ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS The Boston Athenaeum always looks grim. Its classically proportioned facade of gray sandstone faces north, receiving little light. You'd never guess you were looking at one of Boston's astonishing institutions. The grim exterior does achieve one goal: It dramatizes the experience of going inside. There the building explodes into a stunning series of rooms with dramatic vaults and colonnades, many of them brilliantly sunlit as they look out over the Granary Burial Ground at the Athenaeum's rear. We're looking down Beacon Street toward Somerset Street. In both photos, the Athenaeum is in the middle of the right side. It's a unique institution in several ways, beginning with its quirky address, No. 10Ih Beacon. The Athenaeum is a private library for the use of members and qualified scholars. It was founded in 1807 and is still owned by shareholders, called Proprietors. Shares are often handed down by inheritance (there are 1,049, another quirky number). The Athenaeum is the source of much of cultural Boston; both the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts began as spin-offs from its collections. Those collections are still large: more than 600,000 books and a fine array of 19th-century American art. The present building, designed by Edward Clark Cabot in imitation of a villa by the Renaissance architect Palladio, opened in 1849. In 1914, it was altered and enlarged. Today, it is again closed for renovation. Architects Schwartz-Silver are replacing all systems - plumbing, heating, electrical, elevators, sprinklers, windows. The Athenaeum will add new spaces for lecture programs and exhibitions. And it will expand into several floors of Congregation House, the building next door at the right of the photo. Seen from outside, though, the Athenaeum remains the motionless stone in a stream of change. The biggest change is at the rear of our photos, where Beacon Street bends. In the old photo, the vista is closed by a modest granite building that housed church-supported charities. The site today is occupied by a huge, but undistinguished, office tower. -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Athenaeum, Beacon Street", Boston Globe, 2000

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS "We are looking at two photographs of classrooms at the Boston Latin School, one made in 1907, the other in 2002. They offer a visual record of changing values and demographics. In 1967, all the students and their bearded teacher are white, all are male, and all are wearing jackets and ties. On the blackboard is an elaborate chalk-drawn timeline, titled ‘A Literature Graph,’ of English and American writing. All the authors in the graph are white and male, too. Some of the choices feel odd today. On the English timeline are Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, Gray, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Macaulay, and Tennyson. On the American line are Franklin, Irving, Cooper, Emerson, and Lowell – and nobody else. The sense that culture is a closed society, a small club of Anglophile men, is very strong. Needless to say, there’s no literature graph in the new photo. Instead, the blackboard tells us the class is studying cell biology with teacher Patreka Wood, who is a woman of color. The students are obviously of both genders and many backgrounds. They stuff their backpacks informally under their seats. Instead of ties, they often wear information about where they shop: Gap, Nike, Abercrombie. You may not be able to see it in the photo, but two of the kids are making faces at the camera. It’s a totally different world from 1907. It’s informal, diverse, and consumer-oriented, as is Boston itself today. Boston Latin is one of our remarkable institutions. It is the oldest public school in the country, having been founded in 1635, one year before Harvard. Things may be changing at Latin, but they change more slowly than elsewhere. According to the school’s Web site, ‘The curriculum of the school is centered in the humanities, its founders sharing with the ancient Greeks the belief that the only good things are the goods of the soul.’ Entry is by examination. Among the many notable graduates are Benjamin Franklin, Joseph P. Kennedy, and Leonard Bernstein. The present building opened on Avenue Louis Pasteur in 1922. The two photos, therefore, are of different buildings. But the kids in 2002 appear to be sitting at the same desks as the kids of 1907, desks with inkwell holes and ornamental cast-iron legs. Electric light, however, has apparently been added." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Boston Latin School," Boston Globe, 2002

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS "It must be about 1900 in the older of these photos. We can guess the date because there aren’t yet any cars, but the landmark Ames Building, finished in 1889, is visible – in a ghostly way – at the far end of Broad Street. Broad is the street that fades back through the middle of the photo. In the new view, made from the same spot in 1989, the Ames has disappeared behind the latest of Boston’s controversial office towers – 75 State Street, notorious for both its jazz-age crown of gold and its alleged history of influence peddling. With the Ames thus hidden, no major building has survived from the old photo to the new except a fragment of the cone-topped Grain Exchange at the upper right in both cases. The old photo repays study. It shows us an exceptionally graceful bit of cityscape. The intersection in the foreground is one of those pleasantly crazy Boston junctions that seem to have been laid out by congenial drunks. All three of the buildings are rounded at their corners so that each can follow the curve of its street comer as closely and sympathetically as a dancer might follow the movement of a partner in ballet. There are no square towers plunked down awkwardly on curvy downtown sites, a common mistake in the Boston of the 1960s and ‘70s. Round, too, is the surprising gas lamp in the extreme right foreground, a delicate concoction of glass bulb and metal parasol that looks like a Chinese mandarin out for a stroll. Only a few years ago, Broad Street was a low-rent backwater of the business district. Its charm and human scale have now, once again, made it desirable. Today it is the heart of the Custom House National Register District, established by the Boston Landmarks Commission." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Broad Street: 'Round the Corner," Boston Globe, 1989

