After $95M, ‘Phase 1’ of Boston City Hall plaza renovation ready for action
Three and a half years and $95 million later, a new and improved City Hall plaza will open up this week with an eye on bringing more people and events downtown — and there’s more to come.
The fences will come down Friday, when Mayor Michelle Wu plans to welcome people into the newly spruced-up area that now has a playground, water features, more trees, a pavilion and the opening of long-closed entrance to City Hall.
“City Hall plaza should really be the civic front lawn for Boston,” city Arts and Culture Chief Kara Elliott-Ortega told the Herald in a recent interview. “This is city space and a public space, and people should feel like it belongs to them.”
This project rolled out to the public in May 2019 under then-Mayor Marty Walsh, whose administration presented its plan to turn what’s long been a barren brick wasteland around the much-maligned Brutalist City Hall structure into a place that actually might be appealing for people.
“Phase 1” is what’s now done: the entire northern swath of the area between City Hall and the John F. Kennedy Federal Building. The uninterrupted brick, which the architect back in the 60s had envisioned as a European-style square plaza in a way that never quite worked, has given way to more trees, a playground with a large and inviting-looking slide, “interactive water features” and a curving, sloped path to make the previously wheelchair-unfriendly area more accessible.
There’s now a glass-fronted pavilion that looks onto Congress Street — Elliot-Ortega envisions this as a spot for anything from community meetings to art exhibits — and, like a crop circle, a small amphitheater of sorts has appeared at the end of a tree-lined promenade feature.
Additionally, the second-floor northern entrance to the building, which has been closed since 2001 when post-9/11 security considerations brought the city to close it, is now reopening with an overhaul, so people can more easily get to the assorted second-floor services like the parking clerk and elections department.
The administration refers to this whole shebang as a $70 million project, but that figure featured in the most recent press release is actually just the originally budgeted amount. With assorted change orders, complications and expanded drainage work, it’s actually about $95 million that went to general contractor Sasaki Architects and others.
The change orders — the documents signed off on as the project alters over time, usually in a way that costs more money — log the costs nudging up through stabilization issues and the project’s scope expanding to include stormwater runoff work funded by a $4 million grant.
In total, the city’s current rolling five-year capital budget includes $110.3 million for City Hall improvements including this Phase 1 work and other internal improvements. The upcoming Phase 2 is in there, too, with a $50 million budget line.
City Chief Operating Officer Dion Irish said many of these changes came from the project consisting of heavy construction just barely on top of MBTA train tunnels, making the work difficult and complex.
“It was a very challenging project,” he told the Herald. “Not just a landscaping project, but a real engineering project.”
He said there were “some structural elements” largely around the T tunnels that needed extra work and “you can’t just leave these things unaddressed.”
The Orange and Green lines in some areas pass just inches below the surface — to the extent where the first order of work back in 2019 involved using a machine to poke downward to double-check the decades-old plans for exactly how deep the tops of the oldest train tunnels in the country actually are so the project would’t punch right through.
Irish said the workers were “using a lot of interesting materials that I’ve never heard about before, like ‘structural soil'” and a type of funky foam. The COVID-19 pandemic also dragged the work out.
But now it’s party time. Wu will have at least one of the city’s assorted pairs of big ribbon-cutting scissors out to snip the new area open in a Friday afternoon event with music, art and, according to the press release, declarations about “the people’s plaza.”
Elliott-Ortega said the city’s putting $1.5 million in federal pandemic recovery money toward programing events in the new plaza. She said that could means concerts or art pop-ups of various sorts either outside or in the new indoor pavilion that’s part of the area facing Congress Street.
The administration has been focused on having more activity downtown, going so far as to release a report about how to reinvigorate the area after the enervating years of the pandemic.
She said people already have reached out about lights shows and multi-day music festivals there, but the idea is also just to have places where someone can show up, plug in an amp and start reciting poetry or playing some music.
“It’s kind of like having a bunch of new public venues,” Elliott-Ortega said.
Phase 2 — that $50 million next step — is expected to have designs expected in the next few months. That will first shift to the “courtyard” area of the fourth floor of City Hall, the square within a square that’s now largely unused in part because it’s not handicap accessible but also because there hasn’t been a clear vision for it in years.
The accessibility part, Irish said, should soon be solved, as they’re looking to run a new elevator up through the first four floors, making it easier to get to the courtyard and ditching the oft-broken second-floor escalators in one elegant, if expensive, stroke.
“Accessibility is gonna be a salient theme for whatever we do” in both the work in the City Hall courtyard and the southern half of the plaza that’s now due for a similar overhaul. “And then we also want to make sure that these spaces are places where people want to want to go when they want to meet a colleague have lunch or just visit City Hall.”
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/PSjczK0
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