Boston Skyline

Downtown Boston, taken as a whole, has a lot to recommend it.

But the commercial envrironment of Downtown Crossing (a much smaller and narrower area) is in a lot of trouble and needs help.

These statements don't contradict each other.
 
czsz said:
Sorry, but the statistics telling me that Boston is expensive/desirable - and even a list of nice nightspots - don't make the intangible urban experience much better (in the case of real estate costs, and their effects on DT Crossing, they may be making it worse). I'd love to walk out into the streets at night and see/feel activity, rather than be confronted with a list of scattered places to find it indoors. I had a group of friends visit from Montreal who said they thought the city was completely dead after dark - until I introduced them to Central Square.
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Regarding downtown crossing, I agree it is by no means the East Village in NYC or Mission District in S.F. and likely will never be. I guess my point is that nightlife options in this area of Boston are not on the decline and that Downtown Crossing while not vibrant at night is better than it was 15 years ago. My impressions of Montreal were that it certainly has more hedonistic nightlife options than Boston, but urban vibrancy seemed to be clustered in certain neighborhoods here and there similar to Boston. Many areas of Boston have active street life at night e.g. N. End, Back Bay, Kenmore, the squares of Cambridge etc.
 
underground said:
Even naming the things I like about my street would fill up more space than I can fairly take. Other people get to write on the board too. Maybe you can keep an eye out for my disertation in a few years, but until then I think I'll hold off.
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Spend less words defending against supposed attacks, and more on singing the praises of your 'hood. Two or three short paragraphs ought to do the trick. Statler is always giving me assignments like that. ;) :)

Ron Newman said:
Downtown Boston, taken as a whole, has a lot to recommend it.

But the commercial envrironment of Downtown Crossing (a much smaller and narrower area) is in a lot of trouble and needs help.

These statements don't contradict each other.
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Level-headed Ron tells it like it is.

But seriously, I'd love to hear about everyday life in a mostly-business district. I've often wondered what it's like.
 
commuter guy said:
Regarding downtown crossing, I agree it is by no means the East Village in NYC or Mission District in S.F. and likely will never be. I guess my point is that nightlife options in this area of Boston are not on the decline and that Downtown Crossing while not vibrant at night is better than it was 15 years ago.
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So I guess it's leveled off in the last fifteen years.

Problem is, I can remember much further back to when it positively teemed with life at night; and I'm sorry it no longer does. You shoulda seen it when the moviehouses emptied out just before midnight.
 
I realize I'm being nitpicky, and not rendering a "complete picture" of Boston...but I think it's necessary to get at these little things that are holding Boston back from being a great city instead of a good one.

So are the statistics telling you that thousands of people on the upper extremes with regards to choice of residency are all deluding themselves into thinking that Boston is a functional, livable city? Seems to me that if Boston wasn't, those among us who have every means imaginable to move to any location in the world would probably do it. Instead, they remain in Beacon Hill. And what about the rest of us? There are tens of thousands of middle class residents in the downtown neighborhoods who for sure at least have the option of moving to another nearby location. Why aren't they? Are they deluding themselves that downtown Boston is a workable choice or have they chosen downtown because, out of all of their options, it was the best?
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Quite a few of the people living in the central neighborhoods of Boston are way past their prime. Senior citizens in the Back Bay and Beacon Hill may like city life and contribute to it - until their early bedtimes.

Many 20 and even 30somethings are priced into the outer reaches of Somerville, which are not dense enough neighborhoods to be lively in the way that youngish parts of New York are.

As for your friends from Montreal, I recently took a friend of mine's mom from Paris around and she had the time of her life. So which one of our anecdotal stories paints the full picture? Personally, although anecdotal evidence in popular on this board when it comes to bashing the city, I'd like to see some actual hard evidence to back it up, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that neither of our stories is painting the full-on big picture. What I would look at instead is the hard evidence of the continuing high number of tourists, the continuing high rate of hotel room occupancy, the expanding number of tour operators, and the high number of actual residence who choose to make their homes in downtown Boston that all points to the fact that downtown Boston is a great area.
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Yeah, an anecdote without context isn't really telling (though without access to statistics on satisfaction with Boston, it's all we've got). One of these people remembered visiting Boston when he was younger and being more excited by it - part of his problem was being let down by his new perspective on the city. But I can mention others - I knew a German grad student who came up from New York and shuddered that Boston "felt so rigid and conservative". Just recently I heard a whole group of BU students on the Chinatown bus dismiss the city as "a shittier version of New York". That stung even me!

