CultureNOW - Merrimac Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Merrimac Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"We can date the older photo by the 1955 DeSoto at lower left. The photographer has never been well known, but he was probably the best who's ever devoted himself to Boston city scenes. He was Nishan Bichajian.

In the 1950s, Bichajian worked for Gyorgy Kepes, the founder of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Kepes and an MIT colleague, Kevin Lynch, got a research grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study "The Perceptual Form of the City." They wanted to figure out how people perceived the city and how they found their way around. The study resulted in one of the classics of American city planning, Lynch's 1960 book, The Image of the City.

As part of the study, Kepes and Lynch took a map of downtown Boston and marked on it a number of "interesting points of view" to be photographed by Bichajian. They not only picked the spots, they drew arrows to show where the camera should be aimed.

You'd never think a photographer so tightly constrained could make memorable photos. Yet again and again, Bichajian's unerring eye found a way. In this one, we're looking east along Merrimac Street at the corner of Lancaster Street. Overhead, a Coca-Cola sign frames the scene like a curtain being pulled back from a stage. Beneath it, a clutter a fire escapes reminds you of catwalks in a theater, further dramatizing the scene. At lower right, a man in a hat and coat looks up and across to a building at 101 Merrimac Street. His gaze ties the picture together -- there's a watcher on one side of the street and something being watched on the other. This man, you feel, is a stand-in for the invisible photographer, who is also watching.

The left side of Merrimac Street hasn't changed much. Some of the buildings are new, but they repeat the shapes and proportions of the old. Elsewhere, however, all is altered. In the distance, blocking the street, is the Government Center Parking Garage. At far right is a slice of the vast State Service government complex. Both opened in 1970 and both are products of the ambitious "New Boston" urban renewal of the 1960s under Mayor John Collins. They are mammoth intersections in a neighborhood of short blocks and modest buildings. Between them stands the Edward W. Brooke Courthouse of 1999, its top defined by a crisp military visor."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Cut Off by Progress," Boston Globe, 21 August 2005

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Location

Merrimac Street & Lancaster Street
Boston, MA 02114
United States

Nearby Items

Government Service Center		884 feet
Merrimac Street at Friend Street		0.2 miles
Causeway Street at Canal Street		0.2 miles
The Sports Museum		0.2 miles
TD Bank North Garden		0.2 miles
Human Element		0.2 miles
Currents		0.2 miles