Jacob Wirth's gets a new neighbor...finally

View 1: The parking lot that was for many years. (Credit: John A. Keith)

 

View 2: Now under construction, same location.

 

View 3: View from across Stuart Street.

 

View 4: Aerial view, completed project (Credit: Boston Advanced Realty).

View 5: Finished front facade at street level (Credit: BRA).

The Location: 45 Stuart Street, Boston, MA.

The Story: And the South Hinge Block (on the High Spine) is filled completely out. This location has been a parking lot (still, for those keeping score at home, the ultimate urban no-no) for as long as your faithful correspondent has been resident in the Boston area, which is to say since at least 1997 and probably a good deal before that. So, it's rewarding to see it finally returned to being a contributing piece of the urban fabric on the Stuart Street edge between the old town's theater district and Chinatown. Jacob Wirth's, which is more or less the preeminent German restaurant in Boston, can be seen in the top photo in its classic 19th century Boston row buidling, gable turned to the side and curved bay on the right. This will be an interesting juxtaposition if the front facade really looks entirely like View 5. We shall see.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: This one definitely induces tetris flashbacks...

(Blog Post No. 2014-5)

This time, for once, not what McMorrow said... (Blog Post No. 2013-9)

In another of our series on what's happening in coverage of the urban fabric in local media ("they write about it, we give it the once over"), I come today to disagree with the generally very sound Paul McMorrow and his recent opinion piece in the Boston Globe advocating for the demolition of Boston City Hall and its sale as a development site for one or more high-rise towers to punctuate the High Spine's end in downtown west (the last bit about the High Spine is my reading into what Paul is saying). The piece can be found here - Boston City Hall Should Be Torn Down - and while it's as well written as usual, it's just not doing it for your correspondent.

I will stipulate that the building is an affront in almost every way (though it's thankfully not a high-rise itself). But the real problem with City Hall from the perspective of living and working and just being in this, our fair city, is its total lack of urban conviviality, its open hostility in the way in which it meets everything around it. Faithful members of RTUF Nation may recall that yours truly blogged about this issue some time ago in A response and a concern, and what I said then goes quadruple after reading the arguments offered by David Friedman, my fellow Bostonian living up the road in Jamaica Plain who happens, not without importance for the discussion there and here, to be a professor emeritus of architectural history at MIT, in his letter to the editors of the Globe in response to the article ("An American Classic"). Maybe he's more than just a "casual observer," but the good professor's letter merely proves, if there remained any meaningful doubt, the building's defenders are largely, if not exclusively, object building fetishists with virtually no regard for the consequences of foisting what amounts to an oversized modernist sculpture on a critically important urban location. And I quite frankly can't see that opening up the atrium at the middle of the building solves any of the problems with the building that matter to me.

All of that said, I'm not with Paul on tearing the building down. I may have been born and raised in New York and I am very comfortable with tall buildings, but I don't see big height as critical at this location. I'd rather see the city make a real go at opening up the building to the adjacent plaza and, as importantly, Congress Street and filling in the broad array of dead spaces on its perimeter before we decide to tear it down and go somewhere else.

Blog Post No. 2009-8: The W Hotel Boston (100 Stuart Street)

And now for something completely different...

Location: 100 Stuart Street, Boston, MA (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2009

The Photos: Walking along Stuart Street, from the corner at Tremont Street toward Charles Street.

The Story: Finally completed and opened just a couple of months ago, the W Hotel Boston substantially changes the dynamic at the corner of Tremont and Stuart streets in the heart of Boston's theater district. The Charles Playhouse is down Warrenton Street, the Wang and Wilbur theaters are across Tremont Street, the Shubert's right next door, the Emerson Majestic is a block up Tremont, and the Colonial is up and around the corner on Boylston Street. Most recently, art house cinema returned to Boston at the Stuart Street Playhouse two blocks over. Despite its central location, for at least as long as I've lived in Boston (since 1997), this site was the archetypal urban fabric no-no: a surface parking lot occupying a full city block at a key downtown intersection.

The architecture here is uncompromisingly modernist in style, though the building's placement on its site suggests its designers were more than happy to come out and meet the street directly with lots of ground floor activity and transparency. Of course, this is a fairly tight urban site with no space to waste anyway. While the building is a clear departure from much of what's around it, there has been little open hostility to its ultimate arrival, especially given its overall height and facades that proceed directly to the buidling's full height without any stepping back.

This may be a good point at which to discuss Boston's "High Spine." As with so many things having to do with architecture, urban design, and planning in Boston, Robert Campbell recently (in 2006) covered this topic in the Boston Globe (link here) elegantly and with an eye toward what is truly important about it, especially its accordance with Boston's "basic DNA" as a craggy peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow neck, even if the original Boston Neck was a bit more to the south and east. Here let it be said that the High Spine has, since its endorsement in 1961 by the Boston Society of Architets' Committee on Civic Design, provided a remarkably durable and understandable conceptual framework for where tall buildings outside of the city's Financial District should be located. That is, in a "High Spine" stretching from the area around Kenmore Square on the west, running eastward on a line through the Prudential Center, Copley Square, and Park Plaza (thereby threading the needle between the Back Bay and the South End atop the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension, the MBTA Orange and Green lines, and the main Amtrak/Commuter Rail corridor). Major and easily recognizable peaks on the High Spine today include the Prudential building itself and the "old" (the one with the weather beacon on top) and "new" (designd by I.M. Pei) Hancock towers, but there are many less lofty peaks along the length of the spine, including the Millennium Center development from earlier this decade and, now, the W Hotel. It may well be that the location of this new building along the High Spine explains why, at least at this point (several years after its approvals were obtained), its realization has caused little angst among the populace. All in all, it's a welcome addition to the urban ensemble.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: I'm pretty sure that the dimesions on the building's notch along the Tremont Street side are not accurate, but you get the general idea.