The urban reality of City Hall, then and now
IN 1871, BOSTON'S Episcopalians decided to leave downtown and build a new church. Parishioners objected to the site, one calling it "a desert of dirt, dust, mud and wind." But Trinity Church turned out well and Copley Square became a destination.
When Bostonians reject change instinctively, they think change threatens their heritage. Boldness is part of that heritage. Mayor Menino's plan to sell City Hall and build a new one on the waterfront is bold. It is also realistic, reflecting three aspects of urban reality.
The first: a city that does not change and grow is a city that is dying. The "distant" waterfront will be to 21st century Boston what the Back Bay was to the 19th.
The second is a chance to develop the former Scollay Square by emphasizing Boston's prime asset, history, much of it buried beneath and beside City Hall. America's technological, intellectual, and showbiz saga unfolded there, as did profound racial conflicts. A wise developer would draw visitors by sponsoring a merger of the Freedom Trail and the Black Heritage Trail along Sears Crescent on Cornhill.
The third inescapable aspect of urban reality is that City Hall and its partner in grime, City Hall Plaza, have had 40 years to function, and have failed.
In 1880, when H. J. Hardenbergh designed an elegant apartment building near Central Park, New Yorkers said the site was "as remote as the wilds of Dakota," coining a brand name. Today, The Dakota is a desirable address on 72d Street, served, like Boston's Copley Square, by several bus and subway lines. On the waterfront, where a new City Hall may rise, Bostonians remain skeptical of the Silver Line bus because it is new. However, "bus rapid transit" is popular in many cities because of cost and convenience.
In 1960, tearing down the 1865 City Hall on School Street was a popular notion. Many agreed with Edwin O'Connor in "The Last Hurrah," who called it "a lunatic pile of a building: a great, grim, resolutely ugly dust-catcher." The Boston of 1960, after decades of depression, considered history a curse, not a blessing. Sears Crescent on Cornhill, built in 1841, is the sole survivor among hundreds of buildings demolished on 53 acres of old Boston.
John Collins, elected mayor in 1959, and his development chief, Ed Logue, were World War II veterans who believed in government and thought Government Center would ignite a building boom. Their energy, will and intellect created a "new Boston," centered around an unworkable, unlovely City Hall in a suburban mall ("Bureaucrats R Us") of bland government towers atop a blank and pitiless plaza.
The city officially called the area blighted. Others disagreed. "Scollay Square is a sailor's paradise," said a 1952 guide to Boston. "Here you can see a movie or a floor show, get in a little rifle practice, or get tattooed." Leveling the Casino and Old Howard burlesque joints appealed to Boston's residual puritanism.
It was my good fortune to cover the twilight of Scollay Square for the Globe. In 1962, at a museum display of finalist models for City Hall, many Bostonians disdained them all. Those who today disparage the winner would have disliked the also-rans. (A huge concrete doughnut next to Faneuil Hall? Great naming rights possibilities.)
I interviewed merchants and workers in the 900 businesses facing eviction for Government Center. After the Central Artery dissected the North End and urban renewal obliterated the West End, Bostonians were resigned to the government bulldozing neighborhood opinion. Merchants hoped to move on. "We offer anything that swims," said the cheerful proprietor of Sanborn's Fish Market. The onomatopoetic Cupcake Cassidy, a burlesque artist at the Casino on Hanover St., said sadly she would miss her attentive customers.
The most resourceful merchant was George Gloss, who owned the Brattle Book Shop, first on Brattle Street and then on Cornhill a block away. In his research to save the Sears Crescent building, he determined that Cornhill had housed second-hand bookstores since 1825. Emerson, Whittier, Hawthorne, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy browsed for books there. Gloss knew that on Cornhill William Lloyd Garrison had published The Liberator and that on Brattle Street, J. P. Jewett published Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin ."
Merging the Freedom and Black Heritage Trails would bring the Abolitionist era back to life there. In 1835, a pro-slavery Boston mob almost lynched Garrison near there. Woodcuts of the incident eerily resemble Stan Forman's Pulitzer Prize photograph of an antibusing mob attacking Ted Landsmark with an American flag outside City Hall in 1976. If Boston wants to understand its past as well as honor it, the trail will display both images.
The audio-visual arts world could also revive General Joseph Warren giving riding orders to William Dawes and Paul Revere in 1775; George Washington, John Adams and John Quincy Adams working and worshipping; American inventors Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Samuel F. B. Morse learning their trade; Fred Allen , Red Buttons and Phil Silvers leavin' em' laughin' on the burlesque stage. Historians and preservationists helped George Gloss save Sears Crescent in 1961 and interest in local history has intensified since then. David Kruh has written two lively books on Scollay Square, the vanished pleasure dome that lives in imagination.
Retail life has consistently failed on the plaza in the sterile shadow of City Hall. Ed Logue wanted to build a rathskeller in its basement, but the feds said no. Ironically, Logue rescued Quincy Market, slated for demolition in 1956. Its vitality is a daily reminder of the gloom of its hulking neighbor.
In the 1960s, architects and their sidekicks swooned over Boston's concrete totems. Under the headline "A Great Plaza for Boston's Government Center," Architectural Record in March of 1964 called it "a great plane on which people move," comparing the space, favorably, to St. Peter's in Rome and St. Mark's in Venice. The
Distance lends enchantment to the view. Visiting enthusiasts did not visit the place often, did not encounter staircases going nowhere, or get lost in vast spaces that do not inspire but intimidate. "Form ever follows function," said Louis Henri Sullivan, a Boston-born architect who prospered in Chicago. City Hall's function is to impress, overwhelm, even to freeze visitors. The most common word customers use to describe City Hall is "cold." It was designed to resist Sullivanesque adornment or any alteration.
"Those who would dare to call it beautiful should use the word with care," Architectural Record said in 1961 because beautiful was then a taboo adjective. A 1989 encyclopedia, "American Architects," said that City Hall, "in its confrontation and contempt for aesthetic refinements, shows a strain of LeCorbusier's New Brutalism." City Hall is a massive "mission accomplished" statement, $26 million worth of contemptuous, immutable concrete.
The Trust for Boston City Hall Plaza, with the team that produced one of Boston's great urban innovations, Norman B. Leventhal Park at Post Office Square, labored in the 1990s to humanize the plaza. It foundered on Boston's political puritanism. A hotel developer was too "well-connected" (politics in Boston?) so the plaza still sits securely in the public sector, austere as a reformer's dream.
A private developer will need imagination and a sense of history. In 1961, the Government Center Commission focused on transportation, demanding "no surface parking" and "no vehicular access." That rule and three subway lines and five stations beneath City Hall Plaza mean that four of its 11 acres can handle a high-rise building. City Hall is the logical site.
In Boston, where walking is the foremost mode of transportation, Uriah Cotting in 1816 designed a curving street beside Brattle to provide a view of Faneuil Hall. An early name was Market Street, changed to Cornhill.
Some four-story retail and residential buildings on a restored Brattle Street and along Cambridge Street could baffle the plaza's winds and shelter a Copley-Square-sized park facing the new signature tower.
"Can't they just get some lightbulbs and soap and water to help City Hall?," Mayor Collins asked me in the 1980s. Alas, no. Today's defenders say City Hall should remain because it was symbolic of the era. Not all 1960s ideas were sound; the war in Vietnam seemed like a good idea at the time.
For City Hall, it's time for bulldozers and a fresh start elsewhere.
Martin F. Nolan covered politics for the Globe from 1961 to 2001. 
