Land for a City on a Hill: Professor Alex Krieger's iconic tour of Boston

Hello, my name is Alex Krieger. I am a research

professor

at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I've been on the faculty for a long time, more than four a decade. For many years, I have offered a

tour

of Boston for people coming to graduate school design often, of course, from very far away and the

tour

is not so much a tourist view of Boston. In reality, it is through a number of places that have been key to the growth of Boston. Boston is unusual. in that the original settlement was virtually an is

land

and therefore could only grow by making

land

by filling the harbor to make land for both industry and housing right now we are standing on the edge of East Boston on a rebuilt dock and We are here because it offers the most spectacular view of downtown Boston behind me, where all those skyscrapers are, where the tall buildings are, it was originally the Shawmut Peninsula, when Boston was first settled in 1630.

The peninsula itself was like a island and had a very close connection to the mainland that sometimes during storms and high tide was impassable, so there were times when, indeed, Boston was like an island. By the way, East Boston was also once five islands that over the years consolidated into a major shipping center during the latter part of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, if I may point out this strange pavilion to my left, is in memory of Donald McKay, a very important individual who for much of the 19th century operated a major shipping company and was an inventor of sorts. of the so-called clipper and by the way you may hear a noise behind me, we are also quite close to the airport, which in turn filled up starting in the 1920s, adjacent to East Boston, one of the other things of East Boston is that people almost never come here because when they get to East Boston by plane, they get stuck in the tunnel to get to Boston and they don't know where we are now.

East Boston was a major shipping center, as I said, thank you. for mr mckay and others, it has always been one of the great points of arrival of immigrants, uh, irish in the 19th century, russian jews in the late 19th century, many others and in recent decades, many people from central america and del Sur, as well as Bueno, is still perceived as a more affordable place. Very few places in Boston today are affordable, but since it was always on the other side of the harbor, it always seemed a little distant to me now if I turned and pointed toward the pavilion. we can see some very new housing, so it's finally being rediscovered and unfortunately it's getting a little bit gentrified and that's a problem in itself in relation to those who come here thinking that they will find more affordable housing and that certainly more housing will come to them.

Fill in some of these other types of decrepit docks that she might see, so that's the story of East Boston, but if I turn around and see the skyscrapers, that's the type of our downtown now, if I can tell you where the skyscrapers decrease. slightly in size and there are two lower buildings, both with a darker curtain wall and there is a space between them and that space is a narrow body of water called a four point canal, now all to the left of that space, all up to the The eye can see all the way past those Star Wars contraptions that are part of the remaining industrial maritime facilities and even beyond that a small

hill

can be seen.

All of this land was filled into almost a thousand acres and actually began to create a connection between Boston and South Boston, so this landfill was started to create a modern port for the

city

of Boston; However, it took several decades and by the time it was completed, much of Boston's shipping industries had strangely moved elsewhere to more modern ports. All this land that now seems quite filled in and developed was empty for much of the 20th century; It was just parking depots and some military installations, etc., but it wasn't essentially empty until about 20 years ago when a highway expansion project was started.

A new tunnel began to be created under the port to the airport and points north, suddenly this was discovered by developers and investors. It has had many names over the centuries. The Commonwealth Flats used to be called because they were sort of flats, low marshes, etc., not very easy to navigate. One of the other reasons for occupying land in Boston was to make it possible to properly navigate it to avoid low land, which is why Carmel Flats is now called Boston's port innovation district. and then we'll cross the harbor back to the Shaman Peninsula, but then we'll land in that innovation district to give a perspective from there on how it evolved and we'll also look east of Boston.

Now we are standing in the middle of the port. innovation district and it's kind of exciting and it's very new and it seems to have quite a bit of street and pedestrian activity and a mix of uses, mainly office buildings for tech workers, but also an increasing number of housing units, although quite a bit of housing unaffordable, etc. On the one hand, it is exciting that it has been designated as a downtown expansion, critics, however, look around and say that it seems to lack the character of Yield Boston and perhaps is more like to downtown Dallas, Texas. than we think of Boston at least if we look at its various histories, but it is nevertheless an important area and is part of a thousand acres of land that were filled in towards the end of the 19th century and during the first decade of the 20th. century to actually make a new port because the old harbor, the old docks and wharves both in the east of Boston and in the central part of the Sean Peninsula, were considered too small to accommodate modern ships, on the one hand , and furthermore, they did not have access to the railway, which was a big problem because, in fact, as we move towards the end of the 19th century and the 20th century, if there is no connection between the railway and the ships, we do not have a very good logistics system for things to arrive and leave.

