A Good Looking City

[ablarc]

A GOOD LOOKING CITY

Everyone knows the landmarks in this city, so I have left them out. Landmarks and their immediate vicinity are almost always nice looking, but this city looks good nearly everywhere in its built-up area.

It looks good partly because it is almost entirely free of parking lots. Therefore it is not gap-toothed, and the spatial experience is coherent and intentional throughout. This is also true of much of New York and San Francisco, and would be the case with any American city that had the intelligence to get rid of its parking lots.


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This is the shopping street of an old and ritzy residential area right downtown. It is starting to evolve into a regional shopping street of toney boutiques for people with deep pockets. The street was widened about a hundred years ago; you can see evidence of this on the patched brick wall of the building on the left.


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This leafy oasis is actually the roof of a five-story underground parking garage. The garage used to be two stories and above-ground. The views from the upper level featured a veritable menagerie of nifty skyscrapers. Now you have to wait for the leaves to fall off the trees to see the high-rise zoo. But there is plenty of compensation meantime: a green retreat from the bustle, like Bryant Park. It even has a glassy food kiosk.


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Skyscrapers surround another garage roof, this time entirely covered with water. The water is both reflecting pool and part of the mechanical system of the surrounding buildings. Three are office buildings, two are apartments, and two are hotels.


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These three deco office "towers" are part of the building boom that also produced the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. Rather smaller, they extract the last iota of monumental potential from their setting as they strive toward the infinite reaches of the sky. Atop a gentle rise, they take the upward energy of the street and propel it skyward, while simultaneously deflecting it around the bend. In his quest for Babylonian vastness, the architect (Frank Kellogg) progressively lightens the tone of the brick as his building reaches for the sky, lost in the mists of atmospheric perspective. Never have fourteen stories seemed so vast. A fine passage of urban design. Beyond, a recent interloper by Philip Johnson soars effortlessly to three times the height.

The three-towered deco building has recently been converted to a hotel. Other older office buildings in this district are slated to become apartments and condominiums.


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This afternoon rush hour photo was taken from an office tower built on air rights over railroad tracks and an interstate highway. A fairly new mid-rise condominium mimics the undulating façade treatment of its older, smaller neighbors. These are alternately residential or offices, all with shops at street level. Zoning by function has here never raised its ugly head. The sidewalk exhibits a nice uncertainty about the precise location of the line between public right-of-way and private property.

As more larger buildings are added, this street will acquire the proportions of a Paris boulevard.


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A row house district with a checkered past and an increasingly glittering present. Gentrification of this district has been a forty-year effort, slowed by politicians and community representatives of the downtrodden poor. These correctly perceived that if they let the yuppies get comfortable in this place, the floodgates would be opened to a middle class takeover.

Though you could buy a house for a song, everyone had a horror story to tell. Middle class families who moved into this district often left after the fifth burglary and the third mugging. People who are desperate to leave a place sell low, so real estate values appreciated slower than hoped for by those who bought in.

Various social engineering strategies were concocted by the government to keep the poor in place. These included quotas, subsidies and low interest loans for groups that represented low-income economic or ethnic interests. One such group was chosen to develop Villa Victoria, the area of gable-roofed town houses surrounding the lone residential tower in the right middle ground. (The tower is also part of the project, as are the five-story brick-clad slabs.)

Villa Victoria was developed as a Puerto Rican enclave, with a mixture of rental and owner-occupied units, and a bodega. At first it had a distinctly ethnic character, especially on weekends when its streets became impromptu car repair shops and taverns. The streets were filled with salsa music and guys sitting on car hoods drinking beer. It was a place avoided by women.

There was one group who steadfastly refused to be deterred: gays. In their traditional role as the flying wedge of gentrification, they eventually overwhelmed the district by sheer numbers. At some point critical mass was achieved, and the area abruptly became middle class. Today, it is clean, graffiti-free, unlittered and safe. Its demography is a mix of old-timers and carpetbaggers. And the Puerto Ricans? Why, they became middle class too. Today there is nary a boom box to be heard.

