BC High details plans for another addition to campus

Boston College High School is proposing a new wellness center, which is on the left in the rendering. The school’s existing gym is on the right. BC High image

Boston College High School, a private Catholic school serving 1,500 students, last week submitted plans to city officials for a wellness complex on its Morrissey Boulevard/Columbia Point campus that will be attached to the existing McNeice gym and linked to Cadigan Hall, which first opened in 2014 and spans 28,000 square feet.

The two-story addition will take up 42,000 square feet, with a new swimming pool, locker rooms, and weightlifting and wrestling areas. The outside of the addition will be made of brick and glass windows, with views of Morrissey Boulevard. The construction will result in the loss of a dozen parking spaces. Given its size, the project is subject to the city’s “small project review” process.

BC High, which moved from the South End to Columbia Point beginning in 1950, is also overhauling its football grandstand and undertaking substantial landscaping and signage improvements.

One of the goals of the project is to “develop a new face for BC High Athletics by enveloping the existing McNeice Gymnasium into the new Cadigan Wellness Complex building footprint,” noted the filing with the Boston Planning and Development Agency.

The new building is part of an overall $100 million multi-phase plan to update the
73-year-old campus. New trees – overall the landscaping will see a total of 92 new trees on the school property – will offer a screen on the north edge of the campus, where there is an access next to the location of the proposed Dorchester Field House, a joint project between the nonprofits Boys and Girls Clubs of Dorchester and the Martin Richard Foundation.

The Jesuit school’s upgrades come as Columbia Point and the Morrissey Boulevard corridor have projects in various stages of development. The $5 billion “Dorchester Bay City” project aims to bring millions of square feet of research and office space to the former Bayside Expo Center site and the Santander Bank property north of BC High.

UMass Boston, another BC High neighbor, has been a construction zone for much of the last 20 years, as the public research university remakes itself and attempts to sweep away the shoddy construction of 45 years ago that led to the campus’s dilapidated superstructure.

The construction manager for BC High’s project is the Quincy-based Lee Kennedy Co. Comments can be submitted at the following link: bostonplans.org/projects/development-projects/150-160-morrissey-boulevard.The period ends on March 12.


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