The dilapidated East Boston building served as an immigration facility for three decades.
(David L. Ryan/ Globe Staff)
Panel rejects immigration station as landmark
E. Boston building might be razed
The dilapidated East Boston building served as an immigration facility for three decades.
(David L. Ryan/ Globe Staff)
The former East Boston Immigration Station should not be protected as a historic landmark because the rotted building lacks original artifacts and would be difficult to revive for another use, according to a report released yesterday by a city preservation agency.
The long-awaited recommendation by the Boston Landmarks Commission will probably clear the way for the Massachusetts Port Authority to demolish the derelict building, which served as an immigration facility for three decades and a detention center for local Germans and Japanese during World War II.
The yellow brick building Massport has owned since 1985 would be difficult to preserve and reuse because of its large size, an interior grid of support columns, and stringent zoning restrictions, according to the report. Instead of designating the structure as a landmark, the commission staff recommended that the building’s history and contribution to immigration in East Boston be commemorated with signs or other interpretive materials.
The 41-page report was issued 10 years after residents submitted a petition asking that the former immigration station be granted landmark status. The recommendation to reject that request must still be adopted by the Landmarks Commission. First a public hearing will be held June 8 at 5:45 p.m. at City Hall; the earliest the commission could vote would be June 22.
Some local residents have lobbied to save the structure, but others have described the building as a hazard that should be demolished. Massport wants to raze the building to create a flat area for ship repair.
“Massport agrees with the commission’s finding that the building was . . . part of the cultural, political, and economic history of the city, the region, and the nation,’’ Matthew Brelis, a spokesman for the agency, said in an e-mail. He added that Massport also agreed that the building’s condition makes it “a poor candidate for adaptive reuse.’’
The building’s life as an immigration station stretched from 1920 until 1954, a time span in which more than 230,000 legal immigrants entered the Port of Boston. The majority of those newcomers, however, were processed by inspectors at steamship docks, and only people who required a secondary interview were brought to the station.
Notable figures that spent time in the building include Charles Ponzi, the infamous swindler; Edith Berkman, the accused Communist strike agitator; and Karl Otto Heinrich Lange, a German-born physicist and renowned meteorologist at Harvard’s Blue Hill Observatory detained as an enemy during World War II.
After the immigration station closed, it became a radiator factory, a TWA storeroom, and a junk repository.
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