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS There were no nagging preservationists when, in 1920, city officials decided to widen Charles Street on Beacon Hill. Wreckers simply lopped off the front 10 feet of the houses on the river side of the street. The old photo shows the facades of many of the houses being rebuilt after the massacre. The new photo reveals that a great deal of further rebuilding has occurred since then. Like so much of what we think of as historic Boston, this side of Charles Street is almost entirely a 20th-century invention. The exception is the Charles Street Meeting House, the cupola of which can be seen above the housetops at the right of both photos. Designed in the Federal style by a noted architect, Asher Benjamin, it was bl:lilt in 1807 for a Baptist congregation. The site it stood on had just been carved out by developers, who had cut off the top of nearby M t. Vernon Street to fill the riverbank. In the early years, the Baptists could and did immerse their devotees directly in the Charles, which flowed past the back door. In 1920 the church, then housing a black congregation, was scheduled to be demolished for the street widening, but members and neighbors raised funds to move it the necessary 10 feet. It became Albanian Orthodox, then Unitarian Universalist, and most recently, in 1982, was renovated for shops and offices by an architect who lives in the tower. -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Charles Street", Boston Globe, 21 March 1993

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS "Faneuil Hall once was practically buried among a dense throng of neighboring buildings. Now it stands free in open space. Which is better? We like the old version. All that clutter and density are also warm, human, and friendly. In the 1920 photo, we're looking down a street that no longer exists -- Elm Street. It's the kind of street that the word "urbanity" seems to have been invented for. The buildings cluster sociably close to one another. They don't stand aloof behind wide streets or big plazas. At ground level, doors and windows, many showcasing food, lure the passerby: Pillsbury's Best, McKinnon Lunch, Coffees, Teas. In the lower left portion of the picture is what appears to be a lunch cart, about to open its windows and raise its awnings. Only two buildings survive from the old view. Faneuil Hall is the building in the center with the domed cupola. The Custom House Tower of 1915 rises behind it. Everything else we see was cleared in the vast, federally funded Government Center Urban Renewal project, which began in 1962. Wrecking crews demolished a wide area, including everything in the foreground of the old photo. Twenty-two streets reduced to six. The goal was to make wider streets for cars, bigger blocks for skyscrapers, and open space for pedestrians. Some planners argue that the more street intersections a city has, the livelier it will be. Between 1880 and 1950, the central square mile of Boston lost 245 intersections, falling from 618 to 373. (Venice, the most beautiful city in the Western world, has 1,725 in its square mile -- and that's not counting the canals.) The new photo shows Faneuil Hall today. The building is little altered; it's pretty much the same market and meeting hall it was in 1806, the year it was enlarged by architect Charles Bulfinch. But everything around it has changed. Today Faneuil looks less like a congenial piece of the city, and more like a solo star on an empty stage. Notice that the streetlight in today's photo looks more old-fashioned than the streetlight in the old photo. That's a clue to the nostalgic fakery that infects many cities today, as they invent a past more elegant that the actual one was." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Lone Star," Boston Globe, 24 July 2005

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS Beloved old Fenway Park isn't as ancient as we like to think. Even the Green Monster - that infamous left-field wall- didn't appear until the '34 season, when the park was already 22 years old. The original Fenway was built largely of wood in 1912. It burned once in 1926 and again, more seriously) on January 5,1934, while being refurbished by new owner Tom Yawkey. The four":alarm blaze virtually erased the park. We see it being rebuilt in steel and concrete in the older photo. The new one shows it today, with Boston office towers in the background. In the brief era between the two fires, Fenway was even more pungently odd than it is now. Because the left-field bleachers weren't rebuilt after the first fire, a fielder could run behind the third-base grandstand to shag foul flies. That bizarre possibility was cut off by the Green Monster, the terror of pitchers because it is so close to home plate, allowing easy homers or off-the wall doubles. Among today's oversized, standardized, and boring arenas, Fenway is greatly treasured for its intimacy and quirkiness. But it is again in need of renovation and may be replaced by a sports mega palace. Say it ain't so. -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Fenway Park",Boston Globe, 11 July 1993

