Friday, February 19, 2021

A great leap forward in ARCH-itecture

Gateway Arch (1965-68, Eero Saarinen), St. Louis, Missouri, as seen from Mississippi River. Photo by Buphoff (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Streamlined in a space-age sheen of stainless steel, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis springs 630 feet high and wide across the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park in a seamlessly soaring hyperbolic arc, calling to mind the path of Superman leaping tall buildings in a single bound or a model rocket launching, leaping and landing in one fell swoop.

And you'll be going on your own space odyssey as you take a ride in a spaceship-like tram car, comfortably equipped with buttock-contoured bucket seats, upward through the innards of the concrete-reinforced steel arch...

Tram car photo (left): Robert Lawton (CC BY-SA 2.5). Deck photo: Daniel Schwen (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...and dock at its summit observation deck, where you'll feel like the Man of Steel as you gaze down at the breathtaking, far-reaching vistas of...
Photo by Kelly Martin (CC BY-SA 3.0).
St. Louis City and County to the west... 

Photo courtesy of STL Family Attractions Card.
and the Mississippi River and southern Illinois to the east—a 30-mile view on a clear day. 

Photo by Paul McDonald (CC BY-SA 4.0).
"Since you can't see the base of the arch, you think you are floating," an observer wrote of his childhood visit to the Gateway Arch in 1968, the year of its dedication, on the now-defunct AAA website aaatravelviews.com.

Photo courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.






Comprising a pair of identical equilateral triangular legs tapering from 54 to 17 feet per side as they rise and meet at the top, this mathematical masterpiece was designed in 1947 by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen and structural engineer Haanskarl Bandel as a memorial to the Westward Expansion of the United States, as initiated by President Thomas Jefferson's 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France, St. Louis's resulting establishment as America's first civil government seat west of the Mississippi, and Lewis & Clark's 1804 expedition to the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Ocean.

Photo by Becherka, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Situated in a 91-acre park on the city's original riverfront settlement site on a central axis with the domed Old Courthouse—where Missouri slave Dred Scott's case to live as a free man in free states across the river was rejected in 1857—the arch is a direct "Gateway to the West," symbolizing our great leaps forward in national growth, social progress, technological development, and architectural evolution, classical to modern. 

The Gateway Arch is Missouri's tallest publicly accessible structure and the nation's tallest commemorative monument, surpassing Texas' 570-foot San Jacinto Monument by 60 feet and Washington D.C.'s 555-foot Washington Monument by 75 feet.

Thus the Gateway Arch has become St. Louis's signature iconic image, earning a central appearance on the reverse of Missouri's state quarter in 2003. 

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Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Now you see it...

Scollay Square, Boston, c.1920. Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library Print Department.
Scollay Square, Boston, 1920-1962. Always somethin' doin' in these business-bustlin' blocks. Here, soldiers and sailors got prissily pinpricked at a tattoo parlor, sexually soaked at a brothel, tippled and totaled at a tavern, film-fixated at the Olympia, hotdog-hungry at Joe & Nemo's, sensually satiated by Sally Keith at Crawford House, and court-martialed for having abandoned ship too long.

Cornhill, Scollay Square, 1962. Photo by Cervin Robinson, Historic American Buildings Survey.
Here, students and statesmen, councilors and commoners could buy bargain books at the Brattle Book Shop on Cornhill (right), chow down on Chinese cheap-eats at Lun Ting's, take tea at the sign of the Steaming Tea Kettle, purchase prescriptions for pulling all-nighters at Epstein's Drugstore, palaver on politics over Pickwick Ale, talk turkey at The Tasty, and stay out of harlots' way if they could help it.

The Old Howard, Scollay Square, early 20th century.
Elsewhere, newsboys shared the latest scoops at the "Canada Point." William Lloyd Garrison published his anti-slavery newsletter, The Liberator, here in 1831 (and was tarred and feathered for it). Thomas Edison conceived the automatic vote-counter in 1868. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone here in 1875. The Marx Brothers, Abbott & Costello, and Phil Silvers made pre-movie/TV splashes at the Old Howard (left). Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy browsed through books at the Brattle while at Harvard...

But (no) thanks to 1960s urban renewal frenzy and the impulse to consolidate all government bureaucracies into one nucleus...

...now you don't!

Government Center, Boston, 2016. Photo by NewtonCourt (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Government Center, Boston, 1969–Present. Always nothin' doin' on this vast, vapid red desert — unless the Big Apple Circus comes to town, the Boston Harborfest Chowderfest tempts the taste buds, the New England Patriots clinch the Super Bowl, oldies concerts bring in the baby-boomers, or Occupy Boston gets the itch to claim another tent turf.

Otherwise, City Hall Plaza is but a cumbersome cut-through to your latté at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, your business meeting at Exchange Place, your gelato in the North End, your Guinness at The Kinsale, your Freedom Trail footwork, or your wonder-wander before you know where you're going.

Government Center, Boston, 1973. Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.
True, master planner I.M. Pei and City Hall architects Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles tried to solve the latter problem by giving more vista visibility to Faneuil Hall (right), Old North Church (left) and the Custom House Tower (below, right) than Scollay Square had done. But the square itself was too chock-full of history to be worth the sacrifice, especially for...

Now you see it!

Photo by Daniel Schwen (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...the aggrandization of the New City Hall the plaza rolls out a red carpet to. Hence, as you're just-passin'-thru the plaza, you can't not notice its namesake giving you the eagle-eye and the eagle wingspread, affirming that you not only can't fight City Hall, but can't banish it from your sight.

Erected in the concrete-brutalist modernism of Le Corbusier's 1957 La Tourette Monastery in Lyon, France (right), City Hall adapted its model's upper-level cantilevering, precast plank columns, variegated fenestration and shadow-sheltered open entrance to express the vigilance of city government over the people it represents yet its democratic accessibility to that citizenry. Protecting yet providing, sheltering yet sharing, overseeing yet open.

Each set of fenestration architecturally expresses a separate division of city government. The large double window over the entrance signifies the Mayor's office, as well as the Mayor's watchful eye over the public. The row of five double windows to the left is the School Committee, and the incrementally cantilevered upper layers of windows are for the larger City Council.

Hall of Fame?

City Hall, Boston, 1981. Photo courtesy of the Historic American Buildings Survey
The splendid acoustics and open public accessibility of City Hall's main lobby made the organist and choirmaster of St. Paul's Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys, of which I was a proud member in the '70s, much obliged to accept Mayor White's invitation to give a Christmas carol concert there — a prime opportunity to pique our prestige in the public eye.

But with fame came fury. We were promised a piano, but waiting for us at centerstage was a cheap little electric organ—without the extension cord needed to turn the organ around so our director could conduct us while playing it. But the City Hall bureaucracy so outlandishly expressed in the architecture couldn't be bothered to do the simple favor of fetching us a cord.

So the organ was relegated to the role of a pitch pipe, and we were forced to sing our entire repertoire a cappella, which got pretty embarrassing when long passages that cried out for harmony had to be rendered in unison, rendering us amateurish. Which lent credence to that profound proverb from Boston's favorite son, Benjamin Franklin:

Benjamin Franklin in London, 1767.
Painting by David Martin, displayed in the White House.
A little neglect breeds mischief:
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost,
For want of a horse, the rider was lost,
For want of a rider, the battle was lost,
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost,
And all for want of a horseshoe nail.

For want of The Lost Cord, many chords in our carols were lost, as well as one whole number we had to scrap because it just wasn't feasible without accompaniment. Yet the loss of the accompaniment itself was a mixed blessing, for that organ certainly didn't make the sound our choirmaster would have cared to hear while "seated one day at the organ," as Sir Arthur Sullivan put it in the song after which I named our keyboard's missing link.

Following our act was a young folk group who performed a medley from Godspell, but nobody was listening, having apparently turned deaf ears to us for our musical mishap. Fame was as fleeting in this Hall as it had been in the Old Howard—as was public accessibility, now sacrificed for post-9/11 security and COVID-19 safety.

How's that for "Now you see it, now you don't"?

Saturday, February 13, 2021

Richardson's railroad relic

Photo by Cervin Robinson, Historic American Buildings Survey, June 1959.
Recognize this? You might spot it if you look to your right about 500 feet after leaving Woodland Station on the MBTA's Green Line trolley heading to Riverside Station. Yet it might not look quite like this, because of the sad shape it's fallen into since this photo was taken in 1959 as part of the U.S. Government's Historic American Buildings Survey.

1886 photo courtesy of the Houghton Library at Harvard University.
Historic, indeed. This happens to be the original Woodland depot, designed by the great architect Henry Hobson Richardson as one of a string of stations on the Boston & Albany Railroad, which in 1958 became the Highland Branch of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), now the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA).
Photo by Cervin Robinson, Historic American Buildings Survey, June 1959.
Built by the Norcross Brothers in June-September 1886 (beginning two months after Richardson's death), the station typifies the architect's Richardsonian Romanesque style of rock-faced granite trimmed with Red Longmeadow sandstone, a mountainous medieval gable, and a horizontal, earthbound spread across the land. Richardson and his style were chosen to craft the station as a landmark in a largely unspoiled tract of bucolic boondocks in Newton, in the hope that its Romanesque regality would entice more people to settle in that back country and bring in new revenue for the railroad whenever they traveled on business or vacation.
Photo by Cervin Robinson, Historic American Buildings Survey, June 1959.
Yet this station eschews Richardson's trademark Roman arches, carved ornament and Arts-and-Crafts décor for a simpler, crisper structure and interior, as if inviting riders from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to wait inside for their train in an atmosphere that would feel like home to all, without the pretension of his Trinity Church, public libraries and homes for the rich.
Today it caters to the rich, but in a plebeian way as a storage "caddyshack" for the Woodland Golf Club. While the club is kept clean, Richardson's railroad relic is relegated to grungy groundskeeper status, its original use and architect spat on (and likely unknown) by those who exploit it for an ace-in-the-hole...
Photo by Pi.1415926535 (CC BY-SA 3.0).
...particularly with a loading-dock door that has made a hole where one of the original double windows that provided views of incoming trains from either side once was. Once a gracious gateway to future wealth, H.H. Richardson's original Woodland Station is now an onlooker onto a staid wealth it cannot partake of, on the lookout for an angel who will restore it to its former glory.

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