CultureNOW - Fiske Building : Peabody & Stearns and Peter Vanderwarker

Fiske Building

Architect
Peabody & Stearns

Dates

Constructed, 1888
Renovation, 1964

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
The tackiest renovation ever perpetrated on a major Boston building is the main subject of these photographs. The victim is the Fiske Building, the tall building left of center in both photos. The old photo (circa 1900) shows the Fiske as it appeared when it was built in 1888. It was designed by the noted Boston firm of Peabody and Stearns, in the burly granite style made popular by the celebrated architect H. H. Richardson. The Fiske was a handsome feature of State Street until 1964, when owner Maurice Gordon stripped its granite facing and replaced the stone with blue and black metal panels.

Gordon didn't stop there; he chopped off the building's dramatic, mansarded, chimneyed top and replaced it with five more floors of offices in the balconied style of cut-rate beachfront motel. The result may be the ugliest building in Boston. Just beyond the defaced Fiske you can see, in both photos, another mistreated Peabody and Stearns building. This is the former Boston Stock Exchange, at 53 State, which was erected in 1891 - just three years after the Fiske, which it resembles. In 1979, developers proposed to demolish the Exchange for a high-rise tower, but a vocal preservation lobby intervened. Eventually, a compromise much like Solomon's was reached: The rear of the Exchange would be chopped off, and the new tower would be built in its place, leaving the front of the old Stock Exchange to stand alone as a somewhat forlorn relic.

This compromise has now been implemented. The new tower, called Exchange Place, rears its 40 stories of mirrored glass behind the gutted Stock Exchange like a gleaming Niagara behind a quaint ferryboat. Also visible in the new photo, on the right, is a dark tower of offices: the grim, Darth-Vader-like One Boston Place. In the center, above the Stock Exchange, is the more cheerful Devonshire Towers, a residential high rise. There is now a proposal to demolish the abused corpse of the Fiske Building and replace it with a five story shopping arcade, which would lead back to a new, modest, 22-story office building. The designers would be Graham Gund Associates. The plan would be a small recompense to Peabody and Stearns, because it would open up a view down State Street to yet another of that firm's contributions to the architecture of Boston: the Custom House Tower.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Facing the Future",Boston Globe, 17 February 1985

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Location

87 State Street
Boston, MA 02109
United States

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