Blog Post No. 2010-8: Three Things...

Really in no particular order

Ok, maybe some order:

1. More on City Hall Plaza. As a follow-up to the last post regarding Boston City Hall Plaza, Kara Wilbur forwarded me a link to a Providence Journal blog piece by Martin Brussat from yesterday entitled "Boston City Hall Plaza as it ought to be." The vision there, by Robert Helfand, is certainly arresting and presents a far more tightly-woven street network through the plaza than we now have. For instance, it brings Hanover Street up the hill from its current terminus at Congress Street all the way to Cambridge Street, restores Brattle Street around the Sears Crescent, and creates a new cross-street that does a little eyebrow around what is apparently a new Boston City Hall built in a full-throttle classical style. In addition to the new City Hall, we have a central fountain, a campanile, a low-rise replacement for what is now the JFK Federal Building, and a row of new buildings along the Congress Street frontage now occupied by the existing City Hall. There's even a new apparently classically-inspired version of the Government Center MBTA station headhouse. I confess to liking the vision a lot and wanting to sit on the edge of the fountain and watch what might be happening in the plaza. I also confess to thinking that the vision veers dangerously close to the intentional amnesia of those who brought us the current plaza. The vision would be a massive departure from the present and the last almost 50 years making it almost seem like it never happened. As my post suggested, I'm not convinced we need to go quite that far to see some progress and get a better plaza.

2. Performance art + urban planning. Russ Preston's blog -- Life + Urbanism -- recently linked to a really interesting exercise in performance art plus urban planning down in Dallas. Texas. The idea was to simulate a pedestrian-oriented set of buildings and streetscape on a one-block stretch of what is now, by the look of things, a fairly auto-oriented street in the city's Oak Cliff section. The original intent was to use "crowdsourced placemaking" to create a fun, rewarding place -- a "Better Block" -- over a single weekend and for just a $1,000 up front. There's a lot packed into what is shown on the videos, blog posts, and online news articles that are linked together at the Bike Friendly Oak Cliff site. Impressive stuff. I especially like the way the blogger at Bike Friendly Oak Cliff refers to his fellow travelers as "BFOCers." Seriously, though, guerrilla urbanism has a place in the toolkit, no doubt.

3. And on it goes. I'm really not sure what to make of the extremely public way that developer Don Chiofaro is taking on the Mayor over height limits and development potential on the Greenway here in Boston. I mean, I thought the multiple-article frontal assault through the pages of the Boston Globe was a bold enough move. But when you call a press conference, as Chiofaro did late last month, for the express purpose of calling out someone who is now in his 5th term as the Mayor of Boston and really isn't that old, you're playing with fire. Maybe the thinking is that the Mayor is eventually going to be gone and Chiofaro plans on being around when that happens. Maybe he thinks his relationship with the Mayor can't get worse, and so he's got nothing to lose. Who knows? It's certainly a different way of going about things. We here at RTUF will keep our friends around this great country of ours updated as this continues to unfold.

Blog Post No. 2010-7: For City Hall Plaza, maybe continuously rotating temporary uses makes sense...

1 2

3 4

...at least for now

Location: Government Center (formerly Scollay Square, and today alternatively called Boston City Hall Square or City Hall Plaza), Boston, MA. (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: Ongoing (April 2010).

The Photos: Taken on Patriots' Day 2010, looking northwest along the side of City Hall, then coming into the plaza and looking north and northeast at the Big Apple Circus tent.

The Story: So, we took the kids to the Big Apple Circus on City Hall Plaza last Friday night. We had a great time at a show of almost 2 hours in length, featuring the return of Bello Nock and a number of classic circus acts such as juggling, acrobatics, and (my personal favorite, especially now since we have a rescue puppy of our own) a dog act featuring (you guessed it) rescue dogs. Really fun stuff for the whole family.

