Visitation to the Boston Harbor waterfront took a big banger because of the COVID-19 pandemic, with visits to the Harborwalk along the city’s coastline and adjacent parks in 2021 and 2022 dropping to just over half of 2019 levels, according to new data released this week.
Likewise, the number of unique visitors also fell precipitously. An estimated 954,000 visitors came to the harborside in 2022, compared to 2.9 million in 2019, while total visits dropped to 7 million in 2022 from 13.3 million in 2019.
Visits to parks along the harbor and the harbor islands actually rose from 2019 to 2020, as early pandemic rules around business openings and social distancing encouraged more people to spend their free time outdoors. But those numbers fell sharply in the following two years.
Nonprofit group Boston Harbor today disclosed the numbers this week, based on cell phone data captured over those four years along the waterfront. It’s the first time the organization has studied how many people visit the city’s waterfront. The nonprofit also engaged the MassINC Polling Group to interview visitors at five of the biggest waterfront parks in 2023, to understand the makeup of those visitors and how they were using the parks. Roughly half of the visitors were from Boston, mostly from neighborhoods near the water.
Despite the recent decline, Boston Harbor today said the overall results are encouraging and reflect decades of public and private investment via the harbor cleanup, the Big Dig, and the waterfront’s real estate boom.
President Kathy Abbott said she’s not too worried about the decline in visitors to the waterfront in 2021 and 2022 because it largely reflects the ways the pandemic disrupted commuting patterns. Visits likely increased since then as people from the suburbs gradually returned to their offices.
Abbott said she was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of visitors, though she still sees room for improvement. Both studies showed that the racial composition of waterfront visitors essentially matched the demographics in the broader metro area. For example, the data showed that nearly 65 percent of visitors to waterfront parks and the Harborwalk were white, roughly the same as the Boston metro area.
However, Boston Harbor today noted that when that area is exclusive to Boston and around 20 adjoining cities and towns, the white population makes up about 55 percent of residents, and about 45 percent of Boston itself.
Boston Harbor today also used the cell phone data to study visits to the Boston Harbor Islands, primarily Spectacle and Georges Islands. By 2022, the number of visits had surpassed 2019 levels, but the number of unique visitors remained much lower, and a significant portion (¾) of visitors to the islands were white.
With funding from the Barr Foundation, Boston Harbor today just hired its first Harborwalk manager, Jason Rundle, with the hopes that he’ll use the findings to draw more people to the harbor and the islands, as well as reach out to the nearly 400 property owners along the waterfront to get them more involved in the Harborwalk’s future.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.
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