In roughly descending order of numbers, the diverse population consists of: gays, yuppies, Hispanics, Chinese, African-Americans, Middle-Easterners, and others. A nice mix.

The big church is the Roman Catholic cathedral, and the stuff to its right that looks like public housing is public housing. There is less of it this year than last, and next year there will be less still, as the housing authority nibbles at it bit by bit.


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Here is a street scene in the same district. The building in the foreground has not changed function since it was built. It has evidently been spiffed up, though not with central air. The building at right was obviously a church before its present career as condos. Wouldn’t you like to have the pad with the rose window?


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Down by the Waterfront, someone planted a big suburban office building and called it a courthouse. The view is from a boat landing used by, among others, a waterfront hotel.


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During the Urban Renewal era, they built a much-too-big plaza and set some elephantine government buildings on it. They have been trying ever since to find ways to make it smaller. This is their latest effort, a kind of market shelter under which people can sell things. That is the unforgiving façade of the Federal Building at right.


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Every city has an old and important street that used to be a principal way out of town, like Broadway. This one is seen here passing through a smaller satellite city.
This street is quite urban because a subway line passes under it. Development is concentrated along the subway line, thus allowing the rest of the satellite city to retain a certain 19th Century small-town appearance:


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Tom Sawyer is accepting applications from potential fence-painters. The line forms beside the blue bicycle.


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The old city is still there, and plenty of people occupy dense four and five story row houses, some subdivided into apartments, and a fair minority, not. You don’t have to be rich to live in these places if you are in a two-income household, or can tolerate roommates and not much space. I used to have a friend who was a loner and lived in a coal bin.


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People refer to this as a European city. What they mean by that is that it is intact because it has no parking lots, unlike most American cities, and therefore it is walkable. Another European thing about it is that it has fast trains.


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Needless to say, it is not in the Sunbelt. This is the main street of another neighborhood, in this case Italian.


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New and old buildings jostle on a crooked old street grid, making for some striking juxtapositions of scale, materials and styles. None of it is displeasing.


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Down by the waterfront, it gets seriously nautical. Why, that hotel is even shaped a little like a boat. The waterfront is now residential and recreational, but it used to be a busy cargo port and even had a fishing fleet.


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Cruise boats still call, and there is a state-of-the-art container facility. Too bad the skyline is truncated by height limitations and NIMBYs.


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There is a neat new cable-stayed bridge across the river where it empties into the harbor. Very European.


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Looking to the future, a Cesar Pelli skyscraper is proposed over some railroad tracks.


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And they are tearing down their elevated highway.




My thanks to tocoto, scott, statler, Mike617, Poolio, AmeriKen Artist and all others whose pictures appear above. Some of these photos obviously required stalwart early Sunday morning forays to get clean pictures uncluttered by too many people.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Many don't like this city; maybe it's that truncated skyline. I love walking its streets, especially to watch that ridiculous baseball team lose.

An excellent tour, ablarc.

[fioco]

Odd, I've never heard complaints about this city. It's right at the top of the list in walkability. My friends in Wakefield are near the transit so it's an easy hop to the centre city. Ablarc, I'm very impressed by the selection of pictures. You slowly reveal the city with more well-known structures. Thank you for fresh shots and a narrated tour.

[ablarc]

fioco, I think Zippy's tongue was in his cheek.

[Gulcrapek]

Yeah, thanky.

I'm not a big fan of this city, but that's probably because the 2 times I was there it was rainy and disgusting. However it's definitely the second most urban city I've been in and certainly walkable. I need to get there on a sunny day.

[ZippyTheChimp]

fioco, I think Zippy's tongue was in his cheek.
Yep

[JMGarcia]

Having grown up in Boston I am naturally biased. But, in my opinion, it is simply the most beautiful city for its built environment in the country. Its natural setting doesn't match San Francisco and its skyline doesn't match New York, but there is no city more consistently and unrelentingly beautiful in its streetscape as Boston.

