The Boston Globe
The new owner of One Lincoln has poured money into high-end amenities.
A massage chair that can take you to zero G on your lunch break. Dyson hairdryers in the locker rooms and a tenants-only whiskey bar. A rooftop basketball and pickleball court in the middle of downtown Boston.
These are just some of the $100 million in amenities that building owner DivcoWest has installed at the 1.1 million-square-foot One Lincoln St. tower since acquiring it for $400 million at foreclosure auction this spring. The San Francisco-based real estate investment firm is hoping the upgrades will lure tenants to fill 730,000 square feet of vacant space at the Financial District tower.
One Lincoln for decades served as headquarters for financial services giant State Street Corp., until shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, when State Street announced plans to move across town to the One Congress tower near Government Center, leaving former owner Fortis Property Group with a huge hole to fill. In 2022, after the pandemic upended the office market, One Lincoln had a major win: Boston-based private equity firm HarbourVest committed to a 15-year lease for the tower’s top 11 floors, and Fortis closed on a $1 billion refinancing.
At the time, it was hard to know what the future of office would look like, said John M. Toomey Jr., HarbourVest’s CEO. HarbourVest has had its employees coming in three days a week, but starting in January will shift to giving employees 18 remote days a quarter. The company has nearly $147 billion in assets under management.
“The vision I had was, in every configuration of the future of work, there was a place that we were excited to come in every day, that we were proud of,” Toomey said. “I couldn’t tell you precisely when the world would return to more in-office, but what I knew was every picture of the future had something like this in it.”
As the private equity firm prepared to move in, HarbourVest’s name replaced State Street’s sign atop the 36-story tower — prominent on the city’s south-facing skyline — and Boston-based contractor Gilbane Building Co. tackled an interior buildout for the 900-person headquarters.
Fortis, however, never started upgrades it had planned to the building’s amenities, and struggled to pay down its $763 million mortgage on the property. Lenders forced a sale in March, and DivcoWest, developer of the Cambridge Crossing lab campus on the Cambridge, Boston, and Somerville borders and a lender to Fortis, scooped up the building.
DivcoWest launched into upgrades, replacing generators and other intensive mechanical equipment State Street had used to power data centers and trading floors with two stories worth of amenity space mid-building. Today, the 7th and 8th floors feature a game room with darts, a billiards room, and sports simulators, along with a full-size basketball and pickleball court outside. (The court is netted on all sides to prevent a rogue ball from escaping onto the street below.)
The upgrades often resemble a high-end hotel and spa rather than office space, with multiple massage rooms, a salon featuring Olaplex hair products, and two executive changing suites equipped with full shower and lounge zones to refresh after a long travel day.
“The goal of all of this is to elevate the workday,” Roopenian said.
If the $100 million in upgrades helps to lure more tenants, he wouldn’t object to that either.
