Convention Center expansion to reshape its relation with South Boston

The Boston Globe
A new look for South Boston
By Paul McMorrow
November 26, 2010

IT’S NOT that you can’t get to Broadway from the South Boston waterfront. It’s just a pain. The roads connecting the two weren’t designed to make the trip easy. They were designed to insulate one end of the neighborhood from the other. Nowhere is that truer than on D Street.

D Street is the major conduit running between the Seaport’s piers, office buildings, and hotels, and South Boston’s residential streets. The wide street turns one-way for a short stretch south of West First Street, effectively blocking all traffic traveling from the Seaport to Broadway. For drivers traveling from the new section of South Boston to the old one, D Street sends a simple message. That one-way sign might as well be a moat.

Traffic can’t run from one end of D Street to the other because of the giant building sitting between Broadway and the waterfront, the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Boston Mayor Tom Menino led the push to plunk the convention center in South Boston as a way of spurring construction on the waterfront’s massive undeveloped acreage. But South Boston officials feared the convention center would shatter their neighborhood, so they designed it to stand apart from the neighborhood.

The building’s back end, which faces the neighborhood, is ringed by parking lots and fences. Legislation forbade the construction of any new hotels south of the convention center’s Summer Street front door. That clause steered development away from Broadway, and toward the waterfront, leaving a buffer of underused industrial plots between the convention center and the surrounding neighborhood.

That’s about to change. State and city officials announced plans for an ambitious expansion last year, and since then, a blueprint has been fleshed out by a panel of public officials and business leaders.

The panel still has months of deliberations ahead of it, but two major shifts have already become apparent. First, D Street will be transformed from a buffer into a development hub that will link the convention center and the waterfront to the residential neighborhood on the street’s other end. Second, the neighborhood has an appetite to support such a transformation.

Expansion plans always envisioned expanding the facility westward, with construction over the Haul Road linking the convention center to Fort Point. But the convention center’s architects recently concluded that building over the Haul Road isn’t feasible.

Now there is talk not just about building on D Street, but also about creating a second front door for the convention center on the street, transforming a now-lifeless industrial corridor into a hub of activity. This expansion would address the surrounding streets in the same way that the front door on Summer Street embraces the waterfront. And, convention center and city officials hope, it would spur a wave of private construction activity up and down D Street.

This development scheme would redefine the the convention center’s relationship with South Boston, and it would necessarily involve the repeal of the south-of-Summer hotel ban. It would erase architecture and infrastructure that were put in place to isolate the convention center from residential neighborhoods nearby, and transform it into a bridge connecting the still-developing Seaport to Broadway.

The Boston Redevelopment Authority strongly supports enlivening D Street, even though doing so would fly in the face of all the planning that threw up barriers between the neighborhood and the convention center. As it turns out, neither side has much use for those barriers anymore.

Michael Flaherty, a former city councilor and South Boston native, says much has changed in the 15-plus years since the convention center was designed. Back then, Flaherty argues, South Boston residents were “rightfully cautious’’ about the prospect of being overrun by traffic. The intervening years have shown that the convention center, and the waterfront hotels and restaurants serving it, aren’t just good neighbors, but also powerful employers.

“A lot has changed in 15 years, but a lot hasn’t changed, particularly on D Street,’’ Flaherty said. “We need to connect residents to the hope and opportunity on the waterfront, and connect the haves and the have-nots. D Street is the gateway.’’

Paul McMorrow is an associate editor at CommonWealth magazine. His column appears regularly in the Globe.
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