Tag Archives: historic preservation

When should a building be landmarked?

Mayor Walsh wants to illuminate Boston City Hall, which opened in 1969. William Rawn’s redesign of architect Philip Johnson’s 1971 addition to the Boston Public Library is coming to fruition.

These two events bring home the complications of deciding what architecture to preserve in a history-obsessed city.

These buildings have commonalities. They are public, built with taxpayers’ money at about the same time. They both employ the Brutalism style, although the Johnson building uses granite, not concrete. Architects and architectural historians appreciate them. The public mostly detests them.

The Johnson building was landmarked by the Boston Landmarks Commission in 2000. Landmarks oversees Boston’s historic districts, imposes demolition delays on historic structures, and designates buildings as landmarks, according to chair Lynn Smiledge. In the Johnson building’s case, this means the commission must approve changes to its exterior, entry hall and the voluminous staircase atrium.

City Hall is not landmarked. When the mayor wanted to illuminate it, however, he had to obtain Landmarks’ approval because the building’s landmark status is “pending.” In 2007, several residents, including Douglass Shand-Tucci, Sue Prindle, and Friends of the Public Garden founder Henry Lee, submitted a petition to landmark City Hall. The next step would be for Landmarks to commission a study describing the building’s architectural and historic importance to the city and to the state, region or nation. That study was not undertaken.

“There has been a drum beat against mid-century modernism,” said architectural historian Keith Morgan, a professor at Boston University. Morgan believes City Hall’s poor condition is a reason the public doesn’t warm to it. He was one of several individuals who urged Landmarks to move forward with the City Hall study.

“City Hall is clearly of landmark quality,” he said. “It’s the exceptional nature of its design and its historic significance. It was the building that reversed Boston’s downward spiral. We owe it a debt of gratitude.”

Such exhortations have fallen on deaf ears. Lauren Zingarelli, Director of Communications and Community Engagement in the Mayor’s Office of Environment, Energy, and Open Space explained it this way:

“Each year the BLC Work Plan prioritizes two or three study reports for pending landmarks,” she said. “These priorities are based on available funding, owner support and perceived threat.”

With little “owner” support—i.e. two mayors—and threats to the building proposed only by them, Landmarks probably saw few benefits from moving forward on City Hall.

The Johnson building’s story is different. Both library buildings were designated at the same time. They were not threatened. No one would probably object to landmarking the 1895 McKim building that faces Copley Square.

But the Johnson building’s architectural significance is unclear. The report said, “The Johnson addition looks reverently to the McKim building for several of its architectural guiding principles and yet utterly disregards it many ways . . . The starkness of the Johnson addition continues the refined grandeur of the McKim without competing with its visual richness. The disdain for the human scale evident in the Johnson design, however, undercuts the effectiveness of utilizing classical principles in its arrangement and renders its academic ideal lifeless.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of architectural significance.

The Johnson building’s historic significance is also dubious.

The report said it shows how “library philosophy” has changed. For example, open stacks were the norm in the mid-20th century as they had not been in the 1800s. Perhaps that can be construed as history.

The report dwells on Philip Johnson’s importance as a scholar, a taste-maker, and a person whose “sympathy with the Beaux-Arts . . . [gives] his work an altogether more serious character.”

The Kardashians are taste-makers too. It’s hard to see Johnson’s sympathy with the Beaux-Arts in any of his buildings except maybe in symmetry.

Keith Morgan pushed back on me. Johnson and others like him had a profound influence on other architects, he said. That is important.

These buildings’ stories leave one feeling that landmarking, like much of human endeavor, is fraught with subjective feelings despite the principles in place.

Questions still need to be answered.

  • Should a certain amount of time pass before a building is considered for landmarking—say 50 years? The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s original “palace” and its 2012 Renzo Piano addition were landmarked in 2011, before the addition was finished. The addition is fine, but is this another case of a celebrity architect trumping a measured judgment of how a building works with the city over time?
  • To what extent should the public’s affection for a building affect landmarking? Victorian buildings we now appreciate were dismissed by some 20th century critics as vulgar. A future example could be the Hurley Building and its mental health facility, the Lindemann Center, on Cambridge Street. Keith Morgan praises its sculptural quality, but its unpleasant relationship to the street, even without the temporary, dirty steel fences around it, makes pedestrians want to walk on the other side. Its maker was celebrity architect Paul Rudolph.
  • To what extent should materials be considered? We’ve learned that concrete ages poorly, and it’s not only because the public concrete buildings have been left to rot.
  • Can we consider how a building contributes to a sense of place, a sense of Boston? The old Shreve, Crump and Low building at the corner of Boylston and Arlington did not receive landmark status and sits empty, destined for demolition. Its removal will affect the sense of early 20th century Boston within a whole block.