It was laid out like this towards the end of the 19th century and even after some other major landfills were completed, for example, Back Bay, one of the most beautiful and exclusive neighborhoods, is called Back Bay because it is the back bay of the Charles River, so which was actually even larger than the back bay and was designed to then create a modern port where in fact modern ships and railroads could interact now the problem was that when Boston got around to doing all this and of course the several decades involved in filling a large portion of the land titles on the southern peninsula of Boston, well, most of the maritime economy in Boston disappeared because, in fact, there were many other ports on the east coast that already had a much better connection between railway and maritime activities, so we are In this kind of bustling 21st century urban environment that was largely empty for a hundred years as it filled up, there was no need to produce a substantial number of maritime buildings and other functions there because what was on the street was no longer very active in Boston, so it remained empty and you see historical images that it was essentially a place for secondary uses, a place to park.

For many decades it was a large cheap parking depot for the

city

center, which was actually not that far away across one of the canals that was still standing, it was made about 20 years ago when the city went through a sort of major need to remake their road infrastructure. In reality, a highway that was built in the 1950s was expanded to support the city center, although its real function was to help people. To escape the suburbs it needed to be extended, it was actually an above ground structure so the decision was made to extend it by burying it, so this very unattractive feature was also removed and an additional tunnel was also created through from the port to the airport, an extension. of Interstate 90 that takes you from Boston to Seattle without a traffic light, so this was a big bottleneck when I-90 crashed in downtown Boston and went through an older tunnel to the airport and points toward the north, so the great project had to be extended later.

I-90 through this part of the port and to make a new connection to Logan Airport at this time, of course, a major international airport, so guess what, suddenly this area that seemed to be a little far from the El city ​​center and something useless was suddenly much closer to the airport than the city center, so suddenly a huge number of investors began to appreciate the benefits of being able to build here instead of trying with great difficulty to still densify plus the city center is self-limited due to land or moving further into the suburbs etc., so it was actually the most internationally known type of reconstruction of a road system, burying a portion of it to create a sort of long linear park system, but in this case creating a connection to a place with a major highway interchange to the airport.

Wow, all of a sudden, what a great place to build things and so, having stood empty for many decades over the last two decades, it has become. the most desired parts of Boston, really of New England, to build facilities for post-industrial economies and also housing, at least more recently. One more thing is quite important: we are studying in Cambridge, which is a separate city. Trials River from Boston, so even though we are part of a kind of continuous metropolitan region and our economies are intertwined, etc., in reality the cities also compete with each other, so it became clear that this was some kind of new area of major expansion for Downtown Boston also became an opportunity to try to attract some of the high-tech biomedical industries that were clustering around MIT in Kendall Square to come to Boston and that's why a few years ago it changed its name of Commonwealth Flats or Seaport District. 2 that the innovation district and therefore has been relatively successful in trying to take advantage of the strong appeal that Boston has nationally and even internationally to attract high-tech and especially biomedical industries and provide another place for that industry to grow in addition to of course the great success that MIT has experienced in the Kendall Square area, so now we are moving further east from this innovation district or from the historic Colonel Flats area of ​​Boston in a more sense close to the south peninsula of Boston, where we will be next, but this is an important point in understanding the kind of struggle between history and the future that cities like Boston are involved in, so we are standing next to what It was once the largest building in the world until the Pentagon was built and in fact this was also a warehouse. for the army, in the eastern parts of the former common apartments that were filled in using part of the empty land that I described a few minutes ago there were a number of navy and army facilities and this warehouse was the center that is now called the design quite interestingly and attracts several interior design showrooms and now also, increasingly, architects' offices and interior designers' offices etc., it has also connected our cruise terminal and this is not a city that can compete with Miami in terms of cruises. but a good number often come from Europe, perhaps on their way south, so we are technically in the marine industrial park, although it is also quickly becoming an extension of the innovation district and, for many, Boston.

