CultureNOW - Old Howard: Peter Vanderwarker

Old Howard

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
The Center Plaza office building, shown in the newer of these two photographs, is undoubtedly one of the best and most humanly scaled of the many buildings that rose in and around Boston's Government Center during the 1960s. It is a skyscraper that is lying on its side, and its long, slow horizontal curve pleasingly outlines the base of Beacon Hill, while its red brick and precast concrete recall the brick and limestone of older buildings. But its blank giantism, so typical of our era, still fares badly in comparison with the rich clutter of texture and detail, the busy street life, that filled this site at the time - maybe about 1910 - when the older photograph was made. So completely has this part of old Boston been erased that it is hard to believe both photos were shot from exactly the same point.

The vanished street is Howard Street, and its centerpiece, of course, is the Old Howard, the most celebrated burlesque house in the history of the United States. The Howard's fame probably had more to do with its location in puritanical Boston than with any special sizzle in its performers. Many Bostonians still fondly recall the Howard - "beloved," as the historian Walter Whitehill so deftly put it, "by generations of bums, sailors, and Harvard undergraduates." Few probably know of the theater's bizarre beginnings. Its history dates to 1843, when a fundamentalist preacher named William Miller and his followers built a wooden tabernacle here so Miller would have a place from which to preach his message, which was that the Second Coming would occur between March 1843 and March 1844. When the great event failed to happen, the Millerites drifted away, and their tabernacle became a theater called the Howard Athenaeum.

To quote Whitehill again: "A lingering Puritan prejudice against the supposed wickedness of the stage caused Boston theater operators to choose names that implied intellectual elevation." The original Howard Athenaeum burned in 1846 and was replaced by a Gothic stone structure designed by Isaiah Rogers, the architect of
Commercial Wharf. The Howard almost justified its name in the early years, when its stage was home to operas by Verdi -and Mozart. But it soon slipped downhill into a showcase for jugglers and performing monkeys and eventually into a legendary striptease palace. It was demolished after a fire in 1961; the plaque in the lower left of the newer photo identifies the site of the Howard's stage.

An encouraging sign of changing attitudes is the fact that Center Plaza's owner, the Beacon Companies, recently asked architects Fred Koetter and Susie Kim to come up with ideas for enriching the building's exterior appearance and the quality of its public spaces. Design studies are in progress.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Vanishing Act",Boston Globe ,30 September, 1984

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Location

Howard St & Hampden St
Boston, MA 02119
United States

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