City Hall Discussion - Redevelopment - Preservation - Relocation

ablarc said:
Problem is, there's not enough demand for a full and satisfying schedule at the venues that exist --much less new ones.

Jordan Hall has chamber music covered, opera demand in Boston is barely enough to fill the Majestic a few times per season.
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Sad, but true...I recently attended the closing concert of the Boston Chamber Music Society season, and Jordan Hall was less than half-full...I'm a trustee with another Boston-area chamber group -- our four yearly offerings are of equal quality (with a greater focus on "new" and "difficult" music) but the right-sized venue for us is about 150 seats.

I'll never understand why Boston can't have a proper opera company in Boston...Blame it on the Puritans?

My real thought here is that the proper site for something like the Constellation Center is the periphery of City Hall Plaza.

ablarc said:
Boston's not the cultural center it once was.
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Is anyplace? When you lose venues like the Rat (the first place The Police played in the States, the first place The Pixies ever played) and the Channel (U2's first-ever stop in America) you're heading in the wrong direction...Conversely, the Wang has the worst acoustics of any large venue in Boston, but it was preserved because it fit people's image of what a grand theatre should look like...In considering the insipid, third run swill that appears on its stage, I don't know whether to laugh or cry...

There are so many variables that undermine the cultural life in Boston (I won't waste anyone's time with my list -- it's disjointed, conflicting, and bloody long)...Is it wrong to want more than the BSO, Wally's, the MFA, the Gardner, and the Sox?

ablarc said:
Now if they brought back the Old Howard... (seem to recall it was somewhere around City Hall ;). Now that was culture!)
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Never made it there, though there is a healthy underground burlesque revival in Boston (I recall an event about a year ago at the Milky Way)...I'd settle for a Spearmint Rhino near the Convention Center.
 
brick curtain?

this morning i found myself walking around City Hall and realized i should be walking through it. the building is on stilts, if you look close. it should float above the plaza (albeit float like a tank).

my question is, what is up with the brick curtain around the north half of the building? looks tacked on and heavy handed. very pedestrian unfriendly.

if there is no structural reason for the brick appendage, removing it would be a massive improvement in the usability of the building -- as well as the aesthetics.
 
Beton Brut said:
there is a healthy underground burlesque revival in Boston (I recall an event about a year ago at the Milky Way)...I'd settle for a Spearmint Rhino near the Convention Center.
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Underground, huh? How does that play out?
 
Beton Brut said:
Is anyplace? When you lose venues like the Rat (the first place The Police played in the States, the first place The Pixies ever played) and the Channel (U2's first-ever stop in America) you're heading in the wrong direction...
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look, i loved the Rat as much as anyone (my record company effectively was born and then died downstairs). but do you really want the home of Mission of Burma to be bronzed? good music (any type) is all about churn. even several hundred year old compositions are uninteresting unless conducted with a new flare -- so much more so for the gritty stuff.

boston is definitely not losing its place or its way, imho. yes, we lost the foreign correspondents at the globe (very bad-- but that is today's newspaper business for you), yes the Monitor is a shell, the Rat is gone, BFVF sunk, many of the cinemas are closed, and I don't remember any good theater showing up even back when i cared about it. but there are plenty of cultural landmarks still to go around -- and i'd argue that boston is more about creation than about continuity. may sound strange to folks on this board, but all things considered...

boston's economy, intellectual capital, and workforce are all about change. we're about new degrees for new students from new schools (and old ones too). new companies fattened up on the most VC funding per capita in the country. fresh approaches to hard public policy and legal questions (i'm not talking about the BRA here). and new solutions to extending a long streak of competitiveness in one of the most dense and high cost regions in the country, and in a geographically tiny city that is said to be the most frenetic big city in north america.

we aren't losing our "thing" for lack of cultural icons or fortune 500 headquarters -- neither item was ever our specialty, in any case.

