Around the end of November, the Summer Street Steps in Boston’s Seaport District quietly opened for passage. Described as an ‘iconic public gathering place’ by its developer—before much, if any, public gathering has occurred—the new outdoor stairway connects Congress Street and Summer Street, unlocking a corridor between two key arteries notably separated by a 24-foot change in grade. An artifact of the Seaport’s maritime and industrial beginnings, this rift in the grid has posed a challenge to creating a cohesive streetscape in what is today a rapidly evolving area of the city.

Where Congress Street now hums with foot traffic and ground-level activity—there are several restaurants and bars, a hotel, a convenience/liquor store, a Dunkin Donuts, and three family-oriented museums—the elevated stretch of Summer Street west of the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center is by comparison barren, its only retail tenants a salon and a clinic offering botox injections and other cosmetic services. There are few options for descent, involving long walks down D Street or World Trade Center Avenue, or negotiating the somewhat treacherous sets of stairs at the A Street overpass.

What is now an impediment was once a boon for the Boston Wharf Company and the waterfront area it created, owned, and built its signature brick warehousing and manufacturing lofts upon. ‘The pace of loft construction got a particular boost around 1900,’ the Fort Point Channel Landmark District Study Report notes, ‘when the Summer Street Bridge opened and extended Summer Street from downtown to BWCo land.’ The 1899 opening of South Station, which consolidated four separate rail terminals into one grand ‘union station,’ allowed for the removal of a railroad drawbridge that had spanned the channel near Summer Street since 1855, and helped relieve the problem of troublesome ‘grade crossings’ where trains met streets at the same level: 

Even though Congress Street Bridge had been in place for over two decades, Congress Street never became an important route in South Boston. The tracks of the railroad, after 1873 owned by the New York & New England Railroad (NY & NE RR), crossed it at grade; likewise, more tracks crossed A Street at grade, separating Congress Street from BWCo’s bonded yards. Summer Street, intended to give access to the new state piers, avoided this problem by being built above grade; it ran at an elevated level through the BWCo site and continued on a viaduct over the railroad’s tracks and yards east of the BWCo land. Congress Street was then terminated at the train yards. Summer Street provided easy access between BWCo’s site and downtown, and the grade separation made it an important thoroughfare in South Boston.

Though much has changed since the days when freight lines threaded through the Seaport, Summer Street remains elevated, and an ‘important thoroughfare’ connecting South Boston to Downtown, such that it has recently become the subject of a contentious debate regarding a city plan to implement ‘a range of transportation improvements throughout the corridor.’ These include a dedicated lane for buses and trucks, and eventually bike infrastructure to extend the near quarter mile of protected lanes completed in Fort Point in 2019. The project website deems Summer Street ‘a critical missing link in existing pedestrian and bike infrastructure in the City,’ and one of the principal objectives is to make it better for walking: ‘An improved pedestrian experience will be had with the addition of transit/bike infrastructure. With improved traffic management along the corridor, pedestrians will be able to have a safer experience.’

So the Summer Street Steps are just one piece of a bigger, high-stakes puzzle. But they are an important piece, and have been touted as such since their developer presented the initial plan and renderings in 2017. How is it going so far? In one sense, it’s too early to say. The construction of the entire site isn’t complete, and the winter months aren’t the best to gauge an outdoor structure’s level of ‘activation’ as a ‘public gathering place.’ There hasn’t been much wider attention, nor a press release, though the Massachusetts NAIOP (‘the Commercial Real Estate Development Association’) did invite guests to explore the Steps as a part of their annual meeting and holiday party. An official ribbon cutting might still be years away.

In another sense, though, the Summer Street Steps are already complete by fulfilling their most basic and important function as a set of stairs: to allow for movement from up to down, or down to up. This is an accomplishment. It should be celebrated. But there is much work yet to be done, and it’s too soon to declare the project a resounding success. The first and so far only review for the Steps on Google, the listing categorized as a ‘park,’ reads:

Summer Street Steps are a game changer for commuting from Southie to Seaport! It’s now a straight shot down D Street, down the Summer Street Steps and you’re right in Seaport! The Steps even have a rail to walk your bike down the steps. And, if you have a stroller or need elevator access, you can do so right in the 400 Summer Street building.

Which is all more or less true, but if it reads like marketing copy, that’s because it is—a quick search shows the effusive reviewer is an employee of WS Development, the master developer overseeing the project. 

