Boston Harbor Ain't What it Was... Happily

Boston Harbor is the place to have an office now. But it wasn't always. Back in the day, it was polluted, smelly and nearly deserted. (Sounds like a men's locker room.) The turnaround is "amazing," says The Boston Harbor Association prez Vivien Li.

After the 1972 passage of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments, Boston’s League of Women Voters established The Boston Harbor Association, recalls Vivien (second from left, whom we snapped at TBHA’s recent 41st birthday celebration and fundraiser at the Boston Harbor Hotel with comedian Jimmy Tingle, TBHA executive director Julie Wormser and O'Neill & Associates' Tom O'Neill). Fearing they wouldn’t be taken seriously, the League sought business community partners. Silence; but the Boston Shipping Association stepped up to help spark the revival of what some now call Boston’s most valuable natural resource. Their campaign plus a federal lawsuit brought by others initiated the revival. After years of sewage filling the harbor, the aim was to make the water clean, safe for marine life and human swimmers. (Not being able to swim in it is one of the downsides of sewage.)

In the ‘80s when the harbor could look like this at low tide (on the bright side: free tires), Mayor Ray Flynn (whose father was a longshoreman) and a committee he created launched the idea of installing a 47-mile HarborWalk along Boston's six waterfront neighborhoods to ensure public access to the waterfront. Private developers were to build, operate and maintain it. Along with that effort, came a federal court order to clean up the Harbor by building a waste water treatment plant and instituting measures to handle combined sewer overflows. The metropolitan region’s water/sewer rate payers have ponied up $4B to make the harbor beaches swimmable more than 90% of the time. When the CSO project is completed in a few years, the beaches will be swimmable 98% of the time and the Harborwalk 85% complete, Vivien tells us.

At TBHA’s party Thursday, many of the region’s major developers and corporations were in attendance. They now see how valuable a beautiful waterfront can be. Rents are rising for offices and multifamily residences and commercial property sale values are hitting all-time highs. Vivien’s concern about new development is that it should be highly energy and water efficient to minimize new pollution,and also be climate resilient. These days, waterfront property owners contact her to scrutinize proposed new projects to make sure their HarborWalk segments are useful to the public and honor the harbor. She says, “It’s an extraordinary change.”