But this entry is not about the circus itself, fun though it was. It's about the temporary life and activity and yes, restoration of the urban fabric, that can occur when even something as simple as a circus with a tent is brought onto City Hall Plaza. A plaza which has ripened into perhaps the most underperforming centrally-located public space in Boston, if not all of New England and if not the country. I mean, it's really bad, especially considering its proximity to so much great urban fabric and activity. I touched a bit on the plaza in the post about Boston's "mid-century modern" buildings a few weeks ago. It is truly of a piece with the failed buildings with whom it entered our cityscape in the mid-1960s. Most of the time it is a wind-swept, shade-less, inhospitable no-man's land that people hurry through to get from a dreadful MBTA headhouse for the Government Center Station

[especially when compared to what it replaced

(CREDIT: http://www.bambinomusical.com/)]

to everything that surrounds the plaza -- Boston City Hall itself, Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market across Congress Street, the Old State House around the corner at the intersection of Court and Washington, the state government complex up the hill, and the federal government's buildings on the north side of the plaza. When you think of the number of people who go around and through it on a daily basis, it's something of a twisted accomplishment that the space is so dead.

This failed state of affairs at the very center of the city has not gone entirely unnoticed, especially in the last 10 to 15 years. Proposals have been floated and special task forces created to improve the plaza itself and make the buildings around it work better. After extensive discussion and effort from some of the city's most talented and influential citizens, there has been relatively little to show. Physically, all that has happened is the construction of a series of benches and small balconies along the Cambridge Street frontage with vertical, flagpole-like lighting elements (see photo 4, above). The only obvious programmatic progress has been a seasonal farmers' market that sets up just along that Cambridge Street frontage on certain weekdays in the summer. Most recently, the Boston Globe ran a piece about a design contest for ideas to better integrate City Hall itself into the urban fabric. The proposals highlighted are interesting and I do like the way the winning entry opens up the Congress Street side of the building and introduces a cafe at the lower plaza level.

Far be it from this blog to criticize incremental changes and developments like these. Yet the fact remains that chipping away at the edges is not doing enough to change the plaza's sub-par dynamic. To do that, something needs to be happening in the middle of the plaza on a consistent basis. Now, since the Patriots, Red Sox, and Celtics have all won titles in their respective professional leagues this decade, there have been 6 victory parades (the City likes to call them "Rolling Rallies") that have wound past and sometimes ended at City Hall Plaza, so that's brought some crowds onto the plaza. And the City has set up a few major events, sometimes for extended periods, on the plaza in the past several years. These have included not only the Big Apple Circus but also the Holiday Village that used to be at Jordan Marsh (then Macy's) at Downtown Crossing, and is now residing at one of Jordan's Furniture's suburban locations. These are good events, but relatively few and far between. So...a humble suggestion to the City, which may already be going in this direction...how about a simple, set schedule of extended engagements on City Hall Plaza for temporary uses that encourage people to come and spend some time and even spend some money in the very middle of town? Maybe the Big Apple Circus could be more firmly established as the rite of early spring, while late spring, summer and early fall could feature the existing farmers' market combined with the fledging Boston Public Market, which has been casting around for a home for the last few years, and seems always just a step away, but never quite there? They've most recently been in Dewey Square on two days a week during the summer. Despite the great foot traffic generated by its proximity to South Station and the need for the Greenway to have worthwhile programming, that location is really challenged, surrounded on 3 sides by multi-lane, one-way streets and on the fourth side by a utility building for the Big Dig. They can do better. Bring them to City Hall Plaza for an extended run in the middle of the year, get them to operate on more days, maybe even allow them to put up a temporary structure or two, and we'd really be talking. Once we're at the tail end of the fall harvest and the market is closed down, maybe we could have a temporary fair with rides and the like to lead us into winter. And then, who knows, the plaza hunkers down like the rest of us during the coldest part of the year and waits for the clowns, horses, acrobats, jugglers, Bello, Grandma, and the rest of the circus to come again in March?

RTUF Note: This post was edited after its original publication. - MJL

Blog Post No. 2010-6: Streets and intersections are meaningful public spaces...

...not traffic sewers

Location: The intersection of Belgrade Avenue, Corinth Street, and Robert Street in Roslindale, a.k.a, Eagan Square, a.k.a. Alexander the Great Square (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2007

Photos: Clockwise around the intersection, showing the view up Belgrade Avenue back toward the turn at South Street, then the Corinth Street islands, up Belgrade toward Walworth Street, then across and back down Belgrade.

