Boston’s Seaport: Enjoy It While It Lasts
Where innovation meets inundation.
We recently spent a couple days in Boston’s shiny new ‘Seaport’ district, and it was lots of fun. Walking the piers, eating soft serve and lobster (not together), going to museums and beer gardens, watching the tourists and hipster knowledge workers… it felt like a Mediterranean escape meets The High Line.
I grew up in Boston and remember this area as it was before: empty parking lots, disused fish piers, old-school seafood places from the 1960s, and maybe (probably) a few mobsters.
But then the money bomb hit Boston. More specifically, the city’s biotech and financial services boom, low interest rates, and the massive federal investment in infrastructure projects like The Big Dig.
Today, the Seaport’s prime waterfront property has gone upscale: complete with starchitect-designed buildings, art museums, high-tech companies (Chewy, Amazon, Anthropic, Vertex Pharmaceuticals), law and consulting firms, condos and restaurants, promenades and bike paths, hotels and a convention center.
It’s the heart of the new, affluent Boston.
But there’s a problem. Actually two of them.
One, the Seaport isn’t very diverse. But that’s always been an issue for Boston, and the Seaport is no different. There’s almost no working-class neighborhoods left in central Boston anymore… even Southie, a stones throw from Seaport (and featured in Goodwill Hunting and The Departed), is gentrifying. Instead, you get people mooring yachts with names like ‘Trust Fun’ and buying $7 croissants at Tatte.
And two… the whole Seaport may be underwater in the near future. Oops.
Boston already has more high tide flooding than any other American city, and the Seaport – which was built on landfill in the 1880s – routinely floods several times a year.
Here’s a picture I took in July at the Seaport’s Fan Pier:
Now here’s that same spot, flooded during a storm six months earlier.
The flooding threat is so bad that climate protesters have continued to try to stop or slow the Seaport’s development, even after it became a fait accompli.
