Medieval Boston

Renewed Boston

The Urban Village Bites the Dust

Most people think of Boston as a dense city, and it is, especially by American standards. Today’s city is, however, a pale shadow of the medieval maze that was Boston before large-scale modern planning and spatial concepts entered the picture.First theelevated expressway project (1959), then the infamousclearance (1961) described in Herbert Gans’, and finally the(1963ff) introduced the modernist concept of infinite space into the form of the city.Medieval Boston survives in the crooked street patterns and canyonlike spaces of the North End and Financial District, but those who do not remember Scollay Square, the West End, the Waterfront and Haymarket from before Urban Renewal are rarely prepared for the reality that survives today mostly in photographs:Medieval Boston survives in the crooked street patterns and canyonlike spaces of the North End and Financial District, but in the West End, Scollay Square, Waterfront and Haymarket, the Middle Ages were bulldozed into oblivion by Urban Renewal, the New Boston and most of all, theBefore Urban Renewal, as now, one epicenter of the city was, site of Faneuil Hall, built as a produce market with public meeting hall above. Here the Continental Congress met and took steps toward American independence. Here also, before landfill, the residential North End met downtown for commerce and public activities. The Waterfront was the third participant in this colloquy, but it has since been ordered into the distance by landfill and other large-scale planning gestures.In the other direction, the view from the Custom House Tower shows Quincy Market in the foreground and looks past Faneuil Hall toward Scollay Square:Striking is the medieval way space runs in the streets as rivulets defined by buildings. From the standpoint of figure-ground, this is the exact opposite of suburbia, where individual buildings sit objectified in infinite space that extends from here to Nepal and beyond.The streets look like canyons eroded into the city’s relatively uniform-height roofscape. This uniform height was set by how high people were willing to tromp up stairs. Buildings erected after the elevator’s invention are clearly identifiable; they are the ones over five stories.Aside from, the three market buildings and a few diminutive structures in the Blackstone Block, all buildings in all above photographs are now gone. They were removed wholesale in the 1960s according to a Government Center master plan drawn up by I.M. Pei at the direction of Redevelopment Director, creator of the New Boston. Here is a 1975 view of the same scene, also from the Custom House:Brobdignagian Fortress Boston hulks sculpturally in its vast brickyard, where formerly teemed hundreds of tiny buildings. In Modernist guise, Baroque absolutism has displaced the fine grained human scale of the medieval city. Where there had been trickles of space there is now spatial infinity, stretching to the far reaches of the Universe. Within this ocean of space, all objects must be seen in the round as sculpture, and they had better be big, to stand up to all that emptiness.A lengthy (five pages) and interesting thread on City Hall,its plaza, and efforts to replace both:Another centerpiece of Logue’s clean sweep was the clearing of, which was then noted for burlesque. The old buildings survived until Logue’s giant demolition derby. This was conceived as a one-shot silver bullet to simultaneously cure social ills, physical decay and economic stagnation—all by removing offending buildings. Here are the offenders in their less racy days:Logue abolished not only buildings but streets. Superblocks were all the rage, and Boston got maybe the super-est block of all: the Government Center. Two hundred and seventy-something tiny buildings were replaced by three. An aerial photograph tells you about their scale. These three buildings are not very tall, but their footprints are huge. It is the increment of development that determines scale, not height. And the idea here was to create a zone of monumental scale:Across the expanse of brick lies the yawn-inducing John F. Kennedy Federal Building by celebrated Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and self-proclaimed inventor of Modernism:The red-brick plaza of Government Center was to be the pivot of Boston, Hub of the Universe. It was strewn with huge buildings. Unlike the equally huge buildings in the Financial District to its southeast, these were not interspersed with small, old survivors clinging to a medieval street pattern. Therefore (if you should want to) you can get plenty of unobstructed view of them to appreciate their monumental grandiosity:Until the advent of giant containerships, Boston was a bustling cargo port and home to a large fishing fleet. The Waterfront connected seamlessly to the rest of downtown Boston; it was simply where the city met the sea. You often didn’t notice when a street sneaked onto a wharf. Here State Street becomes Long Wharf:There was, however, a Chinese wall of sorts: the Atlantic Avenue El.The El fell to the wreckers, but some of its genes were passed on to the Fitzgerald Elevated Highway, aka the. The elevated road replaced the elevated train in 1959.Like the Government Center, the Central Artery was conceived to propel Boston’s moribund economy into a shining future through a huge infusion of government money. The idea was that a truly progressive place had superhighways, not rickety old streetcars and subways. And as in the case of the Government Center, here was a chance to demolish some buildings that looked ugly and unprogressive. In all, 1000 buildings were taken down, and 20,000 residents displaced. The city was sundered:The Central Artery provided Boston with its biggest-ever Civil Engineering project. Burying it has been bigger still: touted as the costliest public works project of all time. In inflated dollars, the Big Dig cost more than the Panama Canal, built when money was money.The newborn highway was named for John F. (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald. He is perhaps best known as the father of Rose Kennedy, for whom in turn is named--fittingly enough—the highway’s successor, the soon-to-beBeing deceased, Honey Fitz couldn’t show up for the 1959 dedication, so he sent a pair of doubles:The automobile’s campaign to widen Boston’s medieval streets had begun in the 1920’s. Well before the Central Artery was proposed, Boston greatly enlarged Cambridge Street, thus severing the West End from Beacon Hill:If they had been linguistically punctilious, they would have renamed it Cambridge Road, or perhaps Cambridge Highway. But it still had to do double duty as a pedestrian route for Beacon Hill and the West End to get downtown. Truth is, it never made a good highway because there were too many cross streets, and after widening it ceased to be a good street for pedestrians because there were too many cars:Cambridge Street never recovered. It was the gate through which they hauled the Trojan Horse. Gas stations and parking lots began to appear, and it’s been a disheveled mess ever since, neither quite city or suburb, the edge city stranded in the urban core, Tyson’s Corner transported to Georgetown:Separated from the cachet of Beacon Hill by widened Cambridge Street, theteemed in picturesque shabbiness. The shabbiness masked a vital, healthy working class community, knit together by social ties and a medieval physical closeness.This place bred, among others, movie stars. The planning authorities, offended by its resemblance to medieval Paris, said it bred crime.By March 23, 1959, the West End was disappearing rapidly, receding like a hair line:By September 1960, it was gone. Expunged. Annihilated. Erased. Cleared. Ready for Urban Renewal:“An Obsolete Neighborhood,” declared the Boston Redevelopment Agency literature, displaying a figure-ground to kill for, “And a New Plan”:Actually, not so new. Here was the Ville Radieuse, Corbusier’s revenge on the city. Remember, his proposal was to tear down Paris and replace it with skyscrapers in a park. That’s exactly what the planners did in Boston. The West End became Charles River Park. Hundreds of small buildings were replaced by fewer than a dozen big ones:A traffic-clogged expressway cuts off the project from the river, but nobody minds. As the sign on the expressway famously taunts commuters stuck in traffic: “If you lived here, you’d be home now.”Suburban living in the city, without a lawn to mow. A doorman, a parking space, security, peace and quiet, and a pool. What more could you want?Two scales: