'Complete fabrication'

That writing prompt I received in a recent Meetup writing group meeting got me to thinking that "complete fabrication," indeed may be the answer to the housing crisis we are ignoring, neglecting, disdaining, or forgetting the existence of. Mobile homes, prefabricated homes, tech-built homes—all the technology is there, the price is right, and the living is easy, so why don't we do them more often? Are we too focused on the bad rap prefab has gotten as a symbol of just eking by, living hand-to-mouth? Is the Sears-Roebuck kit of parts of the past not dream-home enough for us? 

In short, are we too upwardly mobile to go mobile?

Frankly, mobile homes and trailers fascinate me, for the way they bring back the vintage practice of homesteading, as a couple I knew did when they bought some cheap land in the population-challenged community of Friendsville, Pennsylvania, placed a mobile home like this one on top of it, and made the perfect housewarming temple out of it. 

A mobile home and trailer park on the cliffs above Beer, Devon, England.

Riding by a trailer-park community on largely unspoiled land in rural Connecticut that resembled this one in England, I realized how little is necessary to meet our living needs. And there are more than 100 such communities in Massachusetts—are people aware of them? Or does the mobile-home, trailer-park image suggest homelessness and vagrancy? 

Are we too proud to live in our only affordable option? Or does complete fabrication mean it'll wear out quickly, either when it shows wear and tear or when our interests change and we become upwardly 'mobile' again?

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Inside out, outside in

Edith Farnsworth House (1951, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), Plano, Illinois. Photo by Teemu008 from Palatine, Illinois (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Photos by Paul R. Burley (CC BY-SA 4.0).

That line from the 1971 song "Perpetual Change" by the art-rock band Yes perfectly describes that breed of building bent on exposing its innards to looky-loos by glazing the barrier that's supposed to preserve its users' privacy, so from the outside we can notice the inner perpetual change as occupants shuffle about, gesticulations fly, furniture is rearranged, styles are changed, or (heaven forbid) crimes are witnessed.

This is not unlike the way actors break the "fourth wall" to invite their audiences into their private worlds by revealing secrets, spilling their guts, or asking for sympathy or help, most notably as the island-stranded Prospero does at the close of Shakespeare's The Tempest:

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

Photo by Paul R. Burley (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Edith Farnsworth House (1951) in Plano, Illinois, recently renamed for its owner to honor her vision for it as well as her architect's, epitomizes this transparency. Its window-walls reveal all indoor functions – bedroom, kitchen, living room – unifying them with the outdoors in a two-way exchange.

                                        Glass House (1948, Philip Johnson), New Canaan, Connecticut. Photos by Edelteil (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Glass House (1948, Philip Johnson), New Canaan, Connecticut.
Photos by Edelteil (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Going further with this dissolution between the interior private world and the exterior public realm is Philip Johnson's Glass House (1948) in New Canaan, Connecticut. In fact, it forced its owner to sacrifice privacy — unless its isolation in a forested idyll remote from urban hustle-and-bustle was his definition of privacy. When COVID caused many to flee to second homes in the suburbs, the exurbs, and the rurals, such a house would especially come in handy. This was how both the Edith Farnsworth House and the Glass House were ahead of their time sociologically as well as architecturally, made to order for mass exoduses.

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The 'hills' of Harvard

(L-R) Science Center, Memorial Hall, Gund Hall, Adolphus Busch Hall; Art Museums in foreground. Photo by Nick Allen (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Memorial Hall (1870-77, Ware & Van Brunt), Gund Hall (1972, John Andrews), Harvard University.

Brick and stone historicism has clearly predominated Harvard University's architectural history as the gold (or crimson) standard for campus construction, save for sporadic breaches of this tradition when the midcentury/ millennial modernism of reinforced concrete, steel framing, window walls and skylights became fashionable according to what school of thought was governing the Graduate School of Design or the Building Committee's impulses.

Science Center (1972-73, Josep Lluis Sert), Harvard University.

