Paving the Way to an Urban Revival

100 Hood Park Drive at Hood Park
Charlestown, MA

Charlestown's Hood Park, located just off I-93 on Rutherford Avenue, has deep and historic roots reaching as far back as the 17th century. Once a mill pond-turned-industrial site that housed railroad tracks, a freight depot, and warehousing, the business park currently focuses on 9-to-5 office use and serves the nearby Sullivan Square area.

SMMA was commissioned for a revised master planning effort for Hood Park, which would transform it into an urban destination for the entire neighborhood of Charlestown, comprised of an attractive multi-use avenue enriched with bike paths, parks, and landscaped sidewalks.

The first phase of the master plan, the garage structure at 100 Hood Park Drive activates the rest of the Hood Park development by freeing up existing surface parking lots and enabling room for future growth and development. The garage doubles as workplace, housing offices, retail space and state-of-the-art labs, all of which will introduce new markets to the surrounding community.

Creating a Focal Point

Hood Park Drive is a newly developed street with the modern and imaginative 100 Hood Park Drive serving as the visual and practical focal point. The layout fosters a relationship between the parking garage, the adjacent powerhouse, and expanded open public space. The garage structure also contains ground-floor retail and restaurant space, as well as 50,000 sf of lab space on the second floor.

The building boasts significant technical flexibility. It places parking on the top five levels, as opposed to the lower levels in more typically-designed parking structures. By utilizing flat plates, the garage itself can accommodate a six-story expansion for additional lab and office space, depending on developing tenancy needs. To maximize available space for tenants, the garage floors can be infilled, or additional levels can be added above in the case of expansive growth.

100 Hood Park
  • Rendering of new tower addition above the parking garage at 100 Hood Park Drive in Charlestown

Above: Set to open in 2024, the SMMA-designed tower addition to 100 Hood Park Drive adds 154,700 square feet of new lab and office space atop the original building.

Rendering of 100 Hood Park Drive viewed from Stack Street

Sustainable and Resilient

Catamount Management, the owner of the property, is greatly committed to sustainability and ensuring that that newly developed Hood Park makes use of sustainable design techniques. Each aspect of the new garage design ensures an environmentally sustainable and operationally efficient outcome. 100 Hood Park Drive is designed to meet the Massachusetts Stretch Energy Code, which "emphasizes energy performance, as opposed to prescriptive requirements, [and] is designed to result in cost-effective construction that is more energy efficient than that built to the 'base' energy code."

The building features high efficiency HVAC systems, LED site lighting, Energy Star equipment, sub-metering of tenant space, and rooftop photovoltaic systems for on-site renewable energy generation. The building shell and core will be LEED Certified, and the garage portions of the project will be ParkSmart certified. To improve resiliency due to its proximity to the Mystic River, SMMA will raise the entire site three feet in anticipation of rising storm water levels and future potential flooding.

We are setting up Hood Park to become a community of its own as well as extension of the Charlestown neighborhood. 100 Hood Park Drive will enable the vision for the future of Hood Park and establish an active retail edge for the new street.

Mark Spaulding

Senior Vice President, SMMA