Back in the 1980s, the Fort Point neighborhood was a heavily industrial conglomeration of docks, warehouses and half-empty factories cut off from downtown by the Central Artery.
But where most people saw a wasteland, some saw potential. Drawn by cheap studio space, an artist’s colony began budding in Fort Point, buoyed by the Fort Point Arts Community, a nonprofit founded in 1980 that is dedicated to supporting the work of neighborhood artists and preserving their role in the community.
Gabrielle Schaffner, executive director of FPAC, and Jon Seward, vice president of the group, recently talked with Banker & Tradesman about what it’s been like to watch their wilderness of warehouses sprout a convention center, condos, seafood restaurants and now, high-tech office towers.
‘Where Is That?’
Schaffner has been living and working in Fort Point since 1988. “I came up here from New York,” she says. “I had been attracted by an offer for studio space in Central Square [Cambridge], which was at that point being redeveloped, and the space got lost for redevelopment. And I started looking for [a studio], and I saw an ad for the FPAC office. And that was how I found my space….when I first read the ad in the paper, I was like, ‘Where is that? You walk away from downtown? Across a bridge?’ I think for a long time people just weren’t familiar with the neighborhood. You said ‘Fort Point,’ and they weren’t quite sure where ‘Fort Point’ was. So you’d say, ‘It’s where the Children’s Museum is,’ or ‘It’s near South Station.’ And now that’s all changed.”
The neighborhood was different then. “Most of the Boston Wharf buildings had a couple of floors of artists,” Schaffner says. “In my building, the first two floors were a fruit wholesaler’s … and then there were a couple of printers … The street life was really different. There were restaurants, but they all closed up about three in the afternoon. Greasy spoon, hole-in-the-wall type places. Things were a lot more industrial. The parking lots weren’t paved. The Channel nightclub was still around.”
Big Dig, Big Change
The Big Dig project, which brought down the Artery and helped reconnect the city with the waterfront, was a key shift for the neighborhood, Schaffner and Seward agree. For years, the artists picked their way through a giant construction site to get to their homes and studios. “The [Ted Williams] tunnel came through this neighborhood and the tunnel sections were built here,” Shaffner recalls. “So, I feel like once they finished that and repaved the streets…”
Seward interjects, chuckling. “It’s amazing what a few decades and a few billion dollars of public investment can do for a neighborhood,” he comments. “In-between the Harbor clean-up, the Central Artery project and the Silver Line and some of the other MWRA activities, there’s a lot of sunk investment in the neighborhood now.”
Schaffner agrees. For her, the first sign of change “was when a few other residential buildings started to crop up in the neighborhood. Sort of, ‘Oh, look, there are people on the street and I don’t know their faces.’ This neighborhood really does function as a small town in the big city, and we’re all so united by what we do — I used to know the name of every dog on the street, let alone every person. I think that was one big shift. But it’s nice to have other people live here. There’s more people on the street, more people just around.”
New people brought new amenities. “When Sagarino’s opened, it felt like we’d won the lottery. It’s just a little convenience store, but we didn’t even have a place to buy a quart of milk. One day, we’ll have a grocery store and who knows what else. Drug store, dry cleaning, library,” she says, wistfully.
Artists’ Role
But even though the artist’s community has been central to the revival of the Fort Point, Seward thinks there’s still work to do to make sure newcomers understand the artists’ role in the neighborhood.
“A few years ago, a friend decided to do an art happening thing, and they did a little video of a bunch of artists in the neighborhood walking around wearing berets, so that we could be very Parisian and arty. Because one of the issues of the neighborhood has been that all of the art gets produced in everybody’s studio, and it doesn’t necessarily leak out and become obvious that you’re in an art neighborhood when you’re just walking down the street,” he notes.
The group has been farsighted in trying to make sure the artists’ community survives the wave of gentrification now cresting. FPAC owns property in the neighborhood, including two artists’ co-ops, which provide living/working spaces for artists. FPAC has also worked with the city and developers to make sure newer buildings also contain such spaces.
But still, “it’s not the wild and wooly frontier,” says Seward. “It used to be that you could come here and rent an unreconstructed floor in a building for very modest rates, and we had a lot of people who could come down here, fresh out of art school and rent a space in a building and really focus on their work. And now we just don’t have that same level of opportunity. Most of the spaces that are available are in nicer shape now, and they’re being leased for more money — maybe not top dollar, but often at the limit, or just enough above, what a younger or struggling artist can swing.”
Room For All
But overall, the artist’s community is welcoming the growth of their neighborhood, including their new high-tech neighbors. “I was involved, in earlier days, with Longwood [medical area] planning: What do we do with a medical district that needs to grow but there’s no room for it? Which way does the balloon squeeze? Fort Point, and the Seaport, was never on that radar screen. And it’s wonderful that that [Vertex] think that this is a good location that would be viable for them,” says Seward.
“I’ve always been surprised that [developers] haven’t come sooner with our proximity to downtown. It’s been a little bit mind-boggling that we’ve had it to ourselves for this long,” Shaffner says.
