CultureNOW - Christopher Columbus Park:

Christopher Columbus Park

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"We’d love to know more than we do about the older photo. The Forest Hills/Atlantic Avenue trolley car, visible at the center, appears to be stalled by construction. It looks as if it may even be jacked up off the ground. But when you examine the original photo with a magnifying glass, you can see the trolley car’s operator sitting at the controls. Passengers look quite unperturbed, some reading unfurled newspapers. A puzzle.

We’re looking north along Atlantic Avenue. Behind the trolley car is a block-long building with a nearly block-long sign: ‘Walter Brock, Ladies & Gents Dining Rooms.’ That building is gone now, but two others survive. At left, behind Brock’s, is Mercantile Wharf, and at right, farther down Atlantic, is Commercial Wharf West. Both of these great wharves were designed by distinguished architects in the 1850s in what came to be called the Boston Granite Style. That was an architecture in which massive rough blocks of stone were piled up to create buildings that looked as permanent and reliable as natural outcroppings, thus inspiring commercial confidence – much as do the corporate logos of today, such as an insurance company's Rock of Gibraltar.

Commercial Wharf was split when Atlantic Avenue barreled through it in 1868. Commercial and Mercantile were both renovated in the 1970s, the decade in which Boston's commercial harbor-front, long derelict, returned to life as a shopping, dining, office, and residential neighborhood, a recovery that became a national model for waterfront revivals.

We see some of that waterfront in the new photo. Atlantic Avenue is no longer visible, because it's been rerouted, looping away from the harbor to create a waterfront site for what is now Christopher Columbus Park. The water is just outside the picture, to the right and behind the men. The popular park was designed by Sasaki Associates of Watertown and dates from the bicentennial year of 1976. In 1979 came the statue of Columbus by Andrew Mazzola. Columbus here looks more like a bashful monk than an Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the title of a famed biography by Boston historian Samuel Eliot Morison. But the statue does provide a helpful focus.

The guys in the hard hats are Joe Mandola, engineer, and Dan McNichol, public affairs officer. Both work for the Big Dig – a project that, once again, will transform the face of the waterfront."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Atlantic Avenue," Boston Globe, 1999

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Location

Cross Street & Atlantic Avenue
Boston, MA 02110
United States

Nearby Items

Christopher Columbus		264 feet
Massachusetts Beirut Memorial		282 feet
Boston Harbor Walk		427 feet
The Reading Circle		473 feet
Central Artery		512 feet
Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion		533 feet
Mercantile Wharf Building		603 feet