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South Bay is a 10-acre site in Boston, Massachusetts sandwiched between Chinatown and the Leather District. It is roughly bounded by Kneeland Street, Hudson Street, the Massachusetts Turnpike mainline, and the Interstate 93 mainline. Currently owned by the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority (MTA), the site is being put up for development. The developer with the winning bid could put up an office tower as high as 600 feet, but the site is being envisioned as a mixed-use project anchored by office towers that will include parkland, retail, hotel, and residential space. The South Bay development will serve as the southern anchor of the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a stretch of parks, museums, and civic spaces that will replace the Central Artery, which is now being dismantled.
Currently, the site is partly occupied by basketball courts, temporary highway ramps for the Central Artery, and the old Wang Building, the headquarters for the Big Dig. Most of this will be demolished to make way for the new development.
In terms of scale and scope, this development will be the largest in the Boston area since the construction of the Prudential Tower in 1964.
Development of the site will provide a valuable opportunity for integrating the site into the existing street grid plan of the district's adjacent neighborhoods.
History of the site
The South Bay district, as well as the adjacent Chinatown and Leather District neighborhoods, sit on filled land. Once part of South Cove, a portion of Boston's South Bay, it was filled in 1833 by the South Cove Corporation, who built an intermodal train/sea station as part of the Boston and Worcester Railroad. This development included residential, commercial, and what was considered, at the time, the largest hotel in the United States. Throughout most of the 19th Century and the early half of the 20th Century, the district was made up of rail yards serving railroads entering Boston from the south and west.
The rail yards and terminus attracted leather and garment businesses, which constructed the commercial buildings in the adjacent Leather District. Similarly, the railroad served as an immigrant gateway, a role which it played since the late 1800s for many Asian newcomers, particularly Chinese.
In the 1950s, the Massachusetts Highway Department displaced much of the rail yards to build the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway and later, its interchange with the Massachusetts Turnpike. This significant highway interchange, known locally as the South Bay interchange, is being rebuilt through the Central Artery Tunnel Project (known more popularly as the Big Dig), which has buried much of the highway and left this valuable, centrally located piece of land ripe for new development.
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