The Future of Boston Harbor Cruises

Despite her commitment, running the family business was the last thing on Alison’s mind. As a teenager, she was suddenly partially paralyzed from her feet to her neck, losing the ability to move or speak. “My mother thought maybe I had polio,” she says, but it was Guillain-Barré syndrome—a disease that causes the immune system to attack the nerves. It took her almost two months in Tufts’ Floating Hospital for Children to recover. On top of that, Debbie had enrolled her at the Pingree School, a tony private high school in South Hamilton with pillars and sprawling manicured lawns. She was an outsider in the midst of all that money. “I felt like all of the kids at that school would judge me because I lived in an apartment,” Nolan says. She decided to become a doctor, and shipped off to Stonehill College, a Catholic liberal arts school in Easton, where she studied biology.

When Nolan graduated in 1997, though, the future looked different. Medical school felt daunting and expensive, while the waterfront was a natural fit. The place had changed, too. The federally mandated harbor cleanup effort, started in 1985, was having a real effect, and the dismantling of the Central Artery in 2004 opened the waterfront with help from the new Rose Kennedy Greenway. Feeling like she’d never match her father and grandfather in maritime prowess, she skipped getting a captain’s license and began to carve out her own space on the business side of the operations. She was good at it. Boston was changing and Boston Harbor Cruises needed a new brand. She scrapped her dad’s old-school ads in the Yellow Pages and invested in a big multimedia campaign. The ads were “tremendous,” according to Kathy Abbott, CEO of Boston Harbor Now, a harbor advocacy nonprofit—they had a vision for what was coming.

Nolan had to rebrand herself, too. It wasn’t enough to be a shy waterfront kid with some business savvy—she needed to become a part of the new, moneyed Boston growing up all around her. “She walked out of her comfort zone to build a lot of relationships within the Boston community,” knowing it would be good for the business, says her close friend Dominique Danca. Her aspirations grew from just keeping the family business afloat to something grander and more sweeping: turning it into a link for the city, crafting the waterfront into a command center. She started to spend her evenings in Planning & Development Agency meetings, and joined the Wharf District Council, the advisory board for Boston Harbor Now, and the board of directors for A Better City, among other organizations.

People such as Li started to notice, and wanted to honor her with awards from the business community. “We would be the ones who’d say, ‘Would you allow us to nominate you?’ And she would say, ‘Oh, I don’t need that,’” Li explains. Keen to highlight a young local face who was making waves, she’d cajole Nolan into accepting nominations for honors such as the Boston Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” award, and others from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, by making the case that it was good for the harbor. (Several of the awards I saw in her office were still waiting to be hung.)

For Nolan, it’s the greater good of the harbor that matters most. “The more water transportation there is,” she says, “the more opportunity there is for all of us in the harbor.”

Back on the water taxi, we round the tip of the North End, and Nolan gestures to a spot called Lovejoy Wharf through the taxi’s plastic windows. This, she says, is where a floating dock could soon be installed—the launching pad for commuters trying to get from North Station to the Seaport that could bring a flood of traffic in from the North Shore.

Plans for the pilot—and who will run it—may be put out for bid this month by the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. James Folk, the authority’s transportation director, says the bid will be open to competitors. “It’s not necessarily going to be Boston Harbor Cruises,” he says. Other forward-thinking operators, such as Bay State Cruise Company—or even out-of-state vendors—could see this as a prime moment to cash in on Boston’s aquatic renaissance. Some might even be encouraged by Nolan’s rousing success. “Given the fact where Boston Harbor is today, it would not surprise me that other companies over time also want to bid on what’s happening in Boston,” says Li, though she cautions that “they’re gonna recognize very quickly they have a formidable opponent.”

First, though, Nolan faces other opponents. Attorney Carolyn Latti is representing two plaintiffs who are suing the company for injuries they allegedly sustained on Codzilla. This is Latti’s fifth personal-injury case involving the speedboat, and “people are still sustaining the same injuries,” she says. “I mean, it’s a thrill ride, but a thrill ride doesn’t mean you come back with a fractured spine.” Latti hopes a warning sign could make a difference. “People go on board this vessel. They don’t know that they can come back with a fractured vertebrae, and it has happened,” she claims.

Previous claims against Codzilla, Latti says, were settled and filed away, but these recent plaintiffs won’t exit quietly. In one case, the plaintiff claims that the boat sent her airborne after hitting a wake and that she came crashing down on the seat so hard she suffered a burst fracture, in which the vertebra breaks from a sudden compression. The woman walked off the boat before alerting crew members to her injury; now she’s seeking punitive damages from the company, which denies the allegations. Nolan declined to say much about the lawsuit, offering only: “As a company, passenger safety and satisfaction are our top priority and we are proud of our safety record.”

Whatever happens—with the lawsuits, the ferry route, or the harbor—Nolan has no intention of slowing down. Just last month, Boston Harbor Cruises announced its partnership with noted chef Barbara Lynch, who will be providing food and beverage service for the company’s private charter fleet. Next summer, the ICA intends to open a satellite location in East Boston, and it plans for visitors at its flagship in the Seaport to cruise straight across the harbor in a water taxi to get there—another contract Nolan is watching closely. As the harbor changes, she’s dead set on changing with it.

Decades ago, Matty Hughes never could have dreamed his business would cater to folks heading to the Seaport, of all places, where they’d make money building new technology inside of shining glass towers. It’s all a far cry from the 10-cent tour through sewage—and the grimy Charles—where Boston Harbor Cruises started.

Some would argue that’s probably a good thing. “How lucky Boston is to have Alison and Boston Harbor Cruises,” Li gushes. After all, if anyone is going to lead the charge, it might as well be Nolan, a living bridge between the old harbor and our new waterfront.