CultureNOW - Chauncy Street at Bedford Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Chauncy Street at Bedford Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"A Boston Edison substation stands where a church once stood. We’re looking south along Chauncy Street in Boston. The old photo must date from shortly before the Great Fire of 1872, which wiped out every building the photo depicts.

The church is Rowe Street Baptist. Built in 1847, it was an early Boston example of the Gothic Revival style. We haven’t identified the architect. A guess would be Patrick Keeley, a Brooklynite who did hundreds of churches, including some 30 in the Boston area.

The substation in the new photo arrived about 1990. It’s an example of the style called postmodern, in which new buildings dress like old ones but in cheaper clothes. It has a base at the bottom and a cornice at the top, as do traditional buildings. But the base is split-faced concrete block, not the rough granite it imitates, and the cornice is factory-cast concrete rather than cut stone. If you look closely at the photo, you may see a repeated circle-in-a-rectangle motif in the substation’s cornice. That’s copied from a detail in the facade of the turn-of-the-century building in the background. And the rough base may be intended as a memory of the powerful stonework on the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanical Association, at right in the older photo.

Such gestures are meant to be polite tips of the hat to the past and to the surrounding context. But in this case, they’re too weak to work. What Edison really looks like is a tomb or a secret society. Its fake windows, filled with bricks, say ‘Keep Out’ louder than if there were no windows at all. Set back from the street like a fort, behind a parking lot that resembles a moat, the substation is a scary preview of what many new buildings may look like as they respond to the threat of terrorism.

A pleasant feature of the old photo is the strip of cobbles down the middle of the street: an urban carpet runner, reminding us that a street is a city’s hallway. And the plain houses gain dignity from their front-door porticoes. House meets sidewalk with the elegance of a polished leather shoe."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Chauncey Street," Boston Globe, 24 November 1996

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Location

Chauncy Street & Bedford Street
Boston, MA 02111
United States

Nearby Items

Chauncy Street		156 feet
The Proctor Building		497 feet
Summer Street (Great Fire)		567 feet
Washington Street at West Street		833 feet
Washington Street at Lafayette Place		916 feet
Boston Bricks		926 feet
Ritz and Paramount		936 feet