ABOUT THE PROJECT
Long Wharf was first built in the early 18th century to serve the busiest port in colonial America. Originally the wharf stretched from the shoreline that was then adjacent to Faneuil Hall nearly half a mile out into the harbor. Because the peir reached far into the deep waters, large ships could dock and unload directly onto Long Wharf. As the land of the Boston peninsula has filled in over the past three centuries, Long Wharf has become only a small fraction of its original length.
ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
THE FIRST BOSTON clung tenuously to the edge of a continent, looking ever back across the ocean toward Europe, its waters filled with the ships that were its vital quick messengers across the Atlantic. Even the long piers seem to stretch eastward, like fingers, toward home. These two panoramic views of the Port of Boston document its transformation from that working waterfront of ships, wharves, and warehouses into the stylish neighborhood of today, a in East Boston. Is it perhaps a deliberate joke?
Shown are three of Boston's major wharves: Long Wharf on the left, Central Wharf in the middle, and the tip of India Wharf on the right. At India lies the sidewheel steamer Forest City, which ran between Boston and Portland for nearly forty years. Elsewhere the New York and Philadelphia steamers are also visible. More than eighty ships
in all, most of them two-masted coastal traders, crowd the harbor. At the bottom is Atlantic Avenue designed by Cambridge Seven Associates and built in 1969.
Elsewhere we see old wharfs and warehouses converted to condominiums, taverns, and restaurants.
Harbor tourist cruise ships now line Long Wharf, where stands a new Marriott Hotel designed by Araldo Cossutta (also the architect of Boston's Christian Science complex) in a style reminiscent of the old pier warehouses. At right, on India Wharf, are the Harbor Towers condominplace of residential, cultural, and recreational uses. Both views were made by splicing four separate photographs. They show the port as it looked in the 1870s, just after the era of the great clipper ships, and as it looks now.
Photography required time in the 1870s. If you are sharp-eyed, you can make out a Single sailing ship that appears in all four segments of the old panorama, moving from right to left as it reduces sail and heads toward a berth somewhere nue in 1868 it sliced through the middle of Central Wharf, which previously had been a grand row of fifty -four brick stores, 1,300 feet in length, built in 1817.
In the new photo nothing remains of these buildings on Central Wharf. They were demolished for the Central Artery, or for a relocated Atlantic Avenue, or for the New England Aquarium. The Aquarium is the squarish building at the end of the wharf, a hugely successful attraciums, designed by Cossutta's former partner at I. M. Pei & Partners, Henry Cobb. Boston Harbor, the source of most of Boston's early wealth, lost its prominence as a port because of its shallowness and its failure to compete successfully with New York.
Today, according to historian Bainbridge Bunting, Boston handles less tonnage in proportion to its surrounding population than any other East Coast port. Long dilapidated, it experienced a second coming as a residential neighborhood in the 1970s. Like so much of America today, the Boston waterfront has been severed of any visible connection with work, production, or nourishment. When a fishing industry becomes an aquarium, theater replaces life. "The waterfront died the day you couldn 't any longer get breakfast at 5 A.M.," comments one sad old-timer. But despite a loss of
gritty reality, the waterfront remains a busy and inviting place.
-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - On the Waterfront", Boston Globe, 1984
