Re: Liberty Wharf (Jimmy's Harborside)
I don't think the seaport needs to "look like Boston" necessarily. There are advantages to a blank slate too, and it may still be too soon to call what's going up a failure.
I don't think it's necessarily up to architecture to define an area as psychologically part of "home base" for Boston residents. To many residents it's a non-area, a foreign country, a frontier or a place to pass through on occasion - like an airport. Can architecture help? Certainly. But what's also improtant is that this area becomes part of the mental map of the city. And that goes beyond buildings and footprints.
For example, even though it's a different area than we're discussing, I think the build-out of Fort Point will be key here. Getting residents - not just conventioneers - to come across the channel will help define the seaport as "home base" - and once the channel is seen as an intra-urban waterway and not a border, the arterial roads of Northern Ave, Congress, and Summer Street will provide the necessary psychological link to the new frontier.
