CultureNOW - Codman Square: Peter Vanderwarker

Codman Square

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Today’s Boston is a city of change. Case in point: the church in the middle of both photos.

We're in Dorchester's Codman Square, looking up Norfolk Street to the corner of Talbot. The neighborhood was named for the first minister of this church, the Rev. John Codman, who died in 1847. In his day, this was the Second Church, Dorchester, Congregational and Unitarian. It was built in 1806.

Today the church sign still says Second Church, Dorchester. But it's now a Church of the Nazarene. Services are held in English and Haitian Creole. A second sign proclaims that this same building is also a Wesleyan church, another Protestant denomination. A third sign informs us that the church triples as a Higher Education Resource Center, with classes in English as a second language.

The Great Hall, visible in the both photos on the far right, has gone through almost as many changes as the church. It was built as a library in 1903, on the site of the old Dorchester Town Hall (Dorchester was annexed by Boston in 1870).

In 1975, the library moved to a new building. After a few years, the Great Hall was taken over by the Codman Square Health Center, which renovated it and turned the ground floor over to Codman Academy Charter High School in 2001. In the new photo, six members of the academy's class of 2006 stand next to the health center's CEO, Bill Walczak.

The school, started in 2001, serves 105 students from all over the city. The principal and cofounder, Meg Campbell, calls it 'an expeditionary school.' She means that the students make expeditions; they assume internships in all kinds of businesses and institutions.

'The whole city is our classroom,' Campbell says. School runs six days a week, including Saturday mornings. All of the 2005 and 2006 graduates were accepted to four-year colleges.

'Form follows function' they used to say about architecture. No way. These buildings have accommodated many diverse functions while remaining the same in physical form."

- Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Keep Up the Change: Two Dorchester Buildings Show an Ability to Adapt," Boston Globe, 11 June 2006

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Location

Talbot Avenue & Norfolk Street
Dorchester, MA 02124
United States

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