A 145-room hotel straddling the Cambridge-Somerville line at McGrath Highway has all of the permissions to go forward, after Cambridge’s Board of Zoning Appeal voted Oct. 15 to grant special permits aligning with those given by Somerville in June.
The role played by hotel land in joining two paths for pedestrians and bicyclists is still in place; attempts by path advocates to get developers to take more responsibility for the project failed.
The revised, six-story Mariott Moxy Hotel is 145 rooms, down from the 199-room AC Hotel proposed in 2023 – though the first permits were in 2017. The project has been buffeted by Somerville zoning changes, the Covid pandemic and a plunging market for lab space, which undid an adjacent project that was supposed to be sharing a driveway and parking. That forced a redesign and shrank the plans.
“At least four of you have sat on previous cases. This property has the distinction of receiving not one but three special permits for this hotel use,” attorney Jim Rafferty told board members in reintroducing the project. “We’re now here for the fourth.”
The former Millers River and city line go through the proposed building. Of its full 62,646 square feet, 18,183 square feet of that is in Cambridge; there are five rooms on every floor where “you can go to bed in Somerville and wake up in Cambridge and never have left your room,” Rafferty said. (For the city approval process, the project is known as the Somerbridge Hotel.)
Behind the proposed building is where the final section of the yet-to-be-built Grand Junction path in Cambridge extends from Gold Star Mothers Park across O’Brien Highway to meet the Community Path in Somerville along MBTA green line railroad tracks. Ownership of the hotel has been working with path advocates for 10 years to provide an easement on the property for that link, said Rafferty and leaders of the Friends of the Community Path organization.
Most of the public comment received for the project was in support not just of the hotel property, but of the project’s role in providing the path connection, board chair Steven Ng said.
The developers have agreed to pay for the first 25 percent of design costs for the connecting ramp, up to $105,000, a level of funding agreed to and approved in Somerville. Path advocates hoped Cambridge would use its leverage as the final approver to get more – maybe full payment for the design work.
“There’s no funding identified for the 25 percent to the 100 percent design, and everybody really wants to see this get done – and of course, there’s no funding identified for the construction, but having the full design will allow that to happen much faster,” said Lynn Weissman, co-president and co-founder of Friends of the Community Path. “The sooner the ramp gets built, the sooner it can serve the hotel visitors and the guests and the community around it.”
Rafferty said the ask was impossible. “The project is not what it once was in terms of its scale,” he said, and the financial realities were now that anything beyond the current dollar commitment was “onerous” – but that the value of the land easement being given by developers was “nearly priceless.”
Board members said the demand exceeded its authority and that they were uncomfortable essentially exploding approvals granted in the their neighboring city on a project dragging toward its second decade of permitting.
“I was on special permit number three [and] I hope this time is the last time,” member Danial Hidalgo said. “I’m perfectly fine just matching Somerville.”
The hotel special permitting was approved unanimously.
