Boylston Street, Boston

The view looking east on Boylston Street from just west of Exeter Street, on July 19, 1912. Image courtesy of the City of Boston Archives.

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Boylston Street in 2015:

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These photos were taken a little over a block away from where the the photos in the previous post were taken, and they show Boylston Street in the area just west of Copley Square.  The first photo was taken during construction of the Boylston Street Subway, which was completed in 1914 and allowed trolleys, such as the one seen in the photo, to travel under Boylston Street along the present-day Green Line.

Most of the older brownstone buildings seen on Boylston Street in the first photo have since been demolished, but many of the newer commercial buildings are still standing today.  These include, on the left side of the street, the small white building, which was built around 1908, and the larger red brick building beyond it.  In the distance is the tower of the New Old South Church, which was rebuilt in 1940 and today is partially hidden in this view.

On the right-hand side of the street, the McKim Building of the Boston Public Library can be seen in the distance; it was completed in 1895, and is still the main branch of the Boston Public Library today.  However, the library has long since outgrown the original building, so today the circulating collections are housed in the much more modern-looking Johnson Building, which was completed in 1972 and can be seen in the right center of the photo.  On the far right of both photos is the Hotel Lenox, which was built around 1901 and is still a hotel today, with few changes to the building’s exterior appearance.

One item of interest from the first photo is the trolley to the right.  It is overflowing with passengers, some of whom appear to be hanging on to the outside of the car.  There is a poster on the front of the car that reads “Baseball To-day, American League,” so these passengers were probably heading to Fenway Park, which had opened just a few months earlier.  On this particular day, the Red Sox were playing a doubleheader against the White Sox; Boston would end up winning both games, and later in the season they defeated the New York Giants in the World Series to win the team’s second championship title.  Over a century later, many Red Sox fans still take this route to Fenway Park, although today the trolleys run under the street in the tunnel that was being built in the first photo.

Post Office, Boston

The old post office at Post Office Square in Boston, around 1906-1920. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The scene in 2015:

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The triangular intersection of Congress, Pearl, and Milk Streets has been known as Post Office Square since 1874, with the completion of the post office seen in the first photo. The square was actually the result of the Great Boston Fire of 1872, which destroyed most of the buildings around the post office, which was under construction at the time.  The small park is still there, although most of the buildings around it have changed.

The old post office was demolished to build the John W. McCormack Post Office and Courthouse, which was completed in 1933 and is still standing today.  It features Art Deco architecture, and at 22 stories and 600,000 square feet it is substantially larger than its predecessor.  It was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and it is still used as a federal courthouse, post office, and federal office building.  Just to the right of it is the former National Shawmut Bank Building, which was built in 1906 and can be seen in both photos.  At least one other building from the first photo, the 1893 International Trust Company Building, is still standing today; it is visible in the distance on the left, at the corner of Devonshire and Milk Streets.

Hotel Bristol, Boston

The Hotel Bristol on Boylston Street, just west of Clarendon Street, on October 4, 1912. Image courtesy of the City of Boston Archives.

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The scene in 2015:

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The Hotel Bristol was built at the corner of Boylston and Clarendon Streets sometime in the 1870s, probably soon after the land was filled in as part of the massive Back Bay landfill project.  I couldn’t find too much information on the hotel, and it does not appear to have been one of the city’s top hotels.  It was probably more of a residential hotel, catering to long-term occupants as opposed to temporary visitors.  In the 1912 photo, there were also several businesses on the ground floor, including an auto supply company on the left and a drugstore, T. Metcalf Co., to the right.  Barely visible on the extreme right is the Walker Memorial Building, part of the original Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus before the school moved across the river to Cambridge.  That building was demolished in 1939, but I don’t know how long the Hotel Bristol survived.  It was still listed on the 1938 city atlas, but today the site is occupied by a modern office building.

Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston

The Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, sometime between 1912 and 1920. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The hotel in 2015:

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These photos were taken from about the same spot as the ones in the previous post, just facing to the left of Huntington Avenue.  This view shows the Copley Plaza Hotel, which has had few exterior changes in the past century, and remains a prominent Boston hotel today.  This site was once home to the Museum of Fine Arts, before they relocated to their present site further down Huntington Avenue.  The hotel was completed in 1912, and since then has hosted a number of distinguished guests, including most U.S. presidents as well as many foreign dignitaries and heads of state.

