A court of honor

Photo by Paula Ogier.

Braddock Park, South End. Photo by Payton Chung, CC BY 2.0.

As my school bus meandered through Boston's South End to alight a student in one of its archetypal residential squares, the Victorian architecture riveted me to the window away from my rowdy schoolmates, which often provoked their spiteful derision of me. Yet I remained transfixed by the area's striking resemblance to my Beacon Hill neighborhood as its brick bowfronts, scrolled ironwork, ornate porches and deep cornices trumpeted its potential as a desirable—if not necessarily affordable—place to live someday.
 

A development that fit both bills piqued my special interest for its solemn center-court entrance with lavish iron gate, classical balustrade, Grecian urns, Roman clock parapet, and classic block lettering that proclaimed its name over the gate and under the clock: NEWCASTLE COURT. The bay windows bookending the gateway refined the complex as a stately residence and close-knit enclave, while the sheer opulence of the gate and the clock left me guessing how old this building was.

Built in 1905, Newcastle Court at 599 Columbus Ave. picks up many of the architectural elements of its more upscale South End and Back Bay models, including bay windows with diamond and stained-glass panes, heavy cornices with modillions and fleur-de-lis reliefs, oriel windows, and opulent ironwork. Yet its yellow brick, cast-stone trim and simplified side-window balconies suggest its affordability as well as its turn-of-the-20th-century construction era.

As does its extended rear elevation, which occupies almost its entire side-street block, signifying its developers' intent to build it as an affordable multifamily residential complex. The pressed-metal oriel side windows elegantly extend some interiors into comfortable living spaces akin to those of wealthier South End and Back Bay dwellers. In so doing, these oriels form an architectural dialogue with that of the older red-brick building across the side-street, as a "good neighbor" gesture that welcomes lower-income people into an upper-scale neighborhood.

Of course, the rear extension denies Newcastle Court residents the private "hidden gardens" of the South End and Beacon Hill. But in exchange they get generous recreational acreage from the Southwest Corridor Park as it snakes through their "back yard." They also get a South End rarity: a green carpet welcoming them home.

The classical delicacy of the gateway's fluted columns and iron scrolls foretells the elegance of the space it introduces. The tenants are escorted out and welcomed home by a garden that forms a pastoral oasis from city clamor and a dignified approach to the units, in the vein of the aforementioned residential square with a central park, but this time without the cars, and with a park they can call their own.

The trees and shrubbery enrich the entry experience beyond just unlocking the door from the street. They make it into a rustic rite of passage homeward, which climaxes with the mighty timepiece signifying suppertime in the vein of vintage European public clocks such as the Paris-Orléans clock on Paris's Gare d'Orsay (1900, Victor Laloux, Lucien Magne and Émile Bénard), now the Musée d'Orsay.

Photo by Daniel Stockman (CC BY-SA 2.0)

This "common ground" and watchful clocktower symbolize the Newcastle Court community itself, as 30-year resident Patricia Rogers reported to the Office of Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh on the building's August 19, 2019 rededication: "This building is in at a convenient location, but the best part of living here is my neighbors. We look out for each other. I want to thank the Mayor, Fenway CDC and all of the people here today for helping us stay in our homes." 

The Fenway Community Development Corporation and its development partner, The Schochet Companies of Braintree, Massachusetts, did just that by acquiring the 97-unit block to preserve it as the affordable housing community its original developers intended it to be. 

Now known as the Newcastle/ Saranac Apartments, it not only welcomes low- and moderate-income tenants home with European gentility but also guards them from the eviction they would have faced had they not spoken up, as six-year resident Kim Wilson put it at the rededication ceremony:

"Before I moved in, I always said that this place was great because it was across the street from my church [and] I love the park that you have here. I used to come out here on Friday nights before choir practice and sit out in the park...and say hi to the people who came in the building. The walk pathways, the stores and services around here, and just how everybody used to come and just sit here in the parks...down here in the Northeastern area and just see the kids play, that really impressed me.

"After living here for a short period of time, I heard from one of my fellow tenants the rumor that was going around the building that it was going to be sold. Knowing this was the City of Boston, I figured that the building would be turned into college dormitories for Northeastern, or luxury apartments.

"I was impressed that the owner...came all the way from Florida to speak to us. He...had the City of Boston there to...tell us that they were going to keep this area affordable for us... During this meeting we had a voice. We expressed how we felt, that we were going to be at the table through this whole entire process to keep where we lived affordable... We also rallied by...speaking out at the State House...for funding for affordable housing, because...if we don’t do it, it’s not going to get done.