WS’s involvement in the Seaport dates back to early 2007, when it signed on as the retail partner for John B. Hynes, III and Morgan Stanley’s proposed Seaport Square development, a massive, multibillion dollar buildout of 23 acres of land at the time occupied mainly by parking lots. The provenance of the Seaport Square tract is itself a colorful, twisting saga of bankruptcies, litigation, big names, and big deals, something of a microcosm of America’s long transition to its post-industrial present, and well worth an abridged review.

J.P. Morgan’s monopoly New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad—’the New Haven’—for decades owned the freight yards terminating at Fan Pier and much of the surrounding land, and went bankrupt during the Great Depression in 1935. The company reorganized, failed again, and in 1968 was merged into the newly created Penn Central, which folded after barely two years, then the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Penn Central began selling off its vast real estate holdings in Massachusetts, and in 1978 a group of developers including the upstart Frank McCourt Jr. agreed to acquire the L-shaped parcel adjacent to Fan Pier for $3.5 million. They couldn’t come up with the money, and ended up selling the option on the property to the blueblood firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, which completed the purchase. The dogged McCourt, though, had retained an option to buy the land from CC&F, and attempted to exercise it at the last minute; they didn’t want to sell, and a lengthy legal battle between the two parties followed. A front-page Globe headline read, ‘Rivals vie to pluck a real estate plum.’

When the $145 million loan came due a few years later, McCourt turned over the Seaport land to News Corp, which quickly flipped it to John Hynes and Morgan Stanley for $204 million. The deals would keep flowing as the 23-acre spread was carved up: a few plots sold to Swedish construction giant Skanska here, a couple others to Pasadena private equity firm Cottonwood Management there. WS Development acquired the remaining 12.5 acres from Hynes’s Boston Global Investors and Morgan Stanley for $359 million in 2015. A Boston Business Journal analysis found the total purchase price across all the land sales since from 2011 to 2015 had reached $665 million.

When WS Development first entered the Seaport in 2007, it was still mainly known for building suburban shopping plazas. A 1995 Globe article described it as a ‘real estate firm that often acquires sites for Wal-Mart.’ Its profile rose with the 2009 opening of Legacy Place in Dedham, which became an instant success by putting forward a new vision of outdoor-oriented, ‘lifestyle center’ retail, contra to the prevailing style of enclosed, big-box-anchored malls like those in Burlington and Natick. As ‘a new type of mixed-use retail district and an embodiment of New Urbanism,’ the design firm Prellwitz Chilinski says, ‘Legacy Place captures the appeal of a town-like pedestrian experience, offering a lively, people-friendly streetscape with landscaping and exterior cafés suggesting a neighborhood that grew over time.’

This more thoughtful ‘approach to placemaking’ can be commended, but there are only so many ways to innovate fundamentally retail-oriented spaces. If the new Seaport can often feel like a high-end, harborside mall, well, it’s in the developer’s DNA. Inducements to shopping are highly visible throughout WS’s properties. See, for example, the banner on a temporary construction wall across from the bottom of the Summer Street Steps, as work on the connecting ‘Harbor Way’ path continues: ‘This way to more shops,’ it beckons, beside a busy grid of brand logos.

The single strangest feature of the Steps likewise seems to be borrowed from the retail playbook. There are five large, green JBL speakers deployed in a zigzag down the tiered landings, playing a Spotify Today’s Top Hits-type selection of songs at moderate volume apparently around the clock. From the entrance to ‘Harbor Way’ at Autumn Lane through where it currently lets out at Pier 4 Boulevard, there is also a constant stream of pop music. This is fine, maybe even pleasant if you happen to catch a favorite tune, but it doesn’t help dispel the sensation of walking through a shopping center.

What about the rest of the Steps? There are nice design touches: the central wooden boardwalk, and the emphasis on the raised planters and trees, which when lush and blooming will make the location an attractive oasis in a neighborhood sorely lacking green space. Lights at night add warmth to an eerie and canyon-like area bracketed by construction sites. There is a tiny, almost unnoticeable dab of a harbor view from the top of the stairs, but it may be seasonally obscured when the project is complete and the leaves of the Harbor Way trees come in.

