A New Era for Industry
How the Hybrid Model Is the Future of Work
The hotel at the corner of Arlington and Newbury streets in Boston—overlooking the waterways and verdant landscape of the Public Garden—has a rich history. Opening in 1927 as the first Ritz-Carlton in the country, it has long presented an element of luxury to tourists venturing off the Freedom Trail and passersby clasping shopping bags collected from the chic boutiques freckling adjacent Newbury Street.
In a town filled with historic buildings, this hotel has become a mainstay, an opulent high-rise in one of Boston’s most trafficked areas. Sharon Jozokos was aware of the building’s importance when new owners took it over and rechristened it The Newbury Boston, contracting her company, Columbia, to completely renovate the building.
As Columbia’s vice president of healthcare, Jozokos, AET ’92, CMC ’93, oversaw work on the Oligo Synthesis and Ballroom project at MassBiologics and the Lahey Hospital & Medical Center COVID-19 testing lab in 2020. She was also privy to The Newbury Boston project undertaken by her colleagues, which called for a gut renovation, including infrastructure upgrades to bring all life-safety systems up to code, new construction of a glass enclosure for a rooftop restaurant, and significant interior expansion to create larger rooms and open spaces.
Work began in late 2019. And then the COVID-19 pandemic struck.