Boston City Hall Plaza

Boston rebuilt its seven-acre City Hall Plaza between 2020 and 2022 for accessibility, events and stormwater, with Shawmut Design and Construction as construction manager. Much of the new plaza is carried on large precast concrete elements, and Atlantic Bridge & Engineering was the precast erector. ABE received the precast at our Rochester, New Hampshire yard, stored it, and trucked each piece into Government Center in sequence. Our crews set the six main precast girders, up to 64 feet long and 116,000 pounds each, with a crawler crane on the plaza, then the voided bridging slabs of up to 36,000 pounds, the solid ground slabs and hollow-core plank, working from an erection procedure engineered and stamped by a licensed professional engineer.

ABE also furnished and installed the post-tensioning strands that tie the precast deck together and the steel plate forms at the expansion joints. As the plaza took shape, the scope grew to include the precast play structures in the 12,000-square-foot playscape, the shade sail structure, pavilion elements and a wedge slab. The plaza reopened in November 2022 and was named a 2024 ENR New England Best Project.