The Story: I said at the end of my last post that this blog has a soft spot for incremental change, and here's an absolutely prime example at the neighborhood scale. We're back again in Roslindale Square, at its southwestern gateway, just after the point at which Robert Street comes under the MBTA Needham Line trestle and meets Belgrade Avenue and Corinth Street. This intersection has a veteran's memorial name of Eagan Square, but there's a second, more recent designation as Alexander the Great Square. That's a nod to the community's still strong Greek presence, as evidenced by Alexander the Great Park, which has a bust of the great man at its center.

Until this intersection took its current form about 3 years ago, it was one of the very worst in the neighborhood, from the perspective of both cars and pedestrians. As a driver, it was hard to know who exactly had the right-of-way and the massive expanse of pavement without much definition left it hard to know exactly where the travel lanes were supposed to be. As a pedestrian, it felt like a free-fire zone: far too wide, with poorly located crosswalks that just left you hanging out there.

The new configuration, shown in the pictures and in my sketch below, is far, far better. The two tiny islands have been widened and extended. The cross-walks are now manageable in length. The main construction material for the islands is brick, with granite curbing. The two largest elements have green space within them. A public art installation is reportedly awaiting Boston Civic Design Commission approval and could be installed this year. The traffic pattern is clear, with well-defined through and turning lanes. The cars now know where to go, and so do the people. Everyone is being paid some attention.

I am embarrassed to say that, even though this is just blocks from my house and we lived here well before the intersection was reconfigured, I have no idea who exactly is responsible for making this happen. Responsibility for the intersection lies with the Boston Transportation Department, so ultimately it had to be their project. But I don't know who in the community advocated for the change. Whoever that person is, they deserve heartfelt thanks. And BTD is to be commended for implementing a design that is a far cry from what has been done to our streets and intersections for too much of the last 60+ years.

Which brings us to the teachable moment portion of this post. It is a sad fact that, on the whole, our country decided in the post-war period to delegate virtually complete control over our streets to traffic engineers whose sole goal was to move more vehicles at higher speeds all the time, everywhere. Streets and travel lanes were widened. Private property was taken to facilitate that widening. Sidewalk widths were reduced or sidewalks totally eliminated. Off-street parking was reduced or banned outright. Pedestrian street crossing times were reduced and vehicle signal phasing increased. And the design of most of what was actually built was wholly unsatisfactory or just plain ugly. In short, far too many streets -- the connective tissue that make up the vast majority of our public realm -- were radically impoverished, turned from places that people could enjoy spending time in to places to be avoided at all costs. In the words of more than one commentator, those streets had simply become "traffic sewers." All of this is to say nothing of the federal interstate construction boom of the 1950s-1970s, that plowed through and gutted too many urban neighborhoods to mention them all by name. Being from Brooklyn, all you have to say to me is "Sunset Park" and I immediately think of the Gowanus Expressway, an elevated highway built in the early 1940s that cut that neighborhood in two and separated it from the water. Perhaps the best piece of writing on the phenomenon of interstate highway construction in urban areas is Robert Caro's chapter on "One Mile" of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in The Power Broker, his seminal biography on Robert Moses. Worth reading again even if you've read the book before.

I am overstating the point slightly here. Not every traffic engineer wanted to pave over paradise or obliterate urban neighborhoods, and not every street was turned into a high-speed nightmare. Plenty of great neighborhood streets, as well as parkways and urban boulevards survived. A lot of that was the result of an active citizenry -- Jane Jacobs being probably the most famous active citizen given her well-publicized fights with Moses over Washington Square Park and the Lower Manhattan Expressway [for an excellent treatment of that dynamic, check out Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses, reviewed in the New York Times here] -- that fought the freeway revolt in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some of it was the sheer amount of good urban fabric that our country has been blessed with. There simply wasn't enough time and money while the game was really on to screw up everything. Over the last 20 years, the pendulum has swung strongly back toward treating our streets like valuable, critically important shared spaces. It is no coincidence that form-based coders devote a lot of time and energy to the design of the streets and related open spaces that become the framework for new neighborhoods. If you want to a satisfying built environment, you need to have the streets and the buildings working together. If either component fails to behave, the place you want will not happen. Great strides have been made, to the point where my observation is that resistance to more complete streets often comes from a public distrustful of change in general and of professional traffic engineers, urban designers, and planners in particular, not from those professions themselves. The new Alexander the Great Square shows that the end result is well worth overcoming whatever obstacles are encountered along the way.

