The two pits have gaped since 2008, the fences around them keeping lonely watch over a pair of Boston neighborhoods that should be humming, if not for the holes in their centers. Both craters sprang from game-changing development projects brought low by a sputtering economy, and both opened wounds that spread far beyond the excavation footprints that construction crews began digging and then had to abandon.

The pits at the Filene’s building in Downtown Crossing and the Ferdinand building in Dudley Square aren’t often discussed together. But they materialized alongside each another, and they’ve blighted neighborhoods together. So there’s poetry in the fact that, in 2013, Filene’s and the Ferdinand will be rising in unison.