Columbia Point, in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, sits on a peninsula jutting out from the mainland of eastern Dorchester into the bay. Old Harbor Park is on the north side, adjacent to Old Harbor, part of Dorchester Bay. The peninsula is primarily occupied by Harbor Point, the University of Massachusetts Boston, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, and a complex at the former Bayside Expo Center, Boston College High School, and the Massachusetts Archives. The Boston Harborwalk follows the entire coastline.

History

17th–19th centuries

In Dorchester, Columbia Point was the landing place for Puritan settlers in the early 1600s. The Native Americans called it "Mattaponnock"."Calf Pasture Pumping Station" , Dorchester Atheneum

The community was, in the 17th and 18th centuries, and through to the mid-19th century, a calf pasture: a place where nearby Dorchester residents took their calves for grazing. It was largely an uninhabited marshland on the Dorchester peninsula. Its size was originally . Many landfills, subsequent to that time, have enlarged the land size to in the 20th century.

In 1845, the Old Colony Railroad ran through the area and connected Boston and Plymouth, Massachusetts. The station was originally called Crescent Avenue or Crescent Avenue DepotWhiting, E., Map of Dorchester Massachusetts in 1850 - Boston Public Library Map Collection. The maps shows the Crescent Avenue Depot of the Old Colony Railroad Line. as an Old Colony Railroad station, then called Columbia until December 1, 1982, and then again changed to JFK/UMass. It is an MBTA rail line station for both the subway and commuter rail line.

In the 1880s, the calf pasture was used as a Boston sewer line and pumping station, known as the Calf Pasture Pumping Station Complex. This large pumping station still stands and in its time was a model for treating sewage and helping to promote cleaner and healthier urban living conditions. It pumped waste to a remote treatment facility on Moon Island in Boston Harbor, and served as a model for other systems worldwide. This system remained in active use and was the Boston Sewer system's headworks, handling all of the city's sewage, until 1968 when a new treatment facility was built on Deer Island. The pumping station is also architecturally significant as a Richardsonian Romanesque designed by the then Boston city architect, George Clough. It is also the only remaining 19th-century building on Columbia Point and is in the National Register of Historic Places.

1900s–50s

Land-filling had caused the creation of Columbus Park on the peninsula and what was then called “Day Boulevard”, now Morrissey Boulevard, by 1934. There was a huge trash dump on the peninsula which turned into more landfill for other use.

During World War II, small barracks were built on this landfill for some prisoners of war. After the war, these were re-used for the Columbia Point Veterans Village. Also, in 1950, Boston College High School relocated from the South End of Boston to its present home on Morrissey Boulevard.

More landfill on the north shore of the peninsula had been created to build the Columbia Point Development housing projects which were the largest in Boston and New England and built by the Boston Housing Authority. The area was now known as Columbia Point. The Columbia Point Development was completed in 1954 and had 1,500 apartments in 27 nearly identical three- and seven-story buildings.Schubert, Michael F.; Thresher, Alison, "Lessons from the Field: Three Case Studies of Mixed Income Housing Development" , Great Cities Institute, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, April 1996, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur FoundationRybczynski, Witold, "Looking Back at the Success of Harbor Point : Harbor Point was failed public housing—until it was rebuilt as the nation's first mixed-income community. Twenty-five years later, what can we learn from this visionary project?", Architect magazine, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects, August 16, 2013 When the Columbia Point public housing project opened in 1953, its initial demographics reflected that of the city's population: white tenants made up more than 90 percent of the population while black families made up approximately 7 percent. All reports at the time indicated that racial and ethnic tensions were minimal, that there were high levels of social trust within the neighborhood, and by 1955, had a long waiting list of families wanting to become new tenants. Other infrastructure was added, including public schools. The MBTA rapid transit stop was called Columbia, later to be known as the JFK/UMass stop on the Red Line.

1960s

In the 1960s, there was a movement of community residents from the Columbia Point housing projects to get the city dump, which was located on the peninsula, permanently closed. They were able to get attorney F. Lee Bailey interested and to represent them. Eventually, the city dump closed in 1962 and the private dump, called Mile Road Dump, was ordered closed in February 1963 by the Massachusetts Supreme Court.Cf. Roessner, Jane, A Decent Place to Live, Chapters 8 ("Columbia Point in the Spotlight"), p.56, and Chapter 13 ("Planning for Columbia Point"), p.107. Under the tenure of Boston Mayor John F. Collins (1960–1968), the Boston Housing Authority segregated the public housing developments in the city of Boston by moving black families into the development at Columbia Point while reserving developments in South Boston (such as West Broadway Housing Development) for white families who started refusing assignment to the Columbia Point project by the early 1960s.