RTUF sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: It's a little hard to tell just how much of an improvement the current configuration really lis. There was just way more car-reserved pavement at this intersection than remotely made sense.

RTUF Note: This post has been modified after initial publishing to correct certain typos and grammatical errors and to add photos of the detail of the new traffic islands and of the bust of Alexander the Great that is located in the adjoining park. -- ML

Blog Post No. 2010-5: Whither the Greenway...

or getting the buildings to pay attention now that a park has shown up

Those who know me at all quickly learn that one of the things I enjoy doing in my spare time is running. I've been running with much the same group of guys (and occasionally gals) out of the West Roxbury YMCA for the better part of the last decade. We typically leave the Y at about 5:25 am on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, year-round, year-in, year-out. One of the group's stalwarts is a hard-core conservative by the name of Frank Galvin. And one of Frank's stock-in-trade caricatures of me (decidedly a political and social liberal) is that I take all of my news directly from the Boston Globe. Not to prove Frank right, but....

In urban planning and development as in geometry, one piece of data is a point, two constitute a vector or a trend, and three create a plane or pattern. Ladies and gentlemen, the Boston Globe is clearly trying to show us a pattern about development on the Greenway and one current development proposal in particular:

First, Joan Vennochi's regular opinion piece on Sunday ("Shadow on the Greenway") highlighted recently-released information on likely guidelines for future development along the Greenway and posited that the Mayor's conventional wisdom-based reputation for micro-managing development was muddying the waters on those guidelines. Vennochi pointed particularly to the increasingly public dispute over developer Don Chiofaro's proposal for relatively tall buildings to replace the Harbor Garage site near the New England Aquarium as an example of the downside of the Mayor's attention to this kind of detail.

Second, Paul McMorrow, usually of Banker & Tradesman, had an opinion piece in Monday's Globe about the Greenway. Entitled "Something Beautiful," McMorrow's piece raises the entirely reasonable concern that the battle for restoring Boston's waterfront/downtown urban fabric may still be lost, even after spending close to $15 Billion and topping off the submerged facility with plenty of green, if the parkland is not provided with good, strong, "active edges" on the facing streets. McMorrow then goes on to focus on the Harbor Garage and 3 other Grenway-adjacent public garages and the difficulty of redeveloping those cash flow-generating structures without a big upside in terms of height and intensity of use. McMorrow's piece ends with a plea for public-private partnership on these sites that will lead, he hopes, to creative solutions.

Third, and finally, this morning's column from Brian McGrory -- "First, build compromise" -- returns yet again to the theme of the Harbor Garage with a full-on he-said/he-said write-up over the personal dimension of the relationship between the Mayor and Don Chiofaro. McGrory closes with his own solution: if Chiofaro's tallest building is proposed at 625 feet and the new height guidelines are showing a 200-foot height limit, then the parties should just split the difference and agree to a height limit of 410 feet (right in the middle) so we can all move on.

Did you notice the pattern too?

Now, don't get me wrong. This is juicy stuff for those of us who follow urban design and development issues closely. And the issues at stake -- height, density, shadows, the future of the Greenway as a central element in Boston's downtown justifying the very substantial public investment -- are real. The Greenway absolutely needs to be more than just greenspace that people drive by and don't really use. That would be tragic and a massive wasted opportunity for the City. It would also be a mistake to permit new buildings to shadow the Greenway to such an extent that the parkland really became inhospitable and unused.

But we shouldn't miss the street-and-sidewalk level for the tall buildings here, either. However the height issues are resolved for the Harbor Garage site and all of the other sites adjacent and near to the Greenway within the study area, let's don't lose sight of the urbanistcally complete (dare I say it?) form-based approach that the BRA and their consultants are taking on the overall Greenway District Planning Study. I encourage everyone to look at the full series of presentations (link here) and see how much more is being considered and weighed through that process. There's more going on than building heights. From this blogger's viewpoint, whatever your opinion about building height and shadows, the new development scenarios are taking the right approach at the level of the street and the sidewalk: the intent is to fill in edges and activate key frontages with retail and other uses that are likely to have the greatest impact on activity on the Greenway, without resorting to mega-projects and super-blocks. One look at the reality today, however, shows that this is going to be a lengthy effort requiring an abundance of patience.

