Harborwalk at Pier Four

Along the harbor’s edge, a public path runs around new residential buildings and leads to a park at the end of Pier Four. Free passage to the water must be preserved here during new development, so an open strip of shore remains between private homes. The pier number itself has outlasted both the old warehouses and vacant lots and today’s residential neighborhood.

The name Pier Four is older than today’s buildings. In the nineteen sixties, it was an abandoned numbered pier amid warehouses and vacant lots. Restaurateur Anthony Athanas wanted to turn it into a place people would travel across all of Boston to have dinner by the water. He named the establishment for himself and its pier number—Anthony’s Pier Four.

Athanas had been making his living from restaurants since his teenage years. He came to this project as an experienced owner, but invested everything he had in it: few people believed that affluent visitors would voluntarily travel to the run-down outskirts of the port district. So Athanas held his first big reception for the people on whom success truly depended—he invited the city’s taxi drivers. In the era before electronic maps, it was the driver who advised a visitor where to have dinner. For years, taxi drivers sent passengers to Pier Four.

The calculation worked. The five-hundred-seat restaurant became one of the country’s highest-grossing. People arranged business meetings here, held family celebrations, and welcomed celebrities; Athanas himself lived in an apartment above the dining room and greeted guests. The abandoned pier became an address that Bostonians no longer needed explained to them.

With the money earned here, Athanas added his own ship to the restaurant. In nineteen sixty-eight, he bought the decommissioned river steamer SS Peter Stuyvesant, which had previously carried passengers on the Hudson River. For the vessel, more than eighty meters long, Athanas acquired a tract of shallow water and commissioned a steel-and-concrete support. Inside, they installed a bar, a separate dining room, and a wine cellar. The steamer stood motionless beside the pier, like another building.

On the night of February sixth to seventh, nineteen seventy-eight, during the fiercest blizzard, Athanas was in his apartment above the restaurant. He noticed that SS Peter Stuyvesant had shifted on its support by about fifteen centimeters. Athanas called the United States Coast Guard and tugboat owners, seeking help, but the vessels were needed to rescue people. When he went back to the window, the steamer had already broken free from its moorings and capsized in the harbor.

For several months, Athanas tried to save it, then agreed to dismantle the superstructures. The hull was left on the bottom; at especially low water, its outlines could still be made out beside the pier. The restaurant itself continued operating until two thousand thirteen. Three years later, the building was demolished, and in two thousand seventeen the last parts of SS Peter Stuyvesant were raised from the bottom.

Now the Harborwalk path curves around new private buildings and emerges at a public park at the end of the pier. This passage along the water must be preserved when the Boston waterfront is developed. The restaurant stood where the current park is, and the steamer lay in the water at its edge. Nothing remains of either except the pier number for whose sake Anthony Athanas once fed all the city’s taxi drivers.