MARINA BAY: O’CONNELL’S ANSWER TO LAGUNA BEACH
By Pam Shapiro
Everyone knows the names of Quincy’s two most famous sons: John Adams, the second President of the United States; and the oldest of his five children, John Quincy Adams, who eventually became the sixth President.
Yet, as fascinating as old Quincy is to history buffs, it’s the new Quincy that now lures Beantown’s movers-and-shakers, fishing and boating aficionados, and even some of the most celebrated pro athletes in the Bay State. There’s a new chapter being written in the annals of this city’s history that owes much to another pair of Quincy sons not so well-known outside the city limits: Billy and Peter O’Connell.
The historic quarries, shipyards, World War II-era airfield, and naval station are relics of the past, distant memories captured in photographs and the city’s archives. In their place now is Boston Harbor’s flagship marina – the largest full- service marina and waterfront complex in New England – and one of the most attractive golf courses in the country with breath-taking views of the Boston skyline just across the harbor to the north and the harbor islands to the east.
“They really engineered the whole concept of Marina Bay and a lot of other development in Quincy,” Marina Bay general manager Brian Ferrara says of the O’Connell brothers’ outsized contribution to their native city.
A Quincy native himself, Ferrara says when he was growing up in the 1980’s, the airfield and naval station had already closed. “I used to come to the marina with my family to eat at the restaurants and get ice cream. It was a much smaller operation back then,” he recalls.
Though the marina was first built in the late ‘50s, it wasn’t until the early 1980s that city officials pushed to re-develop the waterfront. What began as a piecemeal process, adding docks here and there, really took off in the late ‘90s and transformed what many considered to be a shabby coastline into the crown jewel of the city.
It’s not for nothing the locals now refer to Marina Bay as “the gem of Quincy,” or the “Boston Riviera.” With its luxury condos and apartments, boardwalk, retail outlets, office space, fine dining, and a harbor full of yachts, pleasure boats, and charter fishing vessels, Quincy is no longer an overlooked post-industrial city nestled in the shadows of Boston. Today, Quincy offers amenities and an ambience for out- of-town boaters and residents alike that you simply cannot find in Boston.
“It’s the closest you can get to Cape Cod without the traffic,” is how one visitor ambling along the boardwalk described Marina Bay on a hot afternoon in July.
Indeed, the architecture of the town- houses leading to the waterfront resembles Nantucket. And, as Ferrara notes, visitors can also see “tones of Miami and France” in the mixed-used development.
Peter O’Connell, the visionary and concept-creator of the brother’s development business, said the boardwalk mimics what you might see in Florida, while the design of some of the buildings were inspired by what he saw years ago traveling by train from Paris to Monaco, such as the memorial clock tower with the names of local soldiers killed in Vietnam inscribed at its base.
Still, while the O’Connell brother’s vision of Quincy becoming more than just a historical attraction is nearly complete, getting from there to here wasn’t easy in the face rock-solid opposition from skeptical city residents back when they first won the bid to re-develop the waterfront.
“At first, there was incredible opposition from some of the neighbors. Some people don’t like change,” Peter O’Connell recalls. “But, having developed the World Trade Center in Boston, the Bayside Expo Center and several apartment complexes in Quincy, the city approved the Marina Bay project in 1983 and over the years the detractors faded away.”
Besides adding new docks, the O’Connell’s went to work on building the harbor-side townhouses, followed by the condominium towers in the late 80s, having weathered a downturn in the real estate market and the bankruptcy of one their partners and principal financier, the Monarch Insurance Co.
Today, Marina Bay is home to over 3,000 residents, including former Congressman William Delahunt, and the former home of New England Patriots superstar Tom Brady, former Boston Red Sox all-star shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, and the late legendary TV news anchor Chet Curtis. But, aside from the cache that comes with living in Marina Bay and the high-end social atmosphere, it’s mariners who get the biggest bang for the buck.
“We offer dock space, storage, a full- service department, fuel, pump-out stations, seasonal slips, transient slips and any concierge services anyone needs. We do package deliveries, car rentals, and we also have any (boat) parts you may need – all of it on-site,” Ferrara says.
