I have been to Boston many times and have explored most of its iconic historic sites Faneuil Hall, Custom House, and the Old North Church, to name only a few but there is no place in the city that captures my imagination like its waterfront. It is, after all, a city shaped and defined from its earliest days by its location on the sea.
On a recent trip back to the city, I wanted to photograph the harbor, one of the oldest and most historically significant in the United States. It is easy to let my mind drift backwards through the centuries of Boston’s history to December of 1773, when colonists disguised as Native Americans went on board ships in this harbor and dumped more than three hundred chests of East India Company tea into this harbor. According to Boston lore, the murky water of the harbor smelled like tea for weeks afterward. That event, known to generations of history students as the Boston Tea Party, was a catalyst of the American Revolution and cemented the reputation of Bostonians as a fractious people with little tolerance for oppression, however mild it might be.
The modern waterfront
The waterfront continues to shape Boston. For two centuries, it was a gritty industrial zone, marked by warehouses, fish piers, and rope yards. As the city grew and prospered, the waterfront maintained its raffish edge. Fan Pier, where I headed to photograph the skyline on a rainy winter day, was a part of that rough-hewn seafront. By the late twentieth century, Fan Pier and much of the surrounding waterfront had fallen into an advanced state of disrepair. In the 1990s, however, the South Boston Waterfront began a decades-long metamorphosis one of the most remarkable urban transformations in modern America. The once disreputable waterfront including Fan Pier was remade into a gleaming, modern cultural and commercial center. The once gritty waterfront, now generally known as the Seaport District, has in recent years become a destination, not merely an economically necessary eyesore on the city’s fringe.
The view from Fan Pier
I headed to Fan Pier because it offers the most iconic view of the city’s waterfront and skyline. From this vantage point, you can almost see the entire span of Boston’s history from the Prudential Tower to the Zakim Bridge to the iconic spire of the Old North Church centuries of one city’s evolution in one striking vista. And beyond them all, the harbor islands, home to both incredible natural beauty and historic sites.
I framed the photo with metal ship sculptures in the foreground, an homage to the role of the sea in creating the city.