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS "Historians call it the ‘Boston Granite Style.’ It must have been the most muscle-bound architecture ever invented in this country. Huge blocks of granite, often left deliberately rough, were piled into massive, fortress-like structures – warehouses, wharves, public works. What was being expressed? Surely the strength, wealth, and durability of Boston’s merchants and sea captains, the people who created the Granite Style in the decades before the Civil War. Durable, however, is something the Granite Style seldom proved to be. One of its monuments was the old Beacon Hill Reservoir, which stood near the crown of Beacon Hill. Charles A. Cummings, the designer of the New Old South Church, in Copley Square, called it the best piece of architecture in Boston. Yet the Reservoir survived only 40 years, from 1849 to 1888, when it was torn down- no small feat in itself, surely – to make room for the Annex to the State House. The old photo shows the Reservoir around 1868, and the new one shows the Annex today. In both views, we’re looking north along Hancock Street. Water was pumped 15 miles, from Natick’s Lake Cochituate, to the top of the Reservoir. This was a huge tub of water lifted high on massive arches as a waiter might lift a tray – but this tray was nearly 16 feet deep and about 200 feet long on each side. No one is quite sure who designed the Reservoir, although an engineer named W. S. Whitwell sometimes gets credit." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Beacon Hill Reservoir," Boston Globe, 28 November 1993

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS It's hard to decide which of these views to prefer - the old one, with its lively parade of bold signs, or the new one, handsomer and cleaner but also tamer and less evocative. The old photo isn't really very old. The year is 1960, the month, October. Perhaps it's a weekend; there aren't many people around. But even in the absence of people, life is provided by the signs. The big Boston Five billboard, obscuring windows, is a bit too much, but many other signs are engaging and give the scene a sort of surrogate population; especially charming is the bold, elegantly corner turning "15¢ Sliced Crispy Pizza." But the little pizza building isn't what it seems. -It's an antique. Built as a house in 1711, it's older, for example, than any surviving building at Harvard, and it's now one of only three 18th century houses remaining in downtown Boston. In the 19th century it gained a further claim to fame as a center of literary Boston when it served as the premises of the famous Ticknor &amp; Fields, publishers of The Atlantic Monthly and of the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Dickens , and others. In the early 1960s the house was threatened by urban renewal. An organization called Historic Boston Inc. was formed to save it. Historic Boston restored the building to approximately what it had looked like in 1828, the year Timothy Carter remodeled it as a print shop and bookstore. This restoration is what we see in the new photo, made in 1986. The restored house is now the in-town offices of The Boston Globe and is known as the Old Comer Bookstore building. Certainly the Old Comer should have been saved, but perhaps it would have been better to save it without recolonializing it. Today it looks a little theatrical, a little bland. Next-door to it, on the right in both pictures, is a house almost as old, the Andrew Cunningham House, dating from the 1720s, also reconstructed by Historic Boston and now a stationery store. Beyond both houses in the new photo, the big parking garage trivializes the older buildings, making them look too small, like stage-sets or dollhouses. -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Publish or Perish", Boston Globe, 1986

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS "The old state house, which dates from 1713, is historic in more ways than one. Not only was it, at various periods, the Capitol of Massachusetts, the City Hall of Boston, and the site of the Boston Massacre, but it was also a 19th-century attempt at a shopping center. Old State Mall, they’d call it today. You can see it tricked out with shop signs and ornaments in the older photo, as undignified as a puppy wearing a tutu. Indignity wasn’t the Old State House’s only problem. Twice it came near to being demolished. In 1826, patriots proposed to replace it with a pavilion containing a statue of George Washington -an early instance of the American preference for media versions of history over the real thing. And in 1875, Chicago offered to remove it to the shores of Lake Michigan, to allow Boston to ‘improve’ its narrow streets. A private group formed, instead, and got the building restored as a museum of Boston history. That group, The Bostonian Society, still occupies it today. On October 15 the Old State House will formally reopen after a stem-to-stem restoration by architects Goody, Clancy &amp; Associates for the Park Service. Among its exhibits will be one on its own history, the checkered biography of a very American building." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - The Old State House," Boston Globe, 4 October 1992