Adolphus Busch Hall, (1912-1921, German Bestelmeyer), Harvard University.

Yet I recently noticed a common thread among the stylistic diversity these traditions and their disruptions produced: a "hill" building technique that clustered and stacked an edifice like a pyramid, directing the eye upward to a summit of one kind or another. 

In so doing, each of these "hills" articulates and distinguishes its individual parts and "divisions" on its exterior, cluing us in to the multiple uses the building was assigned as we optically mount to its summit. Though that is a common characteristic of modern architecture ("form follows function," in Louis Sullivan's words), some of Harvard's historical styles had already adapted that practice as early as the mid-19th century.

Photo by chensiyuan (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Initiating this building-bulking approach to Harvard's campus expansion was Memorial Hall, built in 1870-77 from a High Victorian Gothic design by William Robert Ware and Henry Van Brunt in memory of Harvard alumni who sacrificed their lives in defense of the Union in the Civil War. The building's diversified massing denotes its multiple functions, which Henry James described in The Bostonians (1885-86) as:

...three main divisions: one of them a theater, for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a chamber high, dim and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university who fell in the long Civil War.

Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall. Photo by Bestbudbrian (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The first "division" is Sanders Theatre. Modeled on Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre (1664-1669) at Oxford, Sanders adapts the in-the-round configuration of Rome's Theatre of Marcellus of the 1st century B.C. and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre of 1614, with wood-encased iron ties elegantly opening the space to all present.

Sanders' rotund room is externally expressed as a basilica articulates its rounded apse. The mansard roof with "streaky bacon" slate tilework shapes the soar of the ceiling, hence the resonance of the acoustics. Busts of orators Demosthenes, Cicero, John Chrysostom, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, Edmund Burke, and Daniel Webster adorn the semicircle of lancet-arched dormer gables.

Annenberg Hall, Memorial Hall. Photo by Bestbudbrian (CC BY-SA 4.0).

James' second "division" is Annenberg Hall, a dining hall paralleling the majesty of the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Curving hammerbeam rafters with quatrefoil cutouts uphold the mansard roof's soaring structure and inject the space with awe-inspiring drama, ecclesiastically enriched by stained-glass windows and grand chandeliers.

Photo by P.K. Nelson (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Stained-glass windows, brick buttresses, and a mountainous gable continuing the streaky-bacon slate work articulate Annenberg as a dignified space to enjoy a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach. A cloister with Gothic-arched side entries on either side presents a welcoming, open-ended "porch" to the main attraction, as a narthex introduces a church.

Photo by pundit (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The final "division" is the visually elaborate central portion, crowned by the landmark copper-finial-adorned bell tower and bookended by pairs of peaked turrets flanking stained-glass-window-surmounted entrances. This signifies the space with the highest level of architectural ceremony and social remembrance, the Memorial Transept. In this cross-space that comprises the horizontal segment of the Latin cross Memorial Hall forms as a whole, ribbed vaulting, lancet arches, marble plaques and floors, stained-glass windows, monumental chandeliers, and carved woodwork combine to visually impel us to pay respect to those who perished in the United States' most divisive, decisive war, with the solemnity of the most sacred of Gothic cathedrals.

Repurposing Memorial Hall's pyramidal schemata and tripartite division in a Germanic context is Adolphus Busch Hall, built in 1921 from a design by a Dresden architect whose name reveals the style: German Bestelmeyer.

From a stacked central clock tower splays out diverse wings and ells denoting diverse art collections in what was originally called the Germanic Museum. All are unified by a stucco finish that breaks with Harvard's brick tradition as a forerunner to the gray-beige concrete of its modernist structures. Maintaining the building's historical integrity are a terra cotta tile roof, classical balustrades, and the tri-level clock tower that gives it the landmark dignity of a Rathaus or Gaswerk in a German town.

The hall was originally designed to house collections and reproductions of German art from the country's Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance periods, as indicated by the triumvirate aggregate of wings and ells and the interior's off-white stonework and muted classicism, which casts off stylistic pretensions to let the art run the show. Since the collections have been consolidated in the Harvard Art Museums, Adolphus Busch Hall is today a popular rental venue that adds a Teutonic touch to weddings, banquets, cocktail parties and other private functions. 