When the former elevated Central Artery was built, some of the existing buildings directly adjacent to the highway were literally cut in half and all buildings were forced to turn away. Subsequent buildings largely followed this pattern. Now that the viaduct is gone and has been replaced by the Greenway, it will still take time to reorient the buildings and open them up to what is now a real amenity. To some extent, this process is already underway. When the sun was shining late last week, I snapped a few photos of some examples of this gathering phenomenon, arranged in order from OK to better to really working well:

The photos:

On the left, the landward side of the Marriott Long Whart hotel, where Tia's has put outdoor seating on the Greenway side and a couple of tourist-service storefronts provide some life.

In the middle, at the foot of State Street, an old mercantile building's blank facade has been punched through with windows and balconies. Note the still-blank facade of the lower building.

On the right, new storefronts and streetscape in the block between Hanover and Salem streets, blessed with a location directly adjacent to the North End.

This blog has a clear preference for the small, incremental changes to the urban fabric that repair it piece by piece. While the public debate over height on the Greenway is resolved, here's hoping that these building-by-building improvements continue. And let's also hope that the final guidelines for the Greenway and ultimately any new zoning regulations will find ways to encourage these kinds of changes too. As they occur, RTUF will be cheering them on.

RTUF Follow-up (Posted April 11, 2010): Dan Wasserman, the Boston Globe's excellent editorial cartoonist, makes light of the back-and-forth regarding the Harbor Garage proposal and the Greenway in this morning's editorial page: "Greenway showdown."

Blog Post No. 2010-4: Dudley Village extends efforts to right the triangle

Three decades into its revitalization, the Dudley Triangle reaches almost to its eastern limit.

Location: Dudley Street, between East Cottage Street and Burgess Street, Roxbury/Dorchester Line in Boston, MA.

Year of Urban Faric Restoration: 2007-2008.

Photos: Walking more or less west to east along Dudley Street for a three-block stretch, demonstrating just how well the new stuctures fit in with the existing urban fabric here.

The Story: The new structures in these photos are the collection of 5 buildings that comprise Dudley Village, a 50-unit affordable rental apartments with approximately 6,260 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor, located on the border between the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester along Dudley Street. In the 5th photo, the building under construction is the new Salvation Army Corps Center, a major new community center donated to the City by the Salvation Army through the generosity of the Kroc Family Foundation. Just beyond the Corps Center is the Uphams Corner stop on the MBTA's Fairmount Commuter Rail Line. Yes, careful reader, we've got ourselves a bona fide TOD (transit-oriented development) here.

A local non-profit community development corporation -- Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation (DBEDC) -- led development of the project, which is located on land controlled by a community land trust -- Dudley Neighbors Incorporated (DNI). DNI and its affiliated organization -- Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) -- grew out of a grassroots response to the massive abandonment and deconstruction of the Dudley Triangle in Roxbury (the area principally bounded by Blue Hill Avenue on the west, Dudley Street on the north, the Fairmount Commuter Rail Line on the east, and Quincy Street on the south) in the 1950s and 1960s. Founded in the early 1980s, DNI/DSNI straddles the worlds of community land trusts, community organizing, and planning/development. It is the principal entity that has led the neighborhood back from the brink over the last 25 years. It is also the entity that led the process to arrive at the "Urban Village" plan for the Dudley Triangle in 2000 that provided the basis for Dudley Village. DBEDC is more of a traditional community development corporation, founded in 1979 and now a flagship of Boston's CDC world. DBEDC's service area stretches to the east of the Dudley Village development into Uphams Corner and North Dorchester. Over its 30 years, it has developed over 900 units of affordable housing and 164,000 square feet of commercial space.