[Agglomeration]

I for one have visited that city several times, and I have never liked it. The old brownstones are nice to look at, but virtually everything in that city is, ummm, castrated: nightlife (there's hardly any beyond 1 AM and I heard that they're strictly enforcing occupancy limits), skyline (the John Hancock Tower would be just another face in the tower crowd if it rose in Midtown Manhattan), and general personality (there's no need to go into that other than to say it was horribly boring that last time I arrived there).

[ablarc]

Having grown up in Boston I am naturally biased. But, in my opinion, it is simply the most beautiful city for its built environment in the country. Its natural setting doesn't match San Francisco and its skyline doesn't match New York, but there is no city more consistently and unrelentingly beautiful in its streetscape as Boston.

JMGarcia, I did not grow up in Boston, but I am forced to agree.

[Kris]

July 25, 2004

Boston Rises Above Unflattering Stereotypes

By PAM BELLUCK

"I HAVE just returned from Boston," the comedian Fred Allen, a Massachusetts native, once wrote to Groucho Marx about this city. "It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there."

Mark Twain described his first Boston audience as "4,000 critics."

And Raymond Chandler once wrote, "I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday."

Such is the caricature of this city, or some of the caricatures, anyway. Stuffy, slow to change, prickly, parochial.

Boston has long labored under other stereotypes, too. The conflagration created by court-ordered busing in the 1970's marked it as a racially polarized city. The fact that Massachusetts was the only state to vote for George McGovern for president in 1972, and is the home of the Kennedys and Michael S. Dukakis has typecast Bostonians as litmus-test liberals, weak-kneed in the face of crime and high taxes.

Then there is the image of Boston as gritty and pockmarked, plagued by a polluted harbor and choked by traffic as the nation's largest public works project, the Big Dig highway construction extravaganza, has dragged on.

This is not your forefather's Boston, or even the Boston of your forefather's great-great-great-grandson. Boston is no longer merely Beacon Hill spinsters, Brahmin elitists, big-government boosters and bullying bigots.

"The world hasn't really caught up with how Boston has changed," said Paul S. Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation, which finances nonprofit organizations in the city.

It has become a multifaceted metropolis, with remnants of old Boston spliced into the new.

"The stereotype of Boston is an old, stick-in-the-mud kind of calcified Brahmin kind of place, hidebound, traditionbound," said William R. Fitzsimmons, the longtime dean of admissions at Harvard. "The truth is, just given the reality of the people who now live in Boston, it is really the polar opposite of that kind of stereotype."

Consider that Boston, once a white ethnic bastion, is, as of the 2000 census, a majority minority city, with blacks, Hispanics and Asians making up 50.5 percent of the city's 600,000 people, up from 41 percent in 1990. In the last two decades, immigrants from all over the world have poured in, blurring the white lines of neighborhoods like East Boston.

White flight since World War II has been followed by a recent multiethnic resurgence in city living, and neighborhoods like the South End and Jamaica Plain have become hip and blazing with vitality.

And the city's varsity list of universities makes for a continual influx of newcomers, students, teachers and researchers, who infuse large swaths of the city now, not just the academic quarters around Boston University, or Harvard and M.I.T. across the river in Cambridge.

"I feel that there are more people here now who haven't been here forever, and to me, that's a sea change," said the writer Susan Orlean, who lived in Boston 14 years ago and left with a sour taste, but returned last year to a city that pleasantly surprised her. "The feeling is it's a place where people might flow through, rather than a city that is so entrenched that you feel like you're walking around with a sandwich board saying, `I just got here.' It feels more plastic, more open to being impressed upon, more malleable."

By most accounts, that openness has helped soften racial boundaries. So when the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, Assemblyman Herman D. Farrell Jr., wrote to complain that the New York delegation's party would be in South Boston, where the worst of the antibusing demonstrations took place in the 1970's, several black and white Bostonians sought to correct what they saw as Mr. Farrell's out-of-date impression, and he apologized.

Although the baseball slugger Barry Bonds said last month that he would not play for the Red Sox because "Boston is too racist for me," the Celtics basketball legend Bill Russell has taken a different view. Mr. Russell, who during the 1960's characterized Boston as racist, is now helping promote the city for the Democratic convention. Mr. Russell appears in a pro-Boston radio spot and will help Mayor Thomas M. Menino play host to several events.

