Clean slate
The debate over what to do about Boston's City Hall is missing the point: it's not about a building, it's about reimagining the heart of the city, its connections to the past, and its possibilities for the future.
By George Thrush | May 13, 2007
Ever since Mayor Thomas M. Menino floated the idea of razing City Hall and moving the civic center to the South Boston waterfront, all kinds of people, from architects to politicians to preservationists, have weighed in with opinions. The conversations, not surprisingly, have so far largely focused on the building itself: I love it. I hate it. It's architecturally and historically significant. It's an ugly pile.
But the obsession with this single work of modern architecture, completed in 1969, overlooks the most important implication of the mayor's proposal: Namely, that what is now in play is not just the City Hall building itself, or even the much-maligned plaza, but the entire Government Center complex at the heart of the city. The Government Center garage has been sold, and will likely be razed and redeveloped. The Lindemann Center-Hurley Building could well be torn down and replaced. The lower section of the federal complex facing City Hall Plaza is under discussion. And Bulfinch Triangle -- the wedge of city bounded by Causeway, Merrimac, and North Washington streets -- has been reinvigorated following the Big Dig.
Put it all together and one can easily imagine an urban landscape as different from today's Government Center as it was from the earlier Scollay Square. Instead of a series of vast single-use government buildings, all empty at night, there could be a new series of city blocks with occasional towers, active ground floors, and life around the clock -- a new public space that could reconnect us to the past and to possibilities for the future.
Clearly, the nature of the conversation needs to change. By a remarkable confluence of forces, Boston has arrived at what could be a profound turning point and a historic choice -- one that calls on us to grapple with large questions about the role of design, politics, and culture in helping to shape our city.
To fully appreciate our current situation, one has to understand the historic moment that gave us City Hall and Government Center. It was a moment not entirely unlike our own: There was a heady sense of optimism, a progressive belief in the possibilities of the city, embodied in an ambitious and broadly planned effort to create a "New Boston." The effort succeeded. Government Center -- along with the large federal investment that supported it -- was surely a significant catalyst for the city's revival. More than anything else, Boston's image changed from that of a stodgy Brahmin backwater to a modern, forward-looking metropolis.
But to create that New Boston meant destroying, literally wiping away, an enormous central swath of the old one, in which a whole series of narrow, curving streets and circular intersections worked their magic to reconcile impossible geometries. What had taken centuries to evolve was gone in a matter of months.
The question now is whether Government Center -- having served its purpose as the catalyst of renewal, yet today profoundly disconnected, physically and psychologically, from the rest of the city -- must be preserved in the center of Boston. Paradoxically, many architects and citizens who favor historic preservation are seeking to preserve a monument to one of Boston's most destructive eras. Surely we do not want to eradicate all memory of those years -- repeating, in our own way, the sins of the '60s -- but neither should we consign future generations to an eternity of cold, dark public buildings on barren, wind-swept plazas.
The challenge facing us today, and it is a complex one, is how to build on our connections to the past while keeping our eye on the future.
In the 1960s, Mayor John Collins and Boston Redevelopment Authority planning director Ed Logue designed and built their way toward what they saw as the future. They recognized that Boston still lacked the office infrastructure of a modern city. So in addition to municipal, state, and federal government buildings, a large amount of private office space, and the massive parking structures to go with it, were proposed in the Government Center master plan.
But the new Government Center required the clearing of 48 acres of land, and the elimination of no fewer than 22 streets. Those narrow streets had traced through Scollay Square, while at the same time linking historic Pemberton Square with Faneuil Hall and the Quincy market (then still a messy wholesale food market). Period photographs show the streets lined with a jumbled mix of pool halls, shops, and small offices in primarily 19th-century buildings. They connected Scollay Square to the Financial District, Beacon Hill, and the Bulfinch Triangle.
These streets were the footprint of the city's past, and today some of them could be links to the future. The oft-mentioned "character" of the city is, of course, an elusive thing, composed of many disparate elements -- some physical, like the Hancock Tower and the Longfellow Bridge, and many more intangible, like our love for the Red Sox and our academic bent. But in planning terms, there is no more irreducible aspect of Boston's character than its complex network of neighborhood street patterns.
From the curving streets on the hills of Roxbury to broad Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay and the irregular narrow streets of the North End, the city's street fabric is unique. It ensures that no one will ever mistake Boston for Detroit, Chicago, Denver, or Manhattan. These patterns, enforced by land ownership parcels, connect the city of 2007 to the city of 1960, 1890, and even the late 1600s. Because Boston was always physically constrained by water, it built densely from the start. Both Washington Street and State Street, for example, can be seen on the earliest maps.
Boston is by no means the first city to have to deal with a collision of midcentury concrete modernism and an urban fabric that had evolved over centuries. Berlin, for example, saw the transformation of the Potsdamer Platz from an historic city center to one divided by the Berlin Wall, and then to a place reborn at a new contemporary scale, but also with a newfound connection to its past.
