CultureNOW - Washington Street at School Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Washington Street at School Street

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
The corner of Washington and School streets has been near the nerve center of Boston for 300 years. The older photograph, by Josiah Johnson Hawes, shows it as a marvelous piece of streetscape in the 1860s. In the middle of the photograph is a row of buildings that look as though they have always been commercial yet that also resemble houses, giving this busy scene a domestic scale. Buildings of this era often
look almost as much like pages of text as works of architecture, either because names and quotations have been carved into them or, as in this case, because of signage. Here the signs are so well proportioned and positioned that they not only enhance the buildings but give them a curious kind of captioned quality, almost as if they were a cartoon chorus with speaking parts in the theater of the city.

The photograph is misleading in one way. Because Hawes' glass plates required such long exposure times, he tended to work in the early morning, when nobody was around. This practice gives to the city scenes of Hawes and other early photographers an atmosphere of eerie calm that leads us to assume old Boston was more serene than it really was. In the new photo, all is changed. You can now see the Old South Meetinghouse, revealed because the corner of School Street was carved back in a sweeping curve in the 1960s for a street realignment that never was carried out. Old South dates from 1729 and became a hotbed of revolutionary activity in the 1770s.
A century later, its congregation abandoned it for a new church in the Back Bay - called, logically, the New Old South Church -' with the intent of selling Old South Meetinghouse for demolition, but the plan was foiled by private citizens who raised $400,000 to save
the meetinghouse, now a museum.

Historians date the Boston preservation'movement from that action. To the left of the meetinghouse is the fine Old South office building of 1904 by Arthur Bowditch, who
also did the Berklee School of Music, on Boylston Street. Once a top Boston office address, the Old South building is i handsome exercise in buff brick and terracotta
trim in an eclectic mix of styles. Behind it rise the towers of the new Boston, the tallest of which is the Shawmut at One Federal Street, whose deep shadowed, top-floor windows announce the presence, behind them, of the Harvard Club. On the right of the photo is the facade of the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank, curving to match School Street, designed in concrete in a bold, Tinkertoy style by Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood,
architects of Boston City Hall.

The corner scene today is dramatic, but it is also fragmented, with abrupt, angular juxtapositions of big and small. It lacks the sense the old photograph gives [of an enclosed, cobblestone-carpeted outdoor urban room you can imagine yourself wanting to be in.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Old Corner Update", Boston Globe, 28 October 1984

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Location

Washington St & School St
Boston, MA 02130
United States

Nearby Items

School Street		11 feet
Old Corner Bookstore		22 feet
Ellis Mendell Elementary School Gateway Fence		0.3 miles
Mrs. Baez Serves Coffee on the Third Floor		0.5 miles
Life Around Here		0.5 miles
The Dinner		0.5 miles
Drift		0.8 miles