CultureNOW - City Square: Peter Vanderwarker

City Square

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"We’re looking at three photos of City Square in Charlestown. Watching as it morphs from a fine Victorian square into a disastrous abandoned wreck and then returns again as a handsome public space.

In the oldest photo, City Square is dominated by a domed building that looks like a bald Victorian father at the head of the table. Built in 1868 as Charlestown City Hall, it sports the fashionable motifs of the French Second Empire style, such as the dome and sloping mansard roof. Its life as a city hall was short. Boston annexed Charlestown in 1874. But the building still commanded its square with a civic presence.

A century later, in our 1987 photo, we see the ravages perpetrated on so many American cities when they carved themselves up to make way for the automobile. Route 1 and Interstate 93 merged tit City Square. To outsiders, Charlestown appeared to be one huge spaghetti ramp.

Forward to 2001. The overhead has been torn down and put underground, an early move in what became the Big Dig. The square is a park again, designed by landscape architect Craig Halvorson, who also did Boston's fine Post Office Square park. Back in 1635, after Governor John Winthrop moved from the City Square area to Boston, the square became the site of a tavern known as the Three Cranes. Some of that building’s granite foundation stones were discovered in recent excavations, and they’ve been distributed on a grassy lawn in the park, making a sketch in stone to mark the old location.

At right is a tall weathervane tower, rising from a pool festooned with nautical images. It's a collaboration between Halvorson's office and Cambridge artist David Phillips, who fashioned the crane at the top from a drawing by naturalist John James Audubon.

Anchored by famed restaurant Olives in the building at far right, City Square is again an active part of the city. A Friends of City Square group keeps an eye on things. Nobody, however, lives on the square. Residents would add some further needed life.

The square's quiet beauty was marred only, on a recent visit, by the noise pollution of a city worker operating a leaf-blower that sounded like an outboard motor."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - A Stylish Comeback," Boston Globe, 24 October 2004

"No other important place in Greater Boston was as badly trashed by the impact of motorized transportation as City Square in Charlestown. The older of these two photos shows the square in its heyday, around 1900, before the town was annexed to Boston.

The square in this view is commanded by Charlestown City Hall, the big building in the center with the dome and cupola, built in 1868 in the French mansard style then popular – a style also used, at about the same time, for Boston’s old City Hall.

The old square has a lovely look about it. It has the formality of a genuinely public, civic space, and at the same time it has a very human scale, thanks to the clusters of small buildings that bend back from City
Hall along Rutherford Avenue on the left and Main Street on the right. The biggest one, another mansard job, is the Waverly hotel of 1870, at the left of the photo.

The City Square of today, shown in the 1987 photo, is a sad contrast. An overhead elevated line blighted the square for most of the years between these two photos. It has come down, but the grim steel slash of the Tobin Bridge still hangs like a sword of Damocles over the scene. All the old buildings are gone, and only a couple of new ones stand in isolation. The one on the right, partly blocked by trusswork, is Roughan Hall, once a famed dance hall, which has recently been renovated.

Within a few years City Square may regain its former dignity. Handsome new housing developments are filling the scarred, vacant lots behind it, and the overhead highway is scheduled to come down as part of the massive project to depress the Central Artery."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Where's the square?: How transportation ran over Charleston," Boston Globe, 22 November 1987

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Location

City Square
Harvard Street & City Square
Boston, MA 02129
United States

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