BOSTON’S GAMBLE PAYS OFF
City is starting to reap the benefits of its Big Dig as parks, hotels and shops fill in the reclaimed spaces once dominated by highways and parking lots,
BOSTON— They re-enact the Boston Tea Party every day on a pair of boats in Boston Harbor. Bales of “tea” are thrown overboard and pulled back up again on the end of ropes, in between museum tours and shows in the Minuteman Theater.
It’s what you expect to see in Boston, but there’s more going on beyond Paul Revere’s home and Faneuil Hall and the Old South Meeting House, in the once-desolate streets of warehouses on the far side of the harbour, in neighbourhoods just outside the old colonial downtown and on the far side of the Charles River.
It’s been a decade since Boston finished the Big Dig, a massive infrastructure project that buried roadways deep in tunnels and beneath the harbour at a cost of nearly $22 billion (U.S.), and after years of pain the city is finally seeing the benefits.
Areas that were once parking lots between freeways are filling up with hotels, condos and shops, and a whole section of the downtown that once languished beneath an elevated highway is now an urban park.
As a Torontonian, Boston elicits both déjà vu and envy; there’s so much that’s familiar, such as the forest of construction cranes pinpointing hot spots of new development, and something to covet with the long, narrow park full of greenery, people and public art sitting on top of a road that once cut the city off from its harbour. If you wanted a weekend urban getaway alternative to New York or Chicago, this new Boston presents itself as a tantalizing vision of a future that Toronto imagines annually and endlessly. The Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, built over that buried roadway, starts just behind the tourist centre of Faneuil Hall and arcs down along the waterfront to Chinatown. On a sunny weekday at lunchtime it’s packed with office workers, kids and tourists, eating on the lawns and benches, buying lunch from food trucks and farmers markets and playing in the fountains.
Boston brags about its walkability, so detour down Congress St., over the bridge and past the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum to the Seaport district, with its 19th-century warehouses, now converted into condos and offices. Shops and restaurants fill the main floors, including local favourites, such as a branch of Flour, a popular and very good local chain of bakery cafés.
Boston’s Institute of Contempo- rary Art is right on the water, as is the Envoy, a boutique hotel whose roof terrace bar has the best night-time view of the skyline. The construction cranes mark it as another hot spot of new development, and the ground floor of these new buildings is where you’ll find restaurants such as Committee, which features star chef Diane Kochilas’ refreshed take on Greek classics.
Beyond the old Seaport, where four buried roads emerge in front of the convention centre, there’s a brand new neighbourhood where there were once just parking lots.
The development here echoes the old warehouses, and next to new boutique hotels such as Aloft and Element, the streets look minty, like someone just took off the shrink wrap.
Desperate to create some green space here, the Massachusetts Convention Centre Authority got Citizens Bank to sponsor the Lawn on D, a big rectangle of grass that’s part park, part performance space and part interactive sculpture garden. It’s a gathering point for the neighbourhood, and every night you’ll find locals lingering in the adult-sized swing set, with its white “tires” that light up.
A brisk walk west takes you to SoWa, Boston’s gallery district, where a once-dodgy warehouse district has become the centre of an artist’s community focused on the SoWa Artists Guild and a pair of buildings on Harrison St. filled with galleries and studios. Photographer Debby Krim came here in 2003 when the building next door was still gutted, and has since expanded into three spaces to sell her paintings and jewelry, as well as her signature white floral photo still lifes.
The construction cranes are edging into the neighbourhood, but Krim isn’t worried. “It is gentrification but I don’t see that as necessarily negative.” She’s optimistic about the city, thanks mostly to its youthfulness, renewed every year by the thousands of young people who arrive to attend its colleges and universities.
“We really value knowledge,” she says, “above, say, breast implants, or who you know.”
Across the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Mass., the streets around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are a testament to all that youthful energy transforming Boston. Cutting-edge buildings by I.M. Pei and Frank Gehry are mixed in with Internet and biotech company offices. In the Flour on Massachusetts Ave., two young men discuss their startup, and another stand of construction cranes is transforming Kendall Square.
The easiest way to appreciate MIT’s culture of innovation is to take a tour of the public art on campus, a stunning collection that includes iconic work by Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Jacques Lipchitz and Sol LeWitt, which MIT List Visual Arts Center has showcased with an audio guide introduced by actor Leonard Nimoy. Spread through the quadrangles and courtyards among some startling architecture, it’s a dizzying and very geeky vision of the future, coming into focus in one of the U.S.’s oldest cities. Rick McGinnis was hosted by the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism, which didn’t review or approve this story.
This new Boston presents itself as a tantalizing vision of a future that Toronto imagines annually and endlessly