Boston is not London or Paris or New York, but as a city in total we are highly competitive with San Francisco (i'd say superior based on my experience). We easily win over any non-capital city in the UK (i.e. other than Edinburgh and London) for livability and dynamism. Make Toronto look nouveau and cheap. Make our sister city Hangzhou (a former capital of the Empire of China and capital of a province substantially larger than South Korea) look over eager and silly. And while we're not as decorative or as well fed as Vienna we we knock their socks off on the world stage. And do all that with a puritanical sour look on our collective face. imagine what we could do if we tried smiling...

and if all that isn't enough, just look at the map. Boston is intricately tied into the single most dynamic and realpolitik powerful megalopolis in the world. it isn't called the Philly-Hartford Corridor...

ok. done venting...
 
ablarc said:
Underground, huh? How does that play out?
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Underground in the "burlesque-for-the-indie-rock-and-emo-crowd" sense...Some ladies of the punk rock persuasion have taken up the sexual assertiveness of Gypsy Rose Lee as a sign-post toward feminist empowerment...I say rock on!

Globe article from 2004:
http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2004/03/04/let_them_entertain_you/

In the late '90s, one of my closest friends used to go-go dance at the sadly lost "Lava Room" atop the Kenmore HoJo's -- before the Burlesque Revival, there was a '60's Garage/Freak-Beat scene...Fun times!

singbat said:
but do you really want the home of Mission of Burma to be bronzed?
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In the era of American Idol, abso-fucking-lutely!

singbat said:
i'd argue that boston is more about creation than about continuity. may sound strange to folks on this board, but all things considered...
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Don't forget the requisite parochialism, racism, greed, small-minded civic lassitude, and obstructionist "activists" looking to grab their pound of flesh, even if it puts the butcher out of business...

That said, I don't disagree with much of what you vented...I love my home town, my neighborhood, and my block...I just wish more Bostonians realized that it's a lot easier to see the road ahead when you take your head out of your ass...

If I don't mention my admiration of the architectural muscularity of City Hall in this post, our esteemed moderator may give me the bum's-rush...
 
Beton Brut said:
I just wish more Bostonians realized that it's a lot easier to see the road ahead when you take your head out of your ass...
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Hahahaha, awesome.
 
kennedy said:
so back on the topic of a new city hall...
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Or, perhaps, the re-envisioning of the current building for an enduring and useful future as the seat of our city government...

singbat said:
this morning i found myself walking around City Hall and realized i should be walking through it. the building is on stilts, if you look close. it should float above the plaza (albeit float like a tank).
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You are 100% correct...Though City Hall isn't as graceful as its more organic concrete cousins (see Earo Saarinen or John Lautner), the public spaces in the building have the ability to be truly astonishing...I find it as troubling as Ron Newman that the permeability of this and other buildings has been trumped by Timothy McVeigh...

singbat said:
my question is, what is up with the brick curtain around the north half of the building? looks tacked on and heavy handed. very pedestrian unfriendly.

if there is no structural reason for the brick appendage, removing it would be a massive improvement in the usability of the building -- as well as the aesthetics.
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It's ham-fisted, and mutable...The brick is a reference to "olde Boston" and its form is derived (I believe) from some of Alvar Aalto's work in his native Helsinki...Removing some (or all) of the brick skirt and replacing it with access points and natural lighting to the offices in the Northern end of the building would be wise...
 
The Weekly Dig said:
City Hall Plans Spanked

* by Paul McMorrow
* Issue 9.22
* Wed, May 30, 2007

Mayor Thomas Menino?s grand plan to move City Hall to the hinterlands of the South Boston waterfront didn?t come out of thin air. It certainly wasn?t floated to make a splash at his annual address to the Boston Chamber of Commerce. This shit was well-anticipated?more than a decade in the making.

And in that decade-plus, nobody inside City Hall has even begun to study what such a move would entail logistically. Nor has anyone produced a single public document related to the move.

