CultureNOW - Harvard Square, T Station: Peter Vanderwarker

Harvard Square, T Station

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"Before there was a Big Dig, there was a Little Dig – although it didn’t seem so little at the time. From 1979 through 1984, Harvard Square was virtually disemboweled. The MBTA’s Red Line, which had terminated at Harvard, was being extended to Porter Square, Davis Square, and Fresh Pond.

The old photo shows Harvard Square at the worst of the upheaval. It reminds you of a medieval painting, with the earth perched precariously above a dark pit, where demons are ready to suck you down into damnation. The new photo shows – in the same location as that excavation – an area everyone calls ‘the Pit.’ It’s a paved, partly sunken area used mostly by teens, who have taken it over as their own public square. The name is either a coincidence or perhaps an unconscious memory of the days when the square was a gaping hole.

In the background, the buildings appear unchanged. Only the bank name has disappeared. But in truth, the square has changed enormously in the years since the Red Line extension, morphing from a sleepy, funky college downtown into a sort of outdoor mall of national brand out lets.

The architects who designed the new Harvard Square were the Boston office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (now defunct). They redid not only the underground station but also almost the whole surface of Harvard and Brattle squares, introducing new and wider brick sidewalks, kiosks, granite planters, lighting, and sculpture.

Most of us refer to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority system of buses and subways simply as the T. Few realize that the name is a fairly recent coinage. The inventors of the term were another firm of architects, who call themselves the Cambridge Seven. Cambridge Seven Associates established much of the visual imagery of today’s MBTA in a brilliant design study done in 1968. The firm invented not only the T logo but also the color coding of the train lines – Red Line, Green Line, and so on - in imitation of the system in London. The name T derived from the architects’ observation that many relevant words began with that letter: transportation, train, ticket, trolley, tram, toll, etc. The firm also created the long-familiar (but now, alas, disappearing) yellow-stripe color scheme for T buses. The Seven’s color-coded maps, regularly updated, are still in use, and the ‘HARVARD: TO TRAINS AND BUSES’ sign in the new photo (badly in need of repair) is rendered in the Helvetica font the Seven picked for all the T graphics, a choice that has been widely imitated."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Harvard Square," Boston Globe, 2002

"Harvard Square may be the most vital little downtown in America. In its few blocks, it packs more life than most whole cities: 17 bookstores, 50 restaurants, and just about everything else.

The Square works because Harvard trusts it. The university has never had its own student union or bookstore. It doesn't hide behind monastic walls. Instead, like its European counterparts - the Sorbonne, in France, or Oxford, in England - it reaches out to engage the ordinary commercial life of the city. Usually, you can't quite tell where Cambridge ends and Harvard begins, a fact that has sometimes caused friction. But, always, it has energized both town and gown.

Christopher Alexander, a sharp observer of cities, once wrote: "When a university is built up as a campus, separated by a hard boundary from the town, it tends to isolate its students from the townspeople, and in a subtle way takes on the character of a glorified high school." Case in point: UMass, either Amherst or Boston. By contrast, Harvard, for all its elitism, has always been a participant in the city's life. The photos depict the hub of Harvard Square in 1920 and today. They show Cambridge, as usual, bucking a national trend: The Square has traded away cars in favor of pedestrians.

The change occurred a dozen years ago, when the META tore up the Square to rebuild the underground Red Line station. Cambridge grabbed the chance to reroute traffic and open up space for pedestrians. Such districts usually fail in the United States, because our culture just doesn't generate enough pedestrians to keep these districts alive. Thanks to students, that's hardly a problem in Harvard Square.

A round brick subway kiosk fills the foreground of the older view. It was the earliest of three kiosks here. Probably, it was removed to permit a street widening. The second one -was the copper-vaulted gem we can see behind the tour bus in the new photo. The copper kiosk isn't a subway entrance . anymore. It's now the home of the legendary Out of Town News (address: Zero Harvard Square). The third entrance isn't much more than a dark stairway into the nether world. It can be seen between those two mysterious cylinders, of which the one on the left is an information booth and the one on the right a subway elevator for the disabled. Random disorganization is the message of the new photo.

Scattered with disparate objects, the Square looks like a dining- room table after a meal. Behind all the confusion looms Harvard's Lehman Hall (1925). Once the university bursar's office, Lehman, which is now a dining hall, is typical of Harvard architecture: unashamedly stagy. Its eight fancy white pilasters seem to be glued like makeup onto the face of the building - but they work, giving an otherwise modest building a big public scale. Like a billboard, the facade announces the presence of the university to the Square and evokes the presence of the old colonial landmarks, situated behind Lehman in the Yard, that are the arcfiitectural essence of Harvard."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Twon Meets Gown", Boston Globe, 1992

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Location

Brattle St & Massachusetts Ave
Boston, MA 02138
United States

Nearby Items

New England Decorative Arts		102 feet
Out of Town News		147 feet
Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe		183 feet
Omphalos		200 feet
Blue Sky on the Red Line		200 feet
Gateway to Knowledge		200 feet
New Palmer		215 feet