CultureNOW - Boylston Street at Berkeley Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Boylston Street at Berkeley Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"Nothing in the history of Boston is more amazing than the fact that for more than 30 years, starting in 1858, a train arrived from Needham about every 45 minutes, day and night, with a load of gravel to help fill up the tidal salt marsh known as the Back Bay. This was an operation of city-building that easily dwarfs anything attempted here in our own time.

The old photo gives a sense of the empty, no-man’s-land atmosphere of the Back Bay landfill in its early years. The prominent building is the museum of the Boston Society of Natural History, just one year old, and behind it, under construction, is the Rogers Building, home of the newly founded Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The year is 1864, the photographer is Josiah Hawes. Both buildings were designed in a conventionally French manner by a young architect named William G. Preston, and they looked so much alike that many people became confused, and people will tell you, even today, that MIT began in what is now the Bonwit Teller building, on Berkeley Street. Bonwit’s, though, moved not into MIT’s Rogers Building but into the Natural History Museum in 1947, when the museum moved over to the Charles River dam to become the Boston Museum of Science. MIT kept the Rogers Building until 1939, when it was demolished to make way for the New England Life building, the ungainly monster designed by Ralph Adams Cram that looms menacingly behind Bonwit’s in the new photo. The recent photo also shows the Church of the Covenant, designed by Richard Upjohn, which was built as Central Congregational only two years after the old photo was taken.

Today New England Life owns the building that houses Bonwit’s and, until quite recently, hoped to tear it down. But the rise of the preservation movement, as embodied in the Back Bay Architectural District, probably has removed that threat forever. The Bonwit building will survive, but the new photo shows the little losses time brings to architecture. Gone is the wonderful eagle that bestrode the building’s pediment; gone is the elegant railing that graced its roof; gone are what seem to be carved animal heads (barely visible) on the keystones of the ground-floor arches. The brick in the old photo appears painted, probably to match the limestone, a trick that was played, too, for many years on the State House and Faneuil Hall.

Preston, incidentally, didn’t limit himself to this kind of elegant neoclassicism. Like many Victorian architects, he could give you just about any style you wanted, as evidenced by his Hotel Vendome on Dartmouth Street, his First Corps Cadet Armory in Park Square, his Chadwick Lead Works on High Street, and his Chaflin Building (now housing Goodspeed’s) on Beacon Hill – each one a gem. His papers fill 48 volumes in the Boston Public Library."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Of time and tidal marshes: Looking back at the Back Bay," Boston Globe, 15 April 1984

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Location

Bolyston Street & Berkeley Street
Boston, MA 02116
United States

Nearby Items

Berkeley Street		362 feet
New England Mutual Life Insurance Building		408 feet
The Berkeley at 420 Boylston		535 feet
St. James Avenue at Claredon Street		770 feet
37 Newbury Street		863 feet
Trinity Church		907 feet
Berkeley Building		935 feet