If you buy any of that, the mayor wishes you?d been in City Hall last week, when senior administration officials tried to pass the story to an indignant city council. The party line could?ve used a kinder reception.

As it is, council members gave the officials a savage public whipping, then made them sit sullenly, like misbehaving children, while a parade of architects and constituents assailed the relocation of City Hall.

The hearing began with a bang. Southie Councilor Michael Flaherty held up a sizable stack of planning documents for the South Boston waterfront. ?I?m curious where the idea came from,? he said. ?What methodology went behind taking all these documents, countless hours of work and research and planning and meetings, and literally ? ? THUD. Flaherty tossed the documents onto the floor. The Boston Redevelopment Authority officials Flaherty was scolding jumped. They looked rattled?like Flaherty might start throwing coffee mugs next.

Tom Miller, the BRA?s director of economic development, tried to pacify Flaherty, saying that the forthcoming city budget would fund the type of planning studies Flaherty was demanding.

?Shouldn?t we do the analysis first, before we identify a location?? Flaherty shot back. ?As opposed to make the announcement then run around and try to get the information??

Felix Arroyo pounced next. He?d sent a public records request to the BRA in mid-March (three months after the mayor?s speech) requesting ?any plan, document, design or written material regarding this change of place.? He got a letter back that said no such documents existed. ?So, there was no planning done, either in the past or had begun by March 20, unless this letter is not telling [us] what [we] should know?? he asked.

?That is correct,? replied Miller.

?[There are] no documents, no plans, no written material of any way to relocate or redesign City Hall??

?That?s right.? The councilors seemed dissatisfied by Miller?s petulance. So the punishment continued for hours. --PAUL MCMORROW
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Link
 
The sleek exterior of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, a behemoth of black steel and tinted glass, belies an interior plagued with leaky ceilings, broken elevators, and "wasted" space.
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Boston's City Hall, designed by Gerhard Kallmann, Noel McKinnell, and Edward Knowles in 1962, is another controversial case, and a decision on historic landmark status is pending.
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http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0620/p13s01-alar.htm

Interesting article.
 
The latest issue of the BSA's ArchitectureBoston is all about Boston City Hall. Everything is in PDF so you will need to actually click a link to read it. Well worth the extra effort.

The Sins and Salvation of City Hall (.PDF)
Graphic Essay
Six young design firms suggest that the sins of City Hall need not be mortal.

Past Futures (.PDF)
Back in the Day
City Hall has occupied the imaginations of many designers over time.

When the Unstoppable Meets the Immovable (.PDF)
Roundtable
The force is Mayor Menino, one of the most powerful mayors in Boston?s history. The object is Boston?s City Hall

Concrete Dreams (.PDF)
By John King
Can sustainable design make City Hall inspirational again?

Mending Modernism (.PDF)
By John Allan
Teaching an old dog new tricks might be the most sophisticated strategy for aging Modernist landmarks.

Our City Hall (.PDF)
By William Landay
A crime novelist claims City Hall for us, pugilistic mug and all.
 
The mending modernism article is especially intriguing. It reminds me of the sort of adaptive reuse people were engaging in when they first started reappreciating/restoring Victorian buildings in the 1960s and 70s.
 
Statler, thank you for the post. I used to get AB at the BSA building on Broad St. for free. Now someone has ripped up the lobby and .... no more free mags :cry:
 
Padre Mike said:
Statler, thank you for the post. I used to get AB at the BSA building on Broad St. for free. Now someone has ripped up the lobby and .... no more free mags :cry:
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There was a stack of Metropolis mags sitting there on Tuesday. I grabbed one. But no AB which is what I was looking for.
They also had their last two newsletters. ***YAWN*** How can do you make something as cool as architecture so boring?!?
 
There are currently hard copies of this issue of ArchitectureBoston at the BSA headquarters on Broad St if anyone is looking for them.
 
For those who couldn't be bothered to click on the links here is a small glimpse of what you can find in there:

1600933838_0fcc422076_o.jpg
 
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