Promising a Neighborhood

             
         This is the second issue of a new bi-weekly newsletter that will report on the activity all along the rapidly developing Boston waterfront, including developments in Charlestown, Chelsea, East Boston and the South Boston neighborhood. We will chronicle development projects, plans for new buildings, the arrival and openings of businesses, stores, and public attractions, along with the concerns of all of the people who will live, work or visit the Boston harbor front. Over the next twenty years the Boston harbor front, including the Charlestown Navy Yard and the piers on East Boston will see the construction of thousands of residential units and hundreds of thousands of square feet of new office space. There will be concerns about traffic, quality of life design and most importantly different opinions about how the harbor front areas of Chelsea, Charlestown, East Boston, Boston and South Boston will be developed.
         Projects are now finally beginning to happen. We will be reporting on all of them, including their impact on the residents and office workers in the harbor community. Each project brings more amenities as well as the traffic, pressure on real estate prices and crowding that are the natural by products of any massive scale development on an enclosed, valuable waterfront. Every project is designed hopefully to balance out the negative impact with something positive, particularly the addition at the developers expense to the Haborwalk system
         Now the Charlestown Navy Yard is finally going to seeing the first of several small but attractive public parks on the water. The twenty four hour neighborhood is about to start on Boston's harbor front with Russia Wharf and we are going to follow its progress. The water ferry system is also going to be expanded, bringing the various wharves and piers of Charlestown, East Boston and Boston and the Seaport closer, only minutes away from one another. A neighborhood that will be going twenty four hours a day, but by virtue of plans to vastly expand water taxi service in the harbor will take only minutes to travel from one point to another.
         The one thing still to be built on the harborfront is a signature building, a structure that reflects the special light over the water in a way that rivets attention and is visible from every vantage point around the waterfront. Not since International Place redefined Boston's skyline has Boston had one. While the height will be limited because the harbor is in the flight path of Logan Airport, there is still room for an imaginative building on the flat plane of space that is still open and unobstructed, a space that less than one hundred and fifty years ago was nothing but marshes and mud flats. What is needed is a building designed with imagination that presents an imposing silhouette in clear and foggy weather and that embodies such soaring grace it will symbolize the harbor’s beauty. In Rotterdam, where the harbor structures were wiped out by German bombing in World War Two, imaginative designers have created buildings so imposing they have turned the flat, soulless miles of water and cargo piers into a world where futuristic structures seem to rise out of the water itself, marking the otherwise dreary maze of waterways as a place where magic and mystery co exist. The height constrictions from Logan’s flight path should push architects to work even harder to find other ways of making a striking impression on Boston’s waterfront, but the blank canvas is still there, waiting for the first idea. When will the first design and proposal for such a building emerge? It will mark the arrival of the harborfront as a place of intrigue and excitement.

                                                                                                            The Boston Harbor Journal