CultureNOW - South Boston Bridge: Peter Vanderwarker

South Boston Bridge

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
The first thing you notice about old images of Boston is how spiky they are. The spikes are the masts of ships and the steeples of churches. The two often coalesce: The skyline at sea and the skyline on shore appear to reflect each other in the image of a harmonious universe.

The spikes, like those on a medical chart, also tell you where the peaks of energy were located in old Boston. The city was largely run by a troika: the ministers of the churches, the merchants of the sea, and the politicians in the State House. Besides masts and steeples, the State House is the only other spike in the older view, visible just to the right of the cluster of ships. Designed by the great architect Charles Bulfinch, it opened in 1798. As always, the skyline is a graph of power.

Just a few years earlier, in 1787, the ship Columbia anchored in Boston Harbor after completing the first American circumnavigation of the world, a voyage that, in the words of famed historian Samuel Eliot Morison, "enabled the merchant adventurers of Boston to tap the vast reservoir of wealth in China." The famous China trade, which was largely an exchange of furs from the Pacific Northwest for the teas and silks of the East, soon brought riches to Boston seafaring families.

The old image is a lithograph from a drawing by Jacques Gerard Milbert, a Frenchman who visited the United States between 1816 and 1840. In it, we're standing on the South Boston toll bridge, built in 1805, which crossed Fort Point Channel on the line of today's East Berkeley Street to connect Boston and South Boston. The channel was wider then, and the bridge was 1,551 feet long.

As the litho suggests, the bridge became a setting for social strollers, who enjoyed the new view of the city across the water. It also attracted young lovers, who called it "the bridge of sighs."

Today's photo is a graph of power, too, but it resembles an economist's bar graph more than a medical chart. We're standing on the Broadway Bridge. The tall, boxy shapes of corporate office towers now blot out the churches and the State House. Transportation still occupies the foreground, but instead of ships, we see a chaos of railroad tracks and highways. The tail end of Fort Point Channel is little more than a puddle at lower left. Boston's planners call this area the "South Bay Industrial Wild." They hope, someday, to transform it, through public art, into a gateway to the wider channel beyond.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Power Points", Boston Globe, 27 March 2005

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Location

Foundry Street & W Broadway Street
Boston, MA 02127
United States

Nearby Items

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