Thanks
@JS38!
For someone who is familiar with the history of Boston's infill but not an expert, the TL;DW takeaways for me were the explanation of why the Seaport laid essentially empty for so long and why the Kennedy presidential library is located where it is. Essentially, the intended purpose of filling in the Seaport at the end of the 19th century was to build modern wharfs that could accommodate the (then) modern shipping industry. The work took decades and by the time it was finished much of the industry had left for other cities, leaving the Seaport as little more than parking lots up until up until recent times. Potentially interesting prompt for our "Alternative History" thread: what the area might've looked like had they finished the work a couple decades earlier, retaining the industry and causing the Fort Point neighborhood to develop and stretch much further east.
The Kennedy Library had an I.M. Pei design that looked like the glass pyramid at the Louvre and was supposed to be in Harvard Square, where the Kennedy School and Memorial Park ended up. Cambridge NIMBYs afraid of throngs of tourist killed the idea and the library got relegated to Columbia Point, with the hopes of becoming something like the Statue of Liberty for Boston.