The more interesting view is actually looking west, down Congress Street, the Wharf Co. lofts in the foreground and International Place looming behind, but this is only temporary. The Steps opened along with the adjacent 350 Summer Street office tower, home to Roche-owned ‘molecular insights company’ Foundation Medicine, and its companion building 400 Summer Street is due to rise on the other side. Construction hasn’t yet begun, and this past October WS asked for an extension on its permit from the Boston Conservation Commission, claiming that ‘global economic conditions and the office and laboratory leasing market have changed dramatically, impacting [their] ability to finance and lease’ the tower. In January the Wall Street Journal reported that office space vacancy in major U.S. cities had hit 19.7%, the highest figure since the data began being tracked in 1979, and a follow-up story warned that ‘even premier towers are starting to wobble.’

350 Summer’s prime location alone, with Amazon moving in across the street and a number of blue-chip biotech, consulting, and law firms nearby, should ensure WS will find a tenant eventually. But there is a certain irony to the plea for more time. The block was initially permitted for 350,000 square feet of residential space, until WS filed in 2019 to change the building use to ‘office and/or research and development.’

Basic features of the Summer Street Steps have also changed, or are yet to materialize. As the Fort Pointer has documented over the past several years, the initial renderings of the Steps in 2017 presented a rather grander picture. Sure, the project isn’t finished, it’s the middle of winter, and plans evolve. Still, the site simply looked far more spacious and impressive in the original images than it is in reality.

For such a large, blank canvas, accessibility hasn’t been granted the utmost consideration. In a 2017 comment letter, the waterfront advocacy group Boston Harbor Now strongly encouraged taking a holistic approach to mobility at the location, ‘incorporating a combined ramp and stairs design’ to ‘promote an equal experience for all users.’ Instead, the Boston Planning & Development Agency settled for a commitment from the developer to ‘install a public elevator in close proximity to the Summer Steps and outside of the building’s structural core.’ Currently the elevator route is not immediately adjacent, nor prominently called out, and on either level involves walking three doors down into and through the lobby of Foundation’s office. WS’s Notice of Project Change document submitted to the BPDA in February 2017 said, ‘The experience and design quality of this route will be similar to that of the Summer Street Steps and it is intended that the public would not need to enter into traditionally privatized space such as a residential or office building lobby in order to access this critical accessibility pathway.’

That is a particularly flagrant dereliction; other aesthetic criticisms may seem like trivial sideline quibbling. Building anything in Boston, let alone two thoughtfully designed and historically-informed towers bearing public benefits, is hard enough. The obstacles are numerous. Large sums must be raised, bureaucracy navigated, abutting interests placated, tenants signed. But surely we can do better than ‘take what you can get.’ Billions of dollars of public money—the harbor cleanup, Big Dig, Silver Line, courthouse, convention center—went into making the Seaport a viable arena for private development. Powerful companies and illustrious families fought for decades to build on the waterfront, because everyone knew such an unparalleled opportunity would likely never come around again. The moment demanded more than Class A+ office space and nice stores.

The Summer Street Steps at least are not solely that. They serve a valuable purpose, and years from now could even be fondly seen as the ‘iconic public gathering place’ that has been promised. Stairways are potent symbolic structures, and in the best cases can define and elevate a space to sublime heights. In the original 2017 project plan, WS described their work as being ‘modeled conceptually on the Spanish Steps in Rome and other monumental stairs around the world.’ If only the execution were as ambitious as the vision: the Summer Street Steps are fine, but a Baroque masterpiece they are not.

Why the City of Boston can’t fill a deep pothole in the middle of a busy commercial strip

We seldom think of streets as private spaces. The word itself connotes openness, freedom, the opportunity and danger of the public realm, and has for many centuries: the OED notes the Old English stræte could mean ‘the public square or forum of a town or city,’ and modern usage still closely links all manner of commerce, politics, and culture to the street. Main Street, Wall Street, streetwalker, street fight, street food, streetwear, street cred. ‘To take to the streets’ is ‘to assemble in a public place in order to engage in a political revolt or protest.’

Thomson Place in the Fort Point neighborhood of Boston is a street by any definition, and indeed has become something of the main drag of the surrounding area, home to the Trillium brewery, Trader Joe’s grocery store, four restaurants and counting, a medical clinic, and several corporate offices. There is a Marriott hotel at one end, and a Shake Shack and Silver Line transit station at the other. Its calm, one-way traffic is a refreshing respite from the rushing clamor of both Seaport Boulevard and Congress Street, and its historic, human-scaled architecture stands in stark contrast to the hulking new towers of the master-planned Seaport Square project nearby. But Thomson Place is technically not a public space. It is a ‘private way,’ not owned by the city of Boston, but by Invesco Real Estate and Newton-based Crosspoint Associates.