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS Almost since there has been a Boston, there has been a State Street (or a Great Street or a King Street, to give it the two names it carried before the Revolution). Running from the Old State House down to the water and then, as Long Wharf, out into the harbor, State Street has never ceased to be the backbone of the city's business life. These views show it as it looked in about 1892 and as it looks today. The two most recognizable survivors are the Old State House and the Exchange Building. There have been a few improvements at the Old State House since 1892: Its tower has been painted a light color, and its cupola has been gilded. The Exchange (in the rear middle of both photos) is the first in a row of four turn-of-the century buildings that, taken together, give this part of State Street much of its character. The Exchange, designed in 1891 by Peabody and Stearns, unfortunately was shorn of its rear portion in 1981 to make room for the new mirror glass tower called Exchange Place, a glossy packaging job that is completely inappropriate to Boston. The second building in the row of four is the Worthington Building of 1894, a thin sliver of a building which, at 11 stories, is one of Boston's earliest steel-framed "skyscrapers." Then comes the marvelous Brazer Building rising right behind the Old State House cupola in the new photo. It was designed in 1896 by Cass Gilbert, who later designed the Woolworth Building in New York, for many years the world's tallest. The Brazer tells much about the pride and craftsmanship with which Boston's office buildings were once built. Its top two floors are treated as a loggia in the Italian Renaissance manner, with round, glass medallion windows punctuating a kind of wickerwork of stone detail that contains reed and floral motifs. At the skyline is a copper cornice with alternating spikes and shells. Down at street level, the Brazer lines the sidewalk with a dignified series of arches. Where the building curves at the comer, the glass in the windows curves, too. The fourth building in the row is the Easton Building of 1902, by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, which now contains the Boston National Historic Park Visitor Center. A handsome structure, it is similar to the Brazer but lacks the Brazer's flair. Though none of these four buildings alone is an architectural stunner, together they are an important part of State Street. All have been included by the Boston Landmarks Commission in its Exchange District, an area of "significant" office buildings. They demonstrate that the character of a city isn't created so much by a few very special buildings as it is by plain but good groups like this. -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - All in a Row", Boston Globe, 29 September 1985

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS Like a vengeful giant in a nightmare, the office tower to known as One Boston Place blots out the sky and hulks menacingly over the Old State House in the newer of these two views of State Street, in downtown Boston. One Boston Place looks like a packing crate the real building came in. It expresses all too clearly what its blinkered architects and developers imagined it to be: a mere cubic volume of rentable space. Nothing about it suggests that it is a workplace for human beings instead of, say, a widget warehouse. Its endlessly repeated identical windows transmit an unmistakable message: Whatever lies behind them - whether people or goods - must be anonymous and interchangeable. In the old photo, made in 1933, the Old State House, with its brave cupola, is already dwarfed by its neighbors. Yet it retains a certain dignity. In the 1991 view, One Boston Place hangs behind it like a photographer's backdrop, and the effect is to put the Old State House on display. It has become a precious object, like an ornamental snuffbox in a museum. Robbed of its setting and natural scale, it no longer feels quite like a real building. There's one other change. The old photo shows us a world so richly textured that it looks like a textile display. The carpet of paving stones, the facades with their elaborate pattern of stonework and windows, even the signage that peppers everything with letters - all contribute to an amazing sense of elaborated surfaces. Those signs are nearly gone in 1991, and the street is slick with asphalt. Most of the left side of State has been replaced by the frontage of 75 State Street. Built some ·20 years after One Boston Place and designed by Graham Gund, 75 State was a successful attempt to create an office tower that doesn't look like a packing crate. Burly stonework at the sidewalk deliberately recalls the past, and so do some of the materials, shapes, and colors. Yet 75 State is unmistakably of its own era. It is surfaced mostly in big, flat, smooth pieces of granite that could have been placed in position only by a crane, rather than laid up by the hands of masons. If there's a visible loss of human scale, there's also a breezy and bold inventiveness that offers its own kind of pleasure. -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Overpowering Towering", Boston Globe, 1991

Replacing the Warehouse is Church Park Apartments, designed by the Architects Collaborative and finished in 1973. The rigidly right -angled orthodoxy of modernism does not allow this building to bend as it should at the angled comer. The building can align with one .street or the other but not both. Choosing to align with Massachusetts, it leaves silly little triangles of useless, residual space along Westland, chipping away at the shape of the street and the comer. The aggressive, jutting upper floors dominate Symphony Hall, which is a more important building, while failing to punctuate or tum the comer in any way. The round shape of the parking garage in the rear completes the chaos.

