CultureNOW - St. James Avenue at Claredon Street: Peter Vanderwarker

St. James Avenue at Claredon Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"The land we see in the old photo didn’t exist 10 years earlier. The site was water, part of the tidal basin known as the Back Bay. The filling of the Back Bay – an operation on a scale comparable with today’s Central Artery project – began in 1857. For the next 30 years, every day, 3,500 railroad cars arrived from Needham filled with gravel. By 1869, the filling had progressed far enough to permit the erection of the huge building we see in the photo.

We’re at the corner of St. James Avenue and Clarendon Street, with the site of the future Copley Square just off the right edge of the picture. The building is the amazing Peace Jubilee Coliseum, a temporary auditorium thrown up quickly to house the five-day National Peace Jubilee of June 1869, which celebrated the Northern victory and the return of peace after the Civil War. Whoever said our forebears were chilly Puritans? At the Peace Jubilee, you could enjoy Verd’s ‘Anvil Chorus’ performed by a 10,000-voice chorus and a 1,000-piece orchestra, with a percussion section of 100 firemen swinging sledgehammers against anvils, plus church-bell ringers and the firing of cannon. The Jubilee set a Boston standard for musical mayhem that has not been surpassed by today’s rock extravaganzas or fourth of July Pops concerts.

The life of the Coliseum was brief. By 1876, it had disappeared to make way for the Museum of Fine Arts. By 1912, the old museum, too, was gone, replaced by the Copley Plaza. We can see the hotel in the new photo, with a flag flying from its roof, though it’s pretty much dwarfed by the enormous mirror-glass Hancock Tower, which arrived in the 1970s. The Hancock, lacking a facade of its own, gains a kind of cyber-facade by reflecting other structures, including two earlier Hancock buildings across Clarendon.

The Copley Square area developed into a cultural center more or less by accident. It was in the section of the Back Bay farthest from the Charles River and closest to the railroad tracks (today’s Amtrak and Mass. Pike corridor) and was regarded as less desirable for houses. Cultural institutions gradually gathered there: New Old South Church in 1875, Trinity Church in 1877, the Boston Public Library in 1895. With the arrival of the astonishing Hancock, it remains today one of America’s most remarkable collections of architecture."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Near Copley Square," Boston Globe, 11 July 1999

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Location

St. James Avenue & Claredon Street
Boston, MA 02116
United States

Nearby Items

Trinity Church		257 feet
John Hancock Tower		342 feet
Phillips Brooks		435 feet
Copley Square		536 feet
The Tortoise and the Hare		554 feet
John Singleton Copley		624 feet
Hancock Tower (near Trinity Church)		641 feet