IN OLD BOSTON, PRESERVING THE EVEN OLDER

Author: By Michael Kenney, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 2, 1998

Page: F3

Section: Books

As Michael Holleran notes in ``Boston's `Changeful Times,' '' the city might have been not just less attractive to visitors but a much different place in general. In reporting the efforts to preserve these familiar sites -- and the unsuccessful battle for should-be landmarks such as John Hancock's house on Beacon Hill -- Holleran, an assistant professor of planning and design at the University of Colorado, is actually explaining how the Boston of the late 20th century came to be.

For as ``the center of the city has been remade almost completely'' in the years since the Great Fire of 1872, Holleran writes, ``it has been remade around its landmarks -- all of the ones identified by 19th-century preservationists, and many more that have been added to the list.''

And the same civic spirit that saved the landmarks of Boston's colonial and revolutionary past, Holleran notes, created the environment that allowed ``neighborhoods built for permanence'' like the Back Bay and ``neighborhoods resolutely defended'' like Beacon Hill to ``mostly retain their intended qualities after a century.''

There were early, invariably unsuccessful efforts to preserve several colonial-era structures, mainly churches encroached upon by expanding commercial districts -- indeed, the title phrase ``Changeful Times'' comes from the 1849 effort to save the Second Church in the North End. But Holleran sees the fight to save Hancock's brick mansion in 1863 as ``a pivotal event.'' Its loss was a case of missed opportunities. At the last minute, after the site just west of the State House had been purchased, the building was offered to the state for free, but only if it could be moved. That could not be arranged, and demolition proceeded.

In the aftermath of this loss, writes Holleran, ``Bostonians had gone beyond regretting the loss of urban landmarks to try saving one. In later years they would find energy in the realizations of both how close they had come to succeeding and how great was their loss.''

Just six years later, the congregation of Old South Church decided to follow those of other downtown churches to the Back Bay, assuming that the sale of the Washington Street structure to a commercial developer would pay for the new church. Despite a spirited public campaign -- sparked by the oratory of reformer Wendell Phillips and the scorn of historian Charles Francis Adams -- the Old South Society won the right to dispose of the structure, and it was auctioned off in June 1876 -- the irony of the timing noted in a Boston Globe cartoon titled ``Centennial Patriotism Illustrated.''

Demolition of the steeple had actually begun when a local merchant secured a week's delay and set off a successful campaign to raise money to save the structure, a banner hung from the steeple asking: ``Does Boston desire the humiliation which is to-day a part of her history since she has allowed this memorial to be sold under the hammer?''

Holleran correctly identifies the ``Brahmin aristocracy'' as a key factor in making Boston ``one of the earliest centers of urban preservationism.'' And as he sees it, the fact that the city's wealth was ``held by a stable elite, closely identified with and involved in community affairs, made for less resistance in Boston than elsewhere to public regulation of property.''

The replacement of the city's old Yankee elite by an emerging Irish leadership appears to have triggered more verbal conflict than actual change. Typical was the threat by Mayor James Michael Curley's building commissioner to tear down the colonial Shirley-Eustis Mansion in Roxbury for building-code violations. A further exploration of this issue would have been worth another dozen pages or so, if not an entire chapter.

Among the pleasures of Holleran's account are his portraits of some of the figures involved in preservation, such as William Sumner Appleton Jr., founder of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, who despite ``finding a medieval simplicity in the simple structures of the early colonial period'' made preservation of the later and ``more accomplished'' urban architecture a more systematic activity than it had been previously.

This is an important book for understanding the development of modern Boston -- both its physical structure and its historical ambience. With its focus on what was preserved rather than what was lost, ``Boston's `Changeful Times' '' belongs on the shelf next to Walter Muir Whitehill's classic study, ``Boston: A Topograpical History.''

The evidence of just how much the city ``has been remade around its landmarks'' is all around. In recent years, the bank building at Washington and School streets (now a bookstore) was tapered to create a plaza across from Old South Church.

And as for those tourists along the Freedom Trail, one does not have to ask whether they would have been lured to Boston by the ``shaft or other monument'' that was proposed to replace the Old State House, or the ``attractive model of the old church'' that was proposed to be placed on whatever building replaced Old South.