Dunster House (1930, Charles Coolidge), Harvard University. Photo by Vadivel Ramasamy.

Dunster House, one of Harvard's twelve undergraduate residential houses built in the 1930s along the Charles River under then President Abbott Lawrence Lowell's House Plan, is the most imaginative of the houses. Architect Charles Coolidge had a tight triangular site to work with, which he elegantly symbolized in the prevalence of triangular pediments amid the parts and their pyramidal hillock rise toward the central bell tower. This was modeled on Christopher Wren's Tom Tower of Christ Church, Oxford (1681-82), with a more Georgian than Gothic slant, for Harvard tradition's sake.

Dunster articulates its individual parts forthrightly, as a residential village providing 475 undergrads and 25 staff members with a dining hall, a library, music practice rooms, an art studio, a student kitchen and grille, a gym and squash court, and a smart classroom.

George Gund Hall broke the rules. By building from the inside out and expressing its structure as sculptural form, Harvard Graduate School of Design alumnus John Andrews was determined to make his school's new home exemplary of the Corbusian concrete brutalism and the steel-and-glass framework of the International Style that were trendy in 1972.

Photo by Bobak Ha'Eri (CC BY 3.0).

Yet, in doing so, the building preserved its predecessors' essentials: the triangular bent that shaped Dunster Hall, the light grayness that made Adolphus Busch Hall deviate from Harvard's crimson-brick norm, the ceiling-beam exposure of Memorial Hall, and the "hilliness" of all three, but with more of a steep 

incline this time, in the form of steps and levels of "trays" of drafting tables for students to complete their projects under the luminar purity of skylights, with the bare-bones expression of the roof-rafter structure constantly hovering over their heads to remind them of the architectonic principles they had to focus on in the modern age of design.

Such honest structural expression allowed Gund Hall to expand Memorial Hall's "porch" and "cloister" to new heights and breadths with the use of pilotis, or cylindrical concrete columns, as load-bearing elements. This formed a broad, deep verandah that gave as much exposure to the building's progenitor — Memorial Hall — across the street as it did to Gund's structure internally.

Photo by Gunnar Klack (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Structural sincerity stretches sky-high at the Science Center (1972-73), a daringly defiant mammoth of modernism that delineates its parts to the point of discord among them. In doing so, architect Josep Lluis Sert — then dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design — extolled the scientific advancements taught inside by expressing them the form of advanced engineering and construction, clustering and stepping them as a jumbled pile to represent the ongoing growth and progress of science — in essence, the scientific method, and the erratic process of constant discovery, articulated by exposing the architectonic method of the building's construction.

The "spider" of angled roof-girders crowns the lecture hall with an entomological reference that proclaims the building's scientific use monumentally — and a handsome pair of "hills" the ziggurat and spider doth make.

The stepped semi-ziggurat provides a setback to avoid casting a skyscraper's shadow on the plaza. This gives the building a sculptural presence like that of El Castillo at Chichen Itza in Mexico (below). 

El Castillo, Chichen Itza, Mexico (8th–12th c. AD). Photo by Alastair Rae (CC BY-SA 2.0).

This is how the Science Center respectfully defers to Memorial Hall as Gund Hall did: by lessening its bulk so it won't block Memorial's majestic view. The ziggurat also pays respect to its surroundings by grounding itself as a one-story lecture-hall pavilion, inviting students inside on a human scale...

...only to soar beyond that scale to awestrike its occupants with "a magnificent Piranesi-like interior with the volume of Boston's Symphony Hall," as Bainbridge Bunting and Margaret Henderson Floyd put it in Harvard: An Architectural History. This Piranesian symphony is rife with spatial expressions of the far-reaching dimensions of science: skylit atria, suspended staircases, balcony overlooks, endless corridors, and more labyrinthine adventures through space and light. This web of wonder creates a network of hills, plateaus and valleys that visually prepare us for the adventures through science students and faculty are about to experience in this cosmos of classrooms, labs, lecture halls, offices, a library, and various landing places for relaxation, phone-recharing and laptop travail.

