CultureNOW - Harbor Point: Peter Vanderwarker

Harbor Point

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Columbia Point in Dorchester is the site of a former dump. In recent years it has often been a dumping ground of another kind: a home of last resort for institutions nobody else wanted. The University of Massachusetts, the Kennedy Library, and the state archives ended up there for that reason. They stand like isolated forts on a vacant plain, ignoring one another.

Columbia Point's most important inhabitant used to be just as isolated as the others but is now changing. This is the old Columbia Point housing project, built in 1955 and revamped - as Harbor Point - in the late 1980s for a mixed-income population. The transformation is obvious in these two photographs. The earlier photo was made in the early 1970s. The later photo, from 1990, shows some of Harbor Point's current residents. From left: Lisa and Youssef Abdouh, Margaret LeBlanc, Betty Quarles (who has lived there since 1965), and Lincoln Chan. Nadine Wiley, of the Harbor Point management, is at far right.

By 1985 the Columbia Point housing project, like others of its generation, was a boarded-up, crime-ridden disaster. Only 350 families remained, camped out
in its 1,500 apartments. The buildings were prison-like, flat-roofed, made of monotonous yellow brick, and surrounded by asphalt pavement. Then a brave private developer took on the Point. Corcoran, Mullins, Jennison put together a new ownership
team, which included some tenants; it borrowed state and federal money ' and asked Boston architects Goody, Clancy and Associates to make the old project work. Joan Goody created a plan that called for tearing down 18 structures, renovating nine, and building 46 townhouses of clapboard or red brick. The idea was to replace the bureaucratic monotony with the kind of variety you find in an older neighborhood that's grown, piecemeal, over time.

Goody also laced the project with a new street grid, giving everybody a front door with an address on a street - a simple feature meant to nurture pride and identity. The streets are planted with trees. One street is even a mall, in imitation of Commonwealth Avenue. All terminate with a view of Boston Harbor at a spot where, eventually, there will be a park designed by landscape architect Carol Johnson.

When fully rented, Harbor Point will have 400 low income and 900 market-rate apartments, a mix that's worked well elsewhere. But Harbor Point isn't out of
the woods yet. It's still cut off from the nourishment of the larger city. It needs much more shopping and a better sense of connection to everything around it. Harbor
Point will flourish if it begins to grow at its edges and mesh with its surroundings.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - A Sea Change",Boston Globe, 1990

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Location

Mt Vernon St & Harbor Point Blvd
Boston, MA 02125
United States

Nearby Items

Commonwealth Museum		0.7 miles
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James Brendan Connolly		0.8 miles
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum		0.9 miles
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