"I think there are a lot of things that are happening to make it an open city where everybody's included and there's nobody that's deemed unworthy," Mr. Russell said.

Ted Landsmark, an African-American lawyer who in 1976 was nearly impaled by a white antibusing demonstrator wielding an American flag on City Hall Plaza — a horrifying moment that became a national symbol of Boston's racial hatred when it was captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph — sees a different Boston, too.

"It was clear to me that the city and its communities had changed when one of my attackers came to me about a decade ago to personally apologize for his participation and to say that he was raising his own son with a different set of values than those he had grown up with," said Mr. Landsmark, now president of the Boston Architectural Center.

Today's Boston is more complex politically, too. Mr. Grogan, of the Boston Foundation, said the "Irish domination of politics" had been diluted. That is partly because of increased diversity over all and "the waning power of the Catholic Church, which was under way before the scandal" involving sex abuse by clergy, he added.

Mayor Menino, elected in 1993, is the first Italian-American to hold that post, and the first non-Irish-American mayor since 1925.

Massachusetts is still a Democratic bastion, with its entire Congressional delegation made up of Democrats and led by its two senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John Kerry. The Legislature has the country's highest proportion of Democrats, 84.5 percent. But Massachusetts has elected Republican governors since 1990, and the Democrats are hardly all of the liberal persuasion.

The Legislature, for example, has a large contingent of conservative Democrats led by the powerful speaker of the House. Their influence was clear this spring when the Legislature voted narrowly for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, in hopes that the amendment would eventually be adopted and supersede a court decision that led to same-sex marriages becoming legal in the state in May.

Boston politics has always had a plasticity, a sense that, as United States Representative Barney Frank, a Democrat, put it, "the personal is really intertwined with the political" and what matters is "what kind of relationship my nephew had with his uncle."

And Boston has always had a political self-assurance, a pride in being pioneers on several fronts, including the American Revolution, women's rights and same-sex marriage.

That confidence to tease progress out of history explains a lot about Boston. A city that decades ago had lost much of its manufacturing and shipping industries and its pre-eminence as the center of the American literary world, sprang back to outcompete the country in education, medicine and science, fields that, crucially, do not require natural resources.

History — from the Old North Church to Bunker Hill to well-preserved colonial and 19th-century buildings — is still evident everywhere in Boston. But intertwined with the past is the glitteringly futuristic Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, a new convention center overlooking Boston's now-sparkling harbor, and the nearly completed Big Dig, which will result in acres of new parks and other public spaces.

And though the losing streak by the Red Sox is now 85 years long (the team last won the World Series in 1918), even this self-pitying sports town cannot quite muster its patented brand of righteous indignation now that the New England Patriots have won two Super Bowls.

"That makes it harder for Boston to play the tragic hero," said Mr. Fitzsimmons, the Harvard dean.

But some fans are surely trying to do just that on the eve of the convention as the Red Sox play their archnemesis, the Yankees, at Fenway Park.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Ptarmigan]

It must be Boston. I have been there before. Not too fond of the place. Only good thing is the restaurants they have. Great restaurants! Driving there is a real pain. It is confusing to navigate in Boston.

[ablarc]

...it's definitely the second most urban city I've been in and certainly walkable. I need to get there on a sunny day.


...in my opinion, it is simply the most beautiful city for its built environment in the country. Its natural setting doesn't match San Francisco and its skyline doesn't match New York, but there is no city more consistently and unrelentingly beautiful in its streetscape as Boston.



"I HAVE just returned from Boston," the comedian Fred Allen, a Massachusetts native, once wrote to Groucho Marx about this city. "It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there."

Then there is the image of Boston as gritty and pockmarked, plagued by a polluted harbor and choked by traffic as the nation's largest public works project, the Big Dig highway construction extravaganza, has dragged on.

"The world hasn't really caught up with how Boston has changed," said Paul S. Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation, which finances nonprofit organizations in the city.

It has become a multifaceted metropolis, with remnants of old Boston spliced into the new.
After five years, it’s time for an update.

