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

hello my name is alex krieger i'm a research professor at the graduate school design at harvard i've been in the faculty for uh well for a long time for over four a decade for many years i've offered a tour of boston for people arriving to the graduate school design often of course from very far away and the tour is not so much of a kind of a tourists view of boston uh it's actually through a series of places that have been key to the growth of boston boston is unusual in that the original settlement was virtually an island and therefore it could only grow by making land by filling the harbor to make land both for industry as well as for dwelling at the moment we are standing at the edge of east boston on a rebuilt pier and we're here because this offers the most spectacular view of downtown boston behind me where all those skyscrapers are where the tall buildings are was originally the shawmut peninsula that's when boston was first settled in 1630. the peninsula itself was island-like it had a very narrow connection to the mainland that sometimes during storms and high tide was impassable so there were moments when indeed boston was island-like by the way east boston also was once five islands that over the years were consolidated as it became a major shipping center during the last part of the 18th and throughout the 19th century if i can point to this odd pavilion to my left it is in memory of donald mckay a very important individual who during much of the 19th century operated a major shipping enterprise he was sort of inventor of the so-called clipper ship and by the way you might hear a noise behind me we're also quite close to the airport which itself was uh filled in starting in the 1920s adjacent to east boston one of the other things about east boston is that people hardly ever come here because when they arrive in east boston on an airplane they get sort of tucked in the tunnel to get to boston and they miss where we are standing right now east boston was a major shipping center as i've said thanks to mr mckay and others it has always been one of the great arrival points for immigrants uh irish in the 19th century russian jews at the end of the 19th century many others and in the last several decades a lot of people from central and south america as well it still is perceived to be a kind of a more sort of affordable place very few places in boston these days are affordable but because it was always across the harbor it always seemed a little bit distant now if i turn and point through the pavilion you can see some very new housing so finally it's being kind of rediscovered and unfortunately it's becoming a bit gentrified and that's an issue in itself relative to those who arrive here thinking they would find more affordable housing and more of that housing is certainly going to come to fill in some of these other sort of decrepit piers that she might see so that's the story of east boston but if i turn around and as you see the skyscrapers that's the sort of our downtown area now if i can point you to where the skyscrapers diminish in size slightly and there are two lower buildings both of which have a darker curtain wall and there's a gap between them and that gap is a narrow body of water called four-point channel now everything to the left of that gap everything as far as the eye can see all the way past those star wars like contraptions which are a part of remaining industrial maritime facilities and even further there you can see a little hill all of this land was filled in almost a thousand acres it actually began to create a connection between boston and south boston and so this landfill was initiated to create a modern port for the city of boston however it took several decades and by the time it was completed much of the shipping industries of boston has shifted to other parts to more modern ports so oddly all this land which now looks you know fairly filled in and developed lay empty for much of the 20th century it was just repositories for parking and some military installations and so forth but essentially empty it was not until about 20 years ago when a highway expansion project was begun that would create a new tunnel underneath the harbor to the airport and points north all of a sudden this was sort of discovered by you know developers and investors it's had many names over the centuries uh commonwealth flats used to be called because they were sort of flats low-lying tidelands and so forth not very easily to navigate one of the other reasons for filling in land in boston was to make it possible to navigate it properly to avoid low lands and so carmel flats is now called the boston's seaport innovation district and we will next go across the harbour back to the shaman peninsula but will land next in that innovation district to offer a perspective from there about how it evolved and look back to east boston as well we're now standing in the middle of the seaport innovation district and it's kind of exciting and it's very new and it seems to have a little bit of activities on the streets and pedestrians and a mixture of uses mostly sort of office buildings for sort of tech workers but some an increasing number of housing although quite unaffordable housing and so forth so on the one hand it's kind of exciting it's been designated as the expansion of the downtown critics however look around and say it seems to lack some of the character of yield boston and maybe it looks more like downtown dallas texas rather than what we think of boston at least if we look across it's several histories but nonetheless it's an important area and it is part of a thousand acres of land that was filled in towards the end of the 19th century and through the first decade of the 20th century to in fact make a new port because the old port the old docks and wharfs both in east boston as well as in the central part of the sean peninsula became to be thought of as being too small to accommodate modern ships on the one hand and also they had no access to rail that was a big problem because in fact as we move into later part of 19th century and 20th century if there's no connection between rail and ships you don't have a very good logistical system of things arriving and being distributed so towards the end of the 19th century and even after some other