The Seaport is the newest and most expensive neighborhood within Boston. Just across the Fort Point Channel from downtown Boston, the neighborhood has been redeveloped into new, luxury condo towers and offices with harbor and skyline views. The neighborhood is anchored by the Institute of Contemporary Art, the first arts museum to be built in Boston in a century.
Boston's newest neighborhood. Until recently, an industrial section of the South Boston waterfront, the redevelopment of the Seaport has been described as the largest single real estate project in the city's history. This is just the most recent of several luxury neighborhoods developed in Boston. In the 1790s, Beacon Hill's 108 acres became the place to be - until the Back Bay's 379 acres began to be developed in the mid-1800s. The Seaport is over 500 acres, but it is more densely developed - one 23 acre section contains 3.3 million square feet of development, comparable in ways to Battery Park City or Hudson Yards in Manhattan.
The Seaport is the newest large-scale, upscale neighborhood of Boston – and in this, it carries on a tradition of Beacon Hill (beginning in the 1790s) and Back Bay (beginning in the mid-1800s). Each was developed as an affluent enclave with then-contemporary architecture and the latest amenities (which, at that time, was indoor plumbing and gas lighting, but still).
There are no subway stations within the Seaport. Residents on the west side of the neighborhood can cross the bridge to South Station in the Financial District. Those in the southern part of the neighborhood have a short walk to the Broadway stop on the Red Line, one stop from South Station.
That said, given that the Seaport is becoming one of the most expensive and prominent neighborhoods of Boston for both residents and businesses, the city is considering investing in additional transportation infrastructure to better serve the neighborhood, according to the New YorkTimes. In a parallel to Manhattan's Roosevelt Island, gondola service is being proposed between South Station and the Seaport, according to Boston Globe.
The Seaport comprises most of the northernmost of South Boston's two peninsulas. To the west is Fort Point, and across the channel, the Financial District and the Waterfront. To the south and east are, respectively the West Side and East Side of South Boston.
The Seaport neighborhood has been shaped by two waves of development. First, the neighborhood was transformed when it was
Two waves of transformation: first, reclaiming the land through infill in the late 1800s (most of it today was underwater), to a thriving shipping ... no man's land of warehouses and parking lots.
In 2010, Tom Menino dubbed the area the Innovation District [which means _____________] ... hoped to create a new tech hub to rival Kendall Square in Cambridge.
Thomas M. Menino, a city mayor who died in 2014, had envisioned the area, just across the Fort Point Channel from downtown as an “innovation district,” with state-of-the-art office space, plenty of walk-to-work apartments, numerous restaurants, and pedestrian-friendly streets and parks.
Mayor Menino has long seen the South Boston waterfront as a legacy project, in the same way that White once viewed the redevelopment of the Financial District and Quincy Market. Menino helped transform the waterfront’s parking lots into development opportunities by pairing City Hall’s broad zoning powers with tax breaks and, in at least one case, personal recruitment.
The Big Dig may have been a financial black hole, but today’s Seaport wouldn’t exist without the $14.6 billion project: The new I-93 and I-90 interchange meant that city and suburban dwellers could reach the Seaport in just a few (relatively stress-free) minutes. Meanwhile, the Silver Line, the Big Dig’s mandated public-transit component, ensured that conventioneers, residents, and workers could easily get to and from the airport. The most important change, though, may have been psychological: By burying the dingy, elevated Central Artery — which had previously cut off the waterfront from the rest of the city — the Seaport and downtown were at last connected.
2. The Feds Move In
More than a few eyebrows were raised in 1991 when the city announced it was moving the federal courthouse from the heart of the Financial District to the then-desolate Seaport. But when the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse (pictured above) opened seven years later, complete with an 88-foot-tall glass wall overlooking a park and the harbor, ... The Seaport was suddenly a place to conduct serious business. For years, though, the courthouse remained one of the few buildings around, sticking out
3. An Artery Runs Through It (with On- Ramps)
The Big Dig may have been a financial black hole, but today’s Seaport wouldn’t exist without the $14.6 billion project: The new I-93 and I-90 interchange meant that city and suburban dwellers could reach the Seaport in just a few (relatively stress-free) minutes. Meanwhile, the Silver Line, the Big Dig’s mandated public-transit component, ensured that conventioneers, residents, and workers could easily get to and from the airport. The most important change, though, may have been psychological: By burying the dingy, elevated Central Artery — which had previously cut off the waterfront from the rest of the city — the Seaport and downtown were at last connected.
News