In 1965, the first community health center in the United States was built on Columbia Point, the Columbia Point Community Health Center, and was founded by two Tufts University medical doctors, Jack Geiger and Count Gibson.Delta Health Center Records, 1966-1987 in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Sargent Shriver, "Remarks of Mr. Shriver at Comprehensive Health Services Press Conference. June 1, 1967" . Cf. p.5: "Grantee: Tufts University School Of Medicine, Medford, Massachusetts; Operating Institution: Tufts University School of Medicine-Department of Preventive Medicine; Project Director: Count Gibson, M.D., H. Jack Geiger, M.D., Professors of Preventative Medicine, Tufts University; Location: Columbia Point, Boston, Mass. and Bolivar County, Mississippi; Items of Special Interest: One of the original demonstration programs to contrast a model of a northern urban center with a southern rural one; Amount: $1,168,099, $138,888, $281,685, $3,417,630; Date Approved: 6/24/65, 8/65, 3/30/66, 1/15/67" Geiger had previously studied the first community health centers and the principles of Community Oriented Primary Care with Sidney Kark Brown, Theodore M., and Fee, Elizabeth, "VOICES FROM THE PAST: Sidney Kark and John Cassel : Social Medicine Pioneers and South African Emigrés", American Journal of Public Health, November 2002, Vol 92, No. 11, 1744-1745 and colleagues while serving as a medical student in rural Natal, South Africa.Dr. Jack Geiger's biography page at George Washington University, School of Public Health and Health Services Dr. Count Gibson's biography at George Washington University, School of Public Health and Health Services Cf. Roessner, p.80 The health center was funded by the federal government's Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and was needed to serve the community living in the Columbia Point Public Housing Projects which was on the isolated peninsula far away from Boston City Hospital. The center still stands and is in use today as the Geiger-Gibson Community Health Center on Mount Vernon Street."1965 Columbia Point Health Center" - Boston History and Innovation CollaborativeKong, Dolores, "25 Years of Intensive Caring", The Boston Globe. October 28, 1990, Metro Section, 29. In 2012, due to shifting demographics, Geiger-Gibson Community Health Center reduced its primary care hours and focus, moving its primary care patients to the Neponset Health Center in the Neponset neighborhood of Dorchester.Dumcius, Gintautas, "Geiger Gibson easing off its practice of primary care", Dorchester Reporter, Jun. 7, 2012Sheehan, Daniel, "Health Community Offers Final Salutes to Dr. Geiger", Dorchester Reporter, January 7, 2021.

In 1967, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) published a study, titled An Urban Campus by the Sea, which proposed locating the University of Massachusetts Boston campus permanently at the former Columbia Point landfill. In December 1968, the University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees voted 12 to 4 to accept the Columbia Point proposal from the BRA. The initial reactions of the residents of Columbia Point and Savin Hill were mixed. A coalition of 26 community organizations in Columbia Point and Dorchester formed the "Dorchester Tenants Action Council" (DTAC) to prevent an influx of students into the public housing project on Mount Vernon Street. As construction for the Columbia Point campus began, DTAC demanded the creation of a joint task force to address their housing concerns, while some within DTAC called for the university to construct dormitories as part of the Columbia Point proposal; legislation for doing so was proposed within the Massachusetts House of Representatives but failed to pass. In addition to DTAC, the Columbia Point Community Development Council also asked that a number of construction jobs be reserved for residents of the projects, including "set asides" for non-union minority workers that would later become a source of friction between the community groups and the university against the construction management firm, McKee-Berger-Mansueto (MBM) overseeing the project, its subcontractors, and the construction unions.

1970s–80s

In 1974, the University of Massachusetts Boston campus was opened on the tip of Columbia Point, and called the Harbor Campus.

In 1977, after an unsuccessful bid to have the John F. Kennedy Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts close to Harvard University, ground was broken at the tip of Columbia Point for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, designed by the architect I. M. Pei, and dedicated on October 20, 1979.

The Columbia Point Housing Projects fell into disrepair and became quite dangerous. By the mid-1970s the Boston Housing Authority was under community, political, and legal pressure and orders to renovate and cure the living conditions at the site.Boston Housing Authority, "Preliminary Plan for the Columbia Point Development", July 6, 1976"ARMANDO PEREZ & others vs. BOSTON HOUSING AUTHORITY", Massachusetts SJC, 1975/1979, 379 Mass. 703 By the time the UMass Boston campus opened in 1974, only 75 percent of the units in the Columbia Point housing project were occupied, and the BHA now thought of the complex as "housing of last resort." In 1986, construction began for the new Harbor Point Apartments complex to replace the original Columbia Point public housing project, and was completed in 1990. By the 1980s, only 300 families were living in the housing development, in part, because the Boston Housing Authority had allowed the buildings to deteriorate and be occupied by squatters, and the public housing project had drawn comparisons to the Pruitt–Igoe Apartments in St. Louis and the Cabrini–Green Homes in Chicago. As a consequence, the Boston city government leased the development on a 99-year contract to a private developer composed of a tenant-run community task force and the Corcoran-Mullins-Jennison Corporation that was supported by the university. The housing development is now billed as luxury apartments.