"And we’re just working people trying to make a living for ourselves and keep a roof over our heads. All the members of the tenant association are people that care about what happens to our lives and what happens here in this area, in our apartments. And we’re all here to improve the capacity and the quality of life for us. We are all thankful that the building has been preserved as affordable and no one has to move out." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSxwP5NEBcw)

This makes Newcastle Court both a court of honor and a bastion of hope for living affordably but nobly in the South End—just as I had envisioned it as an onlooker from my school-bus window.
 

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

A court of inquiry

For most Bostonians and visitors, this cavernous cut-through between State Street and Faneuil Hall Marketplace wedged in the shadows of two overbearing buildings is just that—a cavernous cut-through between State Street and Faneuil Hall Marketplace wedged in the shadows of two overbearing buildings.

But if we weren't so rushed to make our next business meeting, gung-ho to grab those takeout French fries, impatient to indulge in that Starbucks latte, or obsessed with social distancing in the age of COVID-19, we might well stop and inquire about this pedestrian path's historic origins. 

Given the remnants of colonial Boston's erratic network of winding and narrow lanes and alleys in places like the Blackstone Block near Faneuil Hall, Spring Lane in Downtown Crossing, Boylston Place in the Theater District, and the North End, our inquiry might revolve around the kind of stomping ground this lane was in premodern times, and the architectural atmosphere it may have led people to or through back in the day.

Corn Court, late 19th century. (All images courtesy of the Boston Public Library.)

The path marks the approximate site of Corn Court, a cobblestoned lane that meandered from Dock Square to Merchants Row in an obtuse zigzag pattern. It typified the way Boston's streets fell in line according to where buildings were placed in colonial times, with no formal city planning to lay out orderly grids and develop real estate along the template the streets had established. 

These photos depict the two approaches to the court, which was built c.1650 for carrying goods from the docks at the harbor's edge Faneuil Hall was later built on. At first unnamed, the lane was simply called "a wheelbarrow-way of five full feet" in 1670, as well as the "alley that leads from the house of James Oliver towards the dock." 

(James Oliver [1617-1682] was a merchant who rose to captain of the Boston Artillery Company and then Boston's militia and later became a town selectman. In 1675, he commanded Narragansett Campaign troops in the Great Swamp Fight in King Philip's War against the Narragansett tribe in Rhode Island.)

The lane was named Corn Court in 1708 for a common New England crop often exported from Boston Harbor. Expanded into Noyes Alley in 1796, it became best known as the approach to the Hancock House, later the Hancock Tavern (visible in both photos), an inn with rooms to let built between 1807 and 1812 in brick with a granite post-and-lintel entrance level and a clapboard rear wall (presumably to save money). It was carefully sited so its clapboard elevation was hidden from view and its more orderly brick/granite faces were visible from the court's main entry from Dock Square, as an invitation for merchants, politicians and others to quaff an ale, port or sherry over the latest scuttlebutt.

Hancock House, mid-to-late 19th century.

Not as strictly symmetrical as most other Federal-style structures, the Hancock House/Tavern had a corner bay that was spaced furthest apart from the other windows to allow more wall area, which possibly indicated larger interior spaces for dining and tea rooms above. This lopsided fenestration also emphasized the tavern's wide corner entrance and gave it a cleaner, more solid "wall" look from its Dock Square approach when the neighboring left-hand building concealed its other windows as one entered the court from Dock Square.

Hancock Tavern, c.1890. Note the Boston Stock Exchange (1889-1891, Peabody &
Stearns, now Exchange Place, the offices of The Boston Globe) in the background.

By the 1880s, the Hancock Tavern had become the stuff of legend. Its signs and menus spun the yarn that it was established in 1634 (four years after the founding of Boston) as the next phase of a tavern begun by Samuel Coles. Rumors spread that it had hosted John Hancock (hence its name!), future French king Louis-Philippe I when he was in exile during the French Revolution of 1789, French foreign minister Talleyrand, Benjamin Franklin...and, yes, George Washington wined and dined here, they claimed! 

Tea room, Hancock Tavern, c.1895-1900.