With 700 boat slips, Ferrara adds, “because we are such a big facility, we can typically fit people in on transient basis and we still have limited seasonal slips available.”
But, besides all that Marina Bay has to offer mariners, residents and visitors, its proximity to Boston and the exclusive Granite Links Golf Club just across town make it all the more attractive. Either destination is only 15-minutes away by car or boat. Or, as Ferrara puts it, “once you are outside the marina, you can really hit the throttle and get anywhere you need to.”
The O’Connell brothers’ involvement in developing Marina Bay is now part of the latest chapter in Quincy’s storied history. Still, Ferrara says, he is excited about the possibility of more to come. Ferrara’s team is hoping to re-establish ferry service to and from downtown Boston and Logan Airport. They are also considering plans to develop a new luxury apartment complex, additional retail shops, an extension of the boardwalk, and the construction of a “mega-yacht basin.”
Even without the continued expansion of Marina Bay, a Quincy resident seated at a table just outside Siros Restaurant over- looking the harbor summed it like this: “The Adams family built the old Quincy and the O’Connells built the new Quincy.”
But, to understand why the O’Connells figure so prominently in the revitalization of this city, the story of how the other “gem of Quincy” – Granite Links Golf Club – must be taken into account.
TURNING GRANITE INTO GORGEOUS GREEN
When Billy and Peter O’Connell were kids growing up in Quincy, the city’s granite quarries closed down for good. But, to the chagrin of worried parents, the abandoned quarries remained a popular draw for the city’s kids with enough guts to leap from the massive boulders into the spring-fed waters at the base of these stone mountains.
Today, atop Quarry Hill, the only remnants of the Granite Rail Quarry of yesteryear are the large stones that surround a fountain off the picturesque last hole at the exclusive Granite Links Golf Club. The only other evidence of the city’s historic stone cutting industry, amid what is now covered in lush greens and fairways, are the black and white photos that hang on the hallway wall where club members and visitors enter The Tavern restaurant next door to the club’s golf shop.
The dozen or so framed photos of what Quarry Hill looked like in the years before the O’Connell brothers had the vision to re-develop what had become a blighted property into one of the best golf courses in America provides a peek into the past.
Some show the machinery that was once used to lift and move the huge pieces of granite that helped fuel the city’s economy. Others are pictures of men working the quarry mines – but shot from a distance – giving the viewer a sense of scale, with the quarry miners looking as if they were little black ants crawling up a rock a hundred times bigger than them.
It seems anyone who has lived in Quincy long enough has a story of the danger and/or excitement of quarry-diving – with the old cars, discarded junk and even dead bodies allegedly submerged in the waters below. Lifelong Quincy native and now general manager of Granite Links Walter Hannon III is no different.
“I swam in the quarries as a kid,” he said in an interview last month while hosting the 5th annual Audi Cup tournament in one of the club’s meeting rooms. “They were dangerous. Some of the kids jumped from as high as 130-feet. My highest dive was from about 55 feet.”
While the exquisitely maintained 27 holes were designed by John Sanford, Hannon said, it was the exquisite sense of timing of the O’Connell brothers and their development company that paved the way for the historic quarry property and nearby dumps to be transformed into the exclusive Granite Links Golf Club.
“I think it was 1993 when a friend of mine got the idea of turning the quarry land into a golf course. It was during the Big Dig (interstate highway) project in Boston and he said, ‘You know, we could get that dirt,’” Peter O’Connell recalled, thinking back to the inception of Granite Links.
The City of Quincy, which owned the 500 acre site, put out a request for proposals. Fresh off the success of developing the city’s most treasured re-development projects – Marina Bay and the 700,000 square feet of office space downtown known as State Street South – the O’Connell brothers were able to put together the winning bid.
And while the massively expensive Big Dig project was an enormous engineer-ing feat in its own right, building a luxury golf course on top of dense granite was no small feat either.
The son of Quincy’s former mayor, Hannon, who was the O’Connell’s project manager for the construction of the State Street South office park, was also hired to oversee the development of Granite Links.
