Ideas percolate in Innovation District
Hopes are high for S. Boston area
Scientist Holly Moeller worked in the lab at Ginkgo BioWorks, one of the newer companies at Boston Marine Industrial Park. (John Tlumacki/ Globe Staff)The Innovation District is not an attempt to reinvent the Seaport or Convention Center area, say planners from the Boston Redevelopment Authority, but rather an effort to embrace new industries. The neighborhoods will not work, they say, with just office towers, five-star hotels, and luxury high-rises.
“I think we forget that the development is tied to the bigger economic picture,’’ said Gregory Vasil, chief executive officer of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board. “We want it to happen in an instant. If I can’t get that huge employer to come in here and bring 400 or 500 jobs at one time, maybe smaller companies [can] come in and take up some space. I think it’s smart.’’
The city’s new endeavor includes a push for some inventive housing that would cater to the laboratory and startup set. At a recent symposium, architects pitched plans to developers for studio apartments with shared kitchens and other common rooms, almost like a dormitory without the college.
The goal would be an inexpensive place to sleep for people such as David Perry, a 23-year-old recent grad from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and one of the forces behind OsmoPure, the bottle-top water filter.
Perry was one winner in the entrepreneurs contest, MassChallenge, sponsored by the state, the city, and private organizations including law firms and businesses. He is moving his infomercial-esque enthusiasm to Boston without a place to live.
“I’ll be couch surfing for a while, I guess,’’ said Perry, who has been staying with a cousin in upstate New York.
But city planners do not want to create a hipster playground for the techno elite. The Boston Marine Industrial Park, for example, remains home to almost two dozen seafood companies that scale, filet, and debone an ocean of fish and mollusks, from dayboat stripers caught off Cape Cod to Indonesia crab.
Take North Coast Seafoods, a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation on Drydock Avenue that employs 160 with knives and hairnets. Even this traditional company boasts high tech innovations: super-cold slush ice, seawater purified with ultraviolet light, and a micro lab so precise it detected when dayboats in Gloucester cut back on ice because of the high cost of diesel.
A few factory buildings away, the DNA hackers at Ginkgo BioWorks toil in jeans and gym shoes, cerebral entrepreneurs who make jokes about microbes and use the word bootstrap as a verb. Their airy lab has the familiar hallmarks of a startup.
Outside its windows, workers repair a 950-foot-long naval freighter parked in one of the largest drydocks on the East Coast. It may only be a 30-minute ride on the Silver Line to MIT, but it is a world away from Kendall Square.
“You get a much better deal out here on lab space than in Cambridge,’’ said one of the founders, Jason Kelly, 29. “More people have been coming to ask us about the area, people we know from MIT, looking for space.’’
While the area will never become a biotech research cluster like Kendall Square, it could become a hub for other life sciences, said Mark Winters, managing principal of the global life sciences for the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield.
“There’s a really positive buzz to that whole area,’’ Winters said. “The single biggest challenge facing it, unfortunately, is the state of the economy and the Boston real estate market.’’
Andrew Ryan can be reached at aryan@globe.com. 
Anil K Gupta