I don't think visitor numbers tell the whole picture. People come to the city for a variety of reasons - experiencing urban life probably isn't high on that list. For tourist families looking for Revolutionary War sights, for technophiles paying homage to MIT, to business travelers, to conventioneers - it can be a perfectly adequate, even surprisingly interesting place. Even for someone intent on exploring its urban life, it can provide months and even years of interest. I guess nightlife is a sticking point for me here. It's where I don't think many visitors are satisfied relative to a lot of other cities (although, hey, I was actually underwhelmed in Paris too).

Many areas of Boston have active street life at night e.g. N. End, Back Bay, Kenmore, the squares of Cambridge etc.
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Define "night". Define "active".

I live in Cambridge and can make due with Central and Harvard at night. They're not New York by any means, but at least they're not empty. But as far as Back Bay goes - I was really disappointed the last time I walked down Newbury St. It was 9pm on Saturday - and almost completely deserted. I had assured my companion that, there of all places, we would find some evening streetlife. But nothing? There? Then?

And people actually live there!

What is going on with that?

(I've had some nice nights in the N. End, but sidewalks start to roll up there around midnight at the latest.)
 
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Did not know where to put this? It's part of the skyline on the exspressway
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Patriots_1228 said:
paris has skyscrapers too ya know..so that picture you call the "skyline" is the equivelant of taking a picture of dorchester and calling it bostons skyline. Of course, maybe its just because paris's towers are so hideous you didnt want to scar us :p.
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Case in point:

ladefensemayne.jpg

Like litter from a kid's toy box, though to be fair, the ugliest one has not yet been built.
 
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ladefensemayne.jpg

A Modernist skyline.

5000.jpg

A Deco skyline.


You could surmise from these two images that our cities would be more aesthetically coherent if Modernism had never happened along.

Deco was plenty modern, but fortunately it wasn?t an ?ism?.

The perils of ideology?
 
La Defense is only arguably "modernist" in the ideological sense of the word.

And art deco is arguably classicist.

The modernism of Van Der Rohe had more to do with classicism than La Defense. Even Le Corbusier's did.
 
Arguably, it's a Hindu universe.

Most of us use words in the way they're understood by most of the rest of us.
 
I don't really understand La Defense as exemplifying modernism as an ideology, I understand it as an agglomeration of local geography, commercial preference, and a state preference for monumentality, perhaps combined with some lingering remnants of anti-traditionalism. In other words, it's way more than modernism that makes it unpleasant - in fact, it's everything but modernism that does. It would look just as failed and stupid with crenellations and gargoyles.

You really can't just use that word to describe everything you dislike.
 
Call it whatever you like. Me, I'll take deco. Modernism, too often (though not always), reflects a style instead of a place. And what's a place without a sense of itself?

There are modern buildings I swoon over. Many, however, truth be told, could be erected anywhere. The reason? They often ignore the street, their neighbors, their community.

And, of course, they often look alike.
 
You're forgetting that deco was an international style, too. There were interchangeable buildings thrown up all over the world. Just because they're prettier doesn't mean they're inherently more "local".

Many were also monumental to the extent that they gave a pretty cold shoulder to the street, as well. The elision from commercial deco to fascist monstrosity was a pretty smooth one.
 
Well there's a reason why Art Deco looks a lot better than modern towers. Back then, architect focused on every single detail to make a building look like art (i.e. gargoyles, spires). A skyline with modern towers can look good if they have a related style of buildings but different at the same time. The Parisian skyline looks awful because it seems like somebody placed random modern towers that doesn't compliment each other. Denver has a good modern skyline IMO:

2006-03-26_Denver_Skyline_I-25_Speer.jpg


Another good modern skyline will be Calgary's:
CalNight.jpg


And of course Boston's
 
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