ITEM PHOTO BY JIM WILSON
Despite showing promise, the ferry out of Lynn has not received funding for the future from the Baker Administration. It has exacerbated an already-difficult commute into Boston for North Shore residents.
By THOMAS GRILLO
First of a four-part series
ALSO: You can’t get there from here: Part 2
You can’t get there from here: Part 3
You can’t get there from here: Part 4
LYNN — Seduced and abandoned.
That’s how at least one Lynn resident feels about buying a waterfront condominium with the promise of a convenient and scenic ferry ride to his office in the Hub.
Priced-out of Boston’s South End neighborhood where the median cost for a home is nearly $1 million, Kelly Boling bought a condo on Lynn Shore Drive for less than $175,000. In addition to sweeping views from Nahant Bay to the Blue Hills, his one-bedroom unit offered an added benefit: the nearby Blossom Street Extension pier where the Lynn ferry operated for the past two years.
“I liked Lynn because real estate was cheaper, there was the prospect of living on the ocean and hiking the Lynn Woods appealed to me,” he said.
The ferry was a bonus, he said, just minutes from his home.
But not long after he closed the deal on the condo in June, the Baker administration canceled the ferry. As a result, the 48-year-old project manager for a national nonprofit had to find another way to his office in the Financial District.
Boling’s frustration is mirrored by many North Shore commuters trying to get into Boston daily on clogged roadways and packed trains and buses.
For Boling, selecting another transportation mode meant choosing between an MBTA bus trip, commuter rail, a drive or a bus ride to Wonderland for a trip on the Blue Line, or driving into Boston. Each option is considerably longer and more stressful than a 35-minute boat ride.
Sheila Ercolini, a Point of Pines Revere resident, who lives five minutes from Lynn’s ferry dock, is one of those frustrated commuters who is having trouble getting there from here. She is still smarting from the boat’s cancellation. Now, her husband drops the executive assistant off at the Winthrop ferry, 20 minutes from her home for the trip into Boston.
“I had this gorgeous, convenient ride, it was the perfect commute,” she said. “Then it was cancelled without any thoughtful effort to build ridership and get it into a financially stable position. It broke my heart.”
Andrew Bettinelli is another former Lynn ferry passenger whose commute is a lot longer. It sometimes can take up to nearly two hours to reach his office on Beacon Hill.
Instead of a short drive from his Marblehead home to the ferry on the Lynnway, he now drives to Revere’s Wonderland for the rest of the trip into the city.
“I’ve gone from a beautiful scenic commute to traveling in a traffic jam,” said the 32-year-old legislative aide.
State Sen. Thomas M. McGee (D-Lynn) and Brendan Crighton (D-Lynn) joined U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton to blast Baker, a Swampscott resident, for being short-sighted and failing North Shore commuters.
They argued that by denying the cash for the ferry, the governor abandoned one of the top priorities for the Lynn Economic Advancement and Development (LEAD) group, the high-powered team that in addition to Moulton includes Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Jay Ash, Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack, James Cowdell of Lynn’s Economic Development & Industrial Corp., Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy and others who can cut through the bureaucracy to jump-start development.
The Baker administration put some of the blame on Lynn. The premise of the ferry service, they argued, was that the first year would be a pilot and subject to the city crafting a marketing, ridership and outreach plan. But that was never done, they insist.
Since then, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation has offered to pay for a study to explore ways for Lynn to make the ferry viable. But for now, the ferry’s future is uncertain.
Brett Laker, a Swampscott resident who works for an insurance company in the Back Bay, tells a slightly different ferry story. When he took the boat to Boston for two years, his door-to-door trip got him at his desk within 75 minutes, about 15 minutes longer than the ride on the commuter rail. But he still chose to ride the ferry.
“If the commuter rail is running on time, I can get to work in under an hour,” he said. “But it routinely takes much longer. There are fewer trains, sometimes they’re cancelled, they’re packed and it can sometimes take two hours to get to work. The ferry was great, you’re on the water, people are in better moods, everyone is chatting, there’s coffee and the staff is great because it’s their job to be nice to people, unlike the commuter rail. It was a completely different experience. It sometimes took me longer to get to work, but it was worth it.”
The end of the ferry’s two-year experiment came in June, when the state denied Lynn’s request for about $700,000 in operating expenses for the ferry to cruise for a third summer.
Baker later told The Item that the ferry failed to attract enough riders in its first two summers of operation. The governor’s decision to reject funds for the ferry service came on the heels of a $4.5-million federal grant for a new 149-passenger ferry with help from Moulton.
One thing that is certain, the lack of ferry service, even temporarily, is sure to chill sales of waterfront and downtown condominiums, according to brokers.
“Not having ferry service this year is serious because it hurts efforts to enhance the downtown and attract buyers,” said Annemarie Jonah, of Annmarie Jonah Realtors in Lynn. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a bad decision that hurts us in Lynn and hurts everyone.”
For Boling, the high prices in Boston led to a nice surprise about Lynn, and not just lower prices.
“People told me I’m not supposed to like Lynn,” he said. “But it has great architecture and it’s certainly more culturally interesting than Boston.”
Thomas Grillo can be reached at [email protected].