Boston Skyline Photos

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Hate to say this but most of the downtown towers should not have been built. I would love if Boston was still like this picture from 1906.
 
I'm not sure if you're blaming today's towers for loss of what was, or if you're just stating that you'd rather have those buildings than what we have now. I wouldn't blame today's towers themselves for most of the city's great losses.
 
I agree.

For the loss of the pre-1950's urban fabric, I would blame the "carpet bombing of WW II Dresden" approach taken in the 50's and 60's for the destruction of the GC and Charles River Park areas.

One could say the same for the 1950's Central Artery project, but that was a relatively narrow scar compared to the other two mentioned above.

In an alternative universe, GC and Charles River Park would never have happened, and instead we'd have, at a minumum, a vibrant North-End type neighborhood in the West End, and a high-density mix of towers and low/medium rise buildings in the GC area. All the empty wind-blown "plazas", superblocks, and massive isolated chunks of concrete brutalism would not be there.

In a rational future, this will happen.
 
...and clusters of new high rises built in areas that were actually blank slates (or at least rail yards / industrial areas ) pre-1950....i.e. the Prudential Center, Seaport, Kendall (these three not counterfactual, of course) as well as South Bay, North Point, and Beacon Yards.

Paris, Amsterdam and many other european cities did it this way and it works (others, of course, did Urban Renewal 'the hard way', but that's a different story...
 
What i've always hated about the Pru Center is the lack of proportionality either amongst the ugly bit players, or how those smaller buildings work so astonishingly horribly with the rest of the neighborhood. It's just awful. can we just implode them now? i think the Pru is one of the better modernistic skyscrapers of the '60s. Compare to 550 California St or the Pan Am bldgs. We're lucky.

Downtown wouldn't make me so sad – if we could just fix some of it.

implode the McCormack, Center Plaza.... you know.
 
Wonderful pics!

How did you get up there? Place of work?
 
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