A West End wonder

Photo by Alexander Tang.

Boston's West End is notorious for being bulldozed into a memory in the 1950s and 1960s, displacing an entire immigrant community with the big-box high-rises of Charles River Park. However, a low-rise gem hides behind a near-jungle on Cambridge Street as a paradigm of how pure geometry can define, shape and organize a quiet study space.

The West End Branch of the Boston Public Library, built in 1968 from an unusual hexagonal design by Eugene Kennedy of Maginnis, Walsh & Kennedy, also presented the hexagon as a considerable exterior space saver and interior space economizer, allowing the placement of books along its perimeters so that they left an open-concept central space for many different kinds of library activities at once, all within a small footprint.

Now, with proposals in the offing to replace the West End Branch Library and top it with 119 units of housing, I had to revisit it before it went the way of the West End.

Its footprint yields acreage for not only parking, but also a peace garden to introduce the entrance with a calming intimation of the peace and quiet one expects in a library.

The garden, the path from the street, the ceiling-high window walls, and the open porch all present us with a very friendly gesture of welcome to the library, giving us an external indication of the generous sitting space and reading light we're in for when we pass the book-sale carts in the vestibule and enter the main room.

Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Rachel Moon.

Sure enough, the room is one open, bright, fluid atmosphere with light (natural and fluorescent) extending to all, in-the-round displays of over 20,000 books of all subjects extending space to all, a myriad of seating options. and a deluge of activities open to all. These include exercise and tai chi classes, movie discussions, story hours, technology instruction, and origami, LEGO and construction clubs.

Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Rachel Moon.

Kennedy wisely designed the interior as a hexagon within a hexagon. This created a smaller hexagonal central space with a slightly dropped ceiling installed with circular "moon" lights. Picking up on a mode of lighting in Alvar Aalto's Baker House dormitory at MIT, this scheme shed extra light on the office-reference desk below. The open shelves pick up on the hexagon theme to create mini-hexagon study spaces.

Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Alexander Tang.

This open-access concept was mirrored in the librarians' accessibility when school paper assignments brought me to the West End Branch Library, a short walk from my Beacon Hill home. For a biology report on hibernation of bears and social studies papers on U.S. westward expansion and Sudbury's colonial settlement, the librarians helpfully supplied me with the books I needed to get an A each time.

Old West Church (1806) as West End Branch Library, c.1920.

Interestingly enough, the modernism of the West End Branch originated in the classicism of the Old West Church, when it was a library from 1896 until the "urban renewal" of the West End forced its closure in 1960. Designed by Asher Benjamin in a Federal style with pilasters, panels and a cupola-crowned clock tower, it was built in 1806 for a Congregational fellowship to replace a church damaged by British forces in 1775. Rev. Charles Lowell, who commissioned the new church, was a major abolitionist who desegregated seating in the church, sheltered renegade slaves in the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, and provided Sunday school for people of all economic backgrounds. In 1887, the congregation dissolved, and Andrew Wheelwright purchased the church to preserve it and turned it over to the city for library use, for which its column-supported open space (below) served it very well – as sort of a model for the columned hexagonal central space of its successor. 

Old West Church, West End Branch Library interior, c.1930.

Jewish Book Weeks and immigrant literacy services were offered at the library for West Enders, courtesy of Fanny Goldstein, its head librarian from 1919 to 1957 and Massachusetts' first Jewish librarian. Shortly before the building's reconversion to a church – this time with a Methodist congregation – John F. Kennedy cast his ballot there on the eve of his historic presidential election in 1960.

The one-story height and generous setback of the West End Branch Library's new home made it a polite neighbor for Cambridge Street's extant historic West End structures, the First Harrison Gray Otis House (1796, Charles Bulfinch) and Old West Church, by virtue of its lowly deference to its elders. By contrast, the library-housing tower proposals for the site look rather corporate and would add to the skyscraperization of the West End by dwarfing its landmark next-door neighbors and making them look even more like "holdouts" from urban renewal. So I'm not too thrilled about it, aside from its provision of much-needed affordable housing in our housing crisis. 

I would preserve the West End Branch Library as a modernist landmark, for its use of innovative geometrics to create a model of the free-to-all inclusiveness that befits a public library design.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!