CultureNOW - Huntington Avenue at Exeter Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Huntington Avenue at Exeter Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"A stunning Buick Roadmaster, in the older photo, is dressed to kill, looking like Fred Astaire on his way to a ball. It sports a tail coat of streamlined fins; a set of tiny, useless side vents, like the studs on a dress shirt; starchy white sidewalls, like spats; and a just-brushed-my-teeth grin. The Buick recalls an era when cities, like cars, tended to greet the pedestrian with a theatrical geniality.

In both photos, we’re at the corner of Exeter Street looking down Huntington Avenue toward Copley Square. Handsome as it is, the Buick, along with an equally party-garbed neo-Colonial Gulf station, was an early omen of the devastation of cities by the automobile. You can see that devastation in the building that hogs the center of the new photo, the Westin hotel. The Westin is part of the vast Copley Place project, erected above a Massachusetts Turnpike interchange in the early ‘80s. The construction of the turnpike demolished this block on the south side of Huntington, including the legendary S. S. Pierce department store.

Good cities are made of interesting streets. The Westin makes a terrible street. Instead of the messy but congenial row of shops and bars, plus one movie house, the Westin devotes almost its entire ground-floor frontage to the handling of cars. There’s a bar on the second floor, but above that come several stories of windowless function rooms. Above those blank walls, the hotel rises to a tower that throws the street into shadow. And it isn’t only the street that's dark. We can’t see it, but across Huntington from the Westin, a crew is building a new tower of pricey condos, Trinity Place. At noontime one day in mid-September, all 18 stories of south-facing windows at Trinity Place were covered by the Westin’s shadow.

Further ruptured by a ramp to the Mass. Pike, Huntington Avenue is now a mere traffic sewer, no longer a place to stroll, shop, and socialize. Visitors to the Westin and the rest of Copley Place ignore the street. Instead, they scuttle in glass gerbil-tube bridges, inhabiting a sealed-off, air-conditioned, above-the-ground world that could almost as well be undersea.

Enough survives, however, to give the neighborhood a lot of character. You can see the triangular top of Trinity Church in Copley Square at the center of both photos and a corner of the Copley Square Hotel at the extreme left. And Trinity Place plans a restaurant at its sidewalk. Things can only get better."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Huntington Avenue," Boston Globe, 24 October 1999

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Location

Huntington Avenue & Exeter Street
Boston, MA 02116
United States

Nearby Items

Boston Public Library: Johnson Addition		663 feet
Charles River Esplanade		861 feet
Lord & Taylor at Prudential Center		934 feet
Paint and Henry		935 feet
Huntington Avenue at Dartmouth Street		946 feet
Boston Public Library		0.2 miles
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