CultureNOW - Longwood Medical Area, Children's Hospital: Peter Vanderwarker

Longwood Medical Area, Children's Hospital

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
From grazing cows to construction cranes: What pair of images could sum up better the recent history of the Longwood medical area? The old photograph dates from 1914. The big building with the dome is the new home of Children's Hospital, which moved that year from an earlier location on Huntington Avenue, next to Symphony Hall. This was a time when all kinds of institutions were gathering in the Fenway/Parker Hill neighborhood. Fenway Court (now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) and New
England Baptist Hospital came in 1903, Harvard Medical School in 1906, New England Deaconess in 1907, Peter Bent Brigham in 1913. And many more.

Why did they flock here? When you look at the new photograph, there is irony in the
explanation that Children's offered at the time. The hospital announced that it needed "less expensive land in a part of the city ... where the air is purer and the noise and jar less.» Grass, sun, and air were valued in those days, before hospitals became efficient mechanized factories for processing the sick. It's pleasant to fantasize that the cows are working to provide fresh daily milk for the children. In both views, we're looking south across Longwood Avenue. Today's construction site will become a six-story, 652-car parking garage, designed for Children's Hospital by Payette Associates. It will be a quiet building, with a facade of brick and granite, and with retail food service along the sidewalk.

The new structure will replace a garage built only 30 years ago, much admired at the time for an engineering technique called "post-tensioning." The steel tension cables are now so eroded by salt that the garage is near collapse. The last time anyone checked, the Longwood area, with 26,000 employees in 20 institutions (including five colleges), was the 14th largest (downtown" in the United States. Longwood's rate of growth is such that it gains a mill.ion and a half square feet of floor area per decade: the equivalent of adding one John Hancock Tower every 10 years. Medical research, rather than direct care, is the biggest function. Somehow, the buildings get shoehorned in. Except for traffic planning, there is little coordination. Each institution does its own thing. But the resulting sense of a family of strong individuals, all jostling and elbowing one another, has its own kind of appeal.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Longwood Medical Area", Boston Globe, 22 January 1995

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Location

Brookline Ave & Longwood Ave
Boston, MA 02215
United States

Nearby Items

Beth Israel Hospital Shapiro Clinical Center		610 feet
Center for Life Science \| Boston		876 feet
Harvard Medical School		0.2 miles
Human Nature		0.2 miles
Butterflies in the Francis Street Garden		0.2 miles
Boston Latin School		0.3 miles
Harvard Medical School, New Research Building		0.4 miles