CultureNOW - Kenmore Square: Peter Vanderwarker

Kenmore Square

There are no podcasts available.

Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Except for the Citgo sign in the sky . and a mob of marathoners on the earth, not much has changed in the later of these two views of Kenmore Square. The first dates from 1914 and the second from this past Patriots Day.

Kenmore Square has always been a kind of junction box in the street plan of Boston. It's the place where three big roads meet: Beacon Street (right foreground), Commonwealth Avenue (left foreground), and Brookline Avenue (disappearing to the right). For anyone journeying into town. from the west - from Brookline, Brighton, or
Newton - Kenmore Square is the place where the real Boston begins, especially since it has long been the point at which the subway first disappears underground.

Most of the buildings of today are already present in the 1914 photograph. The most interesting is probably the one with big windows that holds up the Citgo sign. This is the Peerless Motor Car Building of 1911, headquarters and showroom of an automaker, one of the first chunks of an "automobile row" that eventually stretched from Kenmore Square to Packard's Comer (Brighton and Commonwealth avenues) in Allston. Today the former Peerless building houses the Boston University Bookstore.
The other structures in 1914 were town houses or apartments dating from 1890 through 1910. The square became more commercial after 1912, the year Fenway Park
opened, only two blocks away on Brookline Avenue. Eventually, like other diagonal intersections of major streets - Times Square is the classic case - Kenmore
evolved into an entertainment center. Such intersections are also ideal locations for billboards.

A Boston icon presides over Kenmore Square. The huge neon Citgo sign, visible from up and down the Charles River and from inside Fenway Park, was to be scrapped in
1983. A group of citizens petitioned the Boston Landmarks Commission to save it. The commission praised the sign but chose not to declare it a landmark. However, the
resulting publicity led the advertiser to save and restore it. Still less than 30 years old, the Citgo sign today is regarded as an important relic of America's industrial heyday.

Kenmore Square has been so named only since 1932.Before that it was Governor's Square, and still earlier it was Sewall's Point. In ever-changing Boston, Sewall's Point
was the only solid land in a tidal salt marsh that became, when filled, the neighborhood we call the Back Bay.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Crossroads",Boston Globe, 1990

map not available at this time.

Location

Beacon St & Commonwealth Ave
Boston, MA 02215
United States

Nearby Items

Kenmore Square at Commonwealth Ave		736 feet
Boston University, Center for Student Services		869 feet
Bay State Road/ Back Bay West		0.2 miles
Fenway Park at Lansdowne Street		0.3 miles
Charlesgate (The Beacon Entrance)		0.3 miles
Explosion		0.3 miles
Dream Catching: Phil David Phine Memorial		0.3 miles