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See Shore

A free, hidden gallery in a harborside neighborhood of artists

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T

he gentrification of the Seaport District has come under its fair share of criticism for displacing the artists who once enjoyed cheap rents in Fort Point. But what trendy neighborhood doesn’t embrace art? The developers of FP3, a group of connected industrial buildings renovated into pricey loft-style condos, have given the artists their own space, with an art gallery on its first floor open free to a public that generally doesn’t know it’s there. (The complex’s developers include restaurateur Barbara Lynch, whose Sportello and Menton are housed there.) It’s a great secret worth a look, and not only for the art, presented in rotating exhibitions. The gallery is paneled in old-growth Douglas fir reclaimed from timber-framed buildings, with reclaimed-wood benches by Fort Point artist and furnituremaker Quentin Kelley.

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FP3 is made up of buildings largely constructed around 1900 as warehouses for wool by the Boston Wharf Company, which built the onetime mud flats along Fort Point into wharves during a time when the channel was crowded with ships hauling manufactured goods from molasses to safety razors. The area declined when interstate highways made shipping easier by land than sea.