Chain of Life (1996) by John Robinson. Photo by Charles Ling.

Olivetti Showroom Wall Relief (1954) sandscape by Constantino Nivola. Photo by Sarah C.

Picking up on the art-display tradition of Memorial Hall and the Germanic Museum, the Science Center has some of its own, including John Robinson's Chain of Life (1996), an atrium-suspended mobile depicting the compound of two carbon atoms (black), one nitrogen atom (green), one oxygen atom (blue) and two hydrogen atoms (chrome) that theoretically made life on earth possible; and Constantino Nivola's sandscape Olivetti Showroom Wall Relief (1954), transported from the New York City display room of the Olivetti typewriter company as a bas-relief mural of whimsical abstraction to add more life to the Science Center's antiseptic modernism.

More to come...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

A Flower's Seasons

A flower's petal
Starts to settle
Early in the fall.

A flower's bud
Escapes the mud
With the robin's call.

A flower's blossom
Plays opossum
On a summer night.

A flower's pistil
Shines like crystal
In the winter light.

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The turn in the road

This is my meditation on Paul Cézanne's 1881 painting "Turn in the Road" at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. It exemplifies Cézanne's passion for complex juxtapositions of diverse spaces and shapes that challenge our view of the world. For instance, the bend in the road leads us into a deep space while maintaining its simple flatness. 

Enjoy.

The turn in the road signified community. Encompassing a pleasant peninsula of mature trees and mossy rocks in a gesture of sempiternal circular movement, it piqued my anticipation that a cul-de-sac lay ahead of it, one that forged a close-knit, friendly community among disparate dwellings with an embracing cloak of greenery. The Creedence Clearwater Revival classic blasting on my Bluetooth encapsulated my reverie immaculately:

You can ponder perpetual motion,

Fix your mind on a crystal day,

Always time for a good conversation,

There's an ear for what you say.

Come on the risin' wind,

We're going up around the bend...

However, once I was up around the bend, the settlement ahead spoke a colder language. The bite in the air of the late April wind-chill factor and the diffusion of gray-white light from broken clouds seemed to intensify the cold shoulder that the high fence, the helter-skelter houses, and their tree-screened windows were turning toward me. All was quiet in the little village, but a silence of the unfriendly nature, as if the houses were disappearing into the rock of their surroundings and fossilizing the humanity they once contained within their stucco walls and clay-tiled roofs. Yet their three-dimensionality, popping out in all directions like crystalline rock shimmering in the sun, suggested that a livelihood lurked therein after all.

Questions crossed my mind: Is this a gated community? Or can I enter freely? Does anyone there have any time for a good conversation? Could I offer one? Is there an ear for what I have to offer? Who lives there, anyway?

Undaunted by the fence's lining of the road with the perpetual message of rester en dehors, I winded along, an end in sight for to see. It turned out that my perspective was distorted; the fence seemed to give way to an old dirt road that opened right up to the village, as if spreading a welcome mat yet warding off my entry with the intimation of poverty or decadence.

Since only one house was turning its door and windows my way, the brown terrain was leading right up to its entry, and it was open, that seemed like a logical place for me to begin to unravel the mystery of this village. I ventured inside. It was barren, with that just-moved-out look. The paucity of windows lent a cavernousness to the interior. Suddenly a figure stepped into the light the open door was granting to the foyer.

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Hidden history

Photo by Stephen Foskett (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What is commonly called "the historic North End" and "Boston's oldest neighborhood" has been branded as such by virtue of its 17th-century origins, winding and narrow street patterns from those days, and tidbits of colonial antiquity sporadically spotted along the familiar Freedom Trail: the Paul Revere House (1680), the Pierce-Hichborn House (1711), St. Stephen's Church (1802-04, Charles Bulfinch), the Ebenezer Clough House (1715), Old North Church (1723, left), and Copp's Hill Burying Ground (1659-1850s). Those are but fractions of what would have earned the North End true "historic" distinction had more of its Colonial, Federal and Victorian buildings survived as depicted in these 19th-century images before its turn-of-the-20th-century renewal changed its face forever.

