Boston & Cambridge - 1950's

czsz: I see only one tiny little parking lot in the Scollay Square photo, off to the left next to the Telephone building.
 
N Market and S Market streets look horrible with auto traffic. I suppose it was convenient for vendors and consumers at the time (Victoria's Secret hadn't moved in yet =P), but Kevin White's decision to close them and open Rouse's pedestrian mall was brilliant.
 
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Scollay had a few decent-sized parking lots, but its fabric was relatively intact:

scollay46.jpg
 
That lot's pretty big (it's dead center in the aerial), but I'm struck even more by how much space that tangle of roads gobbled up (and what a tangle it is!). ROWs must account for a third of all the land there.
 
Yeah, strangely enough there was some pro-pedestrian rationale behind a lot of the urban renewal of the 60s and 70s - it reclaimed a lot of public space that had just been turned over to cars without much thought in the preceding half-century or so. All those plazas may be empty, but they're no longer redundant roads.

It's too bad it also coincided with the destruction of a lot of city. Imagine if Scollary Square had been Faneuil Hall Market-ized instead of Government Center-ed.
 
Think of all the romantic alleys with restaurant seating!
 
Or a half dozen dying DTC-esque retail streets with merchants constantly lobbying for the reintroduction of the car.

Or, given that it was Scollay Square, just lots more room for whores.
 
czsz said:
Yeah, strangely enough there was some pro-pedestrian rationale behind a lot of the urban renewal of the 60s and 70s - it reclaimed a lot of public space that had just been turned over to cars without much thought in the preceding half-century or so. All those plazas may be empty, but they're no longer redundant roads.

It's too bad it also coincided with the destruction of a lot of city. Imagine if Scollary Square had been Faneuil Hall Market-ized instead of Government Center-ed.
Click to expand...

I probably would still be quite the destination, like Times Sq meets Rue St Catherine in Montreal. Edit: Because, you know, it WAS that back in the day.
 
Washington St. is/was Boston's Ste-Catherine. Scollay was more like Times Square, but that almost makes it certain that the project would have been seen as a failure in the 70s and 80s, requiring some kind of rethink later on. I continue to submit that it probably would have wound up like DTC today, unless somehow Disneyfied like Times Square or propped up with urban gimmicks like Montreal's former Red Light District, now rebranded the "Quartier des Spectacles" and filled with cool but ultimately pointless glowing ball things.
 
I see Faneuil Hall Marketplace as the Times Square of Boston now. Heck, its the 3rd most visited tourist destination in the country.

That right there is pretty significant in terms of urban development, to go from the run-down automobile-infested Quincy Market vending area into a world-famous pedestrian destination.
 
So I spent the day looking through the MIT Libraries' Flickr photostream. Fascinating.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mit-libraries/

About the image below, and its current-day Google map screen capture: there used to be an exit off of the Mass Ave bridge (southbound) to Storrow Drive?

storrow_drive_rt.png


In the current-day image, you can even see the grass looks a different color in a loop that looks as though it connects with Storrow Drive eastbound.

Anyone know the background? This must have been before my time in Boston, pre-1986?
 
To my knowledge, there never was an exit off the bridge to enter Storrow Drive in either direction. The "NEXT RIGHT" sign sends drivers up Beacon Street toward Charlesgate East, where a right turn sends you onto Storrow.
 
Beton and John - Yes, this ramp from the bridge did exist! I remember it from when I went to MIT and commuted (by foot, bike or bus) across the bridge every day. It made a tight loop to curve around and enter the eastbound lanes of Storrow Drive from the left.

The ramp went away during reconstruction of the bridge in the late 1980s. See the references to 'Ramp "B"' on this Wikipedia page.

Sufficiently old road maps also show it providing access to westbound Storrow Drive, also entering from the left, but that was before my time (and before the Bowker Overpass was built over Charlesgate).

After the ramp was removed, the MDC tried turning the land that it had surrounded into a dog park, accessed by a short stairway from the bridge sidewalk. But that only lasted 2 or 3 years.
 
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Interesting, Ron. This predates my being able to (legally) operate a motor vehicle.
 
Currently home to the Empire Garden restaurant, in the 1950's, this sign was a foreshadowing of days yet to come.

boston_1950S.png
 
Here's Storrow and Mass Ave in 1955 (note there's no Bowker):

storrow55.jpg


PS I strongly suggest you all put www.historicaerials.com in your bookmarks - I'm on it all the time!
 
Nice find, kz!

I just spent spent the last ten minutes going back and forth between 1938 and 2005 over what is today's Melneas Cass Blvd. I feel ill.

1938:
melneas_cass_1938.jpg


2005:
melneas_cass_2005.jpg
 
That's the way I feel when looking at this now and then's, too.

To finish out my weekend's work looking at old photos, here are four from the MIT Libraries.

My questions, comments:

Paulist Center - I swear I remember seeing it look like this in the 1990's, but from what I gather, it didn't look like this after the '70's?

Massachusetts Ave - wow. What a change. If it looked like this today, I'd live there.

Dartmouth Street - not sure where this part of the street is located - the description says Back Bay, but where?

Boston Common - this image shows all these houses on the Common - what were these??

paulist.png


mass_ave.png


bottled_liquors.png


common.png
 
That's Mass. Ave. looking from Shawmut Ave towards Washington Street and its elevated Orange Line. Still does look mostly like this, except the trees were removed from the median. Anyone know why? Putting them back would make the street look so much better.
 
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