This is a little problematic because there is a tension between embracing the modern economy and the postmodern economies of places like Boston, but also trying to preserve blue-collar jobs, so this part, as the name suggests, is a marine industrial park and therefore Of course, there are still a couple of dry dock facilities where ships are repaired or at least one that is active, some that are not. There are several fish processing facilities. We are still a large repository of the fishing industry, although most fish arrive by plane rather than by boat, so there is tension here between trying to preserve opportunities for such industries - like the return of the dockworkers, you would say - versus the pressure coming from the rest of the port innovation district to build more research laboratory material for the type of captains of modern industries, so this is an important place to understand and it is also the remains of industrial infrastructure from the 19th century, including this building, which is quite fascinating not to mention, of course, the dry dock facilities and yet this is where you can almost feel on a daily basis this transition from the old economies to the new economies and then some of the kind of resistance to thattransition that is still happening for some who still feel we are losing many of our blue collar jobs. just for the creative classes that seem to be so important to the future of

boston

from the marine industrial park we will now cross another narrow body of water another canal is called the reservoir canal now this actually denotes the end of that landfill that created the innovation district and will cross into the South Boston Peninsula again the South Boston Peninsula was almost like a separate environment because historically before the landfills it was quite far from the Shama Peninsula and emerged over the course of several centuries into a place primarily for Irish immigrants and it was pretty stable in that sense until recently, but we're moving here two places first, to something known as Castle Island, although there's no castle on it nor is it an island historically, of course, it was the What's happening here right now.

It's actually a beautiful park setting a place where you feel like you're on the Atlantic Ocean, which is hard to feel in many places in Boston because of all the landfills that seem to have separated the city from feeling like it's right on the big ocean. Atlantic. You might also get a sense of the archipelago of about 30 islands that define the edge of the Inner Harbor and, in fact, are occasionally right now perceived as a potential solution to sea level rise if there is a way at some point to connect them. with some type of dock system and therefore help protect the port.

Castle Island was one of those islands, but a long time ago, around the same time the city of Boston was established, the British built a small fortification there and that fortification or the expansions in which throughout of the centuries we are looking at now it has remained a fortification for many, many years, in fact for many centuries, it was even reactivated during World War II when there was concern about German submarines patrolling the east coast of the United States and for a time it was again a military installation during British control of the new world of new england it was the center of military operations and in fact during the revolutionary war it was the center of the british forces trying to overcome the loyalists trying to seek their independence from the British Empire, so it was an island, it was very much an island, as can be seen in historical images and even in photographs from the early 20th century, it was connected to the South Boston Peninsula slowly and not very carefully because of these various landfill operations that were always continually occurring, but more precisely during the time in

boston

where our park system by frederico olmsted and his sons and colleagues was taking place, so between about 1870 and up until the early 20th century a major park system was built in Boston surrounding it, going from the harbor around the edge of the city and back to the harbor and this was its completion, making Castle Island at that time, although it became a later fortified briefly during World War II, it was sometimes simply a recreational area and was connected to the mainland by the park system itself and the creation of several beaches to serve the South Boston community, etc., by which at the moment is a very beautiful place.

Rape is a pleasure due to the fact that these peninsulas were separated. by bodies of water in the mentality of Bostonians even today seems very far away, which is why people from Cambridge or downtown Boston or some certainly western suburbs do not think about going to Castle Island and Castle Island park and the beaches and so on. It's mostly been a bit of a refuge for South Boston residents, but it's a beautiful place that more people should experience because, in fact, this is probably the best place, if some time ago in East Boston we had the best view of downtown, this is actually the best public environment with which to understand that you are on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, so from here we will continue along the beaches, the eastern edge of South Boston and we will head towards the top of a

hill

, towards something called Dorchester Heights, although Dorchester is now a neighborhood even further south of Dorchester Heights.

It's the highest topography on the South Boston Peninsula and we go there for two radically different reasons: We've climbed the fairly arduous climb to the top of the South Boston Peninsula, an area called Dorchester Heights, it's an incredible place, it's perfect. oval and flat, if you look down at it you can see that it is surrounded by double and family residences typical of early 20th century Boston. It offers incredible views of almost all sides behind me, you see a pretty interesting tower and it commemorates a very important moment in the revolutionary war somehow against all odds and it's hard to imagine while we're here, george washington moved 1200 troops and a good amount of cannons and weapons at the top of this hill took command of the port of Boston where the British fleet was and caused the fleet to begin evacuating, making it a very important transition point in the Revolutionary War.