But Boston's is perhaps the most significant example in the United States of a major government building complex designed in this very specific postwar, concrete idiom in the heart of a historic city. And it is here that the real choice must be made between an image of progressivism, however monumental and initially promising, and the stark fact that Government Center fails at many of its most critical urban tasks. It fails to connect adjoining neighborhoods; it fails to provide activity both day and night; it fails to provide enough density to define usable public and private spaces.
Reimagining the Government Center complex offers an opportunity to build new hotels, apartment buildings, and office space. It creates an opportunity to reconnect at least four distinct neighborhoods by reestablishing active, permeable street-fronts to link the North End to Beacon Hill and the Financial District to the Bulfinch Triangle. There is no reason why the walk from Tremont Street and the Boston Common to Hanover Street and the North End cannot be lined with more continuous, pedestrian-friendly edges.
Such a reimagined city center could also be better connected to the new public spaces of the Greenway. Whatever the mix of functions, the city could create a plan for the multiple parcels of Government Center that would require continuous street frontage, so that each block would have restaurants, shops, or other pedestrian amenities at the ground level, instead of the blank concrete walls that exist along New Chardon, Sudbury, and Congress streets today. This would create walking streets where virtually none exist now. And to this end, the plan could at least double the density of the current Government Center, where today there is simply too much open space, and not enough building -- especially at street level.
Today, Boston is about biotechnology, financial services, innovation, design, and the world's best universities. The most important task for a new district is that it express the city's new identity without rupturing its ties to a proud tradition. The Zakim Bridge -- which provides a new view of the city from the north and ties Charlestown in with the rest of the city -- was a step in the right direction. A renewed Government Center would not only add to Boston's new image and identity, but provide new urban spaces to occupy, rather than to simply drive over (or under) or view from a distance.
And yet, all this talk of a new district and an updated identity for the city leads us, inevitably, back to the current City Hall itself and what it stands for. To a group of political progressives who came of age in the 1960s, Boston City Hall is a bit like "Camelot," a sort of castle for the New Frontier and the Great Society, an impenetrable bulwark against the privatizing juggernaut that has rolled over many of the programs of that era.
Indeed, the building has explicit political symbolism --a grand stair from the plaza up to a light filled courtyard on the ceremonial fifth floor, where the Mayor and the City Council battle in the full light of day! The council chamber projects out into the plaza in order to engage the people. Boston City Hall's supporters are committed to both the architectural and political legacy of the building. And this is understandable.
From an architectural standpoint, there is also a real sense that the current City Hall is serious architecture. The product of an international design competition, the building shows little of the compromise that we associate with the design of public buildings today. And it is true that Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles' award-winning design was an all too rare marriage of the political and cultural spirit of the age with real architectural talent.
But that marriage, strong as it was at the time, has failed utterly. And the near desperation with which some in the architectural community are rallying around this building suggests an unwillingness to face this. It also suggests a deep pessimism -- that we can no longer expect new public buildings to be great works of architecture. It suggests that only in the days of the unquestioned "hero architect" could we aspire to excellence. I disagree.
City Hall is an interesting building, to be sure, and architecturally important too. But this location is more important. To insist that the preservation of this building is critical to our future is to see that future in the narrowest way. It is to imagine that Boston had vision just once in recent memory -- in the 1960s.
One need not reject the many great social and political advances of the 1960s to concede that the monuments to that period that are manifested in Government Center are disastrous. The reason past government buildings, such as the Old State House and Old City Hall, have survived is that they were flexible enough to be reused for other purposes (an MBTA station and museum on the one hand, and a restaurant and office space on the other). But the buildings in the Government Center complex deny that possibility, or make it so difficult that reuse becomes prohibitively expensive and an obstacle to successful redevelopment. The strange monumental stairs at the north corner of the Hurley Building were designed as a gateway to a plan for that block that never materialized, and so now lead nowhere; the garage is an enormous, faceless monolith; the lower GSA wing is set much too far from the street; and City Hall, despite the intended symbolism of "openness," is almost entirely opaque on its edges.
Still, many of the ideas that were only dreams in the 1960s have indeed come to pass. Environmentalism and greater social inclusion, for example, are broadly endorsed today, and new government buildings ought to celebrate these new realities in ways that allow for continued growth, not a stagnant view of the past.
"Renewal," Alex Krieger pointed out in the seminal book "Mapping Boston," "should be an ongoing rather than an epochal process." Indeed, if it had not been for the destruction of those 48 acres in the early 1960s, the area we call Government Center, the very heart of the city, would have continued to evolve, with connections to the past intact and layers of Boston's unrivaled history still legible. There's no going back, of course. We can't restore what was lost. But the clock is running out on the epochal projects of the last century and we now have another large chance to renew.
George Thrush is director of the school of architecture at Northeastern University.
