CultureNOW - Washington Street at Boylston Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Washington Street at Boylston Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"As a city grows and changes, its parts sometimes migrate from one place to another, eventually making the city a kind of vast puzzle of displaced pieces. How many members of the Calvary United Methodist Church on Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington, for example, are aware that their church’s clock and cupola once graced the Boylston Market at Boylston and Washington streets?

You can see the cupola at the upper left in the older of these two photographs, made about 1880. Boylston Market looks a lot like Faneuil Hall, not surprising since both were designed by the great architect Charles
Bulfinch. Like Faneuil Hall, Boylston Market had market stalls on the ground floor and a big hall above, used at first by the Handel & Haydn Society and later as a school, church, and gymnasium. The market was demolished in 1887, and the cupola with its clock was moved to a brewery in Charlestown and later to the Arlington church.

Farther back along Boylston Street another clock tower is visible. It stood above a building that still exists, the Boston Young Men’s Christian Union at 48 Boylston, which opened in 1875. The YMCU was founded by Harvard students as a religious discussion group and designed in Gothic style by Nathaniel J. Bradlee. The YMCU’s tower came down in 1912. You can see what remains in the new photo (made in 1987). The YMCU is the little building with the white wall and bent chimney at the right of the photo. It is now an official Boston landmark.

Also a Boston landmark is the big structure with rows of arched windows that occupies the old Boylston Market site. This is the handsome Boylston Building, designed by Carl Fehmer in 1887. It’s a sandstone building in a mix of Romanesque and Renaissance styles, built as an office-warehouse by the same investment group that owned the old market. In recent years it was vacant above a ground-floor pizza parlor and peep shows until its renovation as the China Trade Center. The Boylston and the YMCU are only two among a number of fine 19th-century buildings in today’s Combat Zone – buildings that should be preserved and restored as this neighborhood inevitably changes."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Trading places: Keeping track of landmarks," Boston Globe, 10 May 1987

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Location

Washington Street & Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02116
United States

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