February 18, 2020 — It’s 5 a.m. and the moon looms high. The cranes flanking the Seaport’s newest high-rise are stilled. At this hour, no buses cruise down the main boulevard, no corporate workers hurry to sleek office buildings, and the flat screens at Tony C’s Sports Bar & Grill are as black as the pre-dawn sky. But outside of Bay 21 on the Boston Fish Pier, the morning catch, jiggling like Jell-O, has already arrived.
Rocky Neck Fish owner Steve Gennodie spots the delivery: four cheesecloth bags full of shelled scallops so fresh they’re still twitching. He bellows “Goodbye, Sunshine!” to the boat captain who hauled them in from Provincetown. Mauricio Jantes, Gennodie’s head fish-cutter, slices open the cloth to reveal a shimmering mountain of fleshy white bivalves and pops one into his mouth.
The workday starts before first light at the Boston Fish Pier, a vestige of a blue-collar Boston now surrounded by acres of gleaming glass towers, hotels, and condo buildings. What once defined the South Boston Waterfront is now an outlier, an oddity in fact. It is fair to ask, why is it still here? But also, would Boston be truly Boston if it were not?
For decades after its 1914 debut, the wharf churned with activity next to an expanse of undeveloped land and railroad tracks. Boats lined up 10 deep to offload their catch and sell it at the auction house, the stately building at the tip of the 1,200-foot pier. But dwindling stocks and heavy regulation buckled the industry in the early 2000s, pushing some occupants out of the pier, threatening those who remained, and ending the auction entirely. Nowadays, the wharf has undergone something of a revival, transformed into a bustling processing hub where trucks deliver more catch than trawlers, and fishmongers rely less on local sales than a global network of imports and exports.
In an effort to preserve the neighborhood’s maritime history, Massport, the agency that has owned the pier since 1972, has thrown a line to the local fishing industry in recent years, keeping rents well below what new development projects in the Seaport typically fetch and funneling money into the maintenance of the 106-year-old wharf. Meanwhile, Rocky Neck and the 18 other seafood tenants that fill the pier’s twin brick row buildings have shifted their business models to meet changing consumer demands.