Archival photos courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

Hanover Street, North End. Photo by Ingfbruno (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Largely rebuilt in brick to house extended Italian immigrant families as per updated building, fire and occupancy codes, the North End cannot be called "historic" in the Beacon Hill, South End or Back Bay sense. Yet a few more vestiges of its vintage than meet the sightseer's eye can be seen if you eye acutely as you blaze the Trail.

First Universalist Church / Samaritan Hall

As the coronavirus pandemic has swollen the new patients intake at the North End Waterfront Health clinic at 332 Hanover St., no doubt most of them have overlooked the rich history that the clinic's brick façade, Greek Revival form and vestigial cupola are very telling about. Built in 1838 for the congregation that originated when John Murray brought Universalism over to these shores from England and established a church in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1772, 

350-352 Hanover Street

For starters: Behind these protruding storefronts—tacked on at an angle to their building to parallel Hanover Street—is an overlooked exemplar of early 18th-century brick construction in Boston, dating from about the time of the restored Clough House (below), and built according to an archaic street pattern predating Hanover Street's 19th-century widening. These close-up shots reveal construction techniques of that era: Flemish bond brickwork the peeling paint is exposing, and an S-tie securing an iron floor-joist rod to a side wall. (Speculation that Paul Revere was born here is unsubstantiated.)
 

Cockerel Hall 

Across Hanover Street is Cockerel Hall, an 1870s Victorian Gothic building with a high mansard roof and a peaked corner tower honoring its historic site of the Cockerel Church, or New Brick Church (left). Built in 1721 by parishioners who had seceded from Rev. Peter Thacher's New North Meeting House, the Cockerel Church received its cognomen from its brass rooster weathervane (right) alluding to Peter's betrayal of Jesus as the cock crowed.

Cast by Shem Drowne, who created the banner vane for Old North Church and the grasshopper vane for Faneuil Hall, the cockerel vane now tops the First Church in Cambridge in Harvard Square. The Cockerel Church was made most famous in Esther Forbes' novel Johnny Tremain as the parish where Johnny's silversmith master Ephraim Lapham was a deacon:

He took his time blessing the meal. He was a deacon at the Cockerel Church and very pious... Of course, on Sunday the shop would be locked up all day, the furnace cold. Mr. Lapham would as always escort his household, dressed in Sunday best, to the Cockerel Church and after that back for a cold dinner. Whether they went again or not to afternoon meeting, the master left for each to decide. He himself always went... Johnny, Dove, and Dusty were apt to steal off for a swim, although Mr. Lapham had no idea of it. He thought they sat quietly at home and that Johnny read the Bible out loud to them. (pp. 8, 28)

5 Tileston Place

One narrow alleyway where Johnny Tremain and his fellow apprentices could have made a narrow escape to the harbor for a swim unseen by their master might have been Tileston Street. Originally Love Lane, it was renamed after John Tileston, director of the public North Writing School on the lane. Off the street through a fancily scrolled cast-iron gate is another of the North End's best-kept secrets from John and Johnny's era...
 

...5 Tileston Place, a rare remnant of the North End's pre-code wood clapboard building phase, dating from the late 18th century. And its obscurity from the public eye was its saving grace: it narrowly escaped the mass demolition of several blocks to pave the way for the Paul Revere Mall (aka "the Prado") in the 1930s.

The house typifies the high gambrel and erratic ell extension of some 18th-century North End houses, including the long-gone Copp's Hill home of Edmund Hartt, builder of the USS Constitution ("Old Ironsides").

