Boston City Hall Plaza – A five-acre clay paver hardscape welcomes everyone

Most people never think of their City Hall as a tourist attraction, but then again, most people don’t live in Boston.

Here’s how the City puts it:

“It’s summer on City Hall Plaza. The sun sets later, the days are warm and there’s a breeze coming in off the Boston Harbor. It’s time for the civic center of our city to transform into a vibrant, thriving place for art and culture.”

City Hall Plaza – anchored by five acres of Pine Hall Brick Company clay pavers – plays host to free verse artists; culinary festivals; celebrations of Native American music and dance; celebrations of Latino culture; senior women in rock music, western and soul line dancing; and even three days of chess.

In a place smilingly known for an accent that pronounces the word ‘khakis’ as the thing that both starts your car and describes the pants you may be wearing at the moment, Boston’s City Hall Plaza is both old and new at the same time.

Some background

Since it opened in the 1960s, the Boston City Hall Plaza has had the space to host Boston’s largest gatherings, from sports celebrations to political rallies to seasonal cultural festivals, but it lacked human scale, offered limited amenities, and was, in many cases, inaccessible.

Clearly, something needed to be done, so a study undertaken in 2015 by Utile and Reed Hilderbrand prompted a robust community engagement process that gathered feedback from city officials, business leaders and ordinary citizens to answer the question of what  everyone wanted in their City Hall and Plaza.

From the study, a 30-year master plan was drawn up to address required repairs and to transform the 50-year-old City Hall and Plaza into an innovative, healthy, and efficient civic facility to better serve current and future generations of Bostonians and visitors alike.

In the fall of 2022, the curtain went up on a $95 million redesign and repurposing of the entire area. Objectives included:

• Enhance the architectural legacy.

• Enable accessibility and mobility throughout, by eliminating steps and providing a smooth surface, making the plaza a more inviting place for everyone.

• Provide stormwater management with the use of StormPave™ permeable pavers to filter rainwater and keep pollutants out of Boston Harbor.

The bold plan was implemented

The landscape-architect-led design team worked closely with the city and the Landmarks Commission to maintain the integrity of the original plaza framework, while making it a place where all are welcome.

The original plaza had a 26-foot vertical change across the site, and visitors had to go through a mountain of steps to get from one side to the other. To address that, the design team worked closely with the city’s Disabilities Commission to landscape a new design that eliminates almost all the steps and adds accessibility surfaces.

Through the Plaza’s center, the old, tiered steps became Hanover Walk, a grand, sloping central pathway that ensures access to all the program areas. Notably, the new plaza design maintains brick as the unifying paving feature from the old plaza but uses hand-tight wire-cut brick to avoid mobility challenges.

Within the space itself, a large open area in the main plaza can host major gatherings, but also includes smaller spaces for different scales of activity and year-round uses. A new civic pavilion provides space for up to 150 people indoors.

The plaza provides thousands of linear feet of new benches and seating options, inviting people to stay and enjoy the space. The playscape draws an entirely new generation of users once absent from the plaza and includes areas for sensory play, water play, and adventure play.

The built environment also includes the natural world, with more than 250 new trees, 3,000 new shrubs, and 10,000 new perennials and grasses. The plants provide shade to more than half the site, minimize heat-island effects, treat more than 55,000 tons of carbon emissions, and create a diverse, green environment that supports urban ecological systems.

The old Boston City Hall Plaza was effectively transformed into a verdant and inviting public plaza, while maintaining the spirit of the original design and a city that embraces its historic significance.