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CHESTO MEANS BUSINESS

Harvard sees strong interest from developers for its Allston land

Harvard University owns 130-plus acres of land across from the business school in Allston. David L Ryan/Globe Staff/File/Globe Staff

The race is on to win Harvard’s heart.

Developers have lined up to capitalize on what’s essentially the biggest blank slate in the city of Boston — the 130-plus acres of land across from Harvard Business School in Allston.

Initial applications were due on July 26 for teams interested in building out the first chunk, some 14 acres along Western Avenue, near Harvard’s soon-to-open science and engineering campus. Tom Glynn, chief executive of the Harvard Allston Land Co., said university officials are pleased with the level of interest. The precise number of bidders? Harvard’s not saying. The Harvard land company expects to winnow down the list of players in mid-August, before requiring them to submit detailed proposals by the end of September for Round 2. The winner would be chosen by the end of the year, although the project likely wouldn’t be done for another four.

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The initial plans call for 400,000 square feet of offices and labs, 250,000 square feet of apartments, and a 250,000 square-foot hotel and conference center. (Those figures include ground-floor retail and restaurant spaces.)

But the potential prize could be much larger for a savvy developer eyeing the long game. The winner of this round would get a foot in the door for subsequent opportunities: the adjacent 22 acres, and then roughly 100 acres further south, in what’s known as Beacon Park Yard.

With all that in mind, it was no surprise that developers packed an HBS classroom in early June for a meeting to hear about Harvard’s dream for its Allston holdings.

The buzz around this part of Lower Allston — now a tangle of vacant lots and highway ramps — is that it can become the next Kendall Square, a high-rent hotbed of innovation.

But here’s one crucial difference: the train. The Red Line stops in the middle of Kendall; it’s nearly one mile away from Harvard’s future Allston development.

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That’s partly why Harvard plans to kick in $8 million for a temporary train station on the tracks that run along the area’s southern border, and to contribute $50 million for a permanent “West Station” along the line.

But service at West Station will never come close to competing with the Red Line if the state doesn’t figure out how to significantly increase the frequency of commuter trains. Those discussions are starting to take place, though the talks are focused on the entire system, and not just this one commuter line. The projected costs are not cheap, to put it mildly.

Then there’s the Grand Junction right-of-way, a connection that could bring trains from West Station, over the Charles River to MIT and then over the river again to North Station. Business leaders, particularly those in Kendall Square, are pushing for this, in part to give daily commuters from the west a more direct route to Cambridge.

Looming over all of this is the realignment of the Mass. Pike, a $1 billion-plus highway project that will help Harvard unlock much of its Allston land for development.

The Baker administration made it clear that Lower Allston is a priority, by setting aside $250 million the “Allston Multimodal Project” in a transportation bond bill filed with the Legislature last week. Moving the Pike could take at least a decade. A full build-out of West Station and the Grand Junction? Maybe even longer.

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But Harvard is the very definition of patient money — it has been here for four centuries, after all. This competition for the 14 acres is just the opening act for what will likely be a drawn-out saga, one that would eventually result in nothing less than an entirely new neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.


Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com.