Flat-top skyline still needs a punctuating supertall –just like Downtown and Midtown New York:

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Like its Lower East Side New York equivalent, Boston’s North End is in the throes of yuppie colonization. Though Rose Kennedy was born here when its denizens were Irish, the last wave of immigrants to this medieval tangle of streets and alleys hailed from Sicily and Calabria.

Still much bigger than New York’s shriveled Little Italy, the North End gets less ethnic by the day, as its cast of old Sicilian flaneurs is winnowed by Grim Reaper or the comforts --chez son-the-doctor-- of an in-law unit in the ‘burbs.

When on duty, they lean on walls or sprawl akimbo across chairs to comment in two languages on the passing scene.

That scene gets younger and more nubile by the day. Where North End meets the waterfront, there’s even a Starbuck’s. In the very hive of the expresso culture! Veramente!

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Photo copyright bowesst

Long the locale of legendary events such as the Great Boston Molasses Disaster, the alleged misdeeds of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Brinks Robbery, the North End’s organic street grid dates back to the 1600’s. On that grid, you can locate the pristine white spire of North Church (photo upper left center), from which lanterns launched Revere on his midnight ride, so eloquently chronicled by Longfellow.

With patience, you can also locate Revere’s minuscule medieval manse; it’s visible due left across the little triangle of greenery that also hosts the hulking tunnel vent (photo lower center). You can recognize it by its tiny equilateral gable.

Also commemorated in poetry, but by Oliver Wendell Holmes, the USS Constitution (Old Ironsides), can barely be discerned across the mouth of the River Charles (just to the left of North Church’s spire).

Finally, the long, green bridge crosses the Mystic River --where they hauled the body out of the water in the movie of the same name.

The River Charles is really a dammed estuary. It makes a tranquil tableau for the Longfellow Bridge to cross, a-bristle with pepperpots, while Back Bay’s pristine skyline shimmers in orderly fashion above the protected red brick townhouses of mostly-walkup Back Bay proper. Proper indeed:

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Photo copyright Steve Dunwell.

This segregation of low-rise and high-rise into discrete geographical zones makes picture-postcard scenes. Here’s one from the South End, the other rowhouse district bordering the spine of skyscrapers. The tall one is built on air rights directly above the Turnpike:

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Post-modernist Graham Gund has provided one of the city’s most ornate lobbies, a veritable catalog of marble:

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Not a dead end, the lobby functions as a climate-controlled pedestrian shortcut.

Also not a dead end, Post Office Square animates the roof of a multilevel underground garage. Somewhat reminiscent of Madison Square:

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A few decades ago, the garage spread angina in the Financial District’s heart:

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A distinguished menagerie of buildings surrounded the garage. On weekends, you could enjoy them all from the intimately elevated plaza of the garage’s top deck. You could get up close and personal, for example, with the likes of this beauty:

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French-style Federal Reserve Bank, 1920’s.

Or its brawnier addition:

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Federal Reserve, 1947: late Beaux-Arts. Banks were supposed to look conservative and solid.

When the Federal Reserve moved to a new building by the architect of Citicorp, the earlier, French building was turned into a hotel and its colonnaded brother was demolished. In its place rose a lumpy skyscraper with graceless cantilevers by some architectural hacks:

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Post Office Square’s greenery is entirely blocked from view in this photo by the skyscraper that replaced the Fed, but the Post Office is visible at right. The Square extends from there to the other squat Deco skyscraper (left middle).

Boston’s Financial District resembles New York’s because it’s also built on an organic, 17thCentury network of narrow streets, with buildings from diverse eras, though Boston’s skyscrapers are not as tall:

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About the size of Post Office Square and also re-done in recent years is Copley Square. It highlights Trinity Church, H.H. Richardson’s magnum opus:

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This now boasts a periodic farmers market, and is much improved over its previous iteration, despite its sneaky injection of a little parking lot for church folk (bottom right-center).

