City Hall Discussion - Redevelopment - Preservation - Relocation

Ruairi said:
If a lot of people dont understand what they ar looking at with regard to the most important public building in the city, it's a design failure.
Click to expand...
Riffing on @JumboBuc's point, I'd argue, for example, that the BPL is a far more important civic building. But I'd also argue that how people feel about the aesthetics is not an indication of success or failure.
 
SlothofDespond said:
"Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough" -Noah Cross, Chinatown

In any event, the Government Services Building down the street is a much bigger problem IMO. That thing kills an entire city block that should be vibrant and filled with store fronts and density. I'll be more than happy to do yeoman's work telling anyone who misses it that it was a monstrosity that choked the life out of the city and needed to be destroyed so the area could thrive again. If people want to see a mid century masterpiece wander over to the Christian Science Plaza and take that in. The city doesn't need to be a living exhibit of the disasterpiece examples too.



I don't agree that's a pendulum example. I think with NIMBYs in Boston neighborhoods and surrounding towns we're dealing with similar fear of change, cities, and the people who live in them. The residents trying to protect their neighborhoods from development got theirs and they don't want to allow the area to adapt and change to a Boston area that needs more and denser housing and an expansion of the urban core. Don't forget that the destruction of the West End was designed to displace the poorer West End neighborhood with a bunch of uninviting tower in a park residences for wealthier people. There's no doubt in my mind that there is generally an undercurrent of the strong and wealthy punching down on the poor and weak in NIMBYism, just like there was with mid-century urban renewal.
Click to expand...
I agree. Inserting new buildings here and there into an old neighborhood such as North Cambridge, while preserving the basic integrity and street grid (even enhancing it) is completely different than wiping out entire sectors of a city (i.e., GC and Charles River Park). NIMBYism, had it existed in the 1950s/60s, would have been fully justified in fighting at the time those massive 60s "urban renewal" project disasters. But the surgical insertion today of new, sometimes taller, buildings into existing neighborhoods, especially when they are fronting major arterial streets, should not be much of an issue.
 
Can a building and plaza that has hosted over a million people (at once) be considered a failure? Very few buildings in the US can say that. Was "New Boston" in general a failure, not in my opinion. "Ugly" and "failure" are two different things. The former is a matter of taste (of which social media warriors have none). The latter is a different more sober conversation, like we have here.
 
Scott said:
Can a building and plaza that has hosted over a million people (at once) be considered a failure? Very few buildings in the US can say that. Was "New Boston" in general a failure, not in my opinion. "Ugly" and "failure" are two different things. The former is a matter of taste (of which social media warriors have none). The latter is a different more sober conversation, like we have here.
Click to expand...
I don't think the 1950/60s "New Boston" was a failure. It was an understandable reaction and strategy at the time. Boston was in an economic and cultural malaise due to the postwar flight of middle income families to the suburbs, the ascent of the sun belt cities in the western and southern US, the rise of the automobile, and the beginnings of the shutdown of heavy industry. The city leadership felt that major shock treatments were needed to get the city unstuck and propel it into the future. So, the elevated Central Artery was first plowed through the heart of the city, followed soon after by massive, unprecedented urban renewal projects, all totally different and foreign to the old Boston, and all wiping out large sectors of the city.
I think the task ahead for the next several decades is to retool and repurpose those large urban renewal craters, to re-stitch the urban fabric back together again. We see the beginnings of that already happening.
 
I don't remember the 50s and 60s but I remember the 70s and the bicentennial. The promise of city hall was a space to attract people as tourists in Town from the neighborhoods with events, and then it was a starting point to Quincy Market , the Freedom Trail, and the Aquarium, In that way GC was very successful. I wish we had maintained that idealism. Unfortunately since then every upgrade is unimaginative and just replaces the hardscape
 
To me the problem with City Hall isn't the design of the building, or even the plaza. It's that we destroyed an entire neighborhood that, if kept intact, would now be considered a cherished piece of historical urban fabric. If this was all put up on an empty "clean slate" plot of land it still wouldn't be great, but it also wouldn't be the tragic travesty it is today.
 
