CultureNOW - Mattapan Square: Peter Vanderwarker

Mattapan Square

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
In the more recent of these photographs, the chief inhabitants of Mattapan Square appear to be the gracefully winged light standards, as if a squadron of Martians were touching down on the site. The photograph, made in 1986, vividly shows the kind of sad anti-city we have created for the automobile - a treeless plain of asphalt, furnished with a man made forest of streetlights, traffic signals, billboards, and signs.

The old square looked very different, as the earlier photograph, made in about 1900, shows. The elm trees and trolley cars suggest a slower way of life, though a life still organized around transportation. At the right is the Old Colony Railroad Station, which
probably was built in 1890 and then was moved to this site a few years later. Amazingly, the station survives very recognizably as the present Papa Gino's. The railroad served Mattapan Square until the late 1930s, the trolleys until the 1950s. The building in the middle of the older photograph is the Burk Block, erected in the early
1890s by the Burk family of carpenters and builders.

Mattapan has undergone many changes. Originally a tiny village, it became part of Boston in 1870 and for many years remained largely an area of private estates, farms, and golf courses. After World War I it became a neighborhood of two- and three family
houses, occupied mostly by Jewish families, who made Mattapan, by 1930, the state's largest Jewish community.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, partly as a result of controversial blockbusting and redlining tactics by real estate agents and banks, the area became predominantly black. The Burk Block, the kind of building that gives an intersection such as this much
of its character and sense of place, was demolished in the early 1980s. Today the square is thriving commercially, and the city has plans for new trees.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - A Sense of Pace", Boston Globe,8 June 1986

map not available at this time.

Location

Blue Hill Ave & River St
Mattapan, MA 02126
United States

Nearby Items

Rise / Gateway to Boston		154 feet
Mattapan Station Historic Murals		916 feet
Mattapan Brance, Boston Public Library		1 miles
Morton Street Station Historic Murals		1.6 miles
Pritzker Science Center at Milton Academy		2.3 miles
Hyde Park Plaques		2.6 miles
Blue Hill Avenue Youth Development Center		3 miles