The South Boston Seaport district is making progress. It’s not entirely a blank slate. The Fort Point Channel area occupies one edge, offering artists’ lofts, residential condominiums, offices, restaurants, some shops, the Children’s Museum and the quirky Boston Fire Museum. The ICA contributes to the mix, even if it still stands like a scarecrow in a cut cornfield.
The Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and the World Trade Center have sparked office and hotel development. Shops and restaurants are filling in some of the spaces. The Moakley Courthouse anchors one edge of the harbor. Maritime uses, remarkably, are still present. Babson College has hinted it might start a downtown satellite campus there.
Five private projects—Waterside Place, Fan Pier, Seaport Square, Harborside and Liberty Wharf—have recently been approved, started construction or are almost finished.
Seaport Square’s web site boasts that it is a city of the 21st century, and the same can be said of the other developments. Some of the plans look good. But others are concerning. What might a 21st-century city be missing? Would you want to live there? Can the district foster happy lives?
Let’s take the good stuff first. Much of the planning for these 1,000 acres that lie between the Fort Point Channel and the Reserved Channel has been excellent—short blocks in mostly a grid, a range of street widths designed to carry different loads of traffic, a copious amount of green space, streets that lead to good views, a clean harbor, high tech utilities, green design, innovation centers to grow new businesses, an incipient Silver Line. The individual developments aren’t isolated, but blend into one another as they should. The rustic Barking Crab restaurant stays.
A few factors, though, make us wonder what planners and developers envision as a 21st-century life. So far no plans call for schools, a community health center, post offices, a Y, baseball fields, a soccer pitch, public tennis courts, a skating rink or libraries—public realms as important as green spaces where you sit and enjoy fountains. There is a plan for an “active” space, the use of which hasn’t been determined. One development has promoted a supermarket and another plans a small church that replaces the funky Our Lady of Good Voyage chapel. The architecture is all of a kind, and that isn’t necessarily bad, but the developers’ drawings show buildings that are blocky and squat, with each set in its own block. Will the district end up looking like Crystal City near Washington D.C.?
Rich McGinnis, the BRA’s planner in the district, said no. Crystal City has superblocks and is designed to keep people inside. Seaport offers more to bikers and pedestrians, encouraging them with good sidewalks and squares to enjoy the fresh air. Seaport residents will be able walk to work in either their own neighborhood or the Financial District. Water taxis provide a 10-minute ride to the airport. Buildings are a mix of heights and uses. McGinnis pointed to the access to the water and the port-related uses as imparting a real sense of place to the area.
All the developments encourage ground floor transparency and activity with shops and restaurants. These are appealing, but 21st-century people’s lives will be thin if they can only dine and shop. I got particularly worried when Fan Pier’s website touted Morton’s Steakhouse and Starbucks Coffee as amenities. Don’t we have higher aspirations for our city than eating and buying stuff? McGinnis pointed out there is ample space designated for civic and cultural uses. But so far those uses are undefined.
Morton’s and Starbucks worried me on another front. Is it a given that a 21st century city can succeed only with national chains, not local businesses?
One thing that does not exist in this version of the 21st century city are small parcels where individuals could build single family houses or small apartment buildings, much as the Back Bay was developed in the 19th century. McGinnis said the city owns none of the land, so it can’t impose that requirement, and it wants more density. Developers say they can’t make money on such a plan, even though one 1970s developer did so on Union Wharf.
The Seaport emphasizes density, a key 21st-century tenet, since people finally realized that the more people there are the quicker goods and services will arrive and the longer they will stay. So we’re left with mid-rises of varying heights, but little contrast. There is no low development because of financial considerations and no high-rise because of the proximity of the airport.
Maybe this is all okay. The Back Bay is pleasant because of its uniformity. But the Back Bay’s beauty is enhanced by the contrast—the river on one side, the high-rise commercial city on the other. Without these two confining elements, the Back Bay’s unique residential architecture wouldn’t stand out as much.
The developers will clean the streets and parks so residents will have few complaints about the usual Boston filth. Now that we can’t raise taxes, I guess we’ve permanently turned over what used to be community responsibilities to private entities. My nostalgia for a time when community members paid for the public realm might be silly. The new version might work forever; I can’t say.
Since the build-out for these projects covers at least a decade, most buildings have not been designed. It isn’t clear if the living spaces will be large enough for families with children. I hope the BRA rides herd on this matter because it would be sad if this neighborhood became an old folks’ home enlivened only by 20-and 30-some metro-sexuals. So far, the only thing we’ll see them doing is working, shopping and eating.
“So far no plans call for schools, a community health center, post offices, a Y, baseball fields, a soccer pitch, public tennis courts, a skating rink or libraries—public realms as important as green spaces where you sit and enjoy fountains…”
In a city gridding for a battle to bite the bullet and close multiple schools, you want a new school built? Baseball fields? Plural? Kids don’t play baseball today – I drive by baseball fields every day, and the only time I see them used is what a league is playing. The vast majority of the year, they sit empty – dead space. A soccer pitch? Who’s going ot use it? See baseball, above.
