Somerville’s 1st Life Sciences Building Tops Out

101 South St., Boynton Yards. Image courtesy of DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners and Leggat McCall Properties

DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners, Leggat McCall Properties and Shawmut Design and Construction have topped off 101 South Street, a nine-story, 290,000-square-foot Class A mixed-use building that will be the first life sciences property in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Mass. It is the first of three life sciences buildings being constructed as part of the Boynton Yards development in Somerville and is on slated for completion next summer.

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The project broke ground in June 2019, aided by a $140 million first mortgage construction loan from Bank OZK arranged by JLL for DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners and Leggat McCall Properties.

The building’s state-of-the-art lab space is designed to achieve LEED Gold and WiredScore Platinum certifications and expected to include advanced wet and dry R&D labs and column-free, 35,000-square-foot floor plates for maximum flexibility. The asset will have first-floor retail, community art spaces, indoor bike storage and a four-level underground parking garage for 250 vehicles. The two-story lobby, which will also have retail space, will overlook public green areas and walking paths. With nearly 7 acres of land, Boynton Yards is slated to become a work-live-play neighborhood featuring more than 1 million square feet of commercial, residential, retail, public green, arts and performance spaces. The project is expected to bring 4,000 permanent jobs to the city of Somerville and establish it as another prominent life sciences hub in the region.

The development is located about 1 mile from Kendall Square/MIT in Cambridge, an epicenter of the biotech/life sciences industry, and will be less than a 5-minute walk from the new MBTA Green Line station at Union Square, also scheduled to open in 2021.

Building during COVID-19

The developers are particularly proud of the team’s ability to safely continue the project during the coronavirus pandemic. Shawmut deployed enhanced safety protocols to mitigate the risk of infectious disease spread across all its jobsites nationwide including the development and deployment of Shawmut Vitals. The custom technology platform allows team members to self-certify daily health screenings by scanning a job-specific QR code and completing a health survey. In addition to Shawmut, the general contractor on the project, other firms that are part of the development and construction team are architecture firms SGA and Hashim Sarkis Studios.