CultureNOW - Dartmouth Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Dartmouth Street

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"The finest row of civic buildings ever built in Boston stands along Dartmouth Street in the old photo. We're looking south along Dartmouth. The building on the far left, now gone, is the headquarters store for S.S. Pierce. Samuel Stillman Pierce (pronounced 'purse') founded the store, which supplied gourmet foods to Boston's Brahminocracy, in 1831. The building came along in 1887, designed by little-known architects S. Edwin Tobey. It’s no masterpiece of architecture, but it’s great urban design. A heap of dark Romanesque masonry, it anchored a corner of Copley Square as solidly as a mountain.

To the right of it is the great Boston Public Library of 1895, by Charles Fallen McKim, who also designed Symphony Hall. The BPL can get away with its calm, flat Renaissance facade precisely because it’s bookended by buildings that are so much more architecturally excited.

The bookend to the right of the library is the New Old South Church of 1874, by Cummings & Sears, this time in Northern Italian Gothic style. We see only a slice of it, a pinnacled gable end. New Old South, too, is great urban design, a model of how to fit a big building into a street of smaller ones. Along its main Boylston frontage, it steps gradually from house-sized elements up to high gables and a tower near the corner.

Farthest right is the Boston Art Club of 1881, a gem in the then-fashionable British style known as Queen Anne. It’s by William Ralph Emerson, who obviously enjoyed the style’s emphasis on invention, handicraft, and playful details. Still vital, the Art Club today is home to the Muriel Snowden International
School, a public high school.

Four buildings, four styles, one great streetscape.

S.S. Pierce was torn down in 1958. It was replaced by access ramps to the Mass. Turnpike, and later by the characterless Copley Place shops and hotels, which could as well be in Houston or Atlanta. Part of Copley Place can be seen in the new photo."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Coming Into Copley: Four buildings in four styles made one great stretch of Dartmouth Street," Boston Globe, 26 March 2006

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Location

Dartmouth Street & Newbury Street
Boston, MA 02116
United States

Nearby Items

Boston Art Club		232 feet
Old South Church		505 feet
Copley Place		513 feet
128-130 Commonwealth Avenue		543 feet
Vendome Fire Memorial		617 feet
Aesop Newbury Street		623 feet
William Lloyd Garrison Memorial		701 feet