By Robert Campbell, Globe Staff
If you make a good place for people to live, you'll find you've also made a good place for visitors.
Visitors love to hang out in wonderful real places.
But if you set out with the goal of making a place for visitors, you'll end up with a boring place that may be good for a one-shot visit by tourists or kids or conventioneers, but will lack any enduring appeal.
An urban fairground of ``attractions'' isn't a city, regardless of whether the attractions are trade marts, malls, stadiums, theme parks, hotels, arenas, or convention centers.
This is the key to how we should be thinking about the Seaport District on Boston's waterfront. Boston is a city of whole neighborhoods, and the Seaport should be another one. A whole neighborhood is one in which you can perform all the basic actions of life:
You can live, work, shop, learn, recreate. Each neighborhood, though they may be very different, is thus a microcosm of the city - what the Europeans call a quarter. Think of South Boston, Back Bay, the South End.
Drawing courtesy of Constance Bodurow, Boston Society of Architects/SeaPort Focus Team
This way of thinking applies to more than the Seaport District. The Seaport is only the first of many waterfront neighborhoods that are going to be created here in the next few decades. Consider, for just one example, the rotting petroleum tanks that line Chelsea Creek. This could be the next Charles River Basin, the soul of another great Boston neighborhood. How we plan the Seaport today can become a model for other places tomorrow.
How should we plan it? First, we should accept the idea that ``plan'' isn't a dirty word. Many of America's cities and neighborhoods began as rigorously planned communities - our own Back Bay, Savannah, Washington. Often, they began with utopian ambitions. Utopian ambitions aren't such a bad idea.
The alternative is to let the Seaport be
designed by the random collision of economic and political forces. You can get a sense of how that approach works at a place like Kendall Square in Cambridge. Kendall has lots of ``amenities'': open space to burn, boulevards, plazas. But it's a chaotic mess. Kendall, multiplied by 10, is the best we can expect for the Seaport if something drastic isn't done.
Already, enormous development pressures are at work. To cite just one, the city is required, by the state legislation that authorized the proposed convention center, to approve development of nearly 3,000 new hotel rooms this year and another 2,000 by the time the convention center opens. It's that kind of gun to the head that makes developers want to forge ahead without proper planning.
In good planning, you don't begin by looking for compromises. You begin by creating a vision of an ideal community. You know you'll have to compromise with the real world. But you make those compromises after, not before, you know what your ideal is.
So what's the ideal Seaport? Here are a few suggestions - not an exhaustive list, just my own idiosyncratic one. In places, of course, it overlaps what others have proposed.
Small hotels. No doubt we'll be stuck with at least one of those horrible convention hotels, the block-sized whoppers with a waterfall, glass elevators, windows as dark as sunglasses, and a floor plan that's deliberately confused so you'll get lost among the buying opportunities. But San Francisco offers another way. Within a few blocks of Union Square are at least 50 small hotels that have sprung up over time. Instead of filling a whole block, each is just another door on a busy street, supporting and supported by the other doors into restaurants, shops, galleries, and the like. Instead of being trapped in a vast hotel that's an air-conditioned super-capsule, people are outdoors being street life.
Plenty of housing. There are any number of reasons for this. Everybody involved in the Seaport says they want active shopping to enliven the streets. But business people and conventioneers won't keep stores and restaurants alive. You've got to have a critical mass of people living in the neighborhood. Another reason is transportation. If nobody lives in the Seaport, everyone who works there - and there will be lots of jobs - will have to commute. That's a flawless recipe for traffic congestion. It's an embarrassing but well-known fact that the major opposition to housing in the Seaport comes from South Boston politicians who are afraid new voters won't vote for them. No comment.
Short blocks. It was the great Jane Jacobs who first pointed out that the shorter the block, in general, the better the city. Portland, Ore., with a block 200 feet on each side, is America's smallest, and it works wonderfully; Salt Lake City, at 1,200 feet per side, is a disaster. But the conventional wisdom today is to develop superblocks. As a result, downtown Boston today has one-third fewer street intersections than it had a century ago.
Intersections are places of choice, and a good city offers the maximum of choices. The city's interim plan for the Seaport calls for superblocks. Planners are now asking for these to be subdivided, but it isn't clear how the landowners can be muscled to comply.
Humane streets. Nobody has the right to barrel through a city at 40 miles an hour. Traffic planners need to remember that pedestrians are traffic too. On a street like Boston's Newbury, more traffic often passes a given point on soles than on tires.
Years ago, I stood with a traffic planner on a corner in a southern city. The corner was a sweeping curve, 80 feet in radius, and so was the corner across the street. The result was a wide Sargasso Sea of asphalt confronting the pedestrian. I told the planner that in Boston corners often get along with an 8-foot radius: Why were his so big? ``That's the turning radius of a diesel bus,'' I was told. The city was being planned for a population of diesel buses, not people.
Streets should not be efficient traffic sewers. They are places for human encounter, the most important outdoor spaces in any city. The streets planned for the Seaport - some already under construction - are too wide.
Signature open space. Most American cities have too much, not too little, open space: useless plazas, vacant lots, unvisited parks. Open space must be as carefully designed as any other development. The Seaport needs two kinds. One, a waterfront walk with enough activity - docks, food, cultural events, maybe fishing and swimming - to keep it interesting. Two, a green space memorable enough to become a logo for the neighborhood, like Jamaica Pond or the Public Garden.
Human scale. With a convention center the area of 36 football fields, not to mention the vast ramps for the Ted Williams Tunnel, human scale won't be easily achieved in the Seaport. But if it isn't, nothing else will matter. We'll just get another horror like the convention-center/trade-mart/sports-arena heart of Atlanta, a pile of concrete as alien as the mountains of the moon. Human scale doesn't mean cute or retro, though. If you built another Back Bay on the Seaport, it would look like a toy town. The Atlantic Ocean isn't the Charles River Basin.
The old warehouses near the Children's Museum are better models. But the Seaport's architects will have to go beyond examples from the past to create an architecture for our own time. A city is more than a museum; it must also promise an exciting future. Young people go to the city to become rich and famous. Nobody ever sang of a suburb, ``If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere.'' Ambition and innovation are part of what cities are all about, and their architecture should express that fact.
Jerry Seinfeld tells us all humor comes out of New York. That's a typical New York provincialism, but it has a grain of truth. New ideas, new kinds of culture, new ways of life do usually emerge in cities. When people come to Boston, they come above all for the experience of city life. A city is a place where, in a compact, walkable area, you have an enormous variety of choice. That experience is lacking for many Americans, who live in a geography that's like islands of activity in seas of traffic: a mall here, an office park there, a hotel down the interstate. Being a real city is not only Boston's greatest human asset, it's also our strongest marketing tool. If we're smart, we'll keep it.
Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic
