You must remember this...

Coulton Building (c.1912). Courtesy of Henry Osteen, Boston Mass. Vintage, Facebook.

...but I don't blame you if you don't – especially given the in-your-face eyeful that replaced it (more on that later). The Coulton Building once stood at a prominent corner of Boylston and Berkeley streets in Boston's Back Bay, and was one of the city's many overlooked and underappreciated architectural gems that nobody has remembered since they were gone.

Except for three people who are not with us today (speaking of gone): architectural historian Donlyn Lyndon, the fictional private eye Spenser of the late Robert B. Parker's crime novels and the TV series Spenser: For Hire, and my father, architect and historian Leslie Larson.

YMCA (1882, Sturgis & Brigham), A Stranger's Guide to Boston and its Suburbs (1883).

The Coulton Building was itself a replacement for quite an eyeful: a majestic YMCA, built in 1882 from a design by Sturgis & Brigham. This High Victorian Gothic red brick hybrid of Queen Anne, Ruskinian Gothic and Dutch Gable styles anchored its corner with a generous helping of friendly elegance inviting people of all ages and backgrounds to come in and get fit, who were no doubt attracted by its terra cotta ornament, arched windows, and cylindrical corner turret...

YMCA (1882, Sturgis & Brigham), courtesy of Henry Osteen, Facebook.

...not to mention its smorgasbord of community offerings. In addition to the most advanced athletic facilities, it offered lodging, a library, and lecture halls. Sadly, this bastion of Back Bay grandeur was destroyed by fire in 1910, forcing the YMCA to relocate to its present larger facility on Huntington Avenue. But this building's destruction paved the way for one of the neighborhood's most creative, ahead-of-its-time structures.

Photo by Moulton-Erickson Photograph Co., courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

The completion of the Coulton Building around 1912 certainly brought fresh character to this prominent Back Bay intersection, helping to transition Boylston Street and most of its cross streets from a largely residential and cultural district, like the one extending to Commonwealth Avenue and the Charles River, to one of Boston's main commercial boulevards. It was Boston's new downtown, essentially.

Coulton Building (c.1912). Photo courtesy of Heidi Adams on Facebook.

And what a difference the new building made! Gone were the YMCA's Jacobethan windows and stepped gables in favor of innovative bay windows that stretched the Back Bay's iconic chamfered bays to new dimensions of light and space, while quadrupling the corner turret, to allow all levels to take advantage of the plethora of corner light and vistas that were foreshadowing the modern office building.

Coulton Building, courtesy of MIT Digital Collections.

In The City Observed: Boston, Donlyn Lyndon wrote that the Coulton Building "may be my favorite building in Boston, an astonishing combination of straightforward building construction and sheer willful iconoclasm... As you look at the building you look directly into the offices, with various forms of chairs, bicycles, plants and drapery juxtaposed against the architectural patterning." This was a good opportunity for the building's tenants to use their bay picture windows to showcase their businesses more prominently on the street, drawing upon an aesthetic pioneered by Chicago School of Architecture office buildings such as Burnham & Root's Reliance Building (1890-1895), Holabird & Roche's Monadnock Building (1891-1893) and Chicago Savings Bank Building (1904-1905), and Adler & Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange (1894, demolished 1972). This was a harbinger of modernism's dissolution of the barrier between inside and outside through the membranes of window walls.

The Coulton was also perfectly timed with the construction of the Back Bay subway extension (today's MBTA Green Line) from 1913-1914, which brought a flurry of commuters to and from Boston's new downtown, hence to the light and luxury of its new Chicago-windowed offices and back home to Boston's streetcar suburbs.

The Coulton's bay windows may also have been inspired by its Beaux-Arts neighbor across the street, the Berkeley (1905, Codman & Despradelle), which has similar windows in its tall arched openings. The Berkeley was likely the location of Spenser's office, as Parker's novel Early Autumn suggests: 

I moved down Boylston Street to the corner of Berkeley, second floor. I was half a block from Brooks Brothers and right over a bank... To the right across Boylston I could see Bonwit Teller. To the left Police Headquarters. In Bonwit's windows there were mannequins wearing tight leather clothes and chains. Police headquarters leaned more to Dacron. In the window bay of the advertising agency across the street a young black-haired woman in high-waisted gray trousers leaned over a drawing board. Her back was toward the window. "My compliments to your tailor," I said out loud. My voice sounded odd in the empty room. The black-haired woman went away and I sat at my desk...

Bonwit Teller (now Restoration Hardware), courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

Spenser was likely ogling her through a revealing bay window of the Coulton right across from his office as he kept his eagle-eyes on the city from his panoramic perch, waiting for new clients and giving the streets the once-over for auguries of criminal activity. He also had a handsome view of Bonwit Teller (right) catercorner to him, possibly another model for the Coulton's shop-window approach to architecture. (Now the RH Boston Gallery, this building was built in 1863-1864 from a French Academic / Neoclassical design by William Gibbons Preston as the Museum of Natural History, the precursor to Boston's Museum of Science.)

Woodbury Building (1898-99), 443-445 Boylston St.

In fact, the Coulton was the fourth cornerstone in a four-corner historical merry-go-round that distinguished the Boylston-Berkeley crossroads as a four-way gateway to different parts of the city. Catercorner to it was the Woodbury Building, built in 1898-99 by Woodbury & Leighton, builders of the Boston Public Library. The Woodbury is notable for its razor-thin footprint and its pressed-metal bay windows, another possible inspiration for the Coulton for their light- and space-giving qualities.

For the Coulton's historically inspired and futuristically foresighted design, my father lobbied to have it preserved. But the nine-member Boston Landmarks Commission's rejection of its landmark designation by a tie vote, with one abstention due to a conflict of interest, sealed its fate. So in 1989 it gave way for 222 Berkeley, a haphazardly massed phantasmagoria of historical allusions cooked up by Robert A.M. Stern as a bedfellow of 500 Boylston, Philip Johnson's Italianate extravaganza next door. Now 222 Berkeley commands (and demands) our undivided attention with virtually every Bostonian stylistic trick in the pattern-book: a grand arched entrance ceremonially flanked by Ionic column pairs, a brass mini-dome referencing the State House, bay windows and a corner oriel clearly taking cues from the building's predecessor, a Grecian temple front for its main entrance, a crown of festoons, and brick, brick, brick. This historical hodgepodge takes all our notice away from the three historic corners it competes with, doing grave injustice to the artful restraint, careful composition, and artistic coherence of historic Back Bay architecture in the name of the grotesque showmanship of the postmodern era. Which both the Coulton Building and the YMCA were careful to avoid by focusing on balanced composition, structural practicality, and fenestral finesse, now both long forgotten as time goes by.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!