ABOUT THE HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHS On Tuesday, August 31, 1954, Hurricane Carol – the worst hurricane to hit Boston in the 20th century – toppled the steeple of Old North Church. Carol wasn`t quite as destructive as the more famous hurricane of 1938. But it passed closer to Boston and did more damage locally. It destroyed 4000 houses and 3500 cars. It put downtown Providence under 12 feet of tidal surge. Block Island recorded a gust of 135 miles per hour. Trees and traffic lights went down, including three old elms in Harvard Yard. Massachusetts governor Christian Herter suspended the blue laws, asking stores to remain open on weekends because most people had lost electricity and their refrigerators weren`t working. The older photo shows the steeple at the instant of collapse. We`re looking north along Salem Street in the North End. Winds tore at the wood structure, and it swayed for more than an hour before finally crashing onto Salem Street. The collapse damaged a four-story house at the corner of Salem and Hull. Only minutes before, police had evacuated half a dozen families. Old North – or Christ Church in the City of Boston, to give it its official name – is the oldest church building in Boston. It was designed by William Price, who probably copied its architecture from depictions of London churches by Sir Christopher Wren. The church`s first service was held in 1723. The belfry steeple didn`t arrive until 1740, and the bells – they are still there – were installed in 1745, after being shipped from England. A 15-year old Paul Revere signed on as one of the original seven bell ringers. Thirty years later, Revere arranged the famous lantern signal from the steeple that warned of the British and kicked off the American Revolution – “One if by land, and two if by sea,” in the words of the poem by Longfellow. Hurricane Carol wasn`t the first storm to fell the steeple. It also had tumbled in 1804. A new one was then designed by Charles Bulfinch, the famed architect of Faneuil Hall and the State House. The steeple we see today, the one that was rebuilt after Carol, is a compromise between Price`s and Bulfinch`s. At its tip is still the original weathervane, the work of a Colonial craftsman named Drowne. 1954 was quite the year for hurricanes. Ten days after Carol came Edna, whice passed east of Boston but bruised the Cape and Islands. Then in October came Hazel, which passed west of us through Pennsylvania and New York on its way to becoming the most famous hurricane in the history of Canada. -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - A Stormy Season", Boston Globe, 24 April 2005

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS Some buildings get modernized. Others get antiqued. Antiquing has been the fate of the Paul Revere House in Boston's North End, as evidenced by these two photographs from 1903 and 1985. The change took place between 1905 and 1908, when the Revere House, threatened with demolition, was saved by a group of private citizens who formed the Paul Revere Memorial Association and acquired the house. This group then restored the house to an approximation of its conjectured appearance as originally built in 1680. The restoration included the removal of the house's third story, although, oddly enough, records show the third story was in place at the time Paul Revere bought the house in 1770, when it was almost a century old. Today, the Revere House is called the oldest surviving building in Boston, which raises interesting philosophical questions in view of the fact that very little remains of the physical substance of the original house. Nevertheless, the house gives a very good sense of what a dwelling in early Colonial Boston would have been like, with its gloomy interior rooms clustered for warmth around the great chimney and its exterior clapboard skin tightly buttoned against the weather. Paul Revere, the celebrated patriot and metal smith, lived and worked here from 1770 until the 1790s. He sold the house in 1800. During the next century it served as a tenement, candy factory, and grocery store. In the 1903 photo it appears to be mostly a cigar factory. The group in front of it is presumably on a school or camp outing. In the new photo, first -, second-, and third-graders are enjoying morning recess from St. John's Parochial School, across North Square from the house, along with their teacher, the school principal, and two members of the Revere House Association. The man on the right is Frank Del Gaudio, who was born in 1904, just about the time of the old photo. He has lived in North Square all his life and runs the gift shop that is visible behind him. The Revere House is now undergoing further restorations, intended to improve its authenticity while adding more exhibits. The work will be completed in 1986. -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Listen, my Children", Boston Globe, 22 December 1985

 Peter Vanderwarker&rsquo;s work has been published internationally in books and in magazines. He travels and exhibits extensively. Recent exhibitions include shows in New York and Boston. Upcoming photo shoots include projects in Africa (Rwanda) and China (Hangzhou). The National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation have supported Peter Vanderwarker&rsquo;s work, and he has received Institute Honors from the American Institute of Architects. 

Robert Campbell on Peter Vanderwarker's photography of City Hall and Urban Renewal

Peter Vanderwarker, an architectural photographer, discusses how he received a NEA grant in 1986 to produce a photo-documentary project about the Central Artery in Boston. His work still continues on that subject today.