1/ My 3 favorite parts of the Sunday Globe growing up were the Comics/Fun Pages, the Sports section, and the Cityscapes column in @BostonGlobeMag, where architecture critic Robert Campbell & photographer @Vander47 would compare/explain similarly framed scenes of Boston then & now 
2/ I have no idea if there’s any correlation/causation between that & my earliest memory: being a curious 3yo accidentally exposing a roll of film, pulling a leader that was sticking out. My mom (a patient BPS art teacher) wasn’t mad.
3/ But I was devastated, thinking I’d ruined it, and understanding somehow even then that even if the pictures were just of me playing in the backyard, it would be impossible to retake them and have them be exactly the same.
4/ Later, as a kid coming to Boston monthly (Fenway, the Garden, my dad’s office, museums, etc) the visits had a buzzy specialness, so I was attuned to taking in details/noting changes (from the sidewalk, a car/T window, or an office looking down) in a way I wasn’t in daily life
5/ That may or may not be why, as an adult, I’ve been so interested as a postcard collector (beyond my interest in the personal messages) in city scenes that show something familiar that has changed a little or a lot in the decades since that particular card was printed
6/ Which also means the @BostonGlobe’s move back downtown has done no favors for my occasional attempts to pause my collecting, because every step I take now takes me by a different building/scene firing my imagination & offering layers of history begging to be peeled back
7/ Still, I’ll always be drawn to scenes with a fixed subject that stays the same while things change around it, which may be why I find myself now so often collecting cards of the #oldstatehouse. (Also doesn’t hurt it’s basically across from the @BostonGlobe) cc @BostonianSoc
8/ Whenever I find a new card from way back of something like the Old State House I feel like I'm playing a version of the "spot the difference" games I found strangely addicting/satisfying in Highlights for Children (before discovering the Campbell/Vanderwarker feature)
9/ The landscape around it changes, but so do the lived details of everyday life — cars, paving stones, crowds, clothing, first-floor tenants — and even small things that might make you feel like maybe you're being gaslighted (gaslit?) ...
10/ Like tweaks to decorative trim/brickwork on the facade, or the lion, unicorn, and eagle. But nothing in the built environment is ever totally frozen in amber; these histories via MACRIS (the MA Historical Commission database) & the @BostonianSoc track the changes
11/ And only in wondering about those small changes did I learn that the building's original preservation wasn't just the usual matter of saving it from demolition to erect something bigger/taller/more remunerative but to keep it from being moved to Chicago for the World's Fair
12/ (Sorry — back from this rabbit hole.)
But fascinating:
State history (MHC, left) suggests campaign to save it started 1879 to block bid to move it to CHI World's Fair. That seemed early, recalling rushed planning in @exlarson's "Devil..."
But City history says opposite...
But fascinating:
State history (MHC, left) suggests campaign to save it started 1879 to block bid to move it to CHI World's Fair. That seemed early, recalling rushed planning in @exlarson's "Devil..."
But City history says opposite...
13/ More here, from this @BostonLandmarks study, which is (really) a good read. After more than a decade of debate (Boston's always been good at that) over save/demolish, Chicago's interest sealed the desire to save it for good: cityofboston.gov/images_documen…
14/ Built by colonial govt in 1713 after fire ravaged the old "Town House" & central district, it housed state govt from Revolution to 1798, when "new" State House on Beacon Hill opened. @CityOfBoston bought it in 1803. When city govt vacated it in 1841, they leased it for biz...
15/ It steadily deteriorated thru a series of temporary leases, until a 5-yr lease in 1871 set up a Centennial Year collision course between those who thought it was past-due to be razed (dilapidated, small, awkwardly blocking State St) & those who saw it as a cradle of liberty
16/ The public-meeting coverage on what to do is fascinating. Lawyer Nathanial C. Nash, reminding everyone that it was due to be razed, said a statue would better serve fans of history, but that demolition amid the 1876 hubbub might be awkward...
17/ And Franklin Haven — a banking titan who was "an intimate friend of Daniel Webster," as his 1893 obit would note — dismissed the Old State House as "a great inconvenience" ...
18/ Still, the @GlobeOpinion page, in a breezy, tweet-style "Slings & Arrows" editorial, said, "The old State House is doomed. It must go sooner or later," as a lucrative replacement could relieve financial pressure on taxpayers.
19/ But it was buoyed by Centennial fanfare & a related effort to save @OSMHBoston nearby. It was on market after construction of the new Old South Church in Copley. See here, when one speaker got a big cheer for saying Boston w/o 1776 reminders = Boston w/ "left arm lopped off"
20/ So it got a 5-year reprieve in June 1876, first on a 46-9 vote from the sprawling Common Council, then a 7-4 vote from Board of Aldermen, before 20th-century adoption of mayor/council system. Though they did vote to remove balcony, thrilling "relic hunters" who pocketed bits
21/ When that 5-yr lease was up, they revisited the issue in 1881 — at the urging of that Franklin Haven character (the one who was pals with Daniel Webster), by then in his late 70s and still eagerly waiting to see it razed so that Devonshire St could be extended...
22/ But by then the mood was changing. The @GlobeOpinion page (left) had come around, calling preservation a matter of "propriety," not just dollars & cents. The Boston Post (via @_newspapers) was even more eloquent, calling demolition "little short of sacrilege..."
23/ By then the Bostonian Society, after a few weeks of noodling around following its formation as "the Boston Antiquarian Club" in late 1879 (left),had found a brisk sense of purpose in a public campaign to take over the lease and save the Old State House from demolition...
24/ They succeeded, and a full restoration was finished in the first decade of the 1900s, per these 1909 and 1911 Globe clips ... which explains why it was such a popular postcard subject in that era.
25/ Curiously, I tried a few search terms but didn't see anything in the clips about an effort to dismantle the Old State House and move it to Chicago for the 1893 World's Fair. Though I don't doubt it, as Chicagoans did make a bid to take Independence Hall from Philly...
26/ That was one of many colorful hits that came up, along w/talk in 1903 of moving the OSH to Common or Beacon Hill, to protect if from "strife of commercialism" & accidental damage from subway-tunnel construction. Note the clumsy proto-Photoshop rendering ... & proto-Rogaine ad
27/ Also, this total burn of an 1893 @GlobeOpinion oped re Chicago at start of world's fair, smugly calling it an ex-"prairie slough" that grew too fast & edged NYC in crass campaign for a "bauble" that Boston didn't want anyway, what with time-honored attractions like the OSH...
28/ ... while neglecting that a Boston delegation had gone to Chicago just a few weeks earlier for expertise in developing an elevated rapid-transit system (per this "Seek Chicago's Aid" story in the @chicagotribune):
29/ But this was the most random, and most fun — about a small boy named Frank Cassell, from Chelsea, who spontaneously started directing traffic in front of the Old State House, at State & Devonshire, one day in 1919, evidently just b/c he wanted to...
30/ That's this intersection here, which brings me back to what started this long thread (at least in my head, if not articulated) in the first place ...
31 I can’t help taking pics of it today, b/c just as with those old postcards, the scene is a little different each time. And this a.m. I saw something I hadn’t seen in Boston besides a ballgame or event: a human billboard (on a hot day) for parking...
32/ That’s a special teaser rate for the first half hour, but even then its way above minimum wage (here or elsewhere: bostonglobe.com/business/2018/…).
When I stepped back out later, the parking guy was gone.
When I stepped back out later, the parking guy was gone.
33/33 And speaking of parking ... to bring it back to the then-and-now “Cityscapes” that Robert Campbell & @Vander47 used to do in the Globe, I can’t help but notice how much more crowded the streets are than they used to be.
