CultureNOW - Causeway Street at Beverly Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Causeway Street at Beverly Street

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"The old photo has a film noir atmosphere, a bombed-out, after-the-war look. You sense that spies are lurking and dark deeds are being hatched among the shadows beneath the tangle of overhead steel girders. Scenes like this appear today, over and over, in rock videos. They express the magnetism that has always drawn young people to cities: to their risk, their mystery, their complexity.

What we’re actually seeing, in the older photo, is the construction, in about 1900, of an elevated transit platform. That same platform stands in the center of the 1996 photo, but it’s now in the early stages of being taken down. We’re looking along Causeway Street toward the Charles River. The platform is the familiar Green Line stop at North Station. Beyond it rise the twin towers of Longfellow Place. The plan is to relocate the tracks underground. Once, this platform served a much wider network than it does now. You could ride elevated trains all the way along the harborfront, down Commercial Street and Atlantic Avenue to South Station, or across the river to Charlestown.

A full century divides the old view from the new. During that century, industrial artifacts like this have passed through three stages. At first, they were admired as the latest technological wonders. Later, they came to be despised as hideous scars on the body of the city. Today, they’re often remembered with nostalgia. An elevated station much like this one, the old Northampton stop on Boston's Orange
Line, is now literally a museum piece. It resides at the Seashore Trolley Museum, in Kennebunkport,
Maine, where you can visit it as a treasured relic of a past era.

Notice the granite, castlelike tower at right center in the older photo. It’s one of two towers that graced the Fitchburg Depot, built in 1843. Cape Codders of today may recognize it. Jenny Lind, the ‘Swedish Nightingale,’ sang at Fitchburg Depot in the 1850s, and one of its towers now stands in Truro, as a memorial to her."

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Location

Causeway Street & Beverly Street
Boston, MA 02114
United States

Nearby Items

Telltale LIghts		519 feet
North Station		522 feet
Causeway Street at North Washington Street		678 feet
TD Bank North Garden		699 feet
Currents		702 feet
The Sports Museum		731 feet
Causeway Street at Canal Street		759 feet