A century or half-century later, Peter Vanderwarker comes to the same place but to a very different scene. The result of the earlier photographer's work is in his hand. It's midday, maybe, with bright sun and hard shadows making for much contrast, little repose. Cars and people clutter the street and obscure any sense of it as an urban space. And by the very act of imitation, so faithfully performed, Peter misleads in another sense. By adopting the exact framing and vantage point of the original view, which was carefully chosen and composed, Peter ensures, paradoxically, that his own composition can only be a random one. Where the old photographer picked a beautiful scene and framed it lovingly, Peter must photograph whatever he happens to find in front of his camera. He can choose neither his view nor the framing of it. It isn't surprising that the result is often chaos. Does this mean the city has become more chaotic? The answer is unknowable.

Yet with all these caveats, some lessons do emerge. The old city, it appears, was superior to the new in grain, human scale, continuity, urban space and in a quality I call face. The new city is superior to the old in comfort, convenience and visual drama.

Grain is the pepper-and-salt of small detail- signs on the building fronts, just for one example. And it's also the frequent (but not too big, not dramatic) variation in building height and style. Human scale is the sense the old buildings have that they're places for people. Their windows and doors and awnings and stoops and decorative elements are person-sized. Continuity means the way most of the architecture emerges from the same general classical tradition, a tradition that provides elements that carry over from one building to the next, knitting them together into one city fabric: roof cornices, windows expressed as framed rectangles punched into the building wall (so different from the glass strips or skins of recent years), rustications, solid masonry itself as the basic material.

Urban spaces are all those outdoor rooms- streets as corridors, squares as parlors-that made of the pedestrian city one huge public social club. In the automobile city, space is often shapeless and buildings are not its walls but merely objects in it. "Face" is harder to define, but you can't miss it in the old photos. The buildings are humanoid: windows suggest, as eyes do, intelligences behind them looking out; buildings have tops and bottoms like hats and boots. Lined up and jostling one another like seniors at their class portrait, they smile and frown across the street space. Even the old carriages and upright cars have more face than the sleek, low autos of today. Face makes the city more social, more alive. It's something very different from the graph-paper facades or hulky robotic presences of many of Boston's recent office towers (which people often call faceless).

But the new Boston has its advantages, too. In the past people surely choked on the dust and muck of these streets. Some froze in basements that flooded regularly before the great pumping stations were built. They gagged behind their gay awnings in roasting, unvacuumed summer rooms. They were driven to desperation by the unimaginable equine traffic jams. And although they enjoyed, one feels sure, lots of people were always calling Boston dowdy and dull. Now the new towers crash against the fine-grained buildings of the past. If there's a loss in continuity in the arrival of the John Hancock in Copley Square, there's a big gain in excitement.

This book is the result of a herculean labor by Peter Vanderwarker. It's an illustrated primer on cities, how to make them and how not to make them. Rightly used, along with the similar books coming out on other American cities, it will be of permanent value.