CultureNOW - Copley Square at Huntington Avenue: Peter Vanderwarker

Copley Square at Huntington Avenue

There are no podcasts available.

Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
A ghost trolley car speeds past Trinity Church in the older of these two photographs of Copley Square, made within a year or two of 1900. Comparing the new photo with the old, we see many changes. At the right in 1900 is the old Boston Museum of Fine Arts, designed in 1876 by the firm of Sturgis and Brigham in the ornate, massive style known as Ruskinian Gothic, a style of which the best surviving example in Boston is Memorial Hall at Harvard. For all its pomp, the Fine Arts Museum building lived a brief life, giving way in 1912 to the Copley Plaza Hotel, a relatively tame example of the work of Henry Hardenbergh, the New York architect of the flamboyant DaKota apartments (where John Lennon lived) and New York's Plaza Hotel. Beyond the museum you can make out piles being driven for the construction of the old Westminster Hotel, replaced in 1976 by the Hancock Tower.

Copley Square itself has changed greatly. The trolley in the old photograph is on Huntington Avenue, which split the square diagonally until 1968, when the avenue was closed off and a national design competition produced the present sunken, paved square. Last year another competition was held for a better design, but the winning entry has yet to be implemented. Other changes are obvious. One is the clutter of street furniture so typical of our era. As street comers go today, this one is orderly and sign-free, but there are still at least four kinds of street lights and the usual welter of traffic signals. A plastic, bubble-domed bus shelter awaits Martians in the center of the photo. The dominant image in both photos, of course, is Trinity Church, one of the landmarks of Boston and easily the most influential American building of its era.

Henry Hobson Richardson, its architect, grew up in New Orleans, studied in Paris, and opened a practice in New York, but his name became forever linked with Boston when he was chosen to design Trinity in 1872 and moved his office to Brookline. As a student in France, Richardson admired the so-called Romanesque architecture of the Middle Ages, an architecture of massive stone walls and deep-set round arches, and at Trinity he improvised freely on this style. By no means a smooth or flawless piece of architecture, Trinity is a building made of many boldly formed, individual parts that are heaped up into a great pyramid with enormous visual power. Trinity dazzled American architects; its style, known as Richardsonian Romanesque, was imitated in hundreds of city halls, libraries, and courthouses built in the United States during the 1880s and 1890s. Richardson went on to more mature works (but none more zestful), establishing himself as one of the three or four greatest American architects.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Change at Copley",Boston Globe, 12 May 1985

map not available at this time.

Location

Hutington Ave & Parker St
Boston, MA 02115
United States

Nearby Items

Northeastern University School of Law		714 feet
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston		828 feet
Night and Day		0.2 miles
Walking Man		0.2 miles
Emerald Necklace Conservancy Visitor and Volunteer Center		0.3 miles
Northeastern University Inter-faith Spiritual Center		0.4 miles
Harriet Tubman a.k.a. Moses		0.4 miles