CultureNOW - Huntington Avenue at Dartmouth Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Huntington Avenue at Dartmouth Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"This is one of those pairs of photographs that make you want to cry. Every trace of life and interest has been ruthlessly stripped from this stretch of Huntington Avenue.

In both photos, we’re looking west from the corner of Dartmouth Street. The old photo dates from 1949 and shows, on both sides of Huntington, a pleasant array of buildings. Upstairs are apartments and some offices, with shops at the sidewalk. Nothing about these buildings is pretentious, but they display a rich variety of such detail as windows, cornices, shopfronts, and signage. Their facades are filled with elements that are about the size of a human being. Looking up at a bay window, you can easily imagine yourself standing inside it. As you walk along the sidewalk at the left, each window and door invites your attention and enlivens your experience. The shopfronts and signs are visibly the expression of many small human initiatives. They have a complexity that promises mystery and intrigue.

It’s hard to imagine anyone, by contrast, walking willingly along that sidewalk as we see it photographed in 1989. The whole block is now one blank entity, the expression of corporate power and regimentation rather than of multiple personal initiatives. Much of it is devoted to the auto drop-off of one of the hotels of Copley Place, a use that produces nothing at the sidewalk but a row of shadowy voids. Even the street itself has been degraded. Gone is the rhythm of street lights down the center, each resembling a human figure. Instead, an uncrossable wall and moat divide one side of the street from the other. As pedestrians, we feel this is no world for us.

There are lessons in these photos. The quality of city life has a lot to do with things as simple as the size of lots. If a whole block is one building lot – as it is on the left in the new photo – the chance of human interest and variety is reduced, regardless of the talents of the architect. And on a commercial street like this one, if there are no retail uses along the sidewalk, the sidewalk dies. Finally, if a street is designed as nothing but a conduit for traffic – rather than as a setting for life and commerce – it is doomed."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Huntington Avenue: Commercial Messages," Boston Globe, 1989

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Location

Huntington Avenue & Dartmouth Street
Boston, MA 02116
United States

Nearby Items

Art and Science		267 feet
Boston Public Library		317 feet
Kahlil Gibran Memorial		347 feet
Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel		354 feet
Back Bay Station		576 feet
Copley Place		577 feet
The Tortoise and the Hare		648 feet