They Fixed Downtown Too

[ablarc]

THEY FIXED DOWNTOWN TOO.

My mom didn’t drive. We lived a couple of blocks up the hill from the end of the Boston College Green Line.

Every week she took the trolley downtown to go shopping. There was a cornucopia of department stores: Jordan’s, Filene’s with that great Basement, Gilchrist’s, Kennedy’s, Stearn’s, White’s, Raymond’s, several others…

Each store targeted a market in the spectrum of class from elite to poor folk.

My mom came back on the trolley bulging with bargains. It was the best and easiest shopping in the world. It wasn’t pretty, there was no climate control, but it was compact and practical, the selection was comprehensive, the bargains were real. And you could get there without driving.

Some of the department stores opened branches in suburban malls.

Then gradually the department stores started closing or changing. The landmark event came when Jordan-Marsh tore down its big old emporium and replaced it with a low-slung, featureless brick box that belonged at a mall. Suburbia had started to invade Downtown with its vapid but scientific building types.

Raymond’s, the low-class department store, closed and got torn down. The crowds grew a little thinner. They stopped using mounted police to keep folks on the sidewalk at Christmastime.

After a time, they built an ugly plastic canopy over the sidewalk of some of the stores, obscuring them with good intentions. The idea was to keep rain off customers’ heads --sort of like in a mall.

And a second idea was to actually brand Downtown as a mall. Everyone knew these always succeeded. So they re-branded it “Downtown Crossing.” They even tried building an indoor mall, Lafayette Place, but though they hired a big-name architect, it was an epic failure: wrong location, wrong configuration, wrong look.

They paved the street in brick and banned cars --leaving the roadway for emergency vehicles to hang around and create a state of … well, emergency. Permanent emergency. Because they were clearly anticipating something, the place started to look dangerous.

As a mall it wasn’t much good --cold in the winter, hot in the summer, increasingly dirty, infested with punks, police cars and delivery vans. Every year or so, a department store closed. Folks on the sidewalk gradually grew lower class. Parking lots began to proliferate.

After a while a no-man’s-land opened up between what had been a shrinking Downtown shopping district and the contracting Combat Zone. What shops this transition area contained seemed aimed at dealers, pimps and their admirers.

Sack’s first-run movie emporiums closed. Some started showing porn, others just stayed empty or were converted to restaurants. After a while, the porno theaters started to close, together with the strip joints --hounded by the ladies of Chinatown, because their hubbies had become habitués.

We all know what happened in 2008-09: big plans gone awry, a soured economy.

Place resembling a war zone.



* * *


Then they figured out how to fix it.

A bright newcomer named John A. Keith came out of nowhere to defeat Menino. Keith fired the entire BRA, then personally selected a small brain-trust of like-minded free-thinkers --free, that is, from the stifling effects of unexamined book knowledge and academic norms. When they talked, these folks sounded much like some members of ArchBoston.

They went to work to fix Downtown.

First they threw out the absurd moniker, “Downtown Crossing.” This put everyone on notice that the Washington Street area would be knitted back into the city as an integral part.

But however glorious its past might have been, Downtown came back in an all-new guise. Its newfound success was based not on targeting the working class of Dorchester and Eastie --these folks had long defected to Wal-Mart in their cars-- nor, for that matter, on demographic considerations at all.

Though --like customers of Copley Place, Harvard Square or Newbury Street-- they were from the entire metropolitan region-- customers of the revived Downtown arrived mostly by subway. Most city-dwellers started their shopping trips on transit, while suburbanites switched at new-built transit-stop garages on all four lines.

And they crossed all boundaries of class, these metropolitan Bostonians, because they were all attracted by a new trait that Downtown had never traded on, because it had never possessed the trait. And because much of Downtown was missing, this trait was so extravagantly slathered on in new construction that they all found it even more magnetic than Copley, Harvard and Newbury.

The new Downtown is urban, but really it always was, along with its three leading competitors. But because so much of it is newly purpose-built, it blows the others away with something they couldn’t match without extensive rebuilding. For the one thing John A. Keith and his cohorts demanded of all new construction in Downtown was that it had to be … BEAUTIFUL!



It made people feel special to go there.

Mid-block passageways were developed:



And numerous of Downtown’s tiny alleys were upgraded, such as City Hall Avenue:



Shopfronts entice with slick design:



Arcades connect to subway entrances:



It makes people feel special to go there. They want to hang around a while:




Though Downtown’s building stock is good, it’s not always cheerful. Dabs of color can enliven drab streetscape:



Amazing what can be accomplished with a well-executed mural and a few flowers:



The criterion for hokeyness was excellence of execution. If the execution was excellent, it wasn’t hokey:



Shops were encouraged to stay open evenings and were plentifully laced with pubs:



A little streetcar line ran the length of Washington Street from City Hall Plaza to Tufts:



Arcades and alleys abound in the new Downtown…









But at the center of it all, lies the mother of all arcades:



John Keith’s men figured out how to finance and implement all this. Their specialty is politics.




Photos from SSC.

.

[vanshnookenraggen]

I hate to admit it but I am completely ignorant of Lafayette Place. Could someone gimme a history of that?

btw who wrote the first part?

[ablarc]

Originally Posted by vanshnookenraggen

I hate to admit it but I am completely ignorant of Lafayette Place. Could someone gimme a history of that?

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m.../ai_n18440769/

The buildings are still there, but restyled and converted to mostly office use.

Originally Posted by vanshnookenraggen

btw who wrote the first part?

ablarc, the ruminator.

[Lurker]

It was the BRA's moronic love child with the misguided mission of trying to bring shoppers lost to suburban malls back into the city by building a crummy mall with underground parking.

Several through streets crossing Washington Street were eliminated. The Annex Building to Jordan Marsh along with the old Woolworths, the RH white Department Store, and a few others along Chauncy Street were demolished. All the fabric was replaced with a single superblock development consisting of a mall with a circular circulation path and a Swiss Hotel. The mall was an immediate failure and eventually the space was gutted for the current awkward office/retail setup.

Blocking off the cross streets helped expedite the death of retail on Washington's side streets and isolated a chunk of downtown both pedestrian and automotive traffic from Tremont and Washington Streets. Demolition wiped out the historic street wall along Washington Street between Summer and Avery Streets and left us with the Hayward Place lot.

Now some dolt wants to add two towers over the joke. The whole blight deserves to be leveled and redeveloped along the old street configuration.

[ablarc]

Originally Posted by Lurker

It was the BRA's moronic love child with the misguided mission of trying to bring shoppers lost to suburban malls back into the city by building a crummy mall with underground parking.

"Crummy" is one of the operative words to explain Lafayette Place's grand belly-flop. Designed by Giurgola in ascetic but uninspired Brutalism, it was anything but beautiful.

You can do a successful mall in the city; Copley Place is evidence of that.

But you have to get the circulation right; it needs to be a shortcut from one place to another that people frequently feel the need to link on foot.

And you have to make it look good by prevailing standards.

[Ron Newman]

Copley Place isn't exactly attractive on the outside, though. All of the design was (and is) focused inwards.

[PaulC]

Originally Posted by Lurker

Now some dolt wants to add two towers over the joke.

Is this something new?

[JohnAKeith]

John Keith or John Galt??!

[ablarc]

Are they different?

[blade_bltz]

I would hope so.