Powering Up the Encore Casino

From Dave "Snake Eyes" Brigham:

(Left to right: MWRA wind turbine, Encore Boston Harbor casino, Mystic Generating Station. The Mystic River is in the foreground.)

Only a sucker would've bet against Wynn Resorts developing a new entertainment ecosystem around the Encore Boston Harbor casino the company opened in June 2019, along Broadway in Everett, Mass. Wynn, the Nevada-based gambling-and-hotel outfit run by Las Vegas legend Steve Wynn, made no secret of its ambition to site hotels, restaurants, retail spaces, office buildings and entertainment destinations around its gambling house hard by the Mystic River.

Prior to opening, the casino operator acquired numerous properties along and near Broadway, most of which are currently occupied by parking lots. In its latest deal, Wynn agreed to purchase a partially decommissioned power plant across the main drag from the hotel/casino. Constellation Energy agreed in March to sell the Mystic Generating Station to Wynn for $25 million. The portion of the plant that is still operating will be powered down by June 1, 2024.

"Wynn plans to build a standalone sportsbook, poker room, and nightclub," per the above-linked Casino.org article. "The casino is also mulling a new hotel tower on the property," which spans 45 acres. There is speculation that the Kraft family, which owns the New England Patriots, might seek to build a soccer stadium on this site for its Revolution team.

I've written twice about the area around the casino, first in the summer of 2013, before Wynn Resorts was awarded the license to operate the casino (see June 25, 2013, "Roll the Dice"), and then nearly six years later, when Encore was on the cusp of opening (see May 4, 2019, "Roll the Dice: Encore!").

Currently on the power-station site are numerous buildings, giant smokestacks, transformers, oil tanks and God knows what else. I imagine Wynn Resorts will need to ante up a pretty penny to demolish most (if not all) of the buildings and conduct an environmental clean-up.

In advance of acquiring the power plant, Encore Boston Harbor partnered with Goldman Global Arts to develop two murals as part of an effort to beautify the stretch of Broadway in front of the massive power station. Encore and GGA commissioned two artists, Tavar Zawacki and Okuda San Miguel, for the work.

(Zawacki's work is in the right half of the above photo.)

(San Miguel's work, which he calls Animal Magical, is seen in the three photos above.)

The most interesting building (to me, anyways) along Alford Street (which, once it crosses from Boston's Charlestown neighborhood into Everett, becomes Broadway), is most likely the oldest. I'm unclear whether the Mystic Sewerage building is part of the power plant, and whether it is part of the acquisition that Wynn made.

The sewerage building dates to 1895, per MACRIS, and "was one of three initially built to serve the new North Metropolitan Sewerage Systems (the other stations were located at Deer Island and East Boston)." I'm not sure how this building is used now.

As for the Mystic Generating Station, I believe it dates to the 1940s. It was originally known as the Boston Edison Mystic Power Station. "The brick and reinforced concrete Boston Edison complex was designed to provide power for towns on the northern side of Boston," according to the Society of Architectural Historians. "The power was produced by self-contained units, which included one boiler and one turbo generator. This process allowed for generators to be shut down or turned on depending on the demand for electricity. The building was continually expanded, and additional boiler/generator units were added (in 1945, 1947, 1957, 1959, and 1961). In 1975, Mystic 7 was put into service replacing the units built in the 1940s."

The coming makeover of this site -- which prior to the power plant was home to New England Gas & Coke Co. -- would allow for clear views into Boston's Charlestown neighborhood, and beyond toward downtown, and continue the transformation of the southwestern corner of Everett from industrial wasteland to gambling and entertainment mecca.

Udderly Monstrous

From Dave Brigham:

The wind was cold one recent day when I walked my son down a desolate strip of roadway toward this bleak mastodon of a building. He didn't want to go, which I understood. "They're locking you up for your own good," I told him, tears rolling down my cheeks. "You're too good. They want to toughen you up and get you ready for the Trumpocalypse."

OK, this is too morbid. This isn't a prison, and I wasn't turning my son over to The State in advance of a nuclear war.

But holy cow! Doesn't this place absolutely scream Victorian penal institution? Straight out of a Charles Dickens fever dream, or perhaps a late '70s Pink Floyd video?

The Calf Pasture Pumping Station -- the name tells you everything you need to know. But let's talk some more about it anyway. Located in Boston's windblown and perhaps-on-the-rise Columbia Point neighborhood, this incredible hulk was built in 1883 to help expel the city's waste out to Moon Island. The city closed the station in 1968 when the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority completed the Deer Island waste treatment facility (see February 27, 2015, "Digesting Deer Island," for a bit of history and some of my photos of the non-island.)

The Calf Pasture Pumping Station is so named because, well you know why, but let me tell you anyway: it was a calf grazing area for the residents of Dorchester for a few centuries. For decades after Boston built the pumping station, the city added fill to the original 14-acre peninsula, until the land mass was more than 350 acres, and featured Day Boulevard, Morrissey Boulevard and Columbus Park, according to this UMass Boston timeline of the facility, which now sits on the college's campus. For more information about the pumping station, read this and/or this. To learn more about Columbia Point and how the campus of UMass Boston was sited on a former dump, read this Boston Globe article.

For the past 50 years the granite complex -- which once included more buildings than the three currently standing -- has sat empty, haunted by the ghosts of so many lowing cows. For much of that time, I'm led to understand, there has been talk among city officials, college muckety-mucks and developers with slot-machine jackpots for eyes about what to do with this behemoth.

(One of the pumping station's satellite buildings. You can see a residence hall under construction in the background.)

So what's going to happen to this -- I hate to use the word -- eyesore?

UMass Boston acquired the pumping station from the Boston Water and Sewer Commission in 2012, after a dozen years of discussions and negotiations with the city, which didn't want to give up Calf Pasture because that would mean building a station elsewhere (the site was still used as occasional back-up. I'm unsure whether a new pumping station was built somewhere). Five years ago, the college posted an article, "Deciding the Future of the Calf Pasture Pumping Station," on its blog. Among the issues raised about the difficulty of renovating and repurposing the colossus: environmental remediation is required; a structural assessment needs to be done (and perhaps was); great financial resources are required to rehab the building, which has been nominated for the National Historic Register; and just what the hell do you do with a building that looks out of place amid the modern campus buildings, and brings to mind visions of sewage and rot and looks like a mental hospital or a prison for the mentally deranged?

Nobody seems to have any answers, at least none that are available online. After lying delinquent for so many years, the pumping station continues to deteriorate. My guess is that it will eventually be torn down, but since UMass Boston is a bit strapped for cash these days (look it up online), I imagine even that fate is several years off. As for the Columbia Point neighborhood, things are looking up. Sort of. UMass Boston is selling the land where the former Bayside Expo Center once stood (look for a future post about this), and I have to imagine that many of the parking lots in the area will get developed before too long. A Red Line subway stop is close by, as is the John F.Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Also, there is a plan afoot to turn the former Boston Globe HQ on nearby Morrissey Boulevard into a "tech-centric office space," according to this article.

(The backside of the backside.)

Stay tuned....