The previous version (Sasaki Assocs.) looked better from the air but left much to be desired functionally. The homeless took it over because its surrounding berms promoted the seclusion they sought at night and forced circulation onto a predictable path from which to accost passersby in the daytime, complete with comfy benches. It had about the same clientele as Bryant Park before the makeover. Most folks just stayed out:

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Recently built out to the streetwall, Boylston Street leads to Copley Square and makes a handsome boulevard:

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From the harbor, the city has an arched gate. It’s called Rowe’s Wharf. It’s a brilliant gesture, and most amazingly it’s by SOM and it’s fairly new:

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Boats actually head for it:

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You could call it iconic:

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But really it leads nowhere. The powerful axis set up by the big arch peters out immediately on the landward side. This is where it meets up with the deadly Rose Kennedy Greenway:

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This is the landscaped roof of the Big Dig. A highway runs beneath, and Libeskind designed the appliance he hopes we’ll mistake for a building.

To be fair, the architects of the arch should have aligned it with Broad Street, which by the standards of a medieval grid is … well … broad:

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Broad Street. The domed building at street’s end contains the arch; if you crossed the street, you’d see it. Bulky, nimbified new building wraps around a quivering survivor from Federal times. OK, I guess, since it replaced a parking lot to complete the street wall.

Spot the arch in the next photo. The Greenway turns out to be a water park for kindergarteners. Some urban amenity, huh?

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Further up, you can bring your beach chair and soak up some center city rays:

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Why live in Suburbia, reason the yuppies, when you can bring it with you into the city?

The awful truth is that fifteen billion dollars later, the North End (right) is just as separated from the city as it was before they buried the highway. But now it’s an outpost of Suburbia, the innermost of inner suburbs:

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* * *

Glad to see the Littlest Bar has found a new home:

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It used to be just that –the littlest bar. It had a legal occupancy in the low teens. It was a Boston institution. Folks would take their visitors from out of town. It never ceased to astonish. It was so … Boston.

That was also because it was located here --under the steps that dated back to colonial days, right beside the hoary Café Marliave (awning, right), right across the alley from the word, “Horrors”:

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I used to regale foreigners and Bostonians with walking tours. I loved taking them to hidden places; Boston used to have a lot. And the Marliave’s steps were first among them.

The steps always worked; they never failed to amaze. They drew unsolicited and rhapsodic little wows from the blasé world’s cosmopolites and globetrotters. When you first arrived at this enchanted spot, you found that after all --till now—maybe you hadn’t really seen it all.

“How could I have missed this?” puzzled many a lifelong Bostonian. Well, it’s tucked away.

Well truth is now, it’s also been trucked away to make room for the foundations of a new skyscraper condo for the yuppies who wanted to move downtown to be near the Littlest Bar.

Will it be back? Will they repeal some provisions of the wheelchair code?

Will Boston ever recover its number one most atmospheric locale?

* * *

Another piece of lost Bostonia some might choose to bemoan was the Combat Zone. This was the raunchiest, most Rabelaisian sin district you could possibly dream up this side of Thailand.

It left Times Square in the dust because it was so pure, so undiluted, so explicit, so single-mindedly devoted to the pursuit of smut, and you could have booze with your full helping. It rollicked nightly after eight, drawing thrill-seekers from distant suburbs and from the corners of the globe. It was sleazy, but the sleaze was world class, and for many it put Boston on the map.

If you observed the etiquette it was safe –well-patrolled by watchful cops—but if you didn’t you could end up, like the Harvard football hero, with a stiletto in the ribs. Obnoxiousness not allowed.

At its height it had animated neon signs that you simply would not believe, touting the pleasures available within. The Naked Eye, for example featured out on the street in animated red neon an anatomically correct naked bimbo spreading and folding with … in the crucial place on her anatomy, you guessed it … an eye! The Naked Eye was internally connected to the Pussy Galore Stag Bar. Both places were full of Chinese folks; no wonder their wives wanted the Zone to die!

This is the only sad picture I could find, long after its heyday, in the slush:

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When it existed, the Combat Zone was just beyond the Paramount sign, where the street turns. You can see some of what replaced it in the photo, though some of it is now parking lot:

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* * *

In the extreme lower right corner, a sliver of Copley Square peeps out. The closest left-right street is Boylston Street, the next one is Newbury Street, Boston’s Fifth-Avenue-cum-SoHo. That’s where you go to see Brad Pitt. Or at least his Lamborghini.