How did a global investment management company and regional real estate firm come to own this old street and the early 20th-century warehouse buildings lining it? It’s a bit difficult for the layman flâneur to untangle, such are the convoluted workings of urban development and the decaying state of the public internet and search engines, but we can start with the invaluable Fort Point Channel Landmark District
Study Report. The story goes something like this: the Boston Wharf Company, which built more or less the entire Fort Point district from scratch starting in the mid-nineteenth century, laid out the A Street Extension in 1896, which was later named Pittsburgh Street for the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company that occupied a cluster of buildings at the northern end of the street, including the striking, low-slung warehouse that now hosts Trader Joe’s.

From there it gets hazier, requiring a deep dive into the Globe archives for clues as to what was going on during the ‘dark’ decades between Fort Point’s industrial heyday and its ongoing revitalization from roughly the 1980s onward. In 1954 there’s a record of the Central Wool Warehouse Corporation occupying the building at 26 Pittsburgh Street, which then served briefly as some kind of home appliance clearing house for the once-prominent department store Raymond’s, a more downmarket competitor to Filene’s and Jordan Marsh. Its advertising copy employed an eccentric, ‘swamp Yankee’ vernacular full of creative misspellings:

The same year, the Boston Wharf Company began selling off its sprawling holdings in Fort Point, the most consequential move since its creation of the area 150 years prior, and one that left the pioneering local artist community ‘stunned.’ The writing was on the wall; the Globe quoted a local resident and activist who feared a coming wave of development would leave Fort Point with ‘tourists on one end and a duplication of the Financial District on the other, and very little left over for a real neighborhood.’

A series of deals followed, and in 2005 the Wharf Co. sold its last tranche of properties to a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, completing the liquidation of a portfolio that at its peak spanned 79 buildings, 30 acres, and over 3 million square feet of space. The Thomson Place site was sold to ‘an undisclosed client of HDG Mansur Investment Services Inc.’ for $92 million in 2004, flipped again in 2007 to Crosspoint Associates for $120.5 million, and in 2015 Invesco took over majority ownership in a $183.5 million deal. Invesco tapped local architecture firm Margulies Peruzzi for an ambitious ‘retail activation and streetscape project,’ and the milestones came in relatively short order: Trillium moved to its current site in October 2018, the street opened to one-way car traffic in October 2019, and the same week Trader Joe’s arrived after much speculation and anticipation. This last development in particular signaled a major evolution in the character of the street and the viability of the Seaport in general, for what ‘real’ neighborhood doesn’t have a grocery store? The developers pulled off a seemingly rare feat, making good on their goal of ‘respecting the historic context of the neighborhood while activating a new retail area for some big name tenants.’

So what does any of this have to do with a pothole? Again, despite its redevelopment over the last five years as a central dining and shopping destination, Thomson Place has retained its designation as a ‘private way.’ This has important implications for street upkeep: while the ‘City of Boston is responsible for all general maintenance of public ways,’ ‘residents are responsible for all maintenance of the streets and sidewalks along the private way.’ Which is how you end up with a situation like this:

Since New Year’s Eve there have been five separate 311 reports of this specific pothole at the north end of Thomson Place between Trillium and Shake Shack, and the earliest claims that ‘It’s been there for over a year!!’ (The following sadly reports that the pothole ‘dented my rim and cost $600 to fix.’) All but the first have been closed without resolution with variations of the same response: ‘Per Public Works: On private way, responsibility to abutter.’ In other words, not the city’s problem. There’s a touch of bureaucratic absurdity to the finger-pointing that’s a little funny and a little bleak, simultaneously banal yet also symbolic of a deeper dysfunction that plagues our public places and infrastructure. That is, in the most expensive neighborhood in one of the richest cities in the richest country in the world, if we can’t fix a pothole in a well-trafficked thoroughfare, how can we possibly call ourselves serious people?

All of this is not to blame Boston Public Works nor Invesco, though we might ask for a little more conversation between both, and a higher level of attention to detail from the latter—see, for example, the misspelling of new tapas restaurant Boqueria as ‘Boqueira’ on both of the new ‘wayfinding’ signs on Thomson Place:

Rather, the point is simply to look a bit closer, and in doing so to begin to understand how the places that define our daily movements and routines came to be. Sometimes a pothole is just a pothole. This one tells a story.