substantial landfills had been completed for example the back bay one of the most beautiful and upscale neighborhoods it's called the back bay because it's the back bay of the charles river so this was actually even larger than the back bay and it was designed to then create a modern port where indeed modern ships and rail could interact now the trouble was that by the time boston got around to doing all of this and of course the several decades involved in filling in such a large part of the title flats of the south boston peninsula well most of the maritime economy in boston went away because indeed there were many other ports on the eastern seaboard that had already a much better connection between rail and seafaring activities so we're standing in this sort of bustling 21st century urban environment which was largely vacant for a hundred years as it became filled in there was no need to produce a substantial number of maritime buildings and other functions there because that in the street was no longer very active in boston and so it stayed empty and you see historic images of it being essentially a place for secondary uses place for parking it was for many decades a great repository of cheap parking for the downtown which was not really so far away across one of the channels that was still maintained it was done about 20 years ago when the city went through kind of a major need to redo its highway infrastructure replay actually enlarge a highway that was built in the 50s to support the downtown although its actual function was to kind of help people escape the suburbs it needed to be expanded actually it was an above-ground structure and so the decision was made to widen it by burying it therefore also eliminating this very unattractive feature and also to create an additional tunnel across the harbor to the airport an extension of interstate 90 which gets you from boston to seattle without a stoplight and so this was a great bottleneck when i-90 sort of crashed into downtown boston and went through an older tunnel to the airport and points north so the big project was to then extend i-90 through this part of the seaport and to make a new connection to logan airport by this time of course a major international airport so guess what so all of a sudden this area which had been looked as to be kind of far away from the downtown and kind of useless all of a sudden was much closer to the airport than the downtown so all of a sudden a tremendous amount of investors began to appreciate the benefits of being able to build here rather than to try with great difficulty to further densify the downtown area it's self-constrained due to land or to move further out into the suburbs and so forth so it actually was the kind of reconstruction of a highway system best known internationally by burying a portion of it to create a kind of a long sort of 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 stuff and so having stayed empty for many many decades within the past two decades it has become the most desired parts of boston actually of new england to build facilities for post-industrial economies and also or housing as well at least more recently the one more thing is that's quite significant is we're studying in cambridge here which is a separate city across the trials river from boston so even though we're part of a continuous sort of metropolitan region and our economies are intertwined and so forth actually cities also compete with each other so as it became clear that this was a sort of major new expansion area for downtown boston it also became an opportunity to try to attract some of the high-tech biomedical industries they were clustering around mit in kendall square to come to boston and that's why a few years ago the name of it changed from commonwealth flats or the seaport district 2 than the innovation district and so it has been relatively successful in trying to also take advantage of the great pull that boston has nationally even internationally to attract high-tech and especially biomedical industries and provide another spot for that industry to grow in addition to of course the great success that mit has experienced in the kendall square area so we are now moving further eastward from this innovation district or from historically colonel flats area of boston in a sense of closer to the south boston peninsula where we'll be next but this is an important point in understanding kind of the wrestling of history versus the future that cities like boston are involved with so we're standing next to what was once the largest building in the world until the pentagon was built and indeed this also was a warehouse for the army so on the eastern portions of the former common flats that were filled in using some of the empty land that i described a few minutes ago was a series of navy facilities and army facilities and this warehouse was the center of it it now is called the design center interestingly enough and it attracts various interior design showrooms and also now increasingly architects offices and interior designer offices and so forth it has also connected our cruise ship terminal and this is hardly a city that can compete with miami in terms of cruise ships but a fair number do come in oftentimes from europe perhaps on their way a further south so we're technically we're standing in the marine industrial park although it is also quickly transforming into being an extension of the innovation district and for many in boston this is a bit of a problem because there's tension between embracing the modern economy and the post-modern economies of places like boston but also trying to hold on to blue-collar jobs and so this portion as its name suggests marine industrial park and of course there's still a couple of dry dock facilities where boats are repaired or at least the one that's active some that are not there's various couple of fish processing facilities we still are a great repository of the fishing industry although most of the fish arrive by airplane rather than by boat so there's tension here between trying to preserve opportunities for such industries the sort of the return of the longshoremen one would say versus the pressure that's coming from the rest of the seaport innovation district to build more stuff for laboratories for research for the sort of captains of sort of modern industries so this