CultureNOW - Huntington Avenue at Newton Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Huntington Avenue at Newton Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"As so often happens in Boston, it’s the rich variety of intimate detail that makes the old scene more appealing than the new. Who wouldn’t prefer the amiable, welcoming old clutter of windows, roofs, and stoops to the new building, which look like boxes wrapped in graph paper and which stand back aloofly from the sidewalk?

We’re at the corner of West Newton Street, looking downtown along Huntington Avenue. The old corner is dominated by Mechanics Hall, the Boston trade mart and convention center in its day. The Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association was founded in 1795, with silversmith Paul Revere as its first president. It erected this building in 1881, shortly after Huntington was laid out. The architect was the flexible William Gibbons Preston.

Preston could give you any style you wanted and do it well. His surviving Boston works include the First Corps of Cadets Armory at Arlington Street and Columbus Avenue, the Museum of Natural History at Newbury and Berkeley streets (now Louis Boston, the clothing store), and the Vendome apartments on Commonwealth Avenue. His drawings fill 46 volumes in the Boston Public Library. For Mechanics Hall, he conceived a redbrick façade decorated with medallions and ornaments of terra cotta. You can perceive the vastness of the interior exhibit hall only where it pushes up over the roof line, at left. Along the street, Preston meets the sidewalk with elements more congenial to pedestrians.

Mechanics Hall was torn down in 1959 to make way for the Prudential Center. The Pru’s office tower is at left, sheathed in what looks like the mesh you’d pull over your pawn shop at night for security. At right is 101 Huntington, smaller but no more elegant. A third building is soon to rise at 111 Huntington, in the middle of the new photo. It will be a faceted glass office tower, 36 stories high, with a stepped-back top that gives the effect of a crown. Like William Preston – but unlike the architects of the original Pru – the designers of the new building, Childs Bertman Tseckares, plan to avoid useless plazas. Instead, they will push the lower floors out to meet the pedestrian, with retail stores and a new T stop along the sidewalk. An arcade, roofed in glass, will penetrate to a new garden and beyond to join the redesigned network of arcades that has done much to humanize the Pru."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Mechanics Hall," Boston Globe, 28 February 1999

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Location

Huntington Avenue & Newton Street
Boston, MA 02116
United States

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