CultureNOW - Tremont Street at Clarendon Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Tremont Street at Clarendon Street

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
A time traveler from the Victorian era would have little trouble finding his way around this comer of Tremont and Clarendon streets in the South End. Although everything has changed socially and economically, little has changed physically between the 1870s, the date of the old photo, and 1987, the date of the new.

The South End neighborhood was developed on filled land, mostly during the 1850s. Its beautiful brick bow-front townhouses, many of them gathered around fenced garden squares in the English manner, were fashionable for only a moment. By the 1860s a new piece of filled land, the Back Bay, was being developed with Parisian boulevards and water views that drew the wealthy away from the South End which turned into a neighborhood of rooming houses while still almost brand-new.

In the century between these two photos, the cobblestones and tracks for the horse-drawn trolley have given way to asphalt paving and zebra stripes. The mansard-roofed Hotel Clarendon, on the right in the old photo, is gone, burned in 1969. The tall belfry of the old Shawmut Congregational Church on the left is gone, too, removed as a hazard in the 1950s. Later this church was called the Pentecostal Church; now it is gutted.

As usual in the South End, renewal is occurring alongside decay. The Boston Center for the Arts, offering rehearsal, performance, and living space for artists, now occupies the old Cyclorama Building and National Theater, tucked out of sight at the right of the new picture.

And the prow-shaped cluster of buildings in the center of both photos has recently been renovated. Originally consisting of an apartment house called the St. Cloud and a lower commercial building called the Mystic Bridge Building, the cluster now contains 19 condominiums, nine artists' studio-apartments, a restaurant, a cafe, and shops.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - As Tremont Turns", Boston Globe, 15 March 1987

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Location

Tremont St & Clarendon St
Boston, MA 02116
United States

Nearby Items

Cyclorama		402 feet
Atelier 505		885 feet
Betances Mural		0.2 miles
Boston Historic Murals		0.3 miles
Historic Medallions, Washington Street Corridor, Boston		0.3 miles
Cathedral of the Holy Cross		0.3 miles
Washington Street at Waltham Street		0.3 miles