is why this is an important place to understand and it's also the remnants of 19th century kind of industrial infrastructures there 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 old economies to new economies and then some of the kind of resistance to that transition that still occurs for some that still feel as if we're losing too many of our blue-collar jobs only 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 channel it's called the reserve channel now this actually denotes the end of that landfill that created the innovation district and will be crossing into the south boston peninsula south boston peninsula again was almost like a separate environment because historically before the landfills was quite removed distance wise from the shama peninsula and emerged over the course of several centuries into a place largely for irish immigrants and it was fairly stable in that way until recently but we're moving here for two places first to something that is known as castle island even though there's no castle on it nor is it an island historically of course it was what occurs here at the moment is actually a beautiful park environment a place where it feels if you're actually on the atlantic ocean which is hard to feel in many places in boston because of all the landfills that seem to have kind of separated the city from feeling as if it's right on the great atlantic ocean you could also have a sense of the archipelago of some 30 islands that sort of define the edge of the inner harbor and indeed occasionally at the moment perceived as a potential solution to uh sea level rise if there's a way at some point to perhaps connect them with uh some sort of a levee system and therefore help protect the harbor castle island was one of those islands but way back more or less at the same moment when the city of boston was established the british built a little fortification there and that fortification or the expansions in which over the course of centuries we're looking at right now has remained a fortification for many many years actually for many centuries it was even reactivated during world war ii when there was concern that german u-boats were patrolling the eastern coast of the united states and for a while was once again a military installation during the british control of the new world of new england it was the center of military operations and indeed during the revolutionary war it was the center of the british forces that were 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 you can see in historic imagery and even early 20th century photographs it was connected to the south boston peninsula slowly and not very carefully because of these various landfill operations that were always continuously happening but more precisely during the moment in boston where our park system by frederico olmsted and his sons and colleagues was being pursued so between around 1870 and until the beginning of 20th century a substantial park system was built in boston surrounding it going from harbor around the edge of the city and back to the harbor and this was its completion and so castle island by that time although becoming a fortification later on again briefly during world war ii was at times simply just a recreational area and it was connected to the mainland by the park system itself and the creation of several beaches to serve the south boston community and so forth so at the moment it's actually a very beautiful place rapes are pleasure because of the fact that these peninsulas were sort of separated by bodies of water in the mindset of bostonians even today it seems far away and so people from cambridge or downtown boston or for some certainly western suburbs they don't think of going to castle island and the castle island park and beaches and so forth that mostly has been the sort of haven for south boston residents but a beautiful place more people should experience because indeed this is probably the best place if in east boston some time ago we had the best view of downtown this actually is the best public environment with which to understand that you are on the edge of the atlantic ocean so from here we will follow along the beaches the eastern edge of south boston and head towards a hilltop head towards something called dorchester heights even though dorchester now is a neighborhood even further south dorchester heights is the uppermost topography of the south boston peninsula and we're going there for two quite radically different reasons we have climbed up the rather arduous climb up to the top of the south boston peninsula an area called dorchester heights it's an amazing spot it's a perfect oval and plan if you were kind of look down on it you can see it's surrounded by two and family residences typical of early part of the 20th century in boston it offers amazing views pretty much all around behind me you see quite an interesting tower and it commemorates a very important moment in the revolutionary war somehow against all odds and it's hard to imagine as we stand here george washington moved 1200 troops and a fair amount of cannons and armaments to the top of this hill took command over the boston harbor where the british fleet was and it caused the fleet to start to evacuate so it was a very important transition point in the revolutionary war now dorchester heights is at the top of the south boston peninsula and again sort of behind me you can see portions of the downtown and portions of where we were earlier not just castle island but all that land that was filled in to not make castle island island anymore the thousand acre landfill that would create a modern port that never took place but also happened to sort of connect the shaman peninsula and the south boston peninsula and whereas of course historically they seem to be very very far apart originally now they're sort of connected in various ways including through that large landfill so that's one reason why we took a hike up here but we're also here for a less noble reason and it's to address uh one of the problems that boston has always had with race even though uh uh you know at the moment it's considered a very sort of progressive very liberal community and it is and yet historically uh there are a number of cases where that was not true behind the tower stents south boston high school and that high school was the scene of a variety