Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in WBUR’s weekly arts and culture newsletter, The ARTery. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, sign up here.
A waterfront amphitheater is poised for state approval — but only after pressure from the Boston arts community prompted last-minute changes to the design in two recent public meetings.
The amphitheater is part of a wide-ranging development project on a 6.46-acre parcel of land that was approved by Boston’s planning department in 2022. (It now awaits approval from the state body that regulates waterfront development.) As one condition for the city greenlighting its plans for residential, commercial and lab buildings, developer Related Beal promised a suite of cultural amenities, including affordable artist housing, $3.7 million toward a public art program, indoor civic and cultural space, and infrastructure to support performing arts. The flashiest of the promised arts infrastructure is the aforementioned amphitheater — an asset that artists have seized on to advocate for their vision of a culturally vibrant Seaport.
Since receiving city approval two years ago, Related Beal has sought public input and consulted with the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture as it developed its design for an amphitheater that would present free public programming. At a Zoom meeting in early December, the developer presented the latest designs, which depicted a series of grassy terraces sloping gently from an elevated plaza to the channel. At the bottom, the harborwalk widened to provide space for a large temporary stage that would be stored nearby onsite. Six pre-wired masts could be outfitted with lighting and sound equipment, for which Related Beal would foot the bill.
But community members were having none of it. One by one, meeting attendees — which included representatives from Midway Artist Studios, Celebrity Series of Boston, Boston Lyric Opera and the ILLUMINUS festival — objected to the layout of the seating and the lack of a permanent stage. They said the terraces, which were designed to fit two rows of people on the same level, would have poor sightlines, and questioned whether the space could comfortably accommodate a stated capacity of 1,000. Many objected to the hassle and cost of setting up a stage, which could represent a barrier for smaller organizations. And they expressed what was at stake for Boston’s arts community if Related Beal resorted to half measures in its designs. “If this is not functional, you will have a very nice park that’s not used for performances at all, or very, very little,” Celebrity Series Executive Director Gary Dunning informed city officials.
Members of the development and design team seemed taken aback. “The reality for us is that the end of this park is the moment where one engages with the water,” said Related Beal Executive Vice President Stephen Faber. “We believe that it must be multipurpose. It must. We can’t have, in our opinion, an amphitheater only in which people must move around it in order to gain access to the water.”
Two weeks later, the developer had come around. At a Chapter 91 licensing hearing hosted by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, Related Beal presented drafts of a new amphitheater design that incorporated community members’ demands for better sightlines, and signaled willingness to include a permanent raised stage.
For those who had pushed for more robust infrastructure around the amphitheater, the changes represented a win. “We’re supporting it, with the condition that these elements that have been changed are fully adopted and integrated,” said Raber Umphenour, a resident of the Midway Artist Studios who helped galvanize the arts community around the project. The group had gone so far as to propose its own designs for the amphitheater in a letter submitted to the state last year, which was signed by hundreds of artists and arts organizations such as Celebrity Series of Boston, Boston Landmarks Orchestra, MASARY Studios and The Record Co. The letter argued for a design that would be affordable and straightforward for performers to use.
“One of the reasons that we’ve had so much difficulty in activating the waterfront is because of this lack of cultural infrastructure,” Umphenour said. “When you are asking performing arts organizations to show up to the waterfront to do free public programming, you have to reduce those costs as much as you possibly can, because if you can’t charge for tickets, you have no way of supporting those costs.”
But a few people expressed dismay at the changes to the plan, none more forcefully than Steve Hollinger, a longtime Fort Point resident whose brash internet persona The Fort Pointer often takes the city to task for what he sees as urban planning failures. He criticized arts advocates for entering the process late and upending years of community planning.
“They don’t know the alternatives, and they also don’t know the disservice they’ve done in the process of spending so much time on this amphitheater idea when there were probably a dozen things in this 6.5-acre project that didn’t get that attention, and that needed that attention,” Hollinger said.
Hollinger was heavily involved in the community process that created the city’s Fort Point 100 Acres Open Space Concept Plan, which lays out a framework for outdoor spaces throughout the district. He said the plan envisioned the amphitheater as an extension of the elevated park, to be used for viewing activities on the channel, like dragon boat races, floating art and programming similar to Providence’s WaterFire. Recent changes to the design, Hollinger said, compromised that vision.
“If the amphitheater has an elevated stage, if it has everything that team wants, I’m not going to cry,” Hollinger said. “[But] I think it has dramatically impacted the outcome of the whole project based on compromising those views of the water sheet.”
Another threat to the project is climate change. The berm the amphitheater would be built on was designed with the express purpose of absorbing rising floodwaters — a climate-resilient plan that nevertheless could render the amphitheater moot if flooding becomes a regular occurrence.
Umphenour believed that the project was worth investment, even with the Seaport vulnerable to climate change.
“We have to understand very closely the impacts of climate change and we have to plan for them,” he said. “But we also can’t retreat from the water in a way that makes it not possible to enjoy the benefits of activating and being near the water’s edge.”
The Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture signaled support for the direction the amphitheater design had taken. “The new amphitheater on the Channelside site will be a welcome addition to the landscape of cultural infrastructure in Boston,” Director of Cultural Planning Joseph Henry said in a statement. “The development of the amphitheater is an example of the benefit of engaging with future operators and end users early in the design process, and I am looking forward to seeing it come alive for all Bostonians.”
The amphitheater must also undergo an RFP process to select an operator and is likely years away from completion. Meanwhile, Related Beal has promised to continue to refine the amphitheater designs over the next few months. Community members vowed to hold them accountable.
“We have to ensure that we actually cross the finish line,” Umphenour said. “A race that is incomplete is a race that doesn’t have meaning.”