CultureNOW - Summer Street (Great Fire): Peter Vanderwarker

Summer Street (Great Fire)

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
The most traumatic event in the history of Boston architecture began on the evening of Saturday, November 9, 1872, in a four-story granite building at 83-85 Summer Street. The Great Boston Fire burned down 776 buildings, nearly all of them made of brick or stone. It virtually demolished what was then the newer part of downtown commercial Boston, leaving only the older area around State and Broad streets intact. The fire occurred only one year after two even worse disasters, the great Chicago fire and a
forest fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. The Peshtigo fire killed more people than any
other in American history. Americans in the early 1870s must have wondered
whether the day of judgment was at hand.

A special difficulty in fighting the Boston fire was the narrowness of the streets. After the rubble was cleaned up, Boston's planners seized the opportunity to straighten or widen many of them, including Washington, Federal, Franklin, Chauncy, Congress, and Summer. In both these photos - the old one, made right after the fire, and the new one, made in 1987 - we are looking down Summer Street, in the direction of the waterfront,
with the intersection of Summer, Arch, and Chauncy in the foreground.

In the 1872 photo, the city looks almost like a cemetery. Chimneys and fragments of walls stick up from the ground like tombstones. A few horses and men, blurred by the long exposure, are barely visible wandering among the rubble. It's hard to believe that within three years of this photo, the district was completely rebuilt according to new,
stricter codes meant to make the buildings fireproof.

The new photo shows a Summer Street that can charitably be described as in transition. Ugly, faceless buildings - a blank little bank at lower left, the CVS
pharmacy across from it, and the gigantic 100 Summer Street in the background -
disrupt the human scale of the older Victorian streetscape. The construction work in the lower foreground is a project to extend the length of the Washington Street Red Line station.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Summer Street and the Great Fire of 1872",Boston Globe, 1987

map not available at this time.

Location

Summer St & Chauncy St
Boston, MA 02110
United States

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