CultureNOW - Haymarket Square: Peter Vanderwarker

Haymarket Square
Greenmarkets

Dates

Founded, ca. 1830

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Description

ABOUT THE PROJECT
Since about 1830, Haymarket Square has served Boston as an open-air fruit and vegetable market. Haymarket Square offers produce at a very cheap cost, sometimes significantly less than at a normal supermarket.

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
So completely has Boston's Haymarket Square been erased, it's hard to identify even the streets in the older photograph. That's Washington heading downtown at the left, but no trace of this stretch of the street exists today. In the Government Center Urban Renewal Plan of 1963, 22 streets were replaced by six, and 90 percent of the existing buildings were demolished. "Urban renewal," wrote Edward Logue, director at the time of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, "is a pruning process ... and a replanting." Strip mining might have been a more accurate metaphor than pruning. As for replanting, it's taken 35 years, so far, and isn't complete.

Replanting today is taking the form of the funny looking little building at the center of the new photo, the one with the blank white wall. When it's finished, maybe five years from now, it will probably hold the record for weirdest combination of the functions ever crammed into one building. What we can see now is a parking garage, with shops on the ground floor.

The blank wall is blank because it's awaiting construction of two cent stacks for the new Central Artery, which will pass under the site (a sliver of today's overhead artery is visible at the extreme left). The stacks will be 150 feet high. They will rise through the roof of a six story brick office building, which will wrap around the stacks lower halves like baggy trousers. At the building's corner nearest us in the photo, a seven story air-intake tower is planned.

At the right of the new photo, oddly enough, we see a similar collision of uses. The Government Center Parking Garage opened in 1970; the slopping glass canopy was added in the mid-80's, to shield pedestrians waiting at a new bust stop. At the same time, two floors of office space were piled on the garage's top.

Older European cities are often filled with crazy juxtapositions like these. "Impure" architecture can be chaotic, as surely the cent-stack building will be, but it can also be intriguing, and its very confusion can help humanize a city. We can sympathize with buildings that, like ourselves, seem to be pulled in different directions.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Haymarket Square",Boston Globe,1998

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Location

Blackstone Street & Hanover Street
Boston, MA 02108
United States

Nearby Items

Salem Street		11 feet
Hanover Street at Blackstone Street		31 feet
Asaroton		101 feet
Blackstone Block		348 feet
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway		360 feet
Cross Street		475 feet
Union Oyster House		538 feet