ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Buildings don't get much dumber looking than the Lord & Taylor store that is part of the Prudential Center, on Boylston Street, in the Back Bay. The closest it comes to architecture is the glitzy logo. The rest is a blank billboard. But 50 years ago, this site looked even worse. The 28 acres of prime real estate that is now the prudential center was a railroad yard. In the olf photo, we see grass growing through the Boston & Albany tracks.
The yard didn't disappear until the early 1960s, when Boston, eager for investment after a long depression, gave the Prudential Insurance Co. a tax break to build its Northeast headquarters on the old yard. At the same time, the Massachusetts Turnpike was extended from Route 128 to downtown Boston, cutting through the yard. The Pike, as well as passenger rail lines, still run beneath the Prudential Center - one reason why much of the Pru is raised, with seeming arrogance, on a platform above the city.
Lord & Taylor and the rest of the original Prudential Center were designed by an architect named Charled Luckman. Luckman could not find work as a young architect during the Great Depression, so he went into the soap business. He rose to become president of Lever Brothers, in which capacity he became the client for a classic early-modern office tower, Lever House, in New York (designed by Gordon Bunshaft). Lever House got Luckman interested in architecture again, and he left Lever Brothers to form his own architectural firm.
Alas, Luckman sold soap better than he designed buildings. The original Pru complex was an ugly alien. Instead of joinging the city life along Boylston Street, it was set back, for most part, behind wind-swept plazas. In recent years, some of those plazas have been filled in with shops and arcades. And in another year or two, a new owner, Boston Properties, expects to replace the asphalt access road (in the foreground of the new photograph) with apartments over retail shops, about 13 stories in all - roughly the height of the Lenox, which we see in the background, a modest railroad hotel of 1901 by a prominent local architect, Arthur Bowditch.
Good cities aren't made of vacant lots. Perhaps as it continues to fill in, the Pru will begin to feel like a part of Boston rather than a vast tourist capsule from Mars.
-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Prudential Center", Boston Globe, 1998