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I hope more regular citizens get involved in these matters so we can hash them out.

Your house? Think again.

It is September so my thoughts naturally turn to property rights.

It’s not so outlandish. In September, downtown Boston has many new permanent residents—new owners of houses, condominiums, lofts. Those new to downtown Boston may have to learn new attitudes toward their property.

You may be one of these new owners. You may have a deed to your property now. But it is likely that there have been many owners before you. And there will be many owners after you. You’re a part of a continuum. Your property is not all about you.

This is especially true if you live in one of Boston’s historic districts. If you want to change anything that can be seen from a public way, including new paint in the same color, you have to get permission from your neighborhood’s architectural commission at City Hall.

Small changes are easy. You submit an application and a staff member okays it if it is in keeping with the history of your building. If not, or if you are applying for more extensive changes, you have to appear before the architectural commission overseeing your neighborhood and gain their approval before the city will issue you a construction permit.

Novices complain about this. People whose mindset is “it’s my property, and I can do what I want,” will also complain. You wonder—why did people buy property in a historic district if they didn’t want a home that fits in and enjoys the historic district’s protections?

Because that is what these rules are about—protecting the historic nature of the environment. It keeps neighbors from erecting a huge television dish next to your house, as one of ours did in New Hampshire long ago. It keeps neighbors from building a monstrosity next to you. It keeps the value of your property from eroding.

A good example of the protections in action was the matter of a once-popular singer who bought a house in a 19th-century historic district in downtown Boston and proceeded to remove the original interior, replacing it with a southwestern theme.

Nothing could be done about the inside, which is not protected, but when she applied for a permit to change the entryway into something vaguely southwestern, the architectural commission said no. You might wonder why someone would buy property in a 19th-century New England neighborhood and want a southwestern theme, but then you would also remember that some people are crazy.

In any case, the singer departed, sold her house, and the new owners promptly restored all that she had destroyed inside. Even better, the value of the neighbors’ houses were not eroded by interrupting the pattern of entryways on the block. These things are important when houses are so close together.

Several historic neighborhoods in Boston have no protection against weirdnesses like this. The North End and Charlestown, the oldest neighborhoods in Boston, have no architectural protection for their buildings. On Soley Street in Charlestown a new owner tore down an old house. Maybe the replacement will fit in with the neighborhood. Maybe not.

Even the neighborhoods who do have protection sometimes lose. On Beacon Hill, a Chestnut Street owner got permission over neighbors’ objections to tear down a house he claimed was unstable, even though several other houses about to fall down have been saved. Years ago in the same neighborhood, the architectural commission denied permission for an owner to change the façade of his house. Mysteriously, one night the façade fell down. Hmm.

After living in a historic district for many years, I would have reservations about owning property in a place without those protections. Nearby owners with little knowledge about architecture or peculiar taste could affect my property’s value if they decided to “remuddle” their house, as an old house magazine used to call it.

Studies show that property in historic districts tends to be more desirable, to keep its value better than property elsewhere, and to provide a more pleasant environment in general. Giving up the chance to choose a favorite paint color seems a small price to pay for keeping a historic property appropriate for owners 100 years from now.

A handsome building

All the news about Boston’s central business district has been about the Millennium Tower and the remake of Filene’s.

Sitting around the tower, however, is a lot of old Boston, much of it built after the devastating 1872 fire. It isn’t yet known if the tower will prove to be as handsome as some of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century structures near it. Look at the nine-story, 100 Franklin Street as an example of one of the best buildings in Boston.

Its materials are first rate— white marble blocks, bronze details, decorative cast iron trim and a pair of Roman centurion torchbearers mounted on either side of the main entrance. The front façade curves gracefully to match the line of the street. Every detail, from the window grilles to the fire escapes, is beautifully designed and executed. The contractor was Norcross Brothers, who also built Trinity Church.

A bank now occupies the main floor, which has suffered from modern replacement windows and a newish, banal doorway. But the building is lucky in that other classical details have been preserved.

Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, an architecture firm responsible for many handsome Boston and Cambridge structures of that era, designed the 1908 building for the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. It cost $1.1 million to build, said Robert J. Roche, archivist and records manager for Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott, as the firm is now known. The City of Boston currently values 100 Franklin (or 201 Devonshire, as listed in official records) at more than $22 million.

Its occupants have included the Boston Stock Exchange and the Vault, a group of business leaders who met there as they helped instigate Boston’s urban renewal in the 1950s and ’60s. Now one of its occupants is the building’s current owner, Synergy Investments, which maintains the building at a high level. It is 98.5 percent leased, according to the CoStar real estate database.

A building such as 100 Franklin is desirable, said Kirstin Blount, senior vice president at the real estate firm Colliers International, even though it does not have the large floor plate of newer skyscrapers. It is ideal for smaller firms, she said. Many of these older buildings exist in Boston since high rises account for only 29 million square feet in the approximately 63 million square feet of office space located in Boston’s business districts. The rent in older buildings, even when they are in meticulous condition, can be half that of a high rise or a new building.

The urban analyst Jane Jacobs loved older buildings, claiming they add variety in aspect, diversity in ownership and economic vitality. She believed that older buildings were required to keep streets vigorous.

But such buildings can be vulnerable. The Shreve, Crump and Low building at the corner of Arlington and Boylston is slated for demolition to make way for the Druker Company’s new building as soon as the company signs an anchor tenant.

While 100 Franklin Street looks as if its current profitability will enable it to last, it has no protection other than its owner’s good will. It is eligible for listing on the National Historic Register and is located in Boston’s Commercial Palace Historic District, designated by the National Historic Register. But those honors are not much protection, said Lynn Smiledge, chair of Boston’s Landmarks Commission.

The state-sanctioned historic districts such as those of the Back Bay and Beacon Hill have serious protections for historic structures, but there are no such Massachusetts-designated districts in Boston’s central business district, she said.

As for individual buildings, “the bar is high and the process lengthy,” Smiledge said about designating a structure as a landmark. “A building has to demonstrate significance beyond the local level or be the finest example of its style.”

That wasn’t the case for the old Shreve, Crump and Low building, even though many preservationists objected to its demolition.

Dozens of buildings in the financial district or Downtown Crossing are fine examples of the classical revival period, so 100 Franklin, for all its beauty, has company. Few older buildings demonstrate state-wide or national significance even though they may have interesting local histories. Unless a building is threatened with demolition or significant change, it typically sits on a “pending” list for a local landmark if it has any paperwork at all, said Smiledge.

For now, such beautiful buildings as 100 Franklin Street serve proudly as contrasts to the high rises, most of which in Boston are made of lesser materials and possess little interesting detail. Perhaps the qualities of the older buildings could be the jumping off point for the design of some of the new high-rises in central Boston or the Seaport District’s mid-rises. We could do worse.

 

 

 

 

DPW’s plan: Deforest the downtown

Go out and measure your sidewalk. Is it less than seven feet wide?

Measure the distance from your building to the tree pit. Is it less than 36 inches? Have the tree roots in front of your building heaved the sidewalk?

If your answer is yes to any of these questions, your tree will have to go.

That’s what the Department of Public Works has decreed without consulting neighborhoods that will be affected. The DPW proposed an unsuccessful, ugly plan for creating ramps that deface Beacon Hill’s brick sidewalks at a meeting in December. Eradicating the trees in downtown neighborhoods is the flip side of the ramp plan.

I’m predicting it’s never going to happen. Residents will climb into their trees just as they laid down on the bricks in 1947 on Beacon Hill. Continue reading →

How not to present a plan

The Beacon Hill neighborhood faces a situation in which two good goals — handicap accessibility and historic preservation — clash. Any steps taken to achieve those goals should be a win for both. But a presentation on Thursday night was a loss for both.

There are rules for success when city officials want to make changes in a neighborhood.

1. Understand the neighborhood’s history.

2. Understand what the real problem is.

3. Consult with neighbors.

4. Present two or three plans of high quality.

5. Make a good case for your change.

Public Works officials did none of those things on Thursday night when they tried to get the Beacon Hill Architectural Commission to approve removing bricks and installing concrete at dozens of intersections in that historic neighborhood to make it more handicap accessible. The commission denied the request, but this won’t go away. Continue reading →