36-Story Tower is Completed

BOSTON- The Gale Co. has completed the development of One Lincoln St., a 36-story, one million sf office tower. The $350 million project started in April 2000 and was, at the time, the largest speculative office tower to be built in the country in ten years. In 2001, State Street Corp. signed a long-term lease for the entire tower. The deal represented the largest single transaction ever recorded in the city.

The building has been dubbed State Street Financial Center and he Gale Co., a Florham Park, NJ-based company, will assume all property management responsibilities for the facility and relocate its Boston offices to the building.

The project was originally approved in 1990, and was to be the first downtown office building developed through the city’s Parcel-to-Parcel Linkage Program, which included the investment and participation of a group of city-designated local minority partners, Columbia Plaza Associates. Due to the downturn in the real estate market in the early 1990s, the project was put on hold.

In the mid-1990s the market recovered as the city’s vacancy rate dropped from 20% in 1992 to under 3% in October 1999. The Gale Co., backed by Morgan Stanley Real Estate Funds and the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio, entered into a development joint venture with Columbia Plaza Associates. The partnership was granted a six-month designation to redevelop necessary plans and begin construction.

The building is located on a 80,000 sf site bordered by Lincoln, Bedford, Kingston, and Essex Streets, one block from South Station.