Mariners House

Mariner's House (1847), North Square. Photo by Beyond My Ken (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Paul Revere and Pierce-Hichborn houses are such a draw in North Square that few notice Mariners House a few doors down. It was built by the Boston Port Society in 1847 in the Greek Revival simplicity of a flat brick facade with granite post-and-lintel first floor and crowned with an octagonal lookout cupola to watch for incoming sailors, whom the Boston Seaman's Aid Society and Port Society chaplain Father Edward Thompson Taylor would lodge there, room availability pending. 

Today, Mariners House serves as an affordable hotel ($65-$110 per night, including full breakfast) for mariners on active duty or retired after 20 years of full service.

Dearborn's Reminiscences of Boston (1851) described Mariners House as follows:

This is a noble edifice of 4 stories, erected by the Boston Port Society, and leased to the Seamans' Aid Society : it contains 40 rooms over the basement story : the building is 40 feet square, with a wing extending 70 feet of three stories; in the basement is a storage room for seamens' luggage, kitchen; laundry and bathing room: in the wing, is a spacious dining hall for seating an hundred persons : it has a chapel for morning and evening services arid where social, religious meetings are held every Wednesday evening under the care of Rev. E. T. Taylor : a reading and news room, with a good library to which accessions are daily making; and a store for the sale of sailors' clothing: the building and land cost about $38,000, and it has been furnished at a cost of about $21,000, by the generous contributions of the Unitarian Churches of Boston and vicinity; a good supply of water is on the estate, and two force pumps supply each of the stories with hot or cold water, as required.

Seamen's Bethel / Sacred Heart Italian Church
 

Across North Square is Sacred Heart Italian Church, built as Seamen's Bethel in 1833 by the Boston Port Society in this location so sailors would spot it as they docked at the wharves, as a lure to come and worship. "I set my bethel in North Square because I learned to set my net where the fish ran," said Father Taylor, its Methodist preacher. His guests included Charles Dickens, Jenny Lind, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville, for whom Father Taylor inspired the character of Rev. Mapple in Moby Dick. Following his death in 1871, Seamen's Bethel was acquired by the St. Mark Society, a Catholic Italian immigrant group, in 1884, rechristened Sacred Heart Italian Church in 1888, and reclad in the spirit of the Southern Italian basilicas of their home country in the mid-1920s. Below is Seamen's Bethel c.1860:

Skinny House / Spite House
 

Photo by Rhododendrites (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Occupying the approximate site of Edmund Hartt's house (see above) on Hull Street by Copp's Hill Burying Ground is the Skinny House, aka the Spite House, which earned the distinction from both The Boston Globe and the Boston Landmarks Commission as "the narrowest house in Boston." And no wonder: it was built in the 1870s with a 10.4-foot-wide streetfront, tapering to 9.25 feet wide at the back. This yields lateral interior wall distances of 6.2 feet to 8.2 feet, only five inside doors, mostly floor-through spaces on the four levels (a rare instance of being simultaneously open-concept and closed-in), entrance through a side alley surpassing colonial standards in wiggle-room deficiency, and a decidedly "vertical life," as its 2005 owners told The Boston Globe. 

The Skinny House has been the stuff of lore regarding the rationale for its diminution. One legend has it that two brothers inherited land, and while one was in the service, the other built a house so big it left his brother with little land to build on. Miffed at this, the returning brother built the Skinny House to block his brother's light and views. 

According to another story reported by the Globe in 1997, an unidentified builder erected this sliver of a shanty to obstruct light and air from the house of an ornery neighbor he was fighting with. Regardless of which story you buy, the Skinny House has been proven over time to be a good buy, by virtue of its open-concept spaces, its sale prices under $1 million so far (until the next sale, of course), its access to the best of Boston, and, above all, its place in history—Boston's and its own.

St. Mary's Church

St. Mary's Church (1877, Patrick C. Keely) in 1897.
Photo by Rocco Marciello.

This piece of North End history is hidden from view in a different way than any of the above buildings. Read on and you'll see why.

