CultureNOW - Tremont Street at Mason Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Tremont Street at Mason Street

There are no podcasts available.

Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Fans of Walter Muir Whitehill, the author of Boston: A Topographical History - probably the best book written on the architecture and physical form of the city - may recognize the top photograph. In Whitehill's book it appears cropped into a rectangle; here it looks as it did when it was made by Josiah Hawes, around 1860. Hawes' subject is colonnade Row, a line of 19 houses designed by Charles Bulfinch and built in 1810. Colonnade Row filled Tremont Street from West Street to Mason Street. Whitehill, who died in 1978, wrote in his book, "This row for several decades remained one of the most agreeable places to live in Boston, for from its windows occupants ,looked out across the Common to distant water, hills and the sunsets of a western sky."

Colonnade Row is an example of what is called the Federal style of architecture, so named only because it happened to coincide with the early years of federal government
in the United States. The Federal style derives pretty directly from the work of the Scottish architect Robert Adam - sometimes called Adam style - and is usually, as it is here, a very flat, light, delicate kind of architecture in which the details, lacking any sense of heaviness or bulk, seem almost to be drawn on the building. Bulfinch's Faneuil Hall, State House, and University Hall at Harvard are other well-known examples of the Federal style, as are the houses of Samuel McIntire in Salem. The buildi1}gs on Colonnade Row have a more European look than some of the others and could easily be mistaken for an Adam-style square in Dublin.

Hawes used a wide-angle lens that was smaller than his 8-by-10-inch format, creating a circular image within dark borders. The new photograph imitates Hawes' technique
and his 30-second exposure. All of these Bulfinch , houses, of course, are gone. This area of Tremont Street is certainly one of the finest building sites in Boston, yet for some reason, in recent years it has never held a collection of buildings remotely equal to its potential. The tall building farthest away in the photograph is the ungainly and offensive Tremont-on-the-Common apartment block. The nearest structure, partly cut off, is the Masonic Building (899), the next (with canopy) is the former Edison Building, which is now being renovated, and the third from the right is the rather handsome, 10-story Ditson Building (1916).

Some of Tremont Street's buildings are good individually, but many others aren't. As a group they fail to create the row of tall, strong presences that ought to be looking out over the Common and Public Garden.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Gone but not Forgotten", Boston Globe, 2 Septembre 1984

map not available at this time.

Location

West St & Tremont St
Boston, MA 02111
United States

Nearby Items

Learning, Religion and Industry		140 feet
Declaration of Independence Tablet		237 feet
Temple Place		334 feet
Commodore John Barry Memorial		382 feet
Brewer Fountain		595 feet
Boston Massacre & Crispus Attucks Monument		704 feet
Celebration of the Underground		822 feet