Columbia Point, Boston
The peninsula is primarily occupied by Harbor Point, the University of Massachusetts Boston, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, and a complex at the former Bayside Expo Center, Boston College High School, and the Massachusetts Archives.
This large pumping station still stands and in its time was a model for treating sewage and helping to promote cleaner and healthier urban living conditions.
It pumped waste to a remote treatment facility on Moon Island in Boston Harbor, and served as a model for other systems worldwide.
The pumping station is also architecturally significant as a Richardsonian Romanesque designed by the then Boston city architect, George Clough.
All reports at the time indicated that racial and ethnic tensions were minimal, that there were high levels of social trust within the neighborhood, and by 1955, had a long waiting list of families wanting to become new tenants.
In the 1960s, there was a movement of community residents from the Columbia Point housing projects to get the city dump, which was located on the peninsula, permanently closed.
[12][13][14] The health center was funded by the federal government's Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and was needed to serve the community living in the Columbia Point Public Housing Projects which was on the isolated peninsula far away from Boston City Hospital.
[19][20][5] In December 1968, the University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees voted 12 to 4 to accept the Columbia Point proposal from the BRA.
[5] As construction for the Columbia Point campus began, DTAC demanded the creation of a joint task force to address their housing concerns, while some within DTAC called for the university to construct dormitories as part of the Columbia Point proposal; legislation for doing so was proposed within the Massachusetts House of Representatives but failed to pass.
By the mid-1970s the Boston Housing Authority was under community, political, and legal pressure and orders to renovate and cure the living conditions at the site.
[29] Lacking the federal, state, and local government investment required to renovate Columbia Point while maintaining the deep affordability attached to public housing, the Boston Housing Authority and City of Boston made the decision to turn the property over to a private company to redevelop the area into a luxury, market-rate apartment complex with a portion of the units set aside as subsidized privately owned units.
In 1984, the firm Corcoran-Mullins-Jennison was given control of the management, planning, demolition and renovation for the Columbia Point Housing Projects.
[32] It has received praise for its planning and revitalization from the Urban Land Institute, the FIABCI award, a gold medal with the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence in 1993,[33][34][35] and was used as a model for the federal HUD HOPE VI public housing demolition and redevelopment program begun in 1992.
Goody was interested in putting townhouses on the property whereas Mintz worked on re-vitalizing and re-making the existing buildings and their footprints.
[43][44] However, in 2009, the Bayside Expo Center property was lost in a foreclosure on Corcoran-Jennison to a Florida-based real estate firm, LNR/CMAT, who bought it.
[59][60] In March 2022, the Boston Planning & Development Agency (BPDA) approved a proposal by the Dorchester Boys & Girls Club and the Martin Richard Foundation to construct a 3-story field house on Mount Vernon Street.
[62] In August 2022, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker signed into law an instrastructure spending bill that included a $1 million appropriation for the field house proposal.
