CultureNOW - Tremont Street at Boylston Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Tremont Street at Boylston Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"Our forebears thought of buildings as being something like books lined up on a bookshelf, with signs like titles on their spines. The metaphor is clear in the older view of Tremont Street at the corner of Boylston. It’s an engaging concept that has disappeared from our culture. Buildings don’t have titles anymore, and, of course, they’re bigger.

The buildings nearest us, in the 1904 view, are mostly about music – Weber Pianos, Haines Pianos, Estey Organs – reminding us that this stretch of Tremont, along with the adjacent block of Boylston Street, was long known as ‘Piano Row.’ Some of the other signs, too small to be read in the reproduction, are amusingly mysterious. What went on at Dr. Doyle & Co.? What were the ‘socials classes’ at the Dancing Academy? What on earth was the ‘King Dodo’ storefront? What did they do to you at the Dental Depot?
Maybe some of our older readers can help. Some things do remain the same. The building at extreme right, the Masonic Lodge, dedicated in 1899, is the third Masonic structure to occupy this corner site. A blank-faced nine-story granite block, it’s handsome, but, at such a major intersection, it’s also painfully dead. The late Ed Logue, a Boston planning czar, coveted the site, and once said he had never seen anyone enter or leave the lodge. Also still in service is the subway kiosk, built in 1897 as part of America’s first underground transit line. The kiosk was much criticized at the time for looking like a mausoleum.

This part of Boston is now dominated by - the enormous Millennium Place development of apartment towers, hotels, and cinemas, still not quite finished. But Millennium Place has a surprisingly modest presence on Tremont. It pokes out shyly among older buildings and announces itself only by the ‘Loews Theatres’ signs. The other new actor here is Emerson College, which owns several structures near this corner, including the landmark Little Building, now converted to dorms (from a window of which the new photo was made). The students bring welcome life to a corner that needed it. One wonders, though, what the decorous figures in the old photo would think of the nose rings and pierced tongues they would encounter here today."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Where Tremont meets Boylston," Boston Globe, 2001

"The Hotel Pelham at the corner of Tremont and Boylston streets is often identified as the first apartment house in America. Despite its name, it wasn’t a hotel for transients but a permanent dwelling. All its apartments were flats, a newfangled idea in the Boston of the time-the time being 1857. ‘French flats,’ people called them, and indeed everything about the Pelham is Parisian, from the mansard roof on top to the shops down at the street level. It was a moment when the new Second Empire of Louis Napoleon was
in vogue.

The Pelham dominates the older of these photos. The photo must have been made sometime before 1869, because that was the year in which – astonishing as it seems – the heavy stone building was jacked up and slid back 15 feet (rightward in the photo) to accommodate a widening of Tremont Street. Moving buildings was once more frequent than it is now. In Cambridge, there used to be a saying: ‘You’d better get up early, before the houses begin to move.’ Overhead telephone lines, more than anything else now make such efforts next to impossible.

The new photo was made from the same spot in 1988. Literally everything has disappeared. In place of the Pelham, whose architect is not known, stands the Little Building, a fine office building of 1926 designed by a firm headed by one of Boston’s notable designers, Clarence Blackall, who also created Tremont Temple, the Wilbur Theatre, the Music Hall (Wang Center), and the marvelous Wmthrop Building on
Washington Street.

Subtler than it appears at first, the Little has a fairly richly modeled surface of shallow bay windows. The white terra-cotta shafts between the windows are picked out with Gothic detail. They contrast with the windows and especially with the dark metal panels above and below the windows, giving an effect of light and shade to this north-facing wall. Inside, a two-story arcade, overlooked by a mezzanine, extends along the shop-lined sidewalk into the building."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Tremont and Boylston: Disappearing Act," Boston Globe, 1988

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Location

Tremont Street & Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02116
United States

Nearby Items

Boylston Street near the Common		79 feet
Ditson Co. Building		308 feet
Text Walk		354 feet
LaGrange Street		459 feet
Colors on the Line		752 feet
Cutler Majestic Theatre		817 feet
Washington Street at Boylston Street		825 feet