Introduction to Lost Boston

By Jane Holtz Kay

Before you lies the last chapter in an ancestral folio of a living city, an obituary and record of its precious hoard of architecture. Turning over this old leaf, you will find images gleaned in the last 20 years, images that not only embrace times past but endorse the very art and act of remembrance. The vanished spaces, places, and structures here are as long gone as the yellowing pages of a family album. Like that picture trove, they reveal a shared past as crucial to a city's spirit as the album is to a family's sense of self.

"Felt memory," someone once called the barely articulated sense of times-past that give character to this venerable city. Boston's abiding buildings, its green and sculptured spaces, have created the frame for recollection and renewal as we exit from this, the most destructive epoch in America's built heritage. The ghostly prodigies assembled here entering a new century are not only the sad repository of the perishable past but a buoyant mirror of the splendors that endure.

Most poignantly, this epilogue, an elegy in time and space, records how Boston has continued to succumb to the ravages of America-the-evanescent; how its citizens have gnawed away the fine-grained texture of this town, and often downright wasted it. In this historic city, as elsewhere, what the 19th century valued, the 20th century jettisoned. "What a nice little city, it suits me fine. It suited me fine so I started to change it" was novelist Donald Barthelme's surreal perspective of America. It was Boston's, too.

The new edition of Lost Boston brings more photos to update the original volume. Some come from that era when the so-called "Urban Mechanics," the would-be fixers who "paved paradise" --slaying the city to "save" it with hardtop --earned the epithet "Urban Undertakers." And, yet, the melancholy images here go beyond the mortuary. Boston has never been trapped in the amber of time. This new addition to Boston's album emphasizes a landscape in transition: pages of rescued buildings and threatened buildings follow the lost ones. A living index of the city in the last two decades closes the collection.

The added portfolio of extinct architecture and artifacts reflects the charm of the ephemerally "modern," too--the neon sign, the transient storefront, even the naughty and nasty side of the street. Like the blowsy magnolias that all too quickly parachute to the pavement, these fluttering signs of city life had their day, and died. The memories they recall in this revised volume are not simply shadows of a fugitive or fickle cityscape but the forerunners of spirited heirs. We mourn and move on, too.

For all the losses exhibited in this portfolio, then, the city that reeled from its post-World War II assaults holds its own today. Those who live here now know well that the city rolling into the millennium escaped at least some of these instruments of destruction and hence remains one of the hardiest in the nation. Clinging to its artifacts as architecture not quaintscape, Boston has nurtured its citiness. And the testament to that endurance is in this volume, too: For only a city that is not lost--not lost at all--could merit or have maintained an album like this, a portfolio of architectural memorials.

This new viewing of the lost city remains a call to arms: Look what we've lost; look what we had. To be sure, holding fast was the underlying theme with which the first edition of Lost Boston greeted the hub's 350th birthday in 1980. Together, new and updated images here are not only an encyclopedia and cautionary of the hazards and outrages of what the passing century called Progress but parallel the finer prospects that greet the city's fourth century and provide a fine model for the millennium.

As the century turns, Boston's core, its neighborhoods, and green spaces, look better than they have in decades. Bostonians have begun to learn to take advantage of their outlook on the sea. Surveying the conspicuous affluence of many parts of the city, it is hard to recall the heritage savaged half a century ago when the fifties' age of urban renewal saw the federal bulldozer take a mighty swath of the city for the Central Artery, ruthlessly sack the diverse West End and Scollay and Adam squares for gigantic government buildings.

Two decades ago, while this and other "Lost" city volumes recorded the havoc across the nation, a generation of preservationists was rallying. Activists were halting the highway here, stopping the bulldozer there and echoing the call of the earth stewards of the environmental age. Not surprisingly, today's turn-of-the-century-city has seen many of those ardent preservationists celebrating 20th anniversaries, recording how they shepherded the reviving city. The rescues in this section reflect that new ethos and enthusiasm.

Boston is beginning to re-knit itself--to re-knit all its multi-cultural selves. Esteem for the central city and its close-in historic neighborhoods has galvanized worn neighborhoods. Not just the classic roseate Beacon Hills and South Ends, but the streetcar "suburbs," the Jamaica Plains and, slowly, very slowly the Codman and Roslindale and Dudley and Egleston squares, the Dorchesters and Roxburys, register the gains. The local color is visible in storefronts bearing the scripts and symbols of Cambodia, Africa or the Caribbean where Main Street advocates strengthen community backyards to right the economic inequities of a deep-pocket prosperity with holes.

To its credit, Boston is bluer, with a clean harbor, a "sapphire necklace" of harbor parks and a slowly emerging HarborWalk to parallel Olmsted's mended "Emerald" one. Formally and institutionally, preservation safeguards are in place. The papers pile high in the files of the Boston Landmarks Commission--detailed descriptions, documents of patrimony and purpose. The tourist buses roll by the well-kempt historic sites. Entering the 2lst century, city custodians engage in tenacious landmarking, political fighting, and heroic acts of rescue while the old city lingers in ways both prosaic and poetic: in the incremental economics of adaptive re-use, in the passion for a place or building, in the movement back to older edifices.

Yet, standing here on the ledge of the passing century, I also see losses and an indifference to the shape and soul of the city that strike me more forceably with the passage of time. Today, as when Lost Boston first appeared, the city is enmeshed in a building binge, undergoing a second "Massachusetts Miracle." Now, as earlier, the city's Second Coming is mostly "miraculous" for the singleminded attention to bottomline values which undermine Boston less grossly but as decidedly as the bulldozer.

Late century Boston is a city of cranes and construction and my window in the Central Wharf building surveys them as I work in the very structure that was the subject of my first preservation article. The rumbles of "The Big Dig," the five-mile tunnel burying Boston's elevated Central Artery, echo and I flinch when its jackhammers seem to threaten the 250-year old brick building. How like the heroic makeovers of this age-old city, I reminisce on happy days. On others, I wonder about prospects for the project draining coffers from infrastructure repairs and advances. Can the lessons of Boston and Lost Boston told here--the positive lessons of citybuilding, of planning, of civilized, civic action--offer the spoonful of honey to make this construction medicine go down? Can we build well, as well as restore, I wonder.

Entering another century, the work of the builders of tomorrow largely ignores the axioms that created our splendid yesterday. And the race for the "new," that most promising word in the lexicon of citybuilding, is perverted by mindless change agents. Having failed to learn from their history, are we condemned to repeat its misdeeds?

These images nudge us to do otherwise, to remember that an ever-renewing city must consider its context, its heritage, and the architectural legacy that is its felt memory. The bittersweet impressions here argue for the values visible in the late, departed city and in the city that happily embraces us today.

Introduction to Lost Boston.

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