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Great reply Ron, you really put me in my place. How did you know that I drove the wrecking ball that destroyed Mechanics Hall?

Again the assumption here is that all things equal Boston Proper would still be as well off as today without an intervention; I doubt that is true. Boston very easily could have become a suburban dominated urban area that is rotten at its core just like Detroit. Heck, Boston didn't even possess a public bathroom till the dawn of the 21st Century.

The service economy you see today is as much the product of rt128's growth as Boston's. The fact that we maintained an urban core is almost a miracle.

btw- Why, in that era did they stop calling things Boston and started naming them New England? For example the New England Patriots or the New England Aquarium. The only brand or style Boston had at that point was as a thing of the past or worse a slum.
 
The economy, the universities, hospitals, financial management houses, the residue of our architectural patrimony and the newcomers attracted by those features saved Boston. Who among you excitedly packed your bags, and set out for an apartment in Charles River Park with the words "I can't wait to see that City Hall Plaza!" tumbling from your lips?
When will people get over the big lie? "The New Boston" and urban renewal were a propaganda con perpetrated by self serving politicians, their connected buddies, and a gullible intelligentsia that was enamored of anything that had the label "progressive" attached to it.
The destruction of old Boston was executed with the zeal of "The Great Leap Forward" or one of Stalin's 5 Year Plans. The rows of Cornhill et al. subbed in for the kulaks, and were liquidated for "crimes against modernity".
The credo of this architectural mass murder was: "Let's show the world that Boston can be modern like all those other up and coming American cities." I laugh when someone complains that Boston is "Houston on the Bay".
To you I quote the words of our Dear Leader: "Mission Accomplished!"
 
They became the New England Patriots when they moved out of Boston, to Foxborough.
 
^ Another great single sentence answer Ron. Are you serious something or just being a dick? It is hard to tell sometimes.
 
The economy, the universities, hospitals, financial management houses, the residue of our architectural patrimony and the newcomers attracted by those features saved Boston. Who among you excitedly packed your bags, and set out for an apartment in Charles River Park with the words "I can't wait to see that City Hall Plaza!" tumbling from your lips?
When will people get over the big lie? "The New Boston" and urban renewal were a propaganda con perpetrated by self serving politicians, their connected buddies, and a gullible intelligentsia that was enamored of anything that had the label "progressive" attached to it.
The destruction of old Boston was executed with the zeal of "The Great Leap Forward" or one of Stalin's 5 Year Plans. The rows of Cornhill et al. subbed in for the kulaks, and were liquidated for "crimes against modernity".
The credo of this architectural mass murder was: "Let's show the world that Boston can be modern like all those other up and coming American cities." I laugh when someone complains that Boston is "Houston on the Bay".
To you I quote the words of our Dear Leader: "Mission Accomplished!"
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^ Can we build an ArchBoston hall of fame just to house this post?
 
Scott,

The original question speculated on what we'd be discussing today in 2008 if Boston hadn't undergone the 1950s and 60s urban renewal.

It's reasonable to suggest that without a Prudential Center, Mechanics Hall would still be standing and that we'd now be debating the merits of keeping it or replacing it with something more modern and functional.

It wasn't that long ago that people still wanted to save the (Old) Boston Garden, despite its increasingly decrepit condition.
 
I can understand why Boston 1950's/60's urban renewal took the pattern that it did. Concepts that had taken root during the Great Depression with construction of large superblock public housing projects and Robert Moses' expressway system in NYC were applied in full force in the laying out of the old Central Artery, the Government Center, Charles River Park, NY City Streets project, as well as the aborted NASA center at Kendall Sq. in Cambridge.

These concepts included:
- The "superblock" concept, with wide streets on a super grid, large buildings set back from the wide streets with large plazas, and very little mixed use in individual buildings.
- A robust expressway system, a city-wide system of wide major arterials, large parking garages in the city center, and a diminished transit system.
- Huge areas of poorly located open space and "park" land.
- Pedestrians poorly accommodated.
- Transit lines rerouted to serve suburban commuters at the expense of serving inner city areas (i.e. Charlestown, the South End and Roxbury).