Over the last five years, DBEDC, along with its CDC partners at Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation, Mattapan Community Development Corporation, and Southwest Boston Community Development Corporation [FULL RTUF Disclosure: I have been a board member of the last organization for the last 9 years], has been advocating as the Fairmount Collaborative for new stops and increased service on the MBTA's Fairmount Commuter Rail Line. The Fairmount line is the only commuter rail line that runs entirely within Boston's city limits, but it was largely forgotten, left with few stops and poor service for the last several decades. The line happens to make those few steps in some of the poorest, most transit-dependent neighborhoods in the city. Enter community organizers at the Four Corners Action Coalition and their fellow community groups as well as the CDC members of the Collaborative, who have been enormously successful in banding together to focus energy and political will on the Fairmount line's issues. The first of 4 new approved stations is under construction now, and the second is in design. Another part of the Collaborative's strategy has been to position member CDCs to acquire site control of key parcels near the existing and new stations on the line now, before the new stations and service come on line. Dudley Village fits squarely within that strategy. Here's hoping all of the new developments that come after -- sponsored by the Collaborative's CDCs or by private developers -- fit as well into the urban fabric as does Dudley Village.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: You can see from the sketch that the project essentially restores more than 2 blocks of street wall on the northeastern side of Dudley Street. Very nice work.

Blog Post No. 2010-3: A Response and a Concern

Or, by Their Fruits Shall You Know Them (Urban Design-wise, That Is...)

Last month, the Boston Globe ran two stories on the metropolitan region's mid-20th Century legacy of large-scale concrete buildings. The first was a Sunday Arts & Entertainment section piece on January 3 by Robert Campbell entitled "The beauty of concrete." The second, by Sarah Schweitzer, appeared on January 24 in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine under the headline of "In Praise of Ugly Buildings." Both articles have a kind of "man-bites-dog" quality to them. (I mean, who thinks concrete buildings are beautiful, or that ugly buildings deserve praise?) Indeed, both articles posit that, despite the generally negative view that most people have of Boston's mid-20th Century concrete buildings, given their age, their relative level of endangerment, and the advent of new, relatively young cheerleaders for these buildings, the time has come to reconsider their place in the area's architectural heritage and even accept them as and for what they are. I've been pondering whether and how best to respond. Here goes:

Before getting underway, I'd like to stipulate that I'm going to cherry pick a bit by focusing on the two least-liked buildings in the bunch -- Boston City Hall at Government Center and the State Services Center on the superblock bounded by Staniford, Merrimack, New Chardon, and Cambridge Streets (both in the brutalist style) -- but I believe the argument I lay out here holds for other modernist buildings as well.

First of all, it is essential to understand the historical background for these two buildings to really understand what it means to defend them today and state, as is done in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine article, that "past sins must be forgiven and...the buildings...recognized for thier own history -- that of ushering Boston into the 20th century." The reference to "past sins" is a slight and somewhat opaque nod to the urban renewal-era origins of these buildings: both the State Services Center and Boston City Hall are part of the larger Government Center Urban Renewal Area that condemned and razed Scollay Square in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Scollay Square was, at the time, much past its prime and serving as the city's main red light district. In other words, a rather inviting target for urban renewal, at a time when the urban renewal movement was at its height and wrecking balls were swinging in many places. The most notorious urban renewal project was in the West End, where the entire neighborhood was leveled to make way for Le Corbusier-style towers in the park.

Before and After: The first photo is the pre-demolition West End in the 1950s. The second photo is the West End as it appeared in 1960.

All of this destruction and reconstruction, so the story goes, was a critical sign of the birth of the "New Boston" as the city shrugged off its decrepit, overly conservative past and reached out for a new and brighter future at mid-century. Suffice it to say, not everyone agrees with that narrative.