Yet another note from the Old-Myths-Die-Hard Department: the Hancock Tavern's owners boasted that this was where the Sons of Liberty met before staging the Boston Tea Party. A menu told this tall tale: “Visit the Historic Tea Room Up Stairs. In this room the ‘Boston Tea Party’ made their plans, and dressed as Mohawk Indians to destroy the tea in Boston harbor, Dec. 16, 1773.”

The Daughters of the American Revolution perpetuated that myth when they convened at the Hancock Tavern in December 1898—dressed as Colonial maids—to celebrate the Tea Party's 125th anniversary. Complementing the occasion was a wall inscription of the illusion, probably placed there by then owner E.B. Wadsworth & Co.: “In this room the Boston tea party made their plans and dressed as Mohawk Indians, and went to Griffin’s (now Liverpool) wharf, where the ships Beaver and Eleanor and Dartmouth lay, and threw overboard 342 chests of tea, Dec. 16, 1773."

Hancock Tavern, 1901.

As the above images of tall office buildings rising behind and around Corn Court and the Hancock Tavern signify, commercial real estate value was on the rise, giving birth to Boston's Financial District and sealing the tavern's fate, despite Wadsworth & Co.'s clear attempt to bump up its visibility in that dark, narrow enclave with signage on the commercial level of the encroaching high-rises.

And well they might. The tavern had gone through a succession of proprietors and had been a gambling den for years when Edward and Lucina Wadsworth acquired it in 1897, engaging in a last-ditch attempt to trumpet its alleged historical connection as well as its array of wines, liquors, cigars, lagers and bass ales. ("Burton Musty" was a brand of ale brewed by J.K. Souther & Sons, a short-lived Boston brewery operating from 1884-1889.)

Site of Corn Court and Hancock Tavern, 1920s.

Upon the tavern's demolition in 1903, all of its myths died with it when City Registrar Edward W. McGlenen confirmed its construction date range and reported that the two-story house it had replaced had received its tavern license in 1790, thus retiring the Hancock's Revolution connection to Boston's folklore annals. McGlenen confirmed that Samuel Coles' 1634 inn had no connection either, thus scuttling the Hancock's boast as Boston's oldest tavern.

History couldn't save the Hancock, because it had no history to speak of, save for its unusually functionalist take on Federal architecture and its placement in one of Boston's oldest street patterns.

But the office building that replaced it carried on Corn's court tradition in some form, forming a central light court to give more sun to more of its offices—an innovation that was to figure prominently in modernist buildings such as Boston City Hall more than half a century later. And the building's granite construction continued a proud Boston building tradition the Hancock Tavern was a part of.

So next time you cut through this little alley on your way to work or to satisfy your comfort-food craving or caffeine fix, be sure to pause and reflect on the history—corny or kosher—that took place on this site. (The new social distancing protocol should make that easier.)

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Balboa bonanza

The elaborate Spanish temple edifice of San Diego’s Balboa Park Visitor Center (now closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but worthy of inclusion on your travel bucket list once the lockdown lifts) tells many tales: of world and city history, of conquest, of endurance through time and tempest, of hope for a better future, of determination to preserve the past, and of Balboa Park’s rich cultural offerings today.

First called the Foreign Arts Building, it was one of many Spanish Colonial and Mission style buildings erected in Balboa Park for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition celebrating the 1914 opening of the Panama Canal and promoting San Diego as a first US port of call for northbound ships that navigated the canal. 

Engraving of 1726 depicting Balboa claiming the South Sea and all adjoining lands for Spain in 1513.

This was a legacy of Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossing Panama to the Pacific Ocean (then the South Sea) in 1513 and paving the way for Spanish explorers and settlers along California’s coast — particularly Sebastián Vizcaíno, who mapped the coast in 1602 and named the San Diego area for Catholic Saint Didacus (after Vizcaino’s flagship San Diego); and Father Junípero Serra, who in 1769 founded the Franciscan mission of San Diego de Alcalá that initiated the city.

The Plaza de Panama at the Panama-California Exposition of 1915. 
Photo courtesy of Library of Congress and Committee of 100.

“Here is pictured in this happy combination of splendid temples, the story of the friars, the thrilling tale of the pioneers, the orderly conquest of commerce, coupled with the hopes of an El Dorado where life can expand in this fragrant land of opportunity,” said G. Aubrey Davidson, president of the Panama-California Exposition Corporation, at the January 1 opening of the Exposition. “It is indeed a permanent city, and every building fits into the picture.”

View from the tower of the California State Building at the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park, San Diego, California.

