CultureNOW - Milk Street at Hawley Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Milk Street at Hawley Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"It’s not hard to date the older of these two photos. The bunting on the building at the right front is the giveaway. The year is 1876, and Boston, along with the entire nation, is celebrating the American centennial.

Everything we see in this older photo was brand-new at the time. That is because 1876 came only four years after the Great Boston Fire of November 1872, which consumed 776 buildings, including the entire south side of Milk Street. That side is what we are looking along in the photos, both made from the corner of Arch Street. The new photo dates from 1988.

Probably there never was a more ornate display of Victorian grandeur in Boston than the older row of buildings. The low block nearest to us is handsome but fairly ordinary for the time. Beyond it rises a pale pile in the French style, decked out with pilasters and arches and climbing to a spectacularly complicated mansard roof. This is the Equitable Building, designed by the prolific architect Arthur Gilman. Not surprisingly, Gilman was also one of the architects of Old City Hall, a building in much the same French style as this one. Napoleon m and his planner, Baron Haussmann, had recently created famous boulevards and monuments in Paris – the Paris Opera opened in 1875 – and architecture a la Francaise was, briefly, all the vogue in Boston.

A bit farther down is what appears to be a white mansard-roofed building with a pointed tower. It’s really two more insurance companies side by side: Mutual of New York (which has the tower) and New England Mutual Life. What we see in this old photo is the pride and pleasure that corporate owners once took – and, today, are once again beginning to take – in dressing up their buildings with architectural ornament. These three insurance companies are dressed to kill.

The new photo, as so often in Boston, shows every building gone. The replacements are for the most part not ugly, but they certainly lack the zest of their predecessors. Dominating the view at the far end is One Post Office Square, an office high-rise with some good interiors but a boxy exterior of flat precast concrete that tries to make up in bulk what it lacks in delight."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Milk Street: Corporate Identity," Boston Globe, 1988

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Location

Milk Street & Hawley Street
Boston, MA 02109
United States

Nearby Items

Tontine Crescent		131 feet
Old South Meeting House		331 feet
Newspaper Row (Washington Street)		409 feet
Boston Downtown		409 feet
Boston Irish Famine Memorial		416 feet
Boston Five Cents Savings Bank		474 feet
Bromfield Street		637 feet