Horticultural Hall

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS "Demolishing fine buildings is something Bostonians, like most Americans, are very good at. Few buildings have been more delightful than the one in the old photo. This was Horticultural Hall, built in 1865 as the headquarters of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The building was a marvelous pile of columns, pilasters, brackets, arches, cornices, pediments, dentils, statues of goddesses, and apparently everything else the architect could stuff into one building. Our Victorian forebears didn’t worry much about overindulgence, in either their banquets or their architecture. The architect was the engagingly named Gridley J. Fox Bryant. He worked in a manner that’s sometimes labeled by architectural historians as the Boston Granite Style. This was a 19th-century style of massive buildings that seem to embody the power of the rising mercantile class. You can check out Bryant’s love of bold granite architecture in such works as the Mercantile Wharf, the Charles Street Jail, and especially the flamboyant Old City Hall, which Bryant designed in collaboration with Arthur Gilman. At Horticultural Hall, as at Old City Hall, Bryant shaped his granite into delicate motifs that he drew from fashionable Paris architecture then being built under Napoleon III. But like the practical businessman he was, Bryant inserted a modest ground floor of shops beneath the two taller floors that contained the horticultural society’s rooms. The shops produced income for the society, and they enlivened the sidewalk for pedestrians. In both photos, we’re looking along Tremont Street from the corner of Bosworth Street (formerly Montgomery Place). The new photo is dominated by the swelling façade of Sargent Hall of Suffolk Law School, which opened in 1999 and was designed by the firm Tsoi/Kobus. Sargent is built of stone, too, in this case limestone, but the material is used in a contemporary manner as a thin skin over a structural steel frame, rather than being piled up in solid blocks. Sargent resembles Horticultural Hall in the way traditional architectural motifs – at Sargent, those of an Italian Renaissance palazzo – are deployed in a frankly theatrical way to assert the building’s importance as a civic institution and to suggest its connection to a cultural past. Tsoi/Kobus also did the new boutique hotel Nine Zero at the left of the photo. Between those two, the site of Horticultural Hall is now occupied by a modest office building with a pub at the sidewalk. The horticultural society decamped in 1901 to a new, equally lavish building in the Fenway." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Horticultural Hall," Boston Globe, 2003