Most, including the Foreign Arts Building, were actually built as temporary structures of wood-framed “staff,” a blend of plaster and burlap-like fiber, to house exhibits on artistic, scientific, agricultural, commercial, national and international themes. 

Balboa Park Visitor Center entrance.
Photo: David Cossaboom, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Engraving of the Hospital of Santa Cruz,
Toledo, Spain, by Manual Nao (1843-1884).

Inspired by the 16^th-century Hospital of Santa Cruz (now the Museum of Santa Cruz) in Toledo, Spain (left), architect Carleton Monroe Winslow designed the Foreign Arts Building with an ornate façade (right), a ground-level arcade, and the finial-topped bell tower seen in the images above. The building exhibited Italian and Russian arts and crafts, and Chinese and Japanese goods.

Avenue of Palaces, California Pacific International Exposition, 1934.

When the building housed a natural history museum in 1920-22, its structural weaknesses showed. However, merchant and philanthropist George White Marston, the Exposition’s Buildings and Grounds Committee chairman, called for preservation of as many Panama-California Exposition buildings as possible for their historical beauty, having visited Spain and romanticized its architecture. Thus most of them were revamped for the 1935 California-Pacific International Exposition.

Photo from the Historic American Building Survey (HABS),
courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Foreign Arts Building was renamed the House of Hospitality and redesigned by San Diego architect Richard Requa with a fountain courtyard, Mexican loggia, Flamingo Room, Sala de Oro and Casa del Rey Moro Café. During their October 2 visit, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dined in the Sala de Oro and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt lunched in the Mexican loggia, entertained by troubadours in the courtyard.

Photo by Another Believer, courtesy of Creative Commons.

The Woman of Tehuantepec fountain statue, sculpted by San Diego sculptor Donal Hord, still stands in the courtyard.

U.S. Naval Training Center at House of Hospitality, September 18, 1947.
Photo courtesy of the U.S. Naval Records Administration.

During World War II the U.S. Navy occupied the House of Hospitality as just that: a nurse-staffed hospital as a U.S. Naval Training Center. Following years of decay, patchups and falling ornaments, the building, along with most other Exposition structures, was replicated in earthquake-resistant glass-fiber-reinforced-concrete in 1997 as the Balboa Park Visitor Center.

Balboa Park, San Diego. Photo by Joe Mabel, CC BY 3.0.

Photo by Michael Seljos, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Today the Balboa Park Visitor Center continues to be the beacon of beauty it provided for the two Expositions it became a recognizable icon of, this time informationally as well as architecturally.

The Center provides the skinny on all of Balboa’s family-friendly events, exhibits and recreational opportunities. For starters: the anthropological Museum of Man in the first Exposition’s California State Building; theater at the Old Globe, the second Exposition’s replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre; concerts in the Spreckels Organ Pavilion (with the world’s largest outdoor pipe organ); art, science and model railroad museums; sports facilities; the Botanical Building; picturesque gardens; the San Diego Zoo; and, above all, the El Dorado envisioned by expeditions and expositions.

A Balboa bonanza, for sure!

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Vive la Place d'Italie!

Connaissez-vous la Place d'Italie à Paris?

Avez-vous jamais remarqué No. 10?

Souvenez-vous Monsieur et Madame Thibaut?

If you're a Baby-Boomer or Gen-Xer who, like yours truly, had l'honneur of learning French through the pre-digital filmstrips, reel-tapes and records of Voix et Images de France, you'd answer 'oui' to all of the above. For this then-nouveau, now-passé audio-visual learning tool made Dix Place d'Italie (10 Italy Square) one of Paris's most flocked-to sites for students eager to meet and greet their beloved ingénieur en costume noir, Monsieur Thibaut...

...only to find him fictitious, and his maison the same. For the real Dix Place d'Italie looks nothing like the plain five-story box (or four-story [quatre étages], as the French don't count the lobby, le rez-de-chaussée, as an actual étage) in Leçon 2: La Maison of the filmstrip. 
 

Photo by JLPC, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Creative Commons.

Instead, No. 10 is a distinctive seven-story (including the living space in its mansard roof, which the French do count as an étage) sandstone-limestone mélange of Art Nouveau and French Second Empire, punctuated by French windows, French balconies and bay windows, and bookended by brick English Jacobean-Second Empire hybrids angling obtusely with l'Avenue de la Soeur Rosalie (called La Rue de la Gare in the lesson) à droite (at right), and le Boulevard Auguste Blanqui, à gauche (at left). 