The Church of St. Mary of the Sacred Heart was built in 1877 in a subdued Romanesque design by Patrick Charles Keely, architect of many notable Catholic and Protestant churches in New England and beyond, including the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End. Keely designed most of his churches to reflect the architectural character of their neighborhoods and the heritage of their parishioners. 

He fashioned St. Mary's in brick to blend with the predominantly brick residences in the neighborhood, and with just enough Romanesque trim and ornamentation to recall the Irish and Italian basilicas the residents remembered from their homelands. Thus the churches signified their sacredness, but in an inviting, not overbearing, way.

Bereft of its baroque belfries following hurricane damage and tarnished in its trim from decades of dirt, St. Mary's looked like this when I came here with my boys' choir at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston in 1976 to record some music for a record we were going to make, but never finished. Our choirmaster, renowned organist Thomas Murray, chose this as our venue because he had recorded organ music by César Franck for the Nonesuch label on the church's famed Johnson & Son organ and thought highly of its acoustics. I vividly remember the words he spoke to us as we were about to enter, imparted with the solemnity of Ephraim Lapham and Father Taylor:

This church is almost one hundred years old. But by the time you get back from camp, it won't be here. A lot has been done to it already. The pews have been removed. But the organ has been saved. It will be reinstalled in a church in Minnesota. Now I think you'll find the acoustics splendid in here. But I must tell you that every noise you make and every word you utter carries a long echo in this big space. So please go in quietly, and please show respect. This is a very sacred place.

Sacred, indeed! The relative simplicity (and sordidness) of the exterior hardly prepared me for the heavenly baroque extravaganza of Corinthian columns, springing arches, stained-glass windows, marble statues, intricate frescoes, polychrome trim, and innumerable other artistic articulations of God's creation that permeated the barrel-vaulted hall, culminating at the most richly adorned chancel I had ever seen. It seemed sacrilegious to reduce this masterful artistry to the dust from which man had crafted it as God had sculpted Adam and Eve out of the clay He had created. But, sure enough, the pews had been ripped out of the marble floor and piled at the sides, awaiting the Dumpster. And rubble and debris were scattered about—prompting some choirboys to capitalize on the acoustics by jettisoning pieces from our choirloft down into the sanctuary to hear gunshot booms report and reverb throughout the space as they struck the stone.

Uninclined to such shenanigans, I enjoyed the acoustics sensibly. I was stunned as we concluded our renditions of Gustav Holst's "Lullay my Liking" and Henry Purcell's "Rejoice in the Lord Alway," heard our harmonies fade to a whisper in that hallowed hollow of a hall, then paused in silence for six seconds before Mr. Murray said, "Cut"—which was also a cue for the kids to cut up with fake flatulence and other infantile tomfoolery. Despite all that, there was something that forged perfect visual harmony with the sonority of our seraphic singing: the altar (right), an ornate display of angels, columns, arches, scrolls, and the Virgin Mary and Jesus, all painstakingly wrought by richly carved old-school craftsmanship.  

Nobody seems to know what became of the altar when the church finally met its Maker in 1977, but one of my fellow choirboys reported that it had been "chopped up into ashtray-sized pieces," as this newspaper image of the church's demolition suggests. Which was shocking but not totally surprising, given the clergy's rush to tear it down ASAP before it could be landmarked. 

That cause, of course, was furthered when the newly formed Boston Landmarks Commission rejected the church's landmark designation by an 8-1 vote (the sole dissenter being noted preservationist and historian Pauline Chase-Harrell). The reasons for the decision were mainly economic, as expressed by a local blogger – "Maintenance costs were prohibitive" – despite the very good condition the church was in at the time they started degrading its condition.

This bland piece of housing sits on the site now, superficially blending with its neighborhood with the use of brick, forever erasing all memories of the magnificence of St. Mary's, which itself was but a tiny chapel "tucked into the corner of the ground floor of Casa Maria Apartments on Endicott Street," in Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen's words, until it closed in 2010, thoroughly obliterating all ghosts of the grandeur of its predecessor.

More to come...