Boston mayor John F. Fitzgerald presided over the opening ceremonies, five years before his grandson, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was born.  The hotel also has another, more tragic connection to the grandfather of a prominent national politician; in 1921, the grandfather of present Secretary of State John Kerry committed suicide in a bathroom here.  Less than 20 years later, another notable suicide occurred here when Cincinnati Reds catcher Willard Hershberger became the only Major League Baseball player to commit suicide during the baseball season, on August 3, 1940.  Normally the team’s backup catcher, he had to play full-time in the middle of a pennant race after the starting catcher was injured, but became distraught after blaming himself for several poor games, including a 4-3 loss to the Boston Bees the day before.  The Red would ultimately go on to win the World Series that year, in part out of a desire to honor Hershberger’s memory.

By the mid-1900s, the hotel had begun to decline, and it was rebranded as the Sheraton Plaza hotel, complete with a tacky neon sign on the roof.  For some time it was more of a budget hotel than the grand hotel that it had once been, but in 1972 it was purchased by John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, the same company that was building the John Hancock Tower next door.  They restored the historic building, and today it is operated by Fairmont Hotels and Resorts as the Fairmont Copley Plaza.  More than a century after it opened, it is still one of the city’s premiere hotels, and probably its most recent notable visitor was President Obama, who gave a Labor Day speech here earlier this month.

553-567 Boylston Street, Boston

Some buildings on the north side of Boylston Street, between Clarendon and Dartmouth Streets and across from Copley Square, on October 4, 1912. Image courtesy of the City of Boston Archives.

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The buildings in 2015:

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Like the scene a block away in this post, the 1912 photo here shows the transitions that were happening along Boylston Street in the early 1900s.  When the Back Bay was filled in the late 1800s, Boylston Street was, like the other streets in the neighborhood, lined with Victorian brownstone houses.  However, as the street became a major commercial district, the homes were steadily replaced with more modern commercial buildings, with storefronts on the first floor and professional offices in the upper floors.  The 1912 photo shows three of these new buildings, each of which were built within about four years, and each of which had a different automobile company showroom on the first floor.  The only holdout from the earlier era is the four-story rowhouse in the right-center.  It was probably built in the 1870s, and it survived until around 1923, when the present-day building was put in its place.

The three car companies in the first photo were, from left to right: American Locomotive Company (ALCO), American Underslung, and Overland Motor Cars.  Like most early car companies, none of them stayed in business for too long.  ALCO got out of the automobile business just a year later, although one of their managers had been Walter P. Chrysler, who would later go on to establish his own company a little over a decade later.  The other two companies didn’t last much longer than ALCO, and today their former storefronts are occupied by a cafe, a wine store, and a Chipotle restaurant.  The buildings themselves haven’t changed too much aside from the storefronts; the only major change to any of the exteriors is the removal of the cornice on the top of 561 Boylston, the second building from the left.

Chauncy Hall Building, Boston

The Chauncy Hall Building on Boylston Street at Copley Square in Boston, on October 4, 1912. Image courtesy of the City of Boston Archives.

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The building in 2015:

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This building, located at 585-591 Boylston Street across from Copley Square, was probably built within a year or two of the first photo; the MACRIS online database estimates that it was built in 1916, but clearly this is off by a few years if the first photo was taken in 1912.  The first scene shows a wide variety of uses for office space in the building.  Signs in the upper floor windows include two women’s rights organizations: the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, and the less concisely-named Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government (women would get the right to vote nationwide eight years later).  The top floor apparently housed the Loyal Protective Insurance Company, and a barber shop occupied the far right suite on the second floor.

The rest of the building was apparently dedicated to automobiles and automobile parts; signs advertise for the Detroit Electric Edison Battery and Dayton Airless Tires, along with manufacturers ranging from well-known modern brands such as Benz, to long-forgotten ones like the Flanders Motor Company.  Flanders, which occupied the middle storefront, wasn’t in business for much longer than the time it took to take the photo, but according to the lettering on the windows they had both gasoline and electric cars.  At the time, electric cars were just falling out of fashion, and would not reappear again for another century or so.

Today, the Victorian rowhouse to the left is gone, but the Chauncy Hall Building is still standing.  The ground floor has since been heavily altered, and now houses a CVS, but the exterior of the upper floors is still essentially the same from 1912.  One interesting item of note from the first photo, however, is the large “To Let” sign on the extreme right.  The sign advertised for rental space for “stores, floors & offices in the new eight story fireproof Wesleyan Building to be erected on this site.”  The building appears to have been under construction in the 1912 photo, and is still there today to the right of the Chauncy Hall Building.