South Station Tower

After nearly three decades of stalled air-rights negotiations between developers, the MBTA, and Massport, Boston’s South Station finally got its tower. The 51-story, 678-foot mixed-use building from Hines opened in September 2025 above the live transit hub that serves Amtrak, the MBTA commuter rail, the Red Line, and the South Station Bus Terminal — a stack of office, condominium, and transit infrastructure that’s now the sixth-tallest building in the city.

The tower is the largest air-rights development built in Boston since the Prudential Center in the 1960s. It was first proposed in 2006, lost two prior developers to the 2008 financial crisis and the 2018 MEPA permitting reset, and finally broke ground in January 2020 with Hines as the master developer. Pelli Clarke & Partners (the firm that designed Petronas Towers and Salesforce Tower) handled architecture; Suffolk Construction self-performed concrete and managed the trade stack.

Project Scope

The building sits on a 1.2-acre footprint over the headhouse of South Station, with the tower core threaded through an enabling structure that lets train and bus operations continue uninterrupted underneath. Vertical loads transfer to deep caissons drilled into Boston Blue Clay, with mat foundations on the bus-terminal side that integrate with the existing 1989-era terminal slab.

The program splits the building’s 1.7 million gross square feet across three uses. The lower 16 floors are 680,000 square feet of Class A office space, anchored by Jones Day, FM Global, and Citadel. A 12-floor residential band carries 166 condominium homes under Ritz-Carlton Residences branding. The bottom two floors house a 50%-expanded South Station Bus Terminal with new gates and a redesigned passenger concourse co-designed by Pelli Clarke & Partners and the MBTA. A small retail layer along Atlantic Avenue reactivates a frontage that the original 1970s bus terminal had effectively closed off.

The tower used roughly 33,000 cubic yards of cast-in-place concrete and 7,500 tons of structural steel. The curtain wall, fabricated by Permasteelisa Group with high-performance triple-glazed units on the upper residential floors, totals about 280,000 square feet. The mechanical strategy uses district steam from Vicinity Energy for heating and a high-efficiency electric chilled-water plant for cooling, with separate vertical risers for the office and residential programs.

Why It Matters

South Station Tower is the building that finally proved Boston’s air-rights model works. The deal stack underneath the architecture is what makes it interesting: a 99-year ground lease from the MBTA, a development agreement that funded the bus-terminal expansion from project proceeds, and a Chapter 121A tax stabilization agreement that gave Hines predictability on the 30-year operating horizon. Several other air-rights parcels along the Massachusetts Turnpike and over the Back Bay station have stalled at similar inflection points for similar reasons. South Station’s closing template is now what those deals will reference.

It also re-knits a piece of the city. The original 1899 South Station headhouse, restored as part of the project, no longer sits in front of a single-story bus terminal that visually deadened the south end of downtown. The tower replaces that with a mixed-use stack tall enough to read as a continuation of the financial district skyline. For a transit station that handles roughly 35,000 daily passenger movements, that civic geometry matters more than the floor count.

Project Team & Details