Boston & Cambridge - 1950's

But this isn't the South End. This is the Back Bay. The South End starts on the other side of St. Botolph. This is right next to highly desirable stuff like Symphony Hall, Jordan Hall, and Horticultural Hall.

Looks to me like the never-built South End Bypass would have required clearing St. Botolph Street, not Huntington ... and as we all know, that didn't happen.
 
Prudential was rail yards, a big separator. That area was thought of as the South End and a bad area. Symphony Hall was thought to be stranded in an iffy 'hood.

Come to think of it, you could easily think of it as South End today.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
Remember the South End wasn't a desirable neighborhood when the motel was built. The townhouses were probably in pretty bad shape and it was cheaper to tear them down and build a crappy motel. Also the motel would have been seen, at the time, as a modern improvement over the old fashioned and dilapidated townhouses.
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Indeed. From "Estimate of Physical Changes On the Prudential Site and Surrounding Blocks Occurring Since 1955" (BRA 1961):

Within the study area (excluding Pru site) since 1955 the following
uses were lost by demolition or conversion:

120 apartment units
2 lodging houses
1 dormitory

1 hotel

2 clubs

12 retail stores

1 warehouse

2 gas stations

2 office bldgs. (118,000 sq. ft. flr. space)
1 tech. high school (vacant but not yet razed)

and the area gained by new construction or conversion:

28 apartment units
5 priv. schools

1 motel of 161 units (under construction)

2 retail stores

2 parking lot shelters

1 gas station

1 air conditioning annex

1 telephone exchange office bldg. (12,600 sq. ft.)

[...]

Summary

If one includes the Huntington Ave. motel, (now under construction) the study area peripheral to Prudential has experienced since 1955 a moderate investment in new public works, alterations to buildings, and new construction. The latter will more than compensate for loss of valuation due to recent demolition. The area has had a net loss of 100 apartment units and some non-housekeeping units, but will show a gain of 160 motel units.
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Run-of-the-mill redevelopment.
 
Huntington Ave prior to Copley Place, the Pru rebuild, the condos and offices between Copley Place and the Colonade Hotel, Northeastern's and Wentworth's renaissance, the rebuilding of Mission Main, and the Stop & Shop development in Brigham Circle, was not the friendliest place to be.

The South End went from a near lawless and ungoverned urban wild, one would expect in Detroit or some forsaken quarter in New York City in the 1970s, to the place where you can buy your dog a $40 latte in twenty years. My block went from almost entirely boarded up burnt out townhouses, homeless people, rats, and garbage piled waste high in the alley, to millionaire row in that span of time.
 
Even when I was at Wentworth from 2002-04 Huntington Ave past Longwood was pretty sketchy. It's amazing how quickly it's changed.
 
Oh, for when Boston was a city rather than NIMBYs' playground.
 
As much as we may hate NIMBY's we can't really blame the loss of what we see in those pictures on them. If anything, their rise to power came in reaction to those losses.

We may, however, be able to pin on them the loss of hope of any kind of return to that kind of urbanity. Ironic?
 
For some reasong I M Pei liked to surround his master plans with fortress like buildings(government center, Christian Science Center). The apartment building, Church Park, was suppose to go all the way to Boyston St. I believe the neighborhood stoped that. Same thing along Huntington Ave.
 
But the Midtown motel is certainly not a 'fortress-like building'. Such a building would be a great improvement over the motel.
 
Church Park at least introduced pedestrian walkways approximately at all the cross streets it walled off. The corner treatment at Westland Avenue however, leaves much to be desired.
 
Ron Newman said:
...the Midtown motel is certainly not a 'fortress-like building'.
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True, but it has all the charm of a loading dock for the passerby. Deadening to the streetscape, it's not a fortress, but it's even less "welcoming" to pedestrians than some reviled examples of Brutalism.

Lurker said:
The corner treatment at Westland Avenue however, leaves much to be desired.
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I think of this every time I leave Symphony Hall and turn North.
 
^ Is there a story with the bank? How did it persevere untouched?
 
The main problem I have with Church Park is that the combination of the wide sidewalk and the overhang hides the local businesses and their signs. They are hard to see from the sidewalk and impossible to see from a car or bicycle on the street.
 
^ Tasteful vertical banners running up the facade (designed to tolerate wind and weather) would easily address this.
 
I don't think it's even used as a bank anymore, is it? I thought the BSO had taken it over for office space.
 
Ron Newman said:
I don't think it's even used as a bank anymore, is it? I thought the BSO had taken it over for office space.
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The bank is now owned by the BSO. The last plan I heard, before the economy tanked, was that they wanted to close off that part of St Stephen Sreet and connect the bank parcel with Symphony Hall.

'Fortess' may have been a bad choice of words on my part. I've always wondered if these edge buildings were to separate the projects from the surrounding (bad) neighborhoods or to enliven them like a European plaza. Here is the original plan:

http://www.pcfandp.com/a/p/6522/2.html
http://www.pcfandp.com/a/p/6522/s.html
 
Except that the neighborhood behind Church Park isn't bad and never was. It's basically the music-student neighborhood (Berklee, Boston Conservatory, NEC) and also a residential adjunct to Northeastern University.

And I still don't understand why the motel was built instead of whatever Pei had planned.
 
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