Re: St. Cecilia Parish Hall Addition (20 Belvidere St.)
It's painful that the contractors couldn't even be bothered to properly dismantle the facade details for reuse in salvage.
Um. They did. Look back to original pictures of the facade addition. That was removed and, rumor is, sold for profit. Hence the black metal structure that remains in the pictures immediately above.
The balance around the windows was too difficult to salvage intact and inconsequential in a historical and financial sense.
EDIT: re: facade of course I'm referring to the gruesome trifle that topped this rather pedestrian building. For all the wailing in this thread, you'd think it was a masterpiece hand carved by a master mason, not what it was --- prefab elements pulled out of a Sears catalog (or whatever they used back in the day).
The original church was a rather adequate building first built for the Irish slaves of the Back Bay elite on Comm Ave and Marlborough (despite what Padre Mike suggested earlier in the thread: it wasn't until much, much, much later that it was a wealthy parish. They started out poor). The addition reflected the gaudy taste of its era but was architecturally insignificant inside and out. Hence the form-book facade elements. Pretty? Perhaps, but it was out of context with the original building.
That said, the new addition they've proposed seems to be more in context with the Hilton than the original church structure.
As for the parish house/rectory confusion earlier in the thread, ALL of it was under the eye of ISD. The recently-demo'd addition was shut down at various points over the years. The rectory (in the tower) was, for other reasons, declared unsafe. My understanding is that the nave itself is about the only thing that won't undergo construction or renovation, since they spent significant money on this a few years back. I think services are in the undercroft for the duration due to scaffold in the church.
Anyway, rambling on about neighborhood gossip. Goodnight.