CultureNOW - Boylston Street near the Common: Peter Vanderwarker

Boylston Street near the Common

There are no podcasts available.

Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Here we see elephants heading in one direction, Celtics in the other. Both the herd and the team are on Boylston Street beside the Common, always a good place for a parade. The circus procession was photographed in 1901 by T. E. Man. The newer view is of the Boston Celtics in a triumphal motorcade on June 14 of this year, after the team won its fifteenth National Basketball Association championship in 28 years.

Because of its many music shops, this stretch of Boylston has long been known as Piano Row. The 1901 photo shows at least· one store that sells pianos. The vacant lot is the site of the old Boston Public Library, and the crane on it belongs to Norcross Brothers, the contractors who built all of H. H. Richardson's buildings, among many others. Norcross is at work here on the new Colonial Building, containing the Colonial Theatre. The Colonial's architect, Clarence H. Blackall, designed 12 Boston theaters, including the Wilbur and, with collaborators, the Metropolitan, which is now the
Wang Center for the Performing Arts. As the new photo demonstrates, Blackall's elegant Colonial Building still stands, its lavishly decorated theater now being the city's oldest theater that has survived intact.

Next to the Colonial, on the far left in the new photo, is the 1916 Little Building, which replaced the mansarded Pelham Hotel. Blackall also designed the Little, imitating
the Gothic style of the 1913 Woolworth Building in New York. One of Boston's better office buildings, the Little has an urbane arcade at street level and a facade
of dark bay windows set in a white terra-cotta framethat becomes almost lacy at the top. The two Blackall designed buildings make a fine pair, alike in height and scale but very different in style and exactly opposite in tone - one black on white, one white on black.

A special beauty of the older photo is the orderly city it reveals. From any high window in Boston you could see, as you do here, church steeples rising dark against the gray ring of hills in the distance. In the foreground, the buildings fronting Boylston are drawn up like a row of somewhat unruly troops at attention, making a kind of informal honor guard for the parade. In the nineteenth century, city buildings resembled the human form: narrow and vertical in shape, with some kind of special treatment of the top and bottom floors that always suggests hats and boots. Windows then were eye-like orifices through which intelligences might be looking out - very different from the blank
walls of some recent buildings. The two photos show that not much has changed
on Piano Row. The Ritz-Carlton and its addition are a new presence in the middle distance, and the Hancock looms above the Little. This is still a fine, characteristic
chunk of Boston.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Piano Row",Boston Globe, 5 August 1984

map not available at this time.

Location

Boylston St & Tremont St
Boston, MA 02116
United States

Nearby Items

Tremont Street at Boylston Street		79 feet
Text Walk		326 feet
LaGrange Street		381 feet
Ditson Co. Building		386 feet
Cutler Majestic Theatre		739 feet
Colors on the Line		786 feet
Washington Street at Boylston Street		849 feet