Fast forward to 2006, when Boston Mayor Thomas Menino first raised the possibility of moving city hall to the redeveloping South Boston Waterfront and selling off (read: demolishing) the existing Boston City Hall for private redevelopment to fund the move. The cratering of the commercial real estate market has put that initiative on hold, but the Mayor's mere suggestion was enough to galvanize the previously marginalized supporters of the city's concrete legacy. Thus, Ms. Schweitzer's article quotes extensively from a recent reappraisal from the Boston Landmarks Commission of the architectural value of several of Boston's major modernist concrete buildings, including not only Boston City Hall and the State Services Center but the JFK Federal Building (also at Government Center), 133 Federal Street (which was targeted a couple of years ago for a new ultra-high rise), and the St. Anthony Shrine on Arch Street as well. It appears, based on the article's quotations from the study, that the BLC may be considering landmarking some or all of these buildings. They are said to be "architectural treasures" that have been affected over the years by the public's "widespread lack of understanding, appreciation, and context for buildings of this period." Those presumably really in the know -- the president of the New England chapter of DOCODOMO (an international organization based in Barcelona and devoted to the preservation of modernist architecture), two architects who co-curated an exhibit on Boston's mid-20th century buildings at the pinkcomma gallery in the South End, and a professor of architecture at Boston University -- are then quoted by Ms. Schweizer asserting that "[t]o just say they are ugly is a cop-out" and declaring them "large-scale works of public sculpture."

Sorry, but saying these buildings are ugly is not a cop-out, it's merely stating the truth. And to call them "large-scale works of public sculpture" is the most revealing statement made in either article. It is a peculiarly modernist idea that buildings should be conceived principally as massive art installations as opposed to, say, parts of the city's urban fabric. This orientation largely explains why modernist buildings such as these are almost uniformly unsuccessful when built in urban settings. They are generally intended to be viewed in isolation as art objects, even if they aren't actually so located and even, unlike, say a Jackson Pollock painting, where people are forced to do more than just look at them in a gallery, but actually have to live, work with, and pass by them on a regular basis. As they say in the computer programming world, the fact that these buildings look out of place is a feature, not a bug.

So, like most of the general public, I do not like either the State Services Center or Boston City Hall. All of the foregoing said, though, I am not terribly interested in their specific architectural stylings, how ugly they are, or even how they look on the skyline. Rather, my main concern is how they interact at ground level with people, adjacent streets, and their surrounding built environment.

"By their [urban design] fruits shall you know them."

Viewed through this lens, we have got some bad fruit, people. The State Services Center and Boston City Hall represent acutely impaired parts of the urban fabric that cry out for substantial improvement. To demonstrate what I mean, herewith photos showing both buildings from angles that were not shown in the Globe articles:

First, two photos from the Congress Street frontage of Boston City Hall, the first showing the massive bunker-like brick wall that turns a complete blind face to the street and Dock Square, the Samuel Adams statue, and Faneuil Hall across the way, and the second showing the blocked-off stairway shown in side view in the first photo. The third photo is of the side of the building that faces across the narrow part of City Hall Plaza toward the low-rise portion of the JFK Federal Building.

In order, a section of the Merrimack Street frontage, the pulled-back corner at Merrimack and Staniford Street (fenced off and occupied by parked cars), and the completely door-less facade on Cambridge Street.

This is where the prospect of the BLC possibly landmarking these buildings goes from merely interesting to take on aspects of potentially genuine tragedy. From an urban fabric/urban design standpoint, it is hard to find two more hostile, more badly-behaved buildings in Boston. They are in desperate need of serious, thorough intervention that will open their dull, alienating frontages up to the life of the street and the city they, for better or worse, inhabit. Before the BLC landmarks these buildings, consideration needs to be given to how much more difficult their badly-needed retrofit will become after that occurs.

Ultimately, then, by all means, argue the relative merits of these buildings, their styles and their place in the architectural history of the city. And maintain, preserve, and even systematically improve these buildings' performance. From a sustainability perspective, their replacement would require much more energy than their revitalization -- arguing strongly for leaving them where they are. But let's be careful before we unintentionally saddle ourselves with obviously dead streetscapes and torn urban fabric for too many more generations.

[RTUF Note: This entry has been revised since its original posting.]

Blog Post No. 2010-2: 45 Province Helps Re-Civilize Its Block

Dignifying a historical echo while losing a bit of local color

Location: 45 Province Street, Boston, MA

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2009

Photos: Taking a walk around the block, starting at the corner of School Street and Province Street, then up School, left into Chapman Place to the rear alley behind the new building, around the corner onto Bosworth Street, down the Province House steps, and finally around the front of the building, stopping for a second at the former site of the Littlest Bar (the small, multi-paned facade at ground level with the red trim).

