ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"Nothing has inspired as much controversy in recent Boston architecture as the sudden eruption of anonymous, bulky office towers that look like huge Darth Vaders standing guard over the downtown. The postwar growth of high-tech industries in the suburbs created a need for more service businesses, bankers, lawyers, brokers, and insurance people. Instead of moving out to Route 128 to join their clients in the kind of exodus that ruined many American cities, these people stayed downtown, near the airport, near the government and courts, and near one another. They created a welcome vitality but a corollary problem of overgrowth.
By 1984, the downtown is clearly overbuilt. Damaged are its human scale, its view, its access to sunlight and freedom from unnatural winds, its delicate balance of memory and invention and of past and future.
Two photographs taken from the Custom House tower make the point. In the early photograph, taken about 1930, the first high-rises begin to poke their heads above the uniform 10-to 12-story height established by the zoning laws that were in force until the 1920s. The newcomers have the party-hat look one associates with skyscrapers in New York, as opposed to those in Chicago. They are the United Shoe Machinery Building (center) by Parker, Thomas, and Rice, which was recently saved from demolition, and the State Street Bank Building at 75 Federal Street (right of center) by Thomas M. James. Both are among Boston's best Art Deco-style buildings, both are step-pyramids, and both were built just before the 1929 stock market crash.
Except for the Post Office Building (not visible in the earlier photograph) and the New England Telephone building by Cram and Ferguson, built in 1947 (in the center of the recent photograph), no tower was built downtown until 1960.
The recent photograph shows, from left: 265 Franklin Street (Goody, Clancy & Associates), which is under construction; the new State Street Bank tower (F.A. Stahl, 1966); Dewey Square (Jung/Brannen), which is in the center of the photograph, in the distance; the Bank of Boston (Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty with Pietro Belluschi, 1971), which is partly obscured in this view; One Post Office Square (Jung/Brannen, 1982); and the Shawmut Bank at One Federal Street (the Architects Collaborative, 1976)."
-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Overbuilt Boston: When downtown grew up, the sky was the limit," Boston Globe, 19 February 1984
