-
mous new Banners sports bar justto soak in the game night buzz,
tickets or no.
“People come for that tribal ex-
perience of being at the game,” he
said. “Even if they’re not in the
building.”Tim Logan can be reached at
[email protected].New venues want sports fans
to come early, and leave late
A rendering
depicts rafter-
level seating
and club areas
on the 9th floor
of TD Garden,
part of the
arena’s
expansion.unlike many of its counterparts; in-
stead, it’s offering food and
drink that Bostonians hold dear,
said Ariel Gardner, the head of
marketing for Patina Group, a res-
taurant subsidiary of Delaware
North, which is codeveloping the
Hub on Causeway. Its slogan is
“Boston Eats Here.”
In addition to Sully’s and
Mike’s, Hub Hall will include an
outpost of Monica’s Mercato from
the North End, a Cusser’s Roast
Beef & Seafood stand from the Back
Bay’s Mooncusser Fish House, a
branch of the North Shore’s Sauce
Burger chain, and barbecue
from Andy Husbands’ Smoke Shop.
While Time Out Market is asso-
ciated with a global brand, “Hub
Hall is nothing without the brands
that we partner with,” said Don Bai-
ley, Hub Hall’s director of opera-
tions. The goal, he said, is “to create
something truly unique to Boston.”
When all 18 stalls are up and
running, Gardner said, they’ll pull
in travelers and event-goers all day
and into the night. At least five res-
taurants will serve breakfast during
the week, starting at 5:30 a.m., and
the hall will stay open an hour after
events end at TD Garden.
There was, of course, a time
when food courts were best known
for their uniformity: Visit any rest
stop or mall in America, and you
could probably find a Sbarro pizza
or a Panda Express.
But today’s younger restaurant-
goers want diversity and conve-
nience, and the same factors that
prompted the rise of the fast-casual
lunch boom have contributed to the
rise of the food hall craze, said Bob
Luz, president of the Massachusetts
Restaurant Association. “The food
hall is really the food court for the
new millennium,” Luz said.
And restaurateurs like them, he
said, because “they’re an interest-
ing business model in that it allows
restaurants to expand their foot-
print with limited labor.”
Luz is in the unusual position of
rooting for both the established eat-
eries and bars near the Garden that
have come to rely on game-day
crowds and for their new competi-
tors in the Causeway complex. In
addition to Hub Hall, they will in-
clude the 575-seat Banners Kitchen
& Tap restaurant, a 65-seat bar and
lounge in the ArcLight Cinema,
and Guy Fieri’s 60-seat Tequila
Cocina restaurant inside the Big
Night Live concert hall.
Luz is hopeful the arrival of
hundreds of new restaurant seats
won’t gut the neighborhood’s exist-
ing food businesses. At the same
time, he worries that the cyclical
nature of an entertainment center
— tables routinely empty before the
tip-off or the puck drop — will leave
it struggling to draw a steady year-
round crowd.
“The one question I have is, are
there enough people there who are
going to support it?” he asked. “I’m
just not 100 percent certain that
there’s enough there to really keep
these things up and running and
full.”
But for a business like Sully’s,
the allure of the Garden — and the
chance to join a quintessentially
Boston food hall — proved irresist-
ible. “Their pitch was: It’s all the
places that only locals would know,”
said Michelle Leone, a manager at
Sully’s. “To bring a little bit of
Southie to the Garden was a great
opportunity.”Janelle Nanos can be reached
at [email protected].uFOODHALL
Continued from Page BNewest food
hall to focus
on familiar
local fare
the enormous Hub on Causeway
complex, a $1.1 billion develop-
ment that rises above North Sta-
tion, where the old Boston Garden
once stood. Along with a roughly
60,000-square-foot expansion of
TD Garden, the project boasts a
38-story apartment tower and an
equally tall office building still un-
der construction, a food hall, a
movie theater, a European-style
boutique hotel, a giant sports bar,
and a 1,500-person concert venue
complete with a taco and tequila
joint headlined by the bleach-
tipped-hair celebrity chef Guy Fi-
eri.
Nearly all of it is set to open
this fall and winter, promising to
further transform this pocket of
the city, an area that — beyond the
1995 opening of what was then
the FleetCenter — was for decades
largely overlooked. Amid the
handsome brick buildings front-
ing on Causeway Street, the Hub
almost feels like a giant spaceship
that has landed in the neighbor-
hood. The question on many peo-
ple’s mind is: Does it come in
peace?
Knitting all of this newness in-
to a 19th-century neighborhood is
a delicate task, said Bryan Koop,
executive vice president at Boston
Properties, the developer that
partnered with the Garden’s own-
er, Delaware North, to build the
complex. From architectural
touches that play off of the adja-
cent facades to nods to the old
Garden’s sports lore, the designers
were careful to honor the site’s
past, Koop said.
“For a lot of Bostonians, it’s re-
ally hallowed ground,” he said.
“But it was also once an industrial
neighborhood. Causeway Street
was a dam. The Mill Pond was
about commerce. We wanted to
blend into that.”
Still, there’s no getting around
the fact the Hub’s scope is enor-
mous.
