The Boston Tea Party was one of the key events leading up to the American Revolution, but a once-popular tourist site that heralded the historic protest has been absent from Boston Harbor since a 2001 fire.
Now, after years of delays and then a credit crisis that left financing unobtainable, plans to rebuild an attraction twice the size of the 1973 original are finally moving forward.
Historic Tours of America has secured financing for the estimated $22 million to $24 million project, and the new Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum is slated to open in the fall of 2011 or early 2012 if everything goes as planned.
“We’ve been working on this for ages, and it’s finally coming down to a close, thank God,” said Shawn Ford, a Historic Tours vice president in Boston. “You can go to any city and go to an aquarium. There’s only one Boston Tea Party.”
The Key West, Fla.-based company, which runs the Old Town Trolley Tours locally, started operating the former museum in 1989 and purchased the operation four years later, assuming the lease for the city-owned Fort Point Channel property.
After lightning sparked a fire that forced the museum’s closure in 2001, Historic Tours had to wait for the reconstruction of the Congress Street bridge before the museum could be rebuilt.
The credit markets seized up not long after the bridge was finished, and Historic Tours couldn’t land financing for what was a $14 million project in 2006.
Now, only city zoning approval is needed.
While the former museum had just one replica of the tall ships that were raided in the 1773 tea party protest – the Brig Beaver – the new museum will eventually have three. The Brig Beaver has been totally refitted and will be joined by the Eleanor when the museum reopens. Historic Tours plans to add the third ship, the Dartmouth, in a few years.
“She will be built on-site, so she’ll become an attraction herself,” Ford said.
The museum space will be twice the original size, with new exhibits, video presentations, living history programs and memorabilia. The Boston Tea Room, a new food service area, will be open to the public during the day and available for night rentals.
All told, the museum – which will also get heating and air conditioning – will accommodate groups of up to 500 for functions. It also will have a larger gift shop.
Close to 400,000 people annually visited the original tea party museum in its heyday of the American bicentennial and the years that followed. But the attraction fell into disrepair, and attendance started declining year after year, according to Ford.
“The prior owners didn’t maintain high-quality standards that met visitors’ expectations,” he said. “As technology changed, other attractions also changed with it over the years, but the tea party (museum) didn’t.”
The notoriety of the Boston Tea Party still is far-reaching abroad, according to Ford, who does a lot of international travel and training for Historic Tours.
“When I go over to London or Germany, I ask what are the top three things that come to mind when I say ‘Boston,’ ” Ford said. “Number one has always been the Boston Tea Party. It’s taught all over the world in schools.”
And every day, tourists visiting Boston go to the Fort Point Channel in search of the site, according to Pat Moscaritolo, CEO of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau.
“You can see people walking around, and they have a map or pamphlet, and there’s nothing there other than a plaque,” Moscaritolo said. “It’s pretty hard for them to visualize what actually happened. Now, it will help fill in the story.”
And it couldn’t come at a more relevant time, according to Moscaritolo, because the Tea Party political movement that emerged last year brought new focus to one of the most defining moments in American history.
“It helps reinforce Boston’s brand of ‘It all started here,’ ” he said.
