Twenty years have transformed Fort Point Channel more completely than any other neighborhood in Boston, from brick warehouses to the glass towers you see along the waterfront. Fort Point Channel was the industrial waterfront of South Boston, its brick warehouse buildings constructed in the 1890s to store wool, leather, and goods from the harbor, connected to the railyards that served the waterfront economy. As manufacturing declined in the second half of the twentieth century, the warehouses became cheap studio space for artists, and Fort Point became one of the largest artist communities in New England by the 1980s.
Then the city, seeing the potential of the waterfront land, developed the Innovation District in the 2000s and 2010s, attracting technology companies, biotech firms, and the mixed-use development that has produced the dense forest of glass towers you see along the waterfront today. The Boston Convention and Exhibition Center was built here in 2004; the new Vertex Pharmaceuticals campus employs thousands on the water's edge. The Fort Point artist community has largely been displaced by the rising costs, though some artists maintain studios in the few remaining warehouse buildings.
The channel itself is now a pedestrian amenity; the walk along it from the Children's Museum to the Tea Party Museum traces the arc from Boston's industrial past to its technology future.