The Seaport District with its bustling workspaces, burgeoning population, and youthful vibe has become a city within the city. Trendy, yes, but also a victim of its own success.
The three access points carrying traffic into and out of the neighborhood are clogged virtually day and night.
The Seaport deserves better. It deserves better access, surely, but it also deserves a gateway, something that marks it as the unique destination it has become.
Now it looks like the rusting hulk of the Northern Avenue Bridge will provide just that kind of opportunity — a chance for a truly iconic bridge that says welcome in the most inviting sort of way, by putting people first.
The three alternative designs as presented by city officials this month still present a range of choices, but what they all make clear is that this will be a structure built largely to accommodate pedestrians and bikers, serve as access for emergency vehicles over the Fort Point Channel, and with the potential to become a genuine destination, connecting residents and commuters to the water.
The late congressman Joe Moakley, who once represented the district, loved to talk about how, as a boy, he roamed those waterfront streets waiting for a watermelon to fall off the trains that ran where the federal courthouse now stands. He would live long enough to see the construction of the Evelyn Moakley Bridge and of the courthouse now named for him, which would help anchor the building boom that soon followed.
Moakley helped secure the federal funds for the bridge that bore his wife’s name and insisted the old Northern Avenue Bridge, built in 1908, never be resurrected. It was closed to vehicles in 1997, and then, over safety issues, to pedestrians in 2014. Plans and schemes to give it new life, including one that reimagined it as a horrifying glassed-in shopping mall, have been kicking around for more than two decades. They all died on the vine.
And maybe that was a good thing. After all, who could foresee the rapid growth of the area, especially as the Rose Kennedy Greenway and the Fort Point area would take shape?
Today city planners need the same kind of vision as Moakley — for a neighborhood that by 2030 is expected to add 13,000 new jobs, 10 million square feet of commercial development, 1,500 hotel rooms, and an expanded convention center.
A new Northern Avenue Bridge is only a part of that — but an important part.
One previously contentious issue — whether the ancient swing bridge would continue to be movable or be raised to keep the channel navigable — has been solved: With a recent storm surge already reaching the bottom of the old bridge deck, experts have determined that a new bridge must be raised to account for rising seas — likely to a height similar to the Moakley Bridge.
Bowing to much of the public comment about its use, the consensus recommendation from city officials is that on Day One it would be limited to “walking, biking and emergency vehicles” but that its design could “evolve over time.” Of the three designs now on the drawing board, the “double arch” concept with two fairly narrow lanes meets the “iconic” standard in the same way the Zakim Bridge did earlier. And the proposed pavilion that would allow a view of the old bridge’s swing mechanism might be sufficient to keep preservationists happy.
Cost, of course, is always a factor and the estimated price tag of $100 million is twice what the Walsh administration has thus far pledged to make available. But it’s also far less than the $150 million estimated cost of “restoring” a rusty bridge.
The city should use the bridge redesign as an opportunity to pivot toward a broader plan for the Seaport that takes into account its vulnerability to rising waters. It’s again time for bold thinking in a city that has proven that the past can be respected without being replicated.