The not-so-ugly truth about City Hall
BOSTON CITY HALL was just named one of the ugliest buildings in the world - an unfortunate and untrue designation for a building that caught the spirit of innovation responsible for the revival of downtown Boston. Mayor Thomas M. Menino wants to tear it down, but it deserves to be maintained and honored as the most important building constructed in Boston during the 20th century.
A travel website, www.virtualtourist.com, compiled this provocative list of the 10 supposedly ugliest buildings. General manager Giampiero Ambrosi acknowledged that it's not definitive. The list, based on negative comments from people who frequent the website, says more about the popularity of the destinations than the aesthetic quality of the buildings.
Number two on the list, behind City Hall, is the 59-story Tour Montparnasse in Paris, scorned by Parisians and visitors since it was built in 1973. Compared with other buildings of the period, the tower is not that ugly, just a bland high-rise that would fit into any major US city without much comment. The tower, however, disrupts the traditional six-story streetscape and is visible for miles throughout the city.
Boston City Hall is anything but bland. Chosen in 1962 after a nationwide competition, the aggressively modern design by architects Gerhard M. Kallman, Noel M. McKinnell, and Edward F. Knowles symbolized the rebirth of the downtown district after decades of economic decline. Boston was transformed in the 1960s and '70s by the construction of the Prudential Center, the John Hancock Tower, and a series of high-rises in the financial district.
In hindsight, not all of the changes were wise, notably the destruction of the West End neighborhood to make way for the Charles River Park apartment complex. But taken together, this new construction helped to make this city one of the most dynamic in the country.
The capstone of the redevelopment campaign was Government Center, built on the site of the Scollay Square adult entertainment district. Government Center would keep federal, state, and local employees concentrated in downtown, where they would be customers for local businesses. And the premier building in Government Center was City Hall, intended to break the mold of its predecessor two blocks away on School Street. In the 1950s, it was considered - as novelist Edwin O'Connor wrote in "The Last Hurrah" - "a lunatic pile of a building; a great, grim, resolutely ugly dust catcher." (The Architectural Heritage Foundation sensitively redeveloped Old City Hall; proof that once-unfashionable buildings can be brought back to life.)
New City Hall was such a refreshing change that in 1967, Mayor John Collins moved his office into the unfinished building during the last weeks of his administration. Collins welcomed visitors to "the most exciting public building in America." The heating hadn't been turned on, and December winds howled through the building. Collins came down with pneumonia and was bedridden for weeks.
Not everyone was as enthusiastic as Collins, but in 1976 it made another top-10 list - one of the most significant buildings in US history. And whatever the merits of the architecture, the development of Government Center revitalized downtown Boston. In 1976, Faneuil Hall Marketplace was created out of a set of historic but derelict warehouses just across Congress Street from City Hall. A shopping and dining emporium would have been unthinkable at this location had disreputable Scollay Square loomed nearby.
Three decades later, as downtown Boston continues to thrive, the architectural style of City Hall is out of fashion. Menino, having failed in an attempt to relieve the bleakness of the vast plaza surrounding the building, wants to redevelop the City Hall site and move the municipal offices to the distant edges of the waterfront. But City Hall has superb public-transit access, while the waterfront site does not. That is argument enough to keep City Hall where it is.
As it was in the 1960s, the building remains provocative, assertive, and emblematic of the strength and durability of the municipal enterprise.
If the mayor has his way, a high-rise office building would be built in its place. It might not be as drab as the Tour Montparnasse, but it would be a poor substitute for the icon of modern Boston.
Thomas Gagen, a freelance writer, wrote about downtown development for the Globe Editorial Page. 