Two towers — they rank
among the taller buildings con-
structed in Boston in recent years
— rise from the base, which is it-
self a seven-story kaleidoscope of
restaurants, stores, and entertain-
ment venues. Thousands of peo-
ple will live and work there. Thou-
sands more will come for food and
events and more.
No doubt, it will bring a jolt of
energy to a neighborhood that’s
quiet but for game or concert
nights, said Kishore Varanasi, di-
rector of urban design at the ar-
chitecture firm CBT, which moved
to Canal Street almost 20 years
ago.
“This has gone from a really
difficult part of town to being
something special,” he said. “You
have this new high-end stuff, and
you still have this gritty, historic
architecture.”
Still, Varanasi said, there are
things the neighborhood could
use that the Hub on Causeway
can’t provide, like space for parks.
And he worries that rising
rents will push out small compa-
nies that have found a place in the
old brick buildings of Bulfinch Tri-
angle.
“How do they continue to sur-
vive here and provide the mix that
makes this such an interesting
place?” he said.
It’s a question the area’s estab-
lished restaurants and sports
bars, which have long relied on
TD Garden crowds, are also ask-
ing.
Jim Taggart, general manager
of the Fours, a sports bar, has
watched the neighborhood evolve
from a “really shady, dirty area”
under the old elevated train line to
one with modern luxury apart-
ments.
But the proximity of wealthy
neighbors hasn’t yet fattened his
uCAUSEWAY
Continued from Page B
coffers, he said. “I know there’s an
attempt to turn this back into a
neighborhood, but that hasn’t
happened,” Taggart said. For
many new residents, he said,
“neighborhood bars like this ar-
en’t really their place.”
Taggart is optimistic the Hub
on Causeway’s more everday ame-
nities, such as the grocery store,
will be “the things that make a
neighborhood a neighborhood.”
He believes his regulars won’t
defect, but he worries that hun-
dreds of additional seats in new
restaurants will eat away at his
profits. Anticipating that competi-
tion, Taggart has been looking to
bring in new revenue. There has
been an uptick in DoorDash deliv-
ery orders, and the Fours will soon
unveil new vegan options — in-
cluding the popular Impossible
Burger — in an effort to attract a
younger crowd.
Chris Muller, a professor at the
Boston University School of Hos-
pitality Administration, said Tag-
gart and other business owners in
the area have reason to be con-
cerned.
“There’s going to be a big suck-
ing sound, and that’s going to be
patrons moving across the street”
into the Hub on Causeway, he
said.
The combination of a massiveentertainment complex and a ma-
jor transit center means people
won’t feel a need to leave those
buildings, Muller said. He also be-
lieves the Hub on Causeway will
affect commerce in other parts of
the city.
“It’s going to take away from
the Seaport,” Muller predicted.
“You have an enormous amount
of people traveling through North
Station, and if the winter is really
severe this could be the entertain-
ment complex that takes over.”
Indeed, the North Station area
— close by downtown, the North
End and the West End, even
Charlestown and East Cambridge
— is situated to become a destina-
tion.
“The completion of the Big Dig
[in 2007] completely unlocked so
many opportunities,” said Kim
Sherman Stamler, president of
Related Beal, which built both the
Lovejoy Wharf complex and the
Beverly apartment building, not
far from the Hub on Causeway.
“There’s great infrastructure for
continued growth.”
That’s what Charlie Jacobs
sees, too. He’s the chief executive
of Delaware North’s Boston hold-
ings and the third generation of
his family to run the Bruins and
the Garden — the place is in his
blood. Jacobs is old enough to re-member when Causeway Street
sat in “the shadow of the Green
Line” and the Central Artery
sealed it off from the North End.
He’s looking forward to Cause-
way being a street that helps knits
the city together.
“We think people who live in
communities all around us will
come here,” he said. “That’s the
goal.”Tim Logan can be reached
at [email protected]. Janelle
Nanos can be reached
at [email protected].$1.1b complex is transforming North Station area
LANE TURNER/GLOBE STAFF
Counter-
clockwise from
top: The
Banners
Kitchen & Tap
restaurant is
taking shape at
the Hub on
Causeway,
along with the
terrace at the
citizenM hotel,
a new Star
Market, and
meeting rooms
for the hotel.DELAWARE NORTHTHEHUBONCAUSEWAY,BYTHENUMBERS60,000 square feetof new space at TD Garden
62 new “fixtures”in the bathrooms at TD Garden
1.9 million square feet of mixed-use retail, restaurants,
apartments, offices, and event space in the new complex
196 eventsat the TD Garden in 2018
510 feet to the topof the Hub’s office tower, which, when it
opens, will be the tallest office building built in Boston since
2002
18 restaurantswill occupy the HubHall food hall when it
opens this winter
39.5 feet:the size of the LED screen inside the Banners res-
taurant
575 seatsin the new Banners restaurant and sports bar
$1,600 for a membershipto the Rafters club in TD Garden
100 tequilaswill be at the bar at Guy Fieri’s new restaurant,
Tequila Cocina, inside the Big Night Live entertainment venue
15 movie screensat the new ArcLight movie theater
SOURCE: The Hub on CausewayPAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFFPAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFF PAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFF