CultureNOW - Hanover Street at Blackstone Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Hanover Street at Blackstone Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"Like a bar graph on a business report, this downtown Boston building marks the ups and downs of economics by gaining or losing height.

The older photo, made in 1933, shows the building at a proud five stories. The top floor is obviously an addition. No doubt it was added to gain rentable space during a time of economic prosperity – probably in the 1860s or ‘70s, judging by the floor’s slope-sided mansard architecture.

But 1933, of course, was not a prosperous period, so it’s not surprising that we see a. ‘Floors to Let’ sign at the third-floor level. The new photo helps us guess that these floors never were let. Made in 1988 from the same place, the photo shows our building reduced to three stories – decapitated, like many others in this old warehouse neighborhood, during the depressed 1930s and 1940s. The missing upper stories are replaced by a brash radio billboard; in the foreground, of course, is Haymarket on a Saturday morning.

The site is on Hanover Street between Blackstone (left) and Marshall (right). The chic Bostonian Hotel, visible beneath the Custom House Tower in the new photo, reminds us that Boston is once again prosperous. It isn’t impossible that our building will again grow taller, with an added floor or two like those now growing atop so many older downtown buildings.

You can make out a small blank square in the old photo, on the second-floor wall between the two big windows. It doesn’t look important, but like so many mysterious markings in older cities, it suggests an amazing amount of history.

In this square, until 1933, was set a carved wood panel, the so-called Painter’s Anns of Thomas Child. The panel is believed to have been made in England before 1700 and brought to Boston by Child about 1701, when he set up a paint shop on this comer. The wood panel was Child’s license to practice, so to speak, granted by the Painters’ Guild of England. It now resides in the collection of the Bostonian Society in the Old State House.

Behind the building, in an alley, is a more famous artifact of Child’s. This is the so-called Boston Stone, originally the grinding stone with which Child ground his pigments. In 1737, after Child’s death, the stone was found by a tavern keeper who inscribed the date and the words ‘Boston Stone’ into it and set it in his wall in imitation of the London Stone, from which distances from London were measured.

On the death of Child in 1706, he was eulogized by the celebrated Colonial diarist Judge Samuel Sewall in an early example of black humor: ‘This morning Tom Child, the Painter, died. Tom Child had often painted Death, But never to the Life, before: Doing it now, he’s out of Breath; He paints it once, and paints
no more.’"

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - The height report: The stories tell the economic tale," Boston Globe, 1988

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Location

Hanover Street & Blackstone Street
Boston, MA 02108
United States

Nearby Items

Haymarket Square		31 feet
Salem Street		40 feet
Asaroton		78 feet
Blackstone Block		326 feet
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway		387 feet
Cross Street		506 feet
Union Oyster House		515 feet