Transformation of Boston City Hall Plaza
For five decades, Boston City Hall Plaza hosted the city’s largest gatherings from sports celebrations to political rallies to seasonal cultural festivals. But it lacked human scale, offered limited amenities, and was highly inaccessible. The plaza consisted entirely of impermeable surfaces that prevented the ground from absorbing rain, exacerbated downstream flooding, washed surface pollutants directly into the Boston Harbor, and contributed to intense heat island effects in one of Boston’s most impermeable neighborhoods.
In partnership with city leadership and with the input of thousands of Bostonians, the renovated plaza is now a civic front yard where all are welcome. The improvements prioritize providing universal access, being a model for sustainability and resilience, renewing the cultural legacy of this important Boston landmark, and providing flexibility for a variety of program types for years to come.
Components of the renewed plaza include a new ‘Hanover Walk’ that reconciles the 26-foot vertical difference across the site and connects Congress and Cambridge Streets with an accessible sloped promenade; a 12,000-square foot playscape that draws an entirely new generation of users once absent from the plaza; new planting, seating and gathering areas breaking down the scale of the brutalist plaza; and a new Civic Pavilion nestled into the grade between Congress Street and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). Embedded in these amenities are sometimes-obvious and sometimes-hidden sustainable practices that have transformed the performance of the plaza.
Publisher
Boston Society of Civil Engineers Section (BSCES)