Scott said:
Can a building and plaza that has hosted over a million people (at once) be considered a failure? Very few buildings in the US can say that. Was "New Boston" in general a failure, not in my opinion. "Ugly" and "failure" are two different things. The former is a matter of taste (of which social media warriors have none). The latter is a different more sober conversation, like we have here.
Click to expand...
A million on City Hall plaza all at once? No way that plaza could fit more than 100,000 and I am pretty sure I am being extremely generous with that number.
 
DZH22 said:
To me the problem with City Hall isn't the design of the building, or even the plaza. It's that we destroyed an entire neighborhood that, if kept intact, would now be considered a cherished piece of historical urban fabric. If this was all put up on an empty "clean slate" plot of land it still wouldn't be great, but it also wouldn't be the tragic travesty it is today.
Click to expand...
I feel the same and was around in the 50's and 60's. There was next to no understanding at the time for the reuse of old buildings, especially when so many of them were concentrated in one area. The costs of complete tear out of interiors to accommodate elevators, new plumbing and electricity alone kept developers on the track of total replacement. We could wax nostalgically about the West End, the swath of real estate stolen to build the expressway, etc. Fortunately we're on a different track now and even the city hall still has a chance of becoming a meeting place for a number of events and audiences.
 
Scott said:
Can a building and plaza that has hosted over a million people (at once) be considered a failure? Very few buildings in the US can say that. Was "New Boston" in general a failure, not in my opinion. "Ugly" and "failure" are two different things. The former is a matter of taste (of which social media warriors have none). The latter is a different more sober conversation, like we have here.
Click to expand...
Yes it can because the building was designed without thinking about the long-term consequences of brutalist architecture in a city that prides itself of its historic character.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘new Boston,’ but again I’m not sure of your point. There’s no such thing as ‘new Boston.’ Because if Boston were ‘new,’ we would’ve annexed Chelsea and Canton, expanded our transit system, rebuilt the tunnels so that they aren’t a flaming joke, hired a strong city planner and stuck it to these Boston Brahmins who for generations have always had the final say as to what goes in Boston and what doesn’t.

As far as City Hall is concerned, there’s nothing aesthetically pleasing about brutalist architecture in the heart of where the American Revolution. If that makes me a social media warrior, then so be it.
 
Scott said:
Can a building and plaza that has hosted over a million people (at once) be considered a failure? Very few buildings in the US can say that. Was "New Boston" in general a failure, not in my opinion. "Ugly" and "failure" are two different things. The former is a matter of taste (of which social media warriors have none). The latter is a different more sober conversation, like we have here.
Click to expand...
A few special events in a year do draw in a lot of people on those particular days, but the rest of the year the plaza is a failure; unfriendly, desolate and unwelcoming. It was deliberately designed as a vast empty space surrounded by faceless brutalist monoliths, providing very little human-scale interaction with people in the plaza.
The whole damn thing needs to be ripped up, replaced with small blocks and small streets, retaining one or two smaller plazas, but those surrounded by small streets, shops, and buildings of various heights with retail, residential, and office space.
 
kingofsheeba said:
As far as City Hall is concerned, there’s nothing aesthetically pleasing about brutalist architecture in the heart of where the American Revolution. If that makes me a social media warrior, then so be it.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what it makes you, but whether or not we like a certain type of architecture shouldn't dictate whether something is built. Going to your specific point about the American Revolution, very little of Boston's built environment is as old as that. Yes, some of it is close to City Hall, but let's not pretend that the East End or Scollay Square featured Revolution era architecture, they did not.
 
kingofsheeba said:
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘new Boston,’
Click to expand...
"New Boston" was a kind of slogan or ethos behind a lot of the Urban Renewal here in the 1950's-1970's. Boston had been in economic decline for decades; buildings were crumbling; and the whole city felt old-fashioned and incompatible with a modern city. Urban planners explicitly wanted to build a "New Boston" to revitalize the city, and that included embracing modern architecture like brutalism. I think I've read that Ed Logue coined the term when he was head of the BRA, but maybe someone here can correct me on that.