The street that heads off towards the upper left is Dartmouth Street, and where it intersects Newbury, you’ll find Back Bay’s only surface parking lot. It’s been there for over forty years, and it’s so profitable that it’ll probably be there another forty –unless they change their attitude to allow some height:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/1500.jpg

Both Boylston and Newbury have taller buildings among the prevailing small fry, and sometimes the footprint of a larger building encompasses two or –at most—three lots. The lots are a bit bigger on Boylston Street, and the base, fine-grain unit types are different from Newbury’s. This is because the master planners of Back Bay’s grid intended Boylston to be retail/office from the get-go, while Newbury Street was to be residential.

Incrementally, Newbury’s ground floors were converted to retail and the front yards disappeared beneath paving. The miracle of Newbury Street –and why it surpassed Boylston in cachet—was precisely that the units met the sidewalk as town homes in New York do: a half-flight up and a few steps down. In short order, both levels became retail. There was twice as much retail square footage per foot of sidewalk frontage! They couldn’t have designed it better if they had intended it –which they didn’t. The setup was quaint, encouraged coy, expensive, precious retail concepts, and it eventually succumbed to the big European and American boutique chains. On a Saturday it literally teems with shoppers.

Near the downtown end of Boylston Street where it approaches the Public Garden (right, in next photo), a developer assembled about seven lots. You’d think the resulting blockbuster footprint would put the kabbosh on the street’s scale, but miraculously that didn’t happen, because of the architects' skill in breaking down the building's mass at the streetwall, stepping back the upper floors, and small-grained ground floor retail:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/1700.jpg

The Taj (formerly Ritz-Carlton) Hotel at the end of Newbury Street is perhaps a little less kind, but ritz is ritz, and in some places it knows how to comport itself.

Looking at the same two blocks from the other side, our paragon’s virtue doesn’t extend to what it thinks of as its back side. Here it lets it all hang out and admits frankly, “I’m just a cheap building (gotta save some bucks somewhere).” But who’s to know? Office tenants in the buildings on Newbury Street looking out their rear windows. Really, who cares?

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/1900.jpg

Notice the fine grain of the commercial buildings on Newbury Street’s south side; these were planned to be commercial from day one. On the north (near) side, some of Newbury’s buildings are row houses. These have all been converted: “basement” and piano nobile are retail, upper three floors walk-up residential or sometimes office. Can you spot the Gwathmey building's roof?

Along the far rear of the photo stretches a block-long office building from the Teens or Twenties. Though its footprint is mammoth, no one seems to mind this building. This is partly because it faces away onto the next street facing a truly bobdignagian hotel in the Hotel Pennsylvania mold; partly because it includes a surprising and pleasantly neglected interior shopping mall that registers like a relic from olden times; and partly because the building –aware of its vastness—chooses to make a virtue of it by composing itself as Palladio would have it: like a palace. There’s a central element and two symmetrical implied wings ending in identical “pavilions.”

So it becomes a monument, and we don’t resent monuments for being big. In fact, we rather like it.

There is, however, a nefarious plan afoot by Developer Druker to assemble seven or more lots on Boylston Street (just behind the church spire in the photo) to lay a Pelli-designed, pig-footprint banality upon the street in place of the genteel, nicely-detailed but relatively unprofitable buildings that are there now. He mistakenly believed that by not proposing much height, the resulting building would evade criticsm and –Back Bay NIMBYs being as stupid as they are—at first he was right. The Back Bay NIMBYs sighed with relief until alerted about the impending groundscraper by the folks at Arch Boston. Now there’s an uproar (http://www.archboston.org/community/showthread.php?t=1835).

About time they figured out that out-of-scale means footprint, not height.

* * *

Tripartite organization also characterizes two other immediately adjacent buildings on Boylston Street: the white, glazed terracotta Berkeley Building (1905, middle left in photo) and across Berkeley Street, Robert A.M. Stern’s base for a stumpy skyscraper, 222 Berkeley St. The former is a busty painted lady from the ragtime era complete with finials, pinnacles and bays, and Stern does his darndest to match her with a healthy dollop of pancake and rouge (how ‘bout them balls on top o’ them columns?).