You’re building an imaginary community in your mind. Instead of being Master Social Engineer, how about letting people decide for themselves what they want, the way the rest of the city was built. There are playgrounds because local people demanded them. There are libraries – some soon to be closed – because there was sufficient population density to support them.
I recommend that Sim City thing – you can express your social creativity and not do any damage.
Karen:
Great comments. I agree with your points about the relative lack of amenities and support for 360-degree living. That being said, as a Bay Area native who is now running a company in the Seaport Innovation District (Buzzient), I see a strong parallel with the South of Market area of San Francisco.
In 1993, SOMA had many of the same residential service gaps that you mention; it’s taken 17 years, but now SOMA is one of the most livable and walkable parts of SF. The similarities with SF are much stronger than Crystal City; proximity to downtown, airport, convention center, etc. I think this is the real model that we should look towards.
At Buzzient, we believed in this vision so much that we chose to expand our development team in the Innovation District, vs. staying in Cambridge.
Karen,
Thank you for an insightful discussion of the problem with the new South Boston Seaport. It is ironic that in Boston, a city with so much lively urban fabric as a model, the agency that purports to do our planning (the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which is not really a planning body but a quasi-private urban renewal agency that swallowed up the Boston Planning Board in 1960) cannot get a single new development area to look, feel and function as a real city should. This is because the developers and their bankers are allowed to do the planning, and they need only customers, not citizens. We won’t have much for residents to do in this new “neighborhood” — but there won’t be many residents living there, if BRA “planning” history repeats itself — at least, not “regular people” who live here year-round and need real neighborhood services, both civic and commercial. As to the permitting of huge buildings to achieve urban density — Boston’s population density is highest in Back Bay and Beacon Hill, historic small scale, fine-grained districts. And Somerville is the most densely populated city in New England. So we can lay to rest the myth that we must have towers for density.
I appreciated especially your mention that the private developers will maintain the streets and parks; you recognized the problem of privatization of the public realm, reminiscing about the time when community members paid for the public realm. But you seemed to resign yourself to the new order, “now that we can’t raise taxes.”
Correction: We can and do raise taxes; the tax levy is increased every year, by 2.5% PLUS the value of new growth, precisely for the purpose of taking care of new development. So, as I’ve always said, privatization is not a necessary financial strategy; it is a discretionary political strategy. It’s not about money; it’s about control.
These gifts are no bargain; in the end, our politicians give away — to these very developers — far more in tax breaks, land deals, grants and other public subsidies than we get in privately funded public services. But the developers prefer to do the housekeeping, so they can retain control over the users (barring the “undesirables”) and uses, the design, and eventually, the re-development of these open spaces. The Prudential Center maintains Ring Road because it owns that road, and the sidewalks too; Pru guards can (and do, as I’ve experienced) throw out anyone doing things they don’t like — e.g., political activities, collection of nomination signatures, and other exercises of First Amendment free speech and free assembly rights. And, soon, the Pru (aka Boston Properties) will be constructing two new towers on “plaza” spaces in the Center. Private parks are often just untaxed landbanks.
Post Office Square, the poster-child of the privatized public realm, occupies a parcel of public land, runs a business on it, and pays no rent or taxes; the huge, fabulously profitable garage underneath pays no property taxes. A cleverly crafted Chapter 121A agreement allows the developer to collect the parking revenues under a separate sub-corporation, circumventing the 121A limited-profit regulations. This “free park” loses us at least ten times as much as its maintenance cost. The security guards throw out anyone they please, at any time; free speech and free assembly are not allowed. WE PAY THE SO-CALLED “FRIENDS OF POST OFFICE SQUARE” (actually the for-profit PO Square Redevelopment Corporation) MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR TO KEEP US OFF OUR LAND.
Similarly, the Greenway Conservancy is costing the state ten times what we’d pay to maintain it ourselves. This is another one of those “rescue the taxpayers” boondoggles, pulled on the state by connected lobbyists. Now it’s a corporate theme park, rented out for profit and swept clean of “undesirables” who, apparently, don’t qualify for American civil rights because they might dent the abutting investors’ property values.
Let’s not be misled to believe that we, the great American citizenry, cannot afford our own keep. We certainly can, if we follow the money and demand that our elected officials give us what we’ve paid for. It will be far less expensive to pay for our own services directly; the financial and civic prices of this public “philanthropy” are too high.
Karen,
It’s good to see a dialogue taking place on what the 21st century community will look like. I am a resident of the back bay, and just as you said, not having a place for soccer fields, but just a place of relaxation is not adequate. The commonwealth mall facilitates improv of play, and the long path with a green threshold provides shelter from higher traffic on either side. This is what I think is being envisioned. a non programmed open space. Probably because its hard to designate for an entire community what they will or will not like for sports. Leaving open space and allowing the community to grow into those spaces is important. I do have concerns with green spaces that are run by developers, yes they are more clean, but they feel much less public. There are many green spaces like this that get shut down at night, and even signs go up asking users not to walk on the grass, which I feel is a direct contradiction to having green spaces in a city.