That's what Scott meant by "New Boston." In this context, I don't think Scott was defending all of the Urban Renewal from that time, just some of the architecture.
 
I wasn't even defending the architecture, though I will if you would like. I was explaining why I thought City Hall was not a "failure." I am not so sure that the success that you see city-wide today would have happened at all without the "New Boston" plan. It is too bad that people equate it with Urban Renewal but they are not the same
 
Scott said:
I wasn't even defending the architecture, though I will if you would like. I was explaining why I thought City Hall was not a "failure."
Click to expand...
I see, thanks for the clarification.

Scott said:
I am not so sure that the success that you see city-wide today would have happened at all without the "New Boston" plan. It is too bad that people equate it with Urban Renewal but they are not the same
Click to expand...
Honestly, I'm one of those people. I see them as so linked, I think of them as basically the same. What's the practical difference?
 
Scott said:
I wasn't even defending the architecture, though I will if you would like. I was explaining why I thought City Hall was not a "failure." I am not so sure that the success that you see city-wide today would have happened at all without the "New Boston" plan. It is too bad that people equate it with Urban Renewal but they are not the same
Click to expand...
The phrase "New Boston" in the early/mid 1960s was directly linked to the urban renewal projects at the time. There was no difference between the two. I was there at the time in my teens following all of it closely. They were one and the same. Of course, this "New Boston" also included all the proposed, never built, expressways and transit extensions. All this was described and laid out in the BRA published hardcover book, a Plan for Boston, 1965-1975, which I purchased when I was 16.
As a side note, the Feds at the time were funding only large scale urban renewal/removal projects. They were not funding rehabilitation of old buildings, unfortunately, nor were they funding putting up a new building here and there in an existing neighborhood. They were going for the blitzkrieg approach, and I honestly wonder if that was influenced psychologically by the wiping out of large parts of European cities in WW II aerial bombing just a couple of decades earlier, and the rebuilding of those cities. So, thanks to the Fed's funding approach, we ended up with these huge scorched earth type urban renewal programs.
I just hope Boston takes the approach of trying to re-stitch these areas back together again, and that this mania for preserving the brutalist buildings doesn't get out of hand, as it appears to be doing.
 
Last edited:
I can't believe I'm saying this in public, but I actually like city hall, or rather, I've grown to like it.

Having said that, the first 40' of elevation on Congress Street is an absolute crime: "fortress" is not exactly pedestrian-friendly, AND this faces Boston's tourist mecca. The architect and the city should be held in contempt for designing and approving this. The other major design flaw - particularly for a City Hall - there's no apparent front door. These two flaws represent the exact antithesis of both good urban planning and good civic design.
 
ritchiew said:
"New Boston" was a kind of slogan or ethos behind a lot of the Urban Renewal here in the 1950's-1970's. Boston had been in economic decline for decades; buildings were crumbling; and the whole city felt old-fashioned and incompatible with a modern city. Urban planners explicitly wanted to build a "New Boston" to revitalize the city, and that included embracing modern architecture like brutalism. I think I've read that Ed Logue coined the term when he was head of the BRA, but maybe someone here can correct me on that.

That's what Scott meant by "New Boston." In this context, I don't think Scott was defending all of the Urban Renewal from that time, just some of the architecture.
Click to expand...
Got it
 
ritchiew said:
I see, thanks for the clarification.


Honestly, I'm one of those people. I see them as so linked, I think of them as basically the same. What's the practical difference?
Click to expand...
It is not just a "practical" difference, it was two different things completely. One federal and the other local. But that is besides the point. Some people just want to tell you that you are wrong so they talk about Urban Renewal and they don't want to hear about anything else. Ironically, it seems the wrecking ball is their only cure
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top