of very traumatic racial incidents in the 1970s there was a decision to try to integrate the schools because they were so completely unintegrated well the population of south boston largely irish american certainly white we're very opposed to this and there are terrible scenes of school buses arriving with little kids fearing for their lives with hundreds of neighbors standing there shouting no go away you don't belong here and so forth as they were escorted from the bus by police and even the national guard at some point into the building to take classes you cannot overlook the fact that historically as in other places in america a tremendous amount of discontent took place here sometimes taking kind of violent form so with that now we're going to sort of move back down from this hill and head over towards columbia point where the university of massachusetts campuses where the kennedy library is but we're there also for a different reason not unrelated to the kind of racial injustice in boston to look at an old public housing project that was transformed to become mixed-use neighborhood that has sort of won a lot of accolades for how you might try to transform public housing so here we are we're standing in a place where all kinds of quite very different things are taking place we're standing on the campus of the university of massachusetts boston campus we're standing very close to the presidential library in honor of john f kennedy and more recently also a sort of a sister institution in honor of his brother edward kennedy now called the institute for the study of the senate and we also as we kind of look around a bit further backwards towards the city you can also see a housing project and so the juxtaposition of these things themselves have an interesting history by the way very small portions of what is now columbia point it was an interesting sort of pasture and actually some of the earliest colonists to boston landed here another place where you can sort of make your way through some shoals and mud flats and gain access to land but still it was further south and east of even south boston which is even further away from the sharma peninsula and so over time it actually became more of a place to dump things it became one of the kind of places where of course refuse was located in fact it had and there's still kind of remnants of this an amazing pumping station it's a ruin now you can see it people still wish it could be preserved somehow and was very innovative during the 19th century being able to kind of whisk away refuse further out into the harbor so for much of the 19th century the first half of the 20th century really was a kind of a dumping grounds for garbage for boston and therefore to accommodate more garbage the landfill around the pasture began to be filled in more and more during the 1950s it was selected to be the home and think about this this is a dumping ground for the largest public housing project built in boston for approximately 1500 apartments of course lower class people largely if not ultimately eventually almost entirely african-american so this is another kind of sad part of boston's and the us history but where would you put public housing on a dumping ground quite far away and without much access to transit and so forth although more recently one of our subway extension has a station nearby so in the 50s it was devoted to this public housing project which because like many public housing projects eventually sort of failed partially because there's no access to shopping or other kind of facilities or amenities and because it became the haven for crime and other social behavior and so forth as other public housing projects built under urban renewal era in boston's history it became largely abandoned by the end only several hundred people lived there from the 1500 apartment units that were built there in the early 70s the university of massachusetts system thought it should have a boston-based campus and so the decision was made to locate a campus there which here we are in the middle of it and it sort of thrived and grown over time and so that was the second sort of a larger influx and quite a different influx of people and activities into this area and the third thing in kind of late 70s was the arrival of the presidential kennedy library now this requires a bit of a story because the original decision by the kennedy family actually by john kennedy's wish was to locate it indeed in harvard square it was to be located right where the kennedy school of government is right now and indeed a major design took place of a sort of large complex it was going to be a three-fold design the library of the new school of government named after kennedy in a park again in honor of john f kennedy who liked when he was in harvard to sit at the edge of the charles river and sort of look outward and for a number of years with a design by ironpay that looked remarkably like the pyramid at the louvre was being designed there it received a tremendous amount of protest by the kind of good citizens of brattle street and other of the kind of more upscale neighborhoods to the west of harvard square of the university and think about this so in the kind of the late 60s early 70s the shock of the death of the kennedy was still quite fresh and so there's expectation of course that his presidential library would attract millions of people and so there was this fear about harvard square being inundated with people going to the kennedy library and overwhelming the square and after about seven or eight years of determined protests even lawsuits and so forth through various redesigns the kennedy family finally chose to pull back agreed to build the kennedy school of government which is still there and the park designed supposedly by caroline kennedy including the selection of each of the trees in honor of her father but a search began for where else might the library go and at that time the new university of massachusetts campus and its chancellor say hey wait a minute why don't you build it here there's a potential for it for boston to be like the statue of liberty because given the patterns of planes landing in logan airport they kind of buzz over a portion of the columbia point and it would be a little bit like flying over boston's equivalent of the statue of liberty in this case the library in honor of