Donald Chiofaro

Donald J. Chiofaro is a Boston commercial real estate developer, not a venture or seed-stage investor — a point worth flagging given the stub data, which appears to misclassify him. He is a Harvard University graduate (1968), where he was a football linebacker, and earned his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1972. He began his real estate career at the prominent Boston firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, where he rose to Senior Vice President and, over roughly eight years, developed more than 11 million square feet of real estate across some 16 states.

In 1980 Chiofaro left to co-found The Chiofaro Company (with partner Ted Oatis), which he leads as President. The firm's defining achievement is International Place, a 1.8-million-square-foot, two-tower (46- and 35-story) office and retail complex on Boston's downtown waterfront along the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway. Undertaken in 1981 as a then-audacious bid to build Boston's largest office complex, it involved a roughly twelve-year marathon of negotiations with an estimated 150 community groups and government agencies. It opened in 1987 and remains one of the city's premier office addresses.

Chiofaro built a reputation as one of Boston's most colorful and combative developers — famously arriving at a City Hall meeting in his old Harvard football jersey and imploding a parking garage on Super Bowl Sunday 1985 to clear the International Place site (turning the implosion into a TV commercial). Beyond International Place, the firm's portfolio has included the Westborough Technology Park (~600,000 sq ft), the Nashoba Corporate Center in Westford (a 100-acre office/R&D campus), a 160,000-sq-ft facility for New England Biolabs, and build-to-suit projects for tenants such as Lucent Technologies, General Electric, and Bytex.

Since 2007, much of Chiofaro's public profile has centered on his purchase of the Boston Harbor Garage (near the New England Aquarium) for $153 million, backed by Prudential, and his long, contentious campaign to replace it with a signature waterfront tower — a fight that pitted him against the late Mayor Thomas Menino and successive city and state permitting processes. Notably, he had not completed a new Boston building since International Place opened in 1987.

• Invests as a development principal in large-scale, first-class ("trophy") commercial real estate in Greater Boston, not as a financial backer of operating startups.
• Focus on office, mixed-use, residential, retail, and R&D/lab assets, with a preference for landmark, skyline-defining projects on prime downtown and waterfront sites.
• Willing to take on long-horizon, high-friction entitlement fights — the Harbor Garage saga has run well over a decade — betting that premier locations justify years of permitting battles.
• Emphasizes sustainability and resilience in current work: the proposed Pinnacle at Central Wharf targets LEED Gold and incorporates climate-resiliency, energy, water, and materials strategies, plus ~28,000 sq ft of new public open space (~50% of the site) and Harborwalk improvements.