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/2100.jpg

He even throws in some bays, and therein resides a true Boston architectural tragedy.

A BOSTON TRAGEDY

To my mind, Boston’s greatest unnoticed tragedy of recent years was loss of this magnificent building:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/2347.jpg

A few years before it bit the dust, Mr. Philistine, the Colton Building’s owner, replaced most of the oh-so-slender black mullions with the tawdry, standard glitter of raw aluminum. But when he got to that faceted corner, the octagons foiled him; Sweet’s Catalog failed to provide a standard piece with such geometry, and he had to leave them alone. You can imagine the frameless butt-joined ground floor tempered glass before Liggett’s moved in. Josephine Baker in silk stockings.

These days a graceless lump by Stern occupies its footprint, and a grotesque bronze teddy bear may or may not loll witlessly outside. Unknowingly I mentioned my admiration for this building to Stern at the very time its replacement was on his drawing boards, but he failed to divulge that he was in the throes of replacing it. Embarrassed, perhaps? After all, the man knows old-timey elegance when he sees it.

Early Jazz Age elegance. Check out the octagonal corner. Those bay windows seem full of architects’ furniture:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/2348.jpg

On the opposite corner, the Berkeley Building, a lesser achievement (imo) recently got tarted up for a new lease on life, courtesy of steam cleaning and a bunch of pennants:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/2350.jpg

According to ArchBoston’s Ron Newman, some people did want to save it, but not enough.

BACK BAY PANEL REJECTS PETITION FOR LANDMARK STATUS FOR 2D TIME IN 2 YEARS, 1910 COLTON BUILDING FOUND UNSUITABLE FOR BOARD'S SPECIAL PROTECTION (http://www.bookrags.com/highbeam/back-bay-panel-rejects-petition-for-hb/)

^ That's from 1987.

"A well-organized Back Bay group called "Committee for a Better New England Life" tried to prevent, or at least modify, Philip Johnson's proposed project for the south side of Boylston between Berkeley and Clarendon," he says. "The original proposal would have had two side-by-side copies of 500 Boylston. The committee was unable to save the Colton but did force the developer to build something different at that corner."

Glad to hear I wasn't the only one with a high opinion of this building. For most architects and "experts" it didn't fit neatly into their lexicon of currently approved styles.

That made its preservation even more urgent. Think how modern it must have struck people when it burst upon the scene in the Ragtime era! It makes this building an American outpost of European Art Nouveau. Crystalline. Think avant garde. Think Art.

The "Back Bay Panel" evidently didn't know where to pigeonhole it in a familiar file, or they were in somebody's pocket.

* * *

Parting shots:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/5000.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/5100.jpg
The brick skyscraper that replaced the Littlest Bar.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/5200.jpg
Photo copyright Steve Dunwell.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/5300.jpg
Photo copyright Steve Dunwell.


CREDITS: I took a few of the pix, I’ve credited some whose source I could find. The uncredited pix were mostly taken by members of ArchBOSTON, including DowntownDave and the prodigious kz1000ps, who is also a member of Wired New York. Feel free to claim credit, and thank you. I hope my use of your pix is justified in your minds.


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[zupermaus]

amazing thread! Cheers ablarc

love these pics
http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/0158.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/0290.jpg

love the density too:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/beautiful-city/12.jpg

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/bostondynamite/0100.jpg

I have a serious plane to catch :D

[Ed007Toronto]

I'm confused. Why is picture 5 credited to PittsburgSkyline.com?

[ablarc]

^ That's who took the picture.

[zupermaus]

ablarc you should put this thread on www.skyscrapercity.com and www.skyscraperpage.com, though credit the photos first.

[ablarc]

^ I used to post there, but tell me: How do you immunize yourself against the often inane comments?

[zupermaus]

yeh I so know what ur talking about, its like a playground.

[Alonzo-ny]

I made 4 posts on SSC then gave up.