Recently the Boston Museum Project announced the selection of Moshe Safdie’s design for a Boston Museum to sit over a portion of the new Central Artery Tunnel.  Boston has long needed a museum, and with Moshe Safdie’s stunning design in the shape of a ship’s hull, we could have one that also pays tribute to the risk-takers who literally built the city we know today.

In 1643, a mere thirteen years after the founding of Boston, several private businessmen were granted the right to build a dam along the alignment of today’s Causeway Street, enclosing a small body of water known as the Mill Pond.  The tidal-powered grist and saw mills made for the dam’s investors a tidy profit, to be sure, and the town gained a shortcut between its North and West Ends.  This win-win situation did not go unnoticed by other would-be entrepreneurs, or by those charged with running Boston.  In his Topographical History, Walter Whitehill noted how in 1673, when the town refused to fund a wharf that was deemed necessary for Boston’s defense, it took only a week for seven citizens to raise the money to fund the project themselves.  Altruism?  Civic duty?  Hardly.  Inside their privately-funded, 2000-foot breakwater, (which ran somewhere along the alignment of today’s Atlantic Avenue,) they sold the rights for building warehouses, wharves, and homes.  The seven made a profit and the town had its defensive shield, an arrangement that would be repeated often.

Less than thirty years later, in 1710, another consortium funded and built the spectacular Long Wharf, a dock which thrust itself from the end of King (now Court) Street over one thousand feet into the harbor.  Packed with shops and warehouses it became the nexus for trade in Boston and New England for decades.  One hundred years after that, when the area had fallen into disrepair, another private developer, Uriah Cotting, rebuilt the area around Long Wharf with new streets, docks, and wharves.  When Cotting, flush with success from Long Wharf, then sought backers for the construction of a new dam across the “Great Bay” west of the Public Garden (also known as the Back Bay) Whitehill noted, with some amusement, how “the scramble was so great that one determined investor climbed into Cotting’s office through a window!”

All around Boston entrepreneurs were finding opportunity in altering and developing Boston’s landscape.  In 1785, just four years after the British surrender at Yorktown, a consortium of newly-minted Americans funded construction of Boston’s first bridge across the Charles, a 1500-foot wooden span to Cambridge.  Nothing was safe, not even the large hill that dominated the skyline.  Known as the “Trimountain” because of its three peaks (that’s where we get the name for Tremont Street, by the way,) developers saw it as a convenient source of dirt with which to expand the shoreline of the crowded isthmus.  One by one, Mt. Vernon (in 1795), Beacon (1810), and Cotton Hill (1832) were leveled off and carried away to, respectively, extend Charles Street, fill in the Mill Pond, and create new land north of Causeway Street.  The townspeople, desperate for room, gobbled up the resulting property and investors in all three projects made money.

In Boston today we have many edifices, statues and tributes to the city’s great thinkers, brave soldiers, clever inventors, heroic firemen, and struggling immigrants.  For two centuries after Boston’s settlement, it was private businesspersons who took it upon themselves to tear down mountains, fill in the waterways, build the bridges, wharfs, and streets.  That they prospered financially is not in question.  Neither is that, thanks to them, the city benefited from these and other amenities, and grew to one of the continent’s economic powerhouses.  Moshe Safdie has created a fitting tribute to their vision, and no more appropriate place for such a tribute exists than by the Financial District and Waterfront, and we should do all we can to get it built.