john kennedy and so the kennedy library organization agreed and built it there as you can see and it is a kind of icon but it never has been quite as often visited as expectation of course partially the history of the assassination is now kind of diminished in its kind of impact but also because it still seems like it's kind of far away from most of the kind of more vital places of boston but nonetheless here's a former you know garbage collection that now houses three rather incredible environments the third one being a former public housing project that was transformed in the early 80s middle 80s i guess to be now a kind of one of the most impressive and nationally acclaimed mixed-use housing projects where some of the buildings were demolished some of them were maintained and refurbished the folks who were still there were given the opportunity to stay there in their approved housing and because in the 80s all of a sudden waterfront housing became an interesting thing became also quite suitable for market rate housing and so a group of developers development entity acquired this really horrible remnant of a public housing project and transformed it into a mixed use environment which accommodates some lower-income people and a fair number of sort of middle-class individuals families as well so now let's take a walk along this incredible area of boston called columbia point and experienced the remarkable transformation that has occurred there over the course of a couple of centuries so we're walking through the edge of the university of massachusetts boston campus we are seeing now on the left the kennedy library we're going to go past it along recently improved public walkway you'll see on the left the ruin of this great pumping station that used to pump all the sewage out into the harbor and ahead of us as you can see is the former columbia point public housing project now called the harbor apartments a mixed-use environment that has become really known nationwide as a interesting way to combine affordable housing and market rate housing and indeed was used as a model by the department of housing and urban development to try to also transform some of the other sort of failed public housing projects built during the renewal era so think about this over the course of a few minutes we've gone through a major university campus two important national institutions the kennedy library and now the center for the study of the senate in honor of john f kennedy's brother edward kennedy and into this now seemingly seamless sort of mixed-use housing project again a model from many others now across the country next then we will head back into the center of town and wind up on long wharf more or less looking directly ahead to where we began which was pierce park in east boston well we've just about come full circle to where we began this morning except that we're on the other side of this body of water called boston harbor we began the day at a park directly across the way uh behind a couple of these boats we're standing at the end of long wharf so called because once it's stretched out about a third of a mile into the harbor and we're looking back at where we began at east boston if you pan around here you can see sort of what has been happening recently you can see all that housing that's being built east boston is finally being discovered as a good place to live but of course also causing a little bit of gentrification problems for what was you know lower middle class set of neighborhoods there you kind of pan slightly to the right and you can see the airport as well and if we pan even further you can see where we were earlier in the day the so-called innovation district and you can see the scale of the buildings that are being built there and this was as we've talked about earlier that large landfill at the beginning of 20th century which stayed more or less fallow for most of the time but has been recently rediscovered where many of the kind of life sciences and high tech companies have been moving to boston so again we're standing at the end of something so when i turn around and point back behind me at the very end you see a little building sort of protected by four giant skyscrapers not exactly what sort of preservationists would think of doing but one of the great anomalies it's sort of a beautiful situation where a modern city creates a background for the old state house the colonial state house prior to the revolution where the governor sat and so forth but the reason for standing here and looking back to where we began is also to understand in another way the way in which the land expanded the wharf was long because it went all the way from where we're standing right now all the way to the front of that old state house it's now a very short wharf actually as the city continues to expand and so one of the sort of if you will lessons of the day i hope that you now appreciate is how much boston has been transformed by its constant need to create land because of course originally it was settled virtually as an island and the only way for it to grow and actually the only way for it even to use the harbor which was very shallow and full of mud flats and so forth the only way to even navigate it is to kind of bring land further out into the harbor itself so with that i think i encourage you to now kind of explore downtown boston and one of the great tourist areas that we avoided all day you will walk past three sort of informational kiosks and i hope that you stand and explore them a little bit they actually more or less tell the same story that we have been experiencing over the course of the day uh they're actually called the walk to the sea my firm actually had the pleasure of designing them they step up the hill all the way to the state house so if you think about that it kind of conveys the history of boston through this one walk from the top of beacon hill the highest topographical area in boston and then takes you down and over that path to where we're standing now describe the near 400 year history of boston so one fine day you might also on your own take the walk to the sea you

Channel: Harvard GSD

Views: 1,297

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: alex krieger, boston, tour, urban design

Id: d6yNiuMUCoA

Length: 33min 55sec (2035 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020