Now Dorchester Heights is at the top of Boston's southern peninsula and again behind me you can see bits and pieces of downtown. from where we were before, not just Castle Island, but all that land that was filled in so that it would no longer become Castle Island, the thousand-acre landfill that would create a modern port that never took place but that also connected the Shaman Peninsula and the South Boston Peninsula and although, of course, historically they originally seemed to be very, very far apart, they are now connected in various ways, including through that big landfill, so that's one of the reasons why that we hiked here, but we're also here for a less noble reason and that's to address one of the problems that Boston has always had with race, even though, you know, right now it's considered a very progressive kind of community and very liberal and it is, but historically there are several cases where that was not true behind the stents in the South Boston High School tower and that high school was the scene of a variety of very traumatic racial incidents in the In the 1970s, a decision was made to try to integrate the schools because they were completely disintegrated. the population of south boston, mostly irish, american, certainly white, we are very opposed to this and there are terrible scenes of school buses arriving with small children fearing for their lives, with hundreds of neighbors standing there shouting no, go away, you don't belong here and and so on, as they were escorted from the bus by the police and even the national guard at some point to the building to take classes, one cannot ignore the fact that historically, as in other places in the United States, here A tremendous amount of discontent took place, sometimes taking a kind of violent form, so with that now we're going to get off this hill and head towards Columbia Point, where the campuses of the University of Massachusetts are located, where the Kennedy Library is located. , but we're also there for a different reason not unrelated to the type of racial injustice in Boston, looking at a former public housing project that was transformed to become a mixed-use neighborhood that has somehow earned a lot of praise for how it could be trying to transform public housing, so here we are, we are standing. a place where all kinds of very different things are happening we are standing on the campus of the university of massachusetts in boston we are standing very close to the presidential library in honor of john f kennedy and more recently also sort of a sister institution in honor to his brother Edward Kennedy is now called the Institute for the Study of the Senate and also, when we look a little further back towards the city, we can also see a housing project and therefore the juxtaposition of these things.

They themselves have an interesting history by the way, very small portions of what is now Columbia Point, it was an interesting type of grass and in fact some of Boston's first settlers landed here, another place where you can make your way through some sand and mud banks. floors and get access to land, but it was still further south and east than even South Boston, which is even further from the Sharma Peninsula, so over time it became more of a place to throwing things away, it became one of those places where of course, rubbish was found, in fact it was and there are still remains of it, an incredible pumping station, it's a ruin now you can see it, people still wish it could be preserved in some ways and it was very innovative during the 19th century, to be able to somehow get the waste into the harbor, so for much of the 19th century, the first half of the 20th century it was really kind of a garbage dump for Boston and Therefore, to accommodate more garbage, the landfill around the grass began to be filled. increasingly during the 1950s it was selected to be home and think about this, this is a dumping ground for the largest public housing project built in Boston for about 1500 apartments, of course, largely lower class people, if not ultimately almost entirely African American.

This is another sad part of Boston and American history, but where would you put public housing in a landfill that is quite far away and without much access to public transportation, etc., although more recently one of our subway extensions has a station nearby ? in the 1950s he dedicated himself to this public housing project which, like many public housing projects, eventually failed in part because there is no access to shops or other types of facilities or services and because it became a haven for crime and other social behaviors, etc. Like other public housing projects built during the urban renewal era in Boston's history, it was largely abandoned in the end, with only several hundred people living there out of the 1,500 apartment units that were built there in the early 1990s. 1970s.

The University of Massachusetts system thought it should have a campus based in Boston, so the decision was made to locate a campus there, which here we are in the middle, and it somehow thrived and grew with the time, so that was the second largest type of influx and quite a different influx of people and activities in this area and the third thing in the late '70s was the arrival of the Kennedy presidential library. Now this requires a little bit of history because the original decision of the Kennedy family, actually at the wish of John Kennedy, was to actually locate it in Harvard Square it was going to be located right where the Kennedy School of Government is currently located and, in fact, major design of some sort of large complex was carried out.

It was to be a triple design: the library of the new School of Government that bears the name. kennedy in a park again in honor of john f kennedy, who liked, when he was at harvard, to sit on the bank of the charles river and look out and for several years with an ironpay design that looked remarkably like the pyramid of The Louvre was being designed there and received a tremendous amount of protest from the kind of good citizens of Brattle Street and other more exclusive neighborhoods west of Harvard Square from the University and think of this in the kind of late '60s and early In the 1970s, the shock of Kennedy's death was still quite fresh and so there were expectations, of course, that his presidential library would attract millions of people, so there were fears that Harvard Square would be flooded. with people going to the kennedy library and overwhelming the plaza and after about seven or eight years of determined protests, including lawsuits and so on through various redesigns, the Kennedy family finally decided to pull out and agreed to build the Kennedy School of Government which still is there and the park supposedly designed by Caroline Kennedy, including the selection of each of the trees in honor of her father, but a search began for where else the library could go and at that time the new campus of the University of Massachusetts and Their rector says hey, wait a minute, why don't you build it here?

