CultureNOW - Quincy Market, Interior: Peter Vanderwarker

Quincy Market, Interior

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Boston's longest corridor is really an indoor street, lined with shopping stalls on both sides. Greek Doric columns separate the stalls and transform the building into a ceremonial arcade almost like the nave of a church. The building is one that few
Bostonians will fail to recognize: Since 1976, when it reopened, Quincy Market has been among the most visited places in the world.

Quincy Market began in 1826 as an expansion of Boston's wholesale produce market, which until then had been housed in the basement of Faneuil Hall. It was popularly called Quincy Market after Mayor Josiah Quincy, who built it. The architect was Alexander Parris, who also designed the Rope Walk at the Charlestown Navy Yard. Parris chose the architectural style known as Greek Revival, placing Parthenon-like temple fronts at both ends of his building.

Two blocks of warehouses were built at the same time, at Quincy Market's north and south sides, to serve the Market. In the 1970s, all three buildings were restored by the city and converted by the Rouse Company (as developer) and Benjamin Thompson (as architect) into Faneuil Hall Marketplace, the first of the "festival marketplaces" that Rouse has since cloned all over the country. The old photo was made in 1910 by D. W.
Butterfield, the new one last November. They show that although the Market has lost its old pungency, it has kept its physical form.

The transformation from the wholesaling of meat to the retail purveyance of snacks and takeouts has in some ways made today's Quincy Market a packaged, trivial representation of what it once was. But to say that is to ignore the Market's real success, which isn't so much selling food as it is providing Boston with a new pedestrian Main Street, a place where the locals and the tourists can mingle in a truly public world - a place, too, where the timorous suburbanite can learn again, without risk, to love the busy turmoil of city life.

The people in the new photo all work in the Market. They are (from left) Liz Jordan and Justin Cronin (of Doe Sullivan Old Market & Co. Inc., butcher); Sandy Dawson (of J. P. Aboody Inc., Syrian food); Betty Goodness (of E. N. West Co. Meats, butcher); David Isaacson (of market management); Steve Bourloukas (of Brown Derby Deli); Paul Stevenson (of Au Bon Pain bakery); and Bernie Manzoli (of The Black Forest) .

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Meating Place",Boston Globe, 19 January 1985

map not available at this time.

Location

Congress St & North St
Boston, MA 02109
United States

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