Forget about grandiose plans for 1,000-foot skyscrapers.

If you want to glimpse the future of Boston development, stroll on over to the stately Victorian-era warehouses of the Fort Point Channel District.

A low-key city commission tomorrow is expected to vote into place a set of sweeping guidelines for new development in Fort Point. By the end of its meeting Tuesday night, the Boston Landmarks Commission is likely to have transformed the colorful and densely packed 55-acre neighborhood into the city’s newest historic district.

The vote, in turn, is likely to have a significant impact on the future of new development in Fort Point, which has become one of the hottest areas for new construction and real estate investment in the Hub in recent years. Boston Wharf, the district’s long-time owner, sold off dozens of buildings over the past decade, bringing in a mix of ambitious local and out-of-town developers.

The district’s new developers will have less of a free hand to reshape the area than they would have had a decade ago. Anyone still hoping to tear down a building or two and put up a modern high-rise may be best advised to quietly cash out and head for the Big Apple, or at least for Boston’s Financial District on the other side of the sluggish channel with which the Fort Point neighborhood shares its name.

But fears that development will grind to a halt are also unfounded. Boston historic preservationists worked closely with some of the district’s developers to craft the new rules. And the collaboration could provide a blueprint for building in a city where sentiment appears increasingly opposed to massive, New York-style condo and office sky-rises.

“A lot of changes were made already to try and accommodate the legitimate issues some property owners are concerned about,” said Sarah Kelly, executive director of the Boston Preservation Alliance.

The guidelines for the new historic district envision not an end to development or a slavish devotion to the past, but rather the creative reuse of some the district’s striking, late 19th century warehouses. That means renovating what’s there and, possibly adding a few floors on top.

In fact, it’s a playbook that developers in the district now appear, though not after some painful readjustment, to be fairly comfortable with. It’s a lineup that includes local players like Young Park, head of local development powerhouse Berkeley Investments, and National Development, a top local condo and apartment builder, as well as high-powered New York investors Tony Goldman and Archon Group.

Park has been particularly prolific, this past spring opening the 97-unit FP3, which includes a palatial new, 15,000-square-foot restaurant featuring local celebrity chef Barbara Lynch.

Not that Park’s project has been without controversy, with some of Fort Point’s growing residential community objecting to the project’s multistory rooftop addition.

Whether to allow such rooftop additions has been one of the most controversial aspects of Fort Point’s proposed historic district. While developers have argued they need to be able to undertake modest expansions, some Fort Point residents have argued such additions instead cap historic buildings with jarring, and often overpowering, modern exclamation points.

The proposal offers a compromise, with rooftop additions allowed on some key streets, such as Summer, Melcher and Congress, as long as they tucked back from the view of passersby.

Developers have also insisted on changing some of the words in the new rules, replacing lots of “shalls” to “should” and creating the spirit of guidelines rather than regulations.

But all of this is a long way from the first proposals for development in the district after Boston Wharf, in the late 1990s, began selling off a real estate portfolio it had held for more than a century.

The Leventhal family’s Beacon Capital bought up Fort Point Midway’s block back in 2000. Having created Rowe’s Wharf and other local landmarks, the Leventhals were used to thinking big. Beacon proposed a mix of renovations and tear downs that included an office tower at the end of the block that had the look of a transplant from the nearby Financial District.

The tower sparked controversy in the neighborhood and died quietly after the 2001 recession.

Berkeley Investments’ Park himself recently dropped plans for a mid-rise.

With the economy now in recession, a similar evolution may be store now for the city as a whole. Massive new towers and developments will be hard, if not impossible, to finance over the next few years.

More modest undertakings, by contrast, are likely to find favor in the eyes of bankers in charge of doling out development loans.

Combined with the slowdown is growing opposition to glass-and-steel, Manhattan-sized projects that, for good or ill, don’t conform with cherished notions of the Boston’s historic cityscape.

“Given the financial condition in our country right now, it’s highly unlikely you will see that kind of development, even if you didn’t have those kinds of restrictions,” said Vivien Li, executive director of the Boston Harbor association and an astute observer of city development. “The speculative development we might have seen in the 90s we are not going to see right now.”