There's a chance that Boston is like the Statue of Liberty because, given the patterns of the planes landing at Logan Airport, they're buzzing over a portion of Columbia Point and it would be a bit like flying over Boston's equivalent of the statue. of liberty in this case the library in honor of john kennedy and that's why the kennedy library organization agreed and built it there as you can see and it's kind of an icon but it's never been visited as much as expected, of course, partly the story of The Murder has now diminished in its kind of impact, but also because it still seems to be a bit far from most of Boston's most vital places, but anyway, here's an old garbage collection that now It houses three pretty incredible ones. rooms, the third is an old housing projectpublic that was transformed in the early 80s and mid 80s, I guess it is now one of the most impressive and nationally acclaimed mixed-use housing projects, where some of the buildings were demolished. were maintained and renovated, the people who were still there had the opportunity to stay there in their approved housing and because in the 80s, suddenly, waterfront housing became a cool thing and also became quite suitable for housing at market rate, so a group of developers The development entity acquired this really horrible remnant of a public housing project and transformed it into a mixed-use environment that houses some low-income people and also a good number of families of middle class individuals, so now let's take a walk through this incredible area of ​​boston called columbia point and it experienced the remarkable transformation that has occurred there over the course of a couple of centuries, so we're walking along the edge of the campus of the university of massachusetts in boston and now we see the kennedy library on the left.

If we take it over a newly improved public walkway you will see on the left the ruins of this large pumping station that used to pump all the sewage into the harbor and ahead of us as you can see is the old Columbia Public Point. The housing project now called Harbor Apartments is a mixed-use environment that has become really known throughout the country as an interesting way to combine affordable housing and market rate housing and was, in fact, used as a model by the department of housing and urban development to try to transform as well. some of the other types of failed public housing projects built during the renewal era, so think about this over the course of a few minutes, we've passed a major university campus, two major national institutions, the Kennedy Library and now the center for the study of the senate in honor of the brother of john f. kennedy, edward kennedy and in this nowA seemingly perfect mixed-use housing project, again a model of many others now found around the country, then we will return to the center of the city and end up on a long pier, more or less looking straight to where we started, which was Pierce Park.

In East Boston, well, we've almost come full circle to where we started this morning, except we're on the other side of this body of water called Boston Harbor. We started the day in a park right across the street, behind a couple. Of these ships we are standing at the end of a long pier so called because once it extends about a third of a mile into the harbor and we look back to where we started in East Boston, if you scroll down here you can see More or less what that's been happening recently, you can see that all the housing that's being built in East Boston is finally being discovered as a good place to live, but of course it's also causing some gentrification issues in what's known as a set of lower middle class neighborhoods.

There, you scroll slightly to the right and you can also see the airport, and if you scroll further, you can see where we were earlier that day, the so-called innovation district, and you can see the scale of the buildings that are there. There was construction going on there and, as we've talked about before, it was this big early 20th century landfill that more or less lay fallow for most of the time, but has recently been rediscovered and where many of the types are found. of life sciences and high-tech companies. I've been moving to Boston, so again we're standing at the end of something, so when I turn around and point behind me, at the end I see a small building protected by four giant skyscrapers, not exactly what conservationists would think .

To make just one of the great anomalies, it is a beautiful situation where a modern city creates a backdrop for the old state house, the colonial state house before the revolution, where the governor sat, etc., but the reason for being here and looking back to where we started is also to understand in a different way the way the land expanded, the pier was long because it went from where we are now to the front of that old state house, now it is a Actually, a very long pier. short as the city continues to expand and so one of the lessons of the day that I hope you now appreciate is how much Boston has been transformed by its constant need to create land because of course originally it was established virtually as a island and the only way to grow and, in fact, the only way to use the harbor, which was very shallow and full of mudflats etc., the only way to sail in it is to bring land.

More towards the harbor, so I think I'd encourage you to explore downtown Boston and one of the big tourist areas that we avoided all day. You will pass three types of informational kiosks and I hope you will stop and explore. a bit, they actually tell more or less the same story that we have been experiencing throughout the day. Actually, they are called the walk to the sea. My company had the pleasure of designing them. They go up the hill. the path to the state house, so if you think about that, it kind of conveys the history of Boston through this hike from the top of Beacon Hill, the highest topographical area in Boston, and then takes you down and through that path to where we are.

Standing now, it describes Boston's nearly 400 years of history, so one day you'll also be able to walk to the sea on your own.