David Taber
FOREST HILLS—LAZ Parking, a national parking lot management company with roots in Boston, has purchased the Fitzgerald parking lot, Jeffrey Karp of LAZ told the Gazette last week.
The near 2-acre parking lot across from the Forest Hills T Station was formerly owned by FitzInn Parking Systems and was in foreclosure.
It was the only privately owned property considered during a multi-year community planning process for the area that ended last year. That process, the Forest Hills Improvement Initiative (FHII), resulted in Use and Design guidelines for six parcels, most of them owned by the MBTA. Only the two smallest parcels have since been picked up by developers. [See related article.]
LAZ plans to continue to manage the site, across the street from the Forest Hills T Station on the Forest Hills Cemetery side, as a parking lot, said Karp, a company co-founder and head of its Boston division.
Parking is the company’s “core competency,” he said. While LAZ has worked as a consultant on development projects involving parking, the company does not itself do development work, Karp said.
A bank auction of the property was originally scheduled for Jan. 28 and had been postponed at least twice before LAZ purchased the land in March.
According to documents from the Suffolk County Registry of Deeds, LAZ purchased the lot, along with a lot on Commercial Street in Boston and another in Medford, Mass., for around $6 million. LAZ is taking over mortgages FitzInn took out on the lots, and most of that pricetag is in assumed debt.
Karp said LAZ was founded in 1981 in Boston and Connecticut.