This combination of radiating streets and abutting buildings of contrasting materials gives la maison de M. Thibaut a monumental presence in la Place d'Italie, which is enriched by the greenspace and the fountain in the central circular park, une exemple supérieure de la place radiale of Paris's master planner, Baron Haussmann. 

Plan de Paris, 1853. Paniconography by Firmin Gillot (1820-1872), engraving by F. Delamare.

Between 1853 and 1870, under the direction of Emperor Napoléon III, Haussmann redesigned the city as a geometric network of wide streets and tree-lined boulevards of upscale residential/retail blocks of Second Empire, Jacobean, Beaux-Arts and Art Nouveau architecture of mostly Lutetian limestone and brick, radiating from circular traffic islands that offered parks, fountains and monuments to le nouveau riche de Paris, as a beautiful alternative to the narrow, squalid, disease-ridden streets of medieval Paris where Victor Hugo's Les Misérables took place. Named after the nearby Avenue d'Italie, Place d'Italie was built beginning in 1860 on the site of the Wall of the Ferme Générale (Farmers General), built c.1780 as a means of collecting internal revenue for Paris in the form of indirect taxation.

In Leçon 2, le rez-de-chaussée de la maison de M. Thibaut is described as follows: "En bas, il y a deux magasins" ("Below, there are two stores"). In the lesson these are la pharmacie et l'épicerie (the drugstore and the grocery store). In reality, la pharmacie is there—albeit next door—though No. 10 itself has some sort of café. (But who knows what's there now, in the wake of COVID-19—though I'm sure la pharmacie reste là, since it's needed more than ever.)

But la Place d'Italie as a whole is far from the intimately idyllic human-scaled village M. Thibaut depicted it as when he said, "J'habite Place d'Italie à Paris" ("I live in Italy Square in Paris") in Leçon 1: Présentation ("Voilà Monsieur Thibaut" on YouTube). Soon after Voix et Images was made (1961-62), the square's neighborhood of le XIII^e arrondissement was targeted for the Italie 13 urban renewal project of modern skyscrapers, partially modeled on Le Corbusier's unrealized Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) scheme of cruciform towers in a grid of boulevards and greenspaces. Public opposition halted this proposal, but la Place d'Italie bears the scars of this destructive initiative, most notably...

Photo by besopha, courtesy of Flickr and Creative Commons.
...a bland block snuggling up incompatibly to M. Thibaut's neighbor...

Photo by David Monniaux, courtesy of Flickr and Creative Commons.

Courtesy of La France Vue Du Bitume, YouTube

...le Grand Écran Italie, a 1992 cinema complex by Japanese 

architect Kenzo Tange that looks as alien to its arrondissement 

as its space-age oddity implies (as well as its 2006 closing

and renovation into a Manhattan-style shopping mall,
not surprisingly rechristened ITALIE DEUX)...

Photo by Fauxjeton, courtesy of Creative Commons.
...a boulevard physically and symbolically forging a
generation gap between classique and moderne...

Photo by besopha, courtesy of Flickr and Creative Commons.
...and divers other popups polluting La Place with pompe et insipidité.

Of course, at the end of Leçon 1 we learned that "Monsieur Thibaut est ingénieur" ("Mr. Thibaut is an engineer"), and the propensity for modern design he demonstrated in this image may well have foreshadowed what would become of his Place précieuse a few years hence.

Notice the roof gables outside his office, behind its modern ribbon-window—symbolic of how the midcentury modernism he was engineering was about to supplant some of the old Parisian architecture of his Place.
 

Photo by Thierry Bézecourt, courtesy of Creative Commons.

Luckily, one example of that survives: la Mairie (City Hall) du XIIIe Arrondissement, built 1866-1877 from a Second Empire/Baroque Revival design by Paul-Émile Bonnet (1828-1881) as one of 20 mairies built in all arrondissements by Napoléon III. Its grandeur châteauesque has made it a popular wedding venue...

Photo by Ordifana75, courtesy of Creative Commons.

...especially when lilacs bloom from the pawlonia trees of Jardin Françoise-Giroud in the park, enhancing the building's baroque beauty and restoring a corner of la Place d'Italie to a semblance of its Napoleonic nascence. It does seem like a different 'place' from different vantage points, ranging from historique to haute moderne and antique to avant-garde.

But c'est la vie à Paris.
 

Merci pour votre séjour! Questions? Commentaires?