I'm also thinking that the leveling of European cities during WWII provided some of the inspiration for the "wipe the slate clean" mentality of post WWII urban renewal in Boston.

My wish is that there could have instead been another model followed, wherein the old street grid and most of the existing buildings would have been retained, and a more targeted infusion of new buildings - low, mid, and high rise - on a tight density replacing unsalvageable buildings and introducing height and capacity where appropriate. Pocket parks could also have been added within the existing urban fabric without impacting density and urban feel.

Looking at how European cities infilled their areas cleared by bombing during WWII, they took much more this approach than the one Boston took. They re-created dense, diverse and urban neighborhoods, and generally did not follow the "high-rise in the park" concept that Boston adopted.

I think Boston could have become just as prosperous as it is today if it had redeveloped in the 1950's and 60's using a high density, selective approach to redevelopment, rather than replacement of huge areas of the center city with suburban type development.
 
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Charlie_mta said:
I think Boston could have become just as prosperous as it is today if it had redeveloped in the 1950's and 60's using a high density, selective approach to redevelopment, rather than replacement of huge areas of the center city with suburban type development.
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My point is that we will never know for certain. Not sure if any of you guys grew up in Boston in the 50's and 60's like I did, but it was a dying city plodding along, still basking in its faded glory and consumed by tribalism: Yankee versus Irish etc. that would morph into black versus white, culminating in the 1974 school desegregation fights. While it would have been nice to have preserved more of the fabric of the old Boston, I think the city needed that jolt at that time to wake up. Coulda, shouldas can be risky. I am not saying we should erect a statue to Ed Logue, rather he was one historical figure in that era that eventually led to the Boston of today. Whether Boston would have become Paris or Detroit East, no one will ever know. Having lived through that era, my money would be on Detroit East.
 
I don't remember the 50's and 60's but I remember Boston of the '80's quite well. It was a thrilling place to be a teenager.

Unfortunately Emerson was leaving and Lahey Clinic had ripped down half of Mission Hill and moved to Burlington. Then all of a sudden something changed and houses around the city stopped being torched or ripped down and people actually started building. It was quite amazing.
 
Another factor in the wholesale redevelopment of downtown was the growth of the suburbs, particularly of suburban malls. In my youth Boston was the only place to shop for clothing, furniture and home furnishings if you lived within 15 miles of the city. Also, only adults went shopping back then. Kids and teens didn't have much extra cash, and, aside from 45's (records, that is), comic books (like "MAD"), model cars and planes, and crystal radios (yes, I'm dating myself!), there was little that teens could afford, collected, or bought.
Some cities had decent centers where retail flourished, but by the 1960's they too were in decline due to the growth in use of the auto, the building of Rt. 128, and the sprawl of housing into former farm land. It was simply inconvenient to use Boston for shopping; stores closed and remained empty and the appearances of blight spread. Moving death of heavy industry in the city and the growth of light and high tech industry into the suburbs and the change in the way goods were transported (from rail to truck) were other factors that gutted much of the old industrial areas of central Boston. No doubt whole swatches of downtown were not pedestrian-friendly, nor, at the time, were many old building considered "historic" or architecturally significant. But I still wish the redevelopment was more careful and sensitive to the human scale.
 
Someone mentioned that the mentality that allowed for destruction of the urban fabric took some kind of subconscious inspiration from the destruction of European cities during WWII. If I may suggest a more contemporary parallel: "we had to destroy the village in order to save it".
 
A whole lot of BPL construction pics were posted today ... 404 of them:

http://flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/sets/72157604387910465/


2387539345_0dd7ce8199_b.jpg


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really great photos, nice find!

Alternative architect's rendering of the BPL:

2387556303_a4ee16d8a5.jpg


glad they didn't go with this one, it looks like a city's public high school
 
That meant that it would look like all the other 'public use' buildings at the time. Not a crime, but glad they went with something that strove to be better.
 
Those are great. Nice find, Mike.

I always wondered what this block of Boylston looked like before the Darth Vader building:
2387515973_2db960745a_b.jpg
 
I believe Darth Vader sits on the spot of the old Hotel Kensington, the lions from which (now gold gilt) were moved to the main entrance of the Copley Plaza Hotel after sitting in storage for decades.
 
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