The infamous Roundhouse building near the Boston Medical Center will be converted back into a hotel within the next few months.
Ashok Patel, an owner of the property, confirmed to The Boston Guardian that the building has been undergoing renovations since last year with the goal of re-opening as a hotel.
“ We are renovating the interiors to get it reopened,” Patel said in a phone call Monday. “We’re close. Within the next couple months, we should be able to wrap up what’s left. It’s a long way done, a little bit of work left.”
The Roundhouse is a perfectly circular brick building located at 891 Massachusetts Avenue, just one intersection away from “Mass and Cass,” the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard widely considered to be the epicenter of Boston’s drug problem.
It
was first built in the late 1800s to house the city’s coal gas supply.
After Boston moved away from coal gas in the early 1900s, the building
stood more or less empty until, according to a 2018 article by Universal Hub, a
management company converted it into a hotel around 2001. It began as
the Roundhouse Suites. Later, it became a Best Western. Also, as
recently as 2024, Google Maps images show that the building bore the
Best Western logo. Patel said his company has owned it since 2014.
In
2022, the Roundhouse gained some level of infamy. After Mayor Michelle
Wu’s emergency clearing of the Mass and Cass encampments that January,
the city partnered with the nearby Boston Medical Center (BMC) to
provide 60 shelter beds for the homeless and urgent-care-style addiction
treatment in the building.
This produced mixed reactions from the residents of the neighborhood. Steve Fox, chair of the South End Forum, told WBUR in
2023 that the city’s management of the remnant crime and drug dealing
around the hotel-turned-recovery-center had been “horrible”.
“Somebody
who was staying at the Roundhouse would walk out that door and have a
choice in the morning. ‘Am I going to go see my drug dealer who is
sitting five feet away waiting for me to come out, or am I going to go
to my treatment program?’”
But
that program was shuttered in mid-2023, with both city and BMC
officials citing lack of funding, and the Roundhouse has sat empty
since.
Patel did not
cite a particular reason for renovations now and could not provide a
cost estimate. “We renovated before also in 2016 or 2017, and we went
through a series of renovations,” Patel said. “This is just another one
of those.”
According
to Sue Sullivan, the executive director of the Newmarket Business
Improvement District, the renovations are welcome, as the building had
been worn down while in use by the BMC. So far, the improvements appear
to have been mostly internal. Sullivan noted that she had seen a lot of
the building’s windows be replaced.
“It’s
definitely looking better than it did,” Sullivan said. “After it was a
homeless shelter, it was in bad shape, but they’ve been doing a ton of
work over the last six to eight months to bring it back to hotel
quality.”
