CultureNOW - Salem Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Salem Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTGRAPHS
“Cityscapes” has been running in the Globe Magazine for 21 years now, and in all that time we don't think we’ve ever seen two pictures of the same place as radically different as these.

In the old photo, we're in the Haymarket looking across Hanover Street at a corner where Endicotte, at left, and Salem, at right, came together to form a triangle.The year is 1951, as we learn from the "Joseph Timilty for Mayor" billboard at far right. Did the people who fill these pleasant streets and sidewalks have any sense of the doom that was about to befall their neighborhood? 1951 was the year when the demolition of much of old Boston began, in order to clear a path for the overhead Central Artery. Within months every single brick in this photo had disappeared. The 1951 photo shows a scene of old fashioned city life at its best. Pedestrians rule , and nobody's afraid to walk in the middle of the street or to patronize the street vendor who's out there, too. Different uses are closely mixed together. Wolf's "Men's Clothes, Boy's Clothes, Quality Clothes and Uniforms" sits comfortably on the second floor above the Colonial Market with its "Beef, Pork, Lamb, Veal," and above Wolf's are residential apartments.

The streets bring people together in a memorable, sociable, room like space, shaped by three- and four-story buildings of a human scale. The Central Artery was finally completed in July 1959. It lasted only 45 Years. In the 2004 photo, it's gone, the cars now scuttling like rats through the tunnels of the Big Dig. In the Artery's place we see today's sad, but temporary, landscape of scattered wreckage. Two white towers in the distance are all that remind us that we're still in Boston. One is the Zakim Bridge, at far left, and the other is the Old North Church, at right, seen down Salem Street. Between them, they bracket almost three centuries of the city's history" In a few years, today's blasted landscape will be supplanted by the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a string of parks, pavilions, and few civic buildings. New development will gradually fill in along the greenway's edges. People will again live on this site, and Boston will grow healthy new tissue over the great wound that was the Artery.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Urban Breakdown", Boston Globe, 7 November 2004

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Location

Blackstone Street & Hanover Street
Boston, MA 02108
United States

Nearby Items

Haymarket Square		11 feet
Hanover Street at Blackstone Street		40 feet
Asaroton		105 feet
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway		349 feet
Blackstone Block		350 feet
Cross Street		467 feet
Union Oyster House		539 feet