We are halfway through the project. We’ve been working four years. It has another four years to run. None of the surface is open yet. The artery is still standing. Underneath the surface, in the tunnel under construction, it looks like a whole city out of steel being built underground. And there will be enormous bridges, too, to pick up the traffic as it leaves the tunnel at the other end. A great deal of progress has been made.

All of this, of course, was just a preparation for work on our waterfront. We were very fortunate to have the experience of the last fifteen, twenty years, of getting our ideas together and really understanding what Boston is like, so that when we finally have the opportunity to plan our seaport we do it right.

The area includes about a thousand acres of largely vacant and abandoned rail yards. It is mostly now parking lots. Overall, the port is stable. We still have a port that employs about 10,000 people. We are talking about taking just the 300 acres of the seaport closest to the financial district, which is within walking distance, and looking at that as a way to extend our downtown economy into this area. We hired a terrific firm, Cooper Robertson from New York, who had done a number of seaport plans around the world, and they are very helpful. They did a terrific plan. We worked with them and collaboratively put together a terrific plan for the seaport.

The first step was to locate a major convention center two blocks from the water’s edge. Boston is a very popular convention city largely because there are lots of other things to do for spouses, partners and children who come with the person going to the convention center. There are places to visit, things to see, and trips to take. Very active efforts are being made to entertain people when they are not conventioneering. That convention center is under construction now. It’s an $800 million project. It will be finished in a couple of years, as a sort of first major effort on this water’s edge that will activate this area.

We have also have taken our cue on this 300 acres from that mixed use project that I discussed earlier, Rowe’s Wharf, where instead of doing offices in one part and housing in another and a shopping center in the third place, we did them together. There are four major developers and four major owners of these 300 acres. Each of the pieces looks relatively easy to work and each one of them has to provide a mixture of these uses together. So, it really will be busy, a 24-hour district, where people will work during the day and sleep there at night and be entertained there. It will not be a radical, new, visionary scheme parachuted into this tract, but rather a process of adding compatible new development to the existing warehouse buildings that are already used as studios, apartments, and office space.

We have to extend the fine-grained street grid and make this new part of Boston very familiar to Bostonians. The architecture may be more contemporary, but the character of it will certainly reflect Boston’s unique narrow street pattern and its dense, busy, lively streets. This mixture of uses will guarantee that the parks and the water’s edge will be busy and active except on the coldest days of the year.

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