Seaport Square (Formerly McCourt Seaport Parcels)

The area is clearly designed for cars, not pedestrians.
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Well yeah, since it's now mostly parking lots. It will feel a lot less like that once it's built out. Seaport Square looks like it will have similar density to the old Fort Point warehouse district that it's next to.
 
^^ I can only hope you are right Ron.

To me, the renderings looks very auto-centric.
 
Ron Newman said:
Well yeah, since it's now mostly parking lots. It will feel a lot less like that once it's built out. Seaport Square looks like it will have similar density to the old Fort Point warehouse district that it's next to.
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The newer buildings in the area have zero street presence. Just endless blank walls of tinted glass and cheap-looking prefab cladding.

There is no incentive to walk around and explore. It's an area designed for people to drive to, complete a specific task and leave.

The fact there are no plans for actual mass transit in the area ensure there will be no momentum toward changing that.
 
I've never had to wait more than 5 minutes for a Silver Line bus at South Station, Courthouse, or WTC. The problem is that the stations are mostly still surrounded by parking lots or vacant land. Won't most of the Seaport Square buildings have first-floor commercial uses, similar to the old warehouses?
 
The rendering looks like the Longwood Medical Area without the charm.
 
Well if the area is publicized as adding 5000 new residents to the city then there surely does need to be more study and emphasis placed on the pedestrian aspect of the neighborhood. Having 2 or 3 t stops running down the central part of the development would be greatly appreciated, im sure. Couldn't there be more emphasis placed on the conversion of the bus to lrt or heavy rail? Like Briv said in a previous post, they are turning this into a "Corporate Commune." Why not focus more on dense pedestrian friendly neighborhoods with a mix of residential & commercial zones that connect to mass transit within blocks of each other? Isn't that smarter growth than praising this shoddy work thus far?
 
Blue Line? I don't understand -- that isn't anywhere near here. Courthouse station should be smack dab in the middle of this development once it's built out. WTC station is at its eastern edge, but right now that feels like the middle of nowhere due to lack of development.
 
I wasn't thinking. I was just trying to point out that more funding needs to be popped into this line to convert it to LRT or heavy rail so it can better connect to the central regions of the city.
 
I'm not sure how everyone's coming to this "car-centric" conclusion: the pdf shows street level retail; there's a T station right in the middle of the development; and there will be ~5,000 residents plus 3 hotels worth of visitors. That's not exactly a recipe for nothin' doin'. Even if there isn't an unbroken street wall of retail and even if the transit is a bus in a tunnel, this is hardly shaping up to be Kendall Sq. Not even Hanover or Newbury St have unbroken streetwalls of retail. Furthermore, Newbury only has a T stop at one end, and Hanover St. doesn't have one at all. Both seem pretty ped. friendly to me.
 
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caravaggiste said:
Having 2 or 3 t stops running down the central part of the development would be greatly appreciated, im sure. Couldn't there be an extension of the blue line that runs express from Government Center to this new Seaport Square area?
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The smart money would have been to spur the Red Line into this district, and then under the harbor to Logan in a third tube of the Ted (constructed concurrently with the vehicular tunnel, of course). This would have been a real intermodal connection between South Station and Logan, allowing travelers to park and fly via Alewife or Braintree. You could have even connected the lines at Logan. (Wouldn't it have been cheaper to build the infrastructure at Logan than under Cambridge Street?) The Airport Blue Line station could have been rebranded to face the Breman Street neighborhood, while still offering a connection to Logan via Massport bus, thus covering travelers from the North Shore.
 
caravaggiste said:
I wasn't thinking. I was just trying to point out that more funding needs to be popped into this line to convert it to LRT or heavy rail so it can better connect to the central regions of the city.
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They're actually spending a $600 Million premium to make Phase 3 of the Silver Line a bus instead of rail. Buses can't use the existing abandoned rail tunnels, so they have to either destroy the old 1897 tunnels (there are some historical preservation issues there) or dig deep, and bore brand new tunnels below the existing tunnels.

I don't see why anybody would think a slow, cramped, bumpy ride on a low-capacity bus is worth over half a billion extra.

The Sierra Club has an interesting report on the whole thing.
 
Based on these renderings, this is my favorite project in the Seaport by far. Sure, that's not saying much, but I still think it has potential. You can't blame them on the height, since that's as high as their allowed to go (and for once, there's actually a good reason), and I've always thought pointy tops on short towers looked forced. The architecture itself isn't great, but what I really like is the more human scale - how the towers are spread out among shorter buildings that are similar in scale to Fort Point, how the buildings don't fill up the entire block like everything else we've seen in the Seaport, how it's dense without having the huge, block-sized, same height buildings proposed for Fan Pier. Hell, I even think the amount of greenspace is reasonable. The Silver Line will be converted to light rail eventually, giving it good transit access at Courthouse and WTC, and it proposes a very good mix of uses. Of course there's a lot that could be better (ie. more inspired architecture), but I think this project has a lot of positives.
 
I just don't like it because Hynes is branding this new neighborhood as a corporate city. It reminds me somewhat of the movie gattaca. It's branded with his name, his vision, his money. I would just like to see some more constructive criticism and transportation analysis before anything brash is decided upon. Fan Pier is already going in - I think this zone should be built upon a proper transport infrastructure not the other way around. Isn't this the smart growth so many of you speak of? Can't we have a design competition for any interested parties (worldwide,) that calls for certain guidelines & standards to be met? Better plaNNING = a better city. We shouldn't just jump on the first plan that comes forward to develop this HUGE swath of Boston property.
 
It's not the first plan. It's at least the second, since McCourt had a plan that he presented but never executed.
 
Wasn't he just proposing a stadium or something? Or was that somewhere else?
 
One aspect I would like to comment on that I haven't seen anyone else mention: the whole area seems to be oriented parallel to Summer St. Instead the streets should be oriented towards the harbor and provide major viewlines in that direction so that when you are on the major pedestrian streets you can look down the street and see the water.
 
Joe_Schmoe said:
...the streets should be oriented towards the harbor and provide major viewlines in that direction so that when you are on the major pedestrian streets you can look down the street and see the water.
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Views aren't for pedestrians -- only for "paying customers."
 
Views also depend on what's built at Fan Pier and Pier 4, since the ex-McCourt property does not abut the harbor anywhere.
 
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