CultureNOW - Chauncy Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Chauncy Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
The beautiful photograph of old Boston shows vividly the importance of hats and faces on buildings. Each of the buildings is wearing a hat, as a building should when it appears in public - especially in a climate like Boston's. The most important buildings possess the tallest and fanciest hats, the tallest of all being the cupola of First Church, silhouetted against the sky toward the right of the photo. To the left of the church, the Massachusetts Charitable Merchants Association wears a dignified hat with a curved,
sloping shape known as a mansard roof.

Sensibly enough, the plainest hats belong to the plainest buildings, which are the houses toward the left of the photo. At the time of the 1860 photograph, Chauncy Street was a fashionable residential district. We're looking north from its intersection with
Exeter and Rowe places, which still exist. There's more going on in these old buildings. Beneath the hats are something much like faces, including a few windows that seem to possess the architectural equivalents of eyebrows and lashes.

We're reminded of the way a small child draws a house: with a roof that is like a hat, two windows like eyes, and a door like a mouth. Buildings with faces are ones we feel we can relate to. A city made of them is welcoming, like a society of creatures not
unlike ourselves. The new photograph, made in 1990, shows a much-changed scene. Though the photo was taken from virtually the same spot (actually a few yards farther north, at the comer of Bedford Street), it is hard to see any similarity to the scene of 130 years earlier. Poor Chauncy Street has been reduced to little more than a service alley for the vast Jordan Marsh and Lafayette Place complex, seen at left.

Faceless and hatless, these new buildings fail in any way to engage our sympathy or imagination. Peeking over them, at the very top center of the photo, is a new office tower at 101 Arch Street. It does sport a flat hat and a round clock face, both weak gestures of
respect for the past.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Losing Face",Boston Globe, 13 January 1991

map not available at this time.

Location

Chauncy St & Bedford St
Boston, MA 02111
United States

Nearby Items

Chauncy Street at Bedford Street		156 feet
The Proctor Building		555 feet
Summer Street (Great Fire)		722 feet
Washington Street at West Street		781 feet
Washington Street at Lafayette Place		835 feet
Ritz and Paramount		863 feet
The Paramount Center		922 feet