Awesome write up, I was going to ask equilibria what he meant by that area was going to be east bostons answer to back bay, but you ended up showing it. I had never heard about that before.
Yea from the top down it very much looks like an urban renewal bulldozer job, but the history is much more that for whatever reasons economic or social, that plans here just never were completed or progressed very far. The City has maps that show those proposed east boston fill blocks since at least 1844. Even looking at Olmsteds 1880s plan for wood island park, you can see that he thought fill and the grid would extend both north and south of Wood Island, such that it would lose its prominence from the coast line. Despite such grand ambitions, even the terra firma developable parcels surrounding Neptune remained largely unbuilt upon for decades and decades. I haven't looked into the sociology of it yet, but either was sequenced after the back bay land making effort (which only wrapped up in the fens in ~1900), or as a poorer neighborhood of recent immigrants it just didn't get the same investment the Back Bay did. which itself only wrapped up in the fens around 1900. By the 1910s, they'd only just started on the blocks bounded by Bremen, Geneva and Porter, plus the Neptune skeleton - and thats all they really managed through the 40s. For whatever reason, in the nearly century long span between 1844 and the 1940s, no one really wanted to fill it in until the airport came along and did it.
As evidenced, this is a longstanding pending personal research project of mine, I see you've already cited Seasholes, but these are some primary sources I found particularly helpful.These last few posts have had a great little historical rundown of the area; thanks all for it. This got me going down a bit of a rabbit hole about that big stretch of mostly-vacant land to the northwest of Wood Island Park (between Neptune Road and Prescott Street) shown in the second pic in Stlin's post. It had clearly been built out as a neighborhood complete with a street grid, but very little was ever built on it aside from along Neptune Road.
Apparently the East Boston Company had decided to build out that area in 1887. New lands here would have been of questionable value at the time, since they would have been cut off from the rest of East Boston by the Boston & Albany tracks running parallel to Bremen Street (seen at the left edge of the above pic) which were at grade and formed what was described as a dangerous "Chinese wall" of separation. Even so, by 1893 the EBC had filled and graded forty acres, and that same year the Street Commissioners authorized the opening of the street grid between Parkway (aka Neptune Road) and Prescott Street. According to Nancy Seasholes (who calls this area "The Parkway Lands"), the EBC's plan was to sell lots here as part of a new desirable residential neighborhood but this was derailed by the city, which failed to provide sewer access to the area for several years and consequently refused to accept the new streets. Sewer capacity was eventually extended in the 1900s and the EBC finally sold the lands by 1913, but even after this very little vertical construction took place.
After that the trail got sort of spotty. I don't have a clear answer for why this area was never developed even after it gained utilities, other than the usual answers of Great Depression and the decline of Boston in the following decades. In the 1940s the state annexed several significant plots of land in preparation for the airport's expansion, including "several parcels of vacant land and flats lying between Maverick Street and Prescott Street and between the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad property and the Airport" in 1944, and "flats belonging to the Boston Port Development Company (which had acquired many of the EBC's assets) lying northerly of World War Memorial Park (aka Wood Island Park) and Neptune Road and extending along the northerly shore-of East Boston toward Belle Isle Inlet" in 1945, but I can't tell for sure if either of these takings included the area in question. Wood Island Park itself was slated to be taken for the airport by the mid-1940s, though it was only cleared in 1967. The street grid for the area still existed (at least on maps) in 1950, but by 1954 the majority of it had disappeared.
As for the EBC, it actually had claim to the East Boston Flats in the 1890s and planned to build out a massive complex of docks in the area, but the state stepped in and seized a huge chunk through eminent domain in 1898 and 1913 for public use instead. Seasholes says the company went out of business in 1928, but the name at least seemed to survive for many years thereafter. In the late 1920s and 1930s the company appears in litigation after it fell delinquent on its property taxes. It later became associated with Bernard Goldfine, who became its largest shareholder. Goldfine was later infamously caught buying federal influence during the Eisenhower administration and eventually went to prison for tax evasion. These are only fragments of a picture though. There's supposedly a bunch of EBC annual reports hanging around somewhere, but frustratingly I couldn't find them online or even a library where they'd be at.
Anyway, thought it was interesting to delve into how such a large piece of land managed to sit vacant for half a century. If anyone has more details about it or about the late history of the EBC I'd be curious.
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Did they run a contest to see who could make a (usually pretty ugly) parking garage even uglier?
At least In this case it serves a purpose - those are PV panels, one of the first & biggest solar facades in the US. Even those red panels are solar, which apparently supplies 53% of this buildings power needs. I imagine this is a proof of concept in the US, but that would be really interesting for 5 over 1s clad in with similar non-solar cladding systems.
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That’s very interesting, although I struggle to envision a scenario where facade solar would be more efficient than rooftop. It might make sense in a situation where rooftop solar is not viable, like a 5 over 1 that wants a roof deck, but that is not the case with parking garages.At least In this case it serves a purpose - those are PV panels, one of the first & biggest solar facades in the US. Even those red panels are solar, which apparently supplies 53% of this buildings power needs. I imagine this is a proof of concept in the US, but that would be really interesting for 5 over 1s clad in with similar non-solar cladding systems.
#facadeengineering #facadelovers #facadedesign #bipv #solar #sustainablearchitecture #netzero2050 #epd #circularity #architecture #archdaily #archicad #revit #rhino3d #sketchup #futurearchitecture… | SolarLab - customised solar facades
What an exciting privilege for SolarLab, and our custom solar facade, to be part of todays grand opening of the newly expanded LoganExpress terminal in Framingham. Designed by saam architecture and installed by Consigli Construction Co., Inc. the facades 2668 tailored solar panels covering...
I don't think its a straight efficiency problem - I suspect that these are actually less efficient than a general purpose rooftop panel per area, but solar is all about lit surface area. I think the general theory is that most building massing is some form of rectalinear prism with 6 faces, and if we assume the building is cuboid, the face resting on the foundation is clearly out, but 4/5 remaining faces are vertical, and actually accounts for a majority of building surface, and lit, area. We know already this is a concern with windows and solar heating - That surface area to roof ratio is worse for short and squat buildings like a parking garage or a factory with expansive roof space, but the opposite is true of say a skyscraper or lab structure with a rooftop mostly occupied by mechanical structures.
I wouldn't say that the structure has a lifespan - the technology in the cab does. Unless there are serious accessibility or safety concerns the tower is presumably structurally fit - it's just a concrete tower. The replacement issue is more that they would need some magical interim tower if they were going to replace the cab without shutting the airport down for months.
Concrete structures certainly have lifespans, especially since the codes have changed significantly since the tower was built c.1971. Retrofitting the structure to bring it to up-to-date codes can often be complex and cost intensive, especially for a cast-in-place concrete tower such as that one.
Good example of the design life of a cast in place concrete tower is the Eastgate Tower formerly in Kendall Square. Eastgate was even younger than the Logan Control Tower (circa 1966), but the evaluation of the retrofit and upgrade costs versus replacement led to its demolition and replacement with the SoMa complex.
I would say a new tower would be more likely to to be cookie-cutter than iconic, but apparently that's no longer the case in 2025...
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