The former "immortal pothole" on Thomson Place. Photo: Chaiel Schaffel/WBZ NewsRadio
BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio) — For months, a pothole the size of a small dishwasher sat in the middle of Thomson Place in the Fort Point neighborhood of the Seaport, across from a Shake Shack. It looked like someone took an ice cream scooper to the the pavement. Some took to calling it an "immortal" or "eternal" pothole. From the outside, the hole seemed like a simple matter for the city's public work's department to solve. But the reality was far more complicated.
At least five complaints were filed about the hole in the past two weeks through the Boston 311 system. But the city responded, over and over, that the pothole was on private property. Thomson Place is a private way which generally means that all maintenance is the responsibility of the property owners along the street.
History of the Seaport
The street was built in 1896 by a private industrial company, and remains in private hands to this day — much like the rest of the Fort Point neighborhood, which was dredged out of the harbor in the second half of the 19th Century.
For this particular street, the owners are the real estate firm Crosspoint Associates and Invesco. But the company told WBZ NewsRadio that the massive pothole wasn't on their property.
The Last Layer
WBZ NewsRadio kept digging and found the final layer to this property ownership onion.
A look at the property lines on the Assessor's Office map suggests the MBTA owns a vanishingly tiny strip of the street between Trillium Brewing and Seaport Boulevard. The Courthouse Silver Line Station is just across the street.
It seems that this corner of the Seaport is such a complicated tangle of property, who actually owns what land may have fallen through the cracks. That caused the "orphan pothole" to go unfixed for months.
On Thursday, the T said it still wasn't certain that the hole fell on their land, but that "MBTA General Manager Phil Eng has directed T maintenance personnel to make repairs" while they work out the exact property line. An MBTA spokesman shared a photo of the hole being fixed on Friday, and said both the agency and some abutting property owners would pitch in for the cost.
WBZ's Chaiel Schaffel (@CSchaffelWBZ) reports:
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