CultureNOW - Bay Village: Peter Vanderwarker

Bay Village

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Nothing could be much drearier than the newer of these two photos. We're looking west along Charles Street in Boston's Bay Village. The village is a charming little residential neighborhood, tucked up against downtown Boston. But you'd never know that from this view, which shows merely a jumble of banal buildings surrounding a one-way traffic sewer. There's far too much asphalt. The Milner Hotel is at the extreme left. The old photo, by contrast, is fascinating. It's April 24, 1899. We're in a man's world. You can almost smell the tobacco. The signs, some too small to be read in this reproduction, evoke the era with pungency. One offers "Fine Cigars," another touts "D. Amselem Cuban Cigars," and a third pleads "Try Our Own Make Cigars." In the windows of Gladstone Dining Rooms are placards for The Girl From Ireland,
playing at the Columbia. We see "Gent's Furnishings" and "Pool 2\r2¢ Per Cue" and "5. S. Grandberg & Son, House and Fresco Painters."

A pawnshop offers "Suits to Let" and announces "Railroad Tickets Bought & Sold." One sign employs what sounds like the hippie lingo of a later era: "Misfit Clothing: Hats, Caps, Bags, &c." Our favorite sign, though, is a large posted bill that advertises the "First Grand Ball of the Bill Posters Union." Perhaps it was also the last. As always, one wonders why the old photo was made at all. Photography in 1899 was a cumbersome undertaking, and this is clearly a professional job. Perhaps Gladstone's, at the center with its up-to-date Ionic columns made of cast iron, has just opened? But the photo feels too informal for that.

All is changed now. Even the streets have different names. Today's Charles was Pleasant then. Gone is the textured world of the past, a point best made by comparing the pattern of cobblestones in the old photo with the featureless asphalt of the new. Gone are the fascinatingly tiny and twisty streets and the richly articulated sidewalk frontage of shop windows. And gone, too, or nearly so, are the signs, the dialogue balloons of a city that always seemed to be speaking congenially to us. You needn't want to re-create the past - always a mistake - to wish that some of the intricate, humanly scaled detail of the old photo, and some of that photo's sense of a city eager to communicate with its pedestrians, were present in the new view.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Bay Village", Boston Globe, 2000

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Location

Charles St & Cambridge St
Boston, MA 02114
United States

Nearby Items

Beacon Hill		11 feet
Liberty Hotel (Charles Street Jail)		643 feet
Lunder Building		982 feet
Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital		0.2 miles
The Ether Dome		0.2 miles
Nursing Sundial sculpture at MGH		0.2 miles
Vilna Shul		0.3 miles