The Story: Where to start with this patch of Boston? I think I'll start with an excerpt from the treatment that Campbell and Vanderwarker gave to Province Court, the alley on the opposite side of Province Street, in Cityscapes of Boston (pages 158 and 159). [RTUF NOTE: Photo taken from the same vantage point in 2010 has been added as the last photo above. - ML] There, Robert said of the multi-storied garage that occupied this site from the mid-1950s until just a couple of years ago:

This car warehouse is the faceless Metropolitan Garage (1956), which may soon be demolished if a proposed redevelopment goes forward [RTUF NOTE: 45 Province is that ultimate redevelopment, some 17 years after Campbell wrote in 1992.] Regardless of whether it lives or dies, the Metropolitan's lesson is clear. Garages in the city are useful, but they shouldn't be allowed to kill the life of the street by occupying, as this one does, large areas along the sidewalk. Walking past so much dead frontage is like crossing a no man's land. It is empty, risky, and dull. Garages on commercial streets should be tucked out of sight beneath, above, or behind a continuous sidewalk frontage of other uses with interesting windows and doors, the architectural metaphors of human presence. Garages should also be designed with flat floors and enough ceiling room to enable them to be convertible -- like other buildings -- to different uses in the future.

Robert was right in so many different ways about that building. It was ugly, remarkably tall for a building used solely for a garage, and dead to the street in an aggressive, zombie-like way. Enough buildings like this, and you can kill even a city as tightly-knit as Boston. Despite its flat floors, it was not reused. Instead, it was totally demolished to make way for the building seen in the photos that I took this last week.

Even if you're not enitrely comfortable with the height of the new building (I personally am comfortable with the height, being, as I have stated in a prior post, from New York), it is a vast improvement over the former garage and parking lot that used to occupy this location. The residential condominiums rise above ground floor retail, a residential lobby announced by an expansive curving glass canopy, and off-street parking access/egress that is shielded for the most part by strategic landscaping and column placement. Following Robert Campbell's dictum, all of the building's 290+ parking spaces are located below grade beneath the building. One of the retail spaces appears to be reserved for a restaurant, with a side terrace (seen in the third photo, above) that looks like it will be a good place to perch come springtime. I especially like the careful treatment of Chapman Place at the rear of the building (cobblestones and granite curbing along the full length), how the building's main volumes are varied just enough to avoid a canyon effect, and the way the building fills in the entire block. All in all, 45 Province gives the surrounding streets a series of strong edges to work with.

Now for the historic echo and the lost piece of local color. The historic echo is the staircase leading up from the sidewalk on Province Street to the level of Bosworth Street above. This staircase is all that is left of the Province House, a mansion built by a wealthy Boston merchant in the 17th century that was made the official residence of the royal governors of the Massachusetts Province starting in 1716. After the Revolution, the Commonwealth found little use for the building once the seat of state government moved from what is now the Old State House to the Charles Bulfinch-designed (new) State House on Beacon Hill. So, in 1811 the structure was conveyed to the fledgling Massachusetts General Hospital as part of its endowment. After a century of income-generating commercial use for the hospital, the site was sold and the building was then demolished by the new owners in 1922. A plaque commemorating the location's rich history is located to the left of the base of the stairs. I think it fair to say that 45 Province re-civilizes this location -- an interesting concept considering it is located in the historic heart of a historic city, yet still true considering the garage structure it replaced.

We also now have another echo with the vestigial facade of the former Littlest Bar. Michael Levenson's Boston Globe piece lamenting the pub's demise can be read here. In summary, the pub was open for about 60 years, from the end of the Second World War until construction started on 45 Province a few years ago. It truly was the kind of place, as Levenson says, where half a dozen patrons could make it feel crowded. The Littlest did survive in altered form, relocating a few blocks away to Broad Street in a larger, ground-level space that just can't match what it had here. I don't challenge the notion that a strong piece of local color was lost here. But the city gained back a more extensive and functioning urban street frontage, and that has a value of its own.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: To say that this building neatly fills in a tear in the urban fabric that was crying out for restoration is an understatement. It does what was needed in this part of town.

RTUF NOTE: This post was modified after its initial publication to correct certain errors, improve readability, and add the photo of Providence Court. -- ML