Not only did Hannon’s team need to secure 58 different permits from Quincy city officials and neighboring Milton to get the green light to begin construction, they had to navigate the bureaucratic minefield of the state Department of Environmental Protection, fend off a lawsuit by a nearby auto dealer concerned about his cars getting dusty from all the dirt that would need to be trucked in, and put to rest concerns being raised by environmentalists who wanted the site to remain untouched.
Finally, after years of planning, the dirt from the Big Dig started to be trucked to the site in 1997.
“It was an enormous operation and engineering feat,” Hannon recalled. “There were so many intricacies in moving all that dirt – 15 million tons of it. We’re talking about 1,200 trucks a day, 24 hours a day, six day a week, for three or four years. It was trucked up City Drive to the site, where it had to be tested for contaminants every 1,000 yards.”
Although the O’Connell brother’s already had a reputation for re-developing and reviving vital parts of Quincy, city officials wanted ensure the greatest good for a greatest number of city residents, asking the developers to cap the landfill, which would save the city $11 million; build four Little League fields and an international size soccer field.
Granite Links opened its first nine holes – the Quincy 9 – in 2003. Two years later, the second nine holes, known as the Mil- ton 9, opened; followed by the final nine holes (the Granite 9) in 2007.
Hannon credited his construction superintendent Gary Kessener for being “the hardest working guy I’ve ever met.” And he lauded the design of John Sanford, who hand-measured every green. Still, one of the central features of the course is the unobstructed views golfers and club diners have of downtown Boston’s skyline.
“It was a challenge moving all that dirt, working with the Teamsters Union, building on top of the unique topography and things like clay turning into ice in the winter, at the end of the day, look what we got: the views are off the charts. There isn’t a view of Boston that’s better,” Hannon said.
It’s a view golfers, diners and wedding parties can take in from the course or the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that en- closes the club’s Tavern restaurant, which Sports Illustrated Golf rated as number seven on its list of “The 19 Best 19th (watering) Holes in golf.”
While managing a fine dining establishment even at an exclusive golf club is challenging, the secret to its success, Hannon said, was Granite Links ability to score the noted chef Dave Todisco.
The spacious, chandelier ballroom above The Tavern and the fully-stocked golf shop is an ideal venue for weddings. Throw in a top-flight ground maintenance crew and live jazz under the tented pavilion just near the Crossing Nines and you’ve got one of the premier golf clubs in the north- east. And though the club has only 375 members, as part of the deal with the city, Granite Links is open for non-members to play.
In recent years, it has become a popular draw for celebrities and pro athletes – from Boston’s own silver screen star Mark Wahlberg and crooner Michael Bolton to the New England Patriots superstar tight end Rob Gronkowski and hockey icon Bobby Orr of the Boston Bruins.
But, the coolest thing about Granite Links, Hannon said, at least to him, is that “two guys from Quincy,” Billy and Peter O’Connell, had the vision and guts to dive into re-developing an old quarry and like so many other parts of Quincy, “re-shaped what the city looks like.”
“They’re great guys to work for,” Hannon said of the O’Connell brothers. “I wouldn’t be here, working for them for 35 years, if they weren’t.”
Kaitlynn and Jamie at the Marina Bay docks.
Marina Bay’s docks feature an array of yachts, pleasure boats, and charter fishing vessels.
Quincy’s coastline boasts luxury condos and apartments, as well as Nantucket-like townhouses.
With retail outlets and plenty of restaurants, Quincy is a perfect place to spend the day.
Granite Links’ fully-stocked golf shop, The Tavern, and an expansive ballroom attract golfers, diners, and wedding parties alike.
Floor-to-ceiling windows and picturesque panoramas make The Tavern a scenic dining destination.
Golfers try to keep focus at the tee as they stop at one of the course’s breathtaking lookouts.
The Granite Links course offers unparalleled views of the Boston skyline.
The top-flight ground maintenance crew keeps the greens looking pristine all year long.
Beautiful sunset reflecting on the boats in Marina Bay.
Stunning aerial shot of the whole Bay.
Between Granite Links, Marina Bay, and countless shops and restaurants, Quincy has something for everyone!
Aerial skyline of Boston behind the gorgeous Marina Bay.
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