"Dirty Old Boston"

dhawkins said:
There are some great photos of old school Boston Combat Zone by a photographer/ teacher, Jerry Berndt. This might be more art than architecture but I thought it would be interesting. To many to post, here's a link to a general search. Link

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That guy's hand.......has been places........
 
Charlie_mta said:
Whew, the photos on the link.... so glad the Combat Zone is gone. What a human train wreck that place was.
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Like everything in the civic space these days, what once was an anonymous face-to-face transactional experience has now moved to an e-commerce node. Anything you wanted there you can now get online -- or delivered to your door. Tougher to 'send back' some of today's packages, though. The human train wreck is now in our living rooms. 😈
 
BeyondRevenue said:
Like everything in the civic space these days, what once was an anonymous face-to-face transactional experience has now moved to an e-commerce node. Anything you wanted there you can now get online -- or delivered to your door. Tougher to 'send back' some of today's packages, though. The human train wreck is now in our living rooms. 😈
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I agree, but it is good that a section of the city no longer exists as a magnet for people wanting that type of life. I worked in the financial district but always avoided the Combat Zone.
 
Charlie_mta said:
I agree, but it is good that a section of the city no longer exists as a magnet for people wanting that type of life. I worked in the financial district but always avoided the Combat Zone.
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It looks volumes better. Menino made great things happen there. Four of the five ‘theaters’ were saved from demolition and are now acceptably used. The Gaitey Theater if I’m not wrong, is the only one that was too far gone and is now The Kensington. The Zone went from ‘avoid at all cost’ to ‘can’t afford the cost’ in a decade with no affordable stops in between. Transformed in every sense of the word.
 
393b40 said:
I only see the New New Boston in these images..., this is the Dirty Old Boston thread :p
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Good call! I moved it over to the skylines thread. Had both of them open and it went into the wrong one. In exchange, I put a picture that compares shiny and new to dirty and old. I wonder if anybody here was part of that crowd?
 
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If built today, they'd probably cap the Hancock where it is in the below shot, and half the people here would argue that it's fine.

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^ GC: anti-urban to the max. Superblocks, wide highway-like streets, no street wall, vast empty plazas abutting vast faceless buildings, I know that the generation who perpetrated this was traumatized by WWII and probably was influenced in all this by the wiping out of large sectors of European cities by wartime aerial bombing, but, come on.
 
Charlie_mta said:
^ GC: anti-urban to the max. Superblocks, wide highway-like streets, no street wall, vast empty plazas abutting vast faceless buildings, I know that the generation who perpetrated this was traumatized by WWII and probably was influenced in all this by the wiping out of large sectors of European cities by wartime aerial bombing, but, come on.
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.....and virtually no street-level retail whatsoever. It's no mystery.

If you want humanoids to stay away, that right there is the template.

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A few parts of the Seaport have not learned the lesson. Some open space only looks good in theory or on paper.
 
Charlie_mta said:
^ GC: anti-urban to the max. Superblocks, wide highway-like streets, no street wall, vast empty plazas abutting vast faceless buildings, I know that the generation who perpetrated this was traumatized by WWII and probably was influenced in all this by the wiping out of large sectors of European cities by wartime aerial bombing, but, come on.
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What's interesting is that European cities that were scarred by WWII, used the destruction to build metro systems, underground walkways, and pedestrian streets. I can think of Munich as a very good example of this. Their excellent U-Bahn and S-Bahn were mostly constructed on the rubble of the destroyed city. It looks amazing today.
 
Java King said:
What's interesting is that European cities that were scarred by WWII, used the destruction to build metro systems, underground walkways, and pedestrian streets. I can think of Munich as a very good example of this. Their excellent U-Bahn and S-Bahn were mostly constructed on the rubble of the destroyed city. It looks amazing today.
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Exactly. Present-day Frankfurt is also very much a byproduct of intelligent and purposeful rebuilding post-WWII.
 
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