Buildings

Arlington Street Church, Boston

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Arlington Street Church in Boston, around 1862.  Photo taken by J.J. Hawes, courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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The church around 1904. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The church in 2014:

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For the first two centuries of Boston’s history, this location was right on the waterfront. However, as the city grew in population, they needed more land, so by the 1850s, the city started filling in the Back Bay, adding new real estate along the Charles River from the Public Garden (seen in the lower right of the 1904 photo) to the Kenmore Square area.  The Arlington Street Church, completed in 1861, was one of the first buildings to be constructed on the newly-created land.  The first photo shows the neighborhood just as it began to be developed; plenty of empty land beyond the church is visible in the space between it and the apartment building to the right.  Today, it remains an active church, and aside from no longer having ivy on its walls, it looks very much the same as it did 110 years ago.

Park Street, Boston

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Looking up Park Street from Tremont Street, around 1906. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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Park Street in 2014:

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Not much has changed on Park Street in the past century. Boston Common is still there, fence and all. The Massachusetts State House still dominates the top of Beacon Hill, and to the right Park Street Church still looks almost the same. Even the storm drain and manholes are still there.

Summer Street, Boston

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Looking up Summer Street from Lincoln Street, around 1904. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The same view in 2014:

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Although this is part of Boston’s Financial District, this part of Summer Street doesn’t look too dramatically different from 110 years ago.  Several of the older buildings are still recognizable, with the most noticeable being the one on the far left.  Known as the Church Green, it is named after the New South Church that once stood on the site.  It was demolished in 1868, and replaced by a bank building.  That building burned just a few years later in the 1872 fire, and the present-day building was completed in 1873.  In the 1904 photo, it advertised a number of shoe-related services, including shoe polish, womens shoes, and boot and shoe patterns.  Today, the first floor has a Dunkin Donuts and a Chipotle.

Temple Place from Tremont Street, Boston

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Looking up Temple Place from Tremont Street, facing away from Boston Common.  Photo taken between 1910 and 1916, courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The scene in 2014:

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This area was a major shopping center around the turn of the last century, and it still is today.  Temple Place doesn’t look all that different, with many of the same buildings still there.  However, the street has since been truncated at Washington Street (the next block down), with Macy’s and other retail stores occupying the area where the street (actually called Avon Street on the other side of Washington) used to be.  The building on the far left, the R.H. Stearns Building, is essentially unchanged, although it has different tenants now.  The R.H. Stearns department store occupied the building from its completion in 1908 until 1977, when the company closed.

Milk Street, Boston

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Looking down Milk Street, just past Old South Meeting House, around 1911. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The same street in 2014:

The Library of Congress estimates that the first photo was taken between 1910 and 1920, but the license plate on the car appears to be dated 1911, which would, assuming the driver’s registration was current, place the photo around that time.  It captures a scene, frozen in time, not long before some major world events began to happen.  At the time, the Titanic was still under construction, the czar still ruled in Russia (for the next few years), and World War I was just a couple years away.  Automobiles such as the one in the photo were still a fairly new concept, and although none are seen in the photo, horse-drawn carriages were still a common sight around Boston.

The world has dramatically changed since the first photo was taken, but the street scene here isn’t completely altered – several buildings are still there, including the one on the far left, and the one just over a block down the street on the right.  Based on their architectural styles, they were probably brand-new in 1911, but today they don’t look all that different from the outside.

Washington Street, Boston (2)

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Another view looking up Washington Street, taken from the corner of Temple Place, around 1906. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The scene in 2014:

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This view of Washington Street was taken a couple blocks back from the one in this post, and shows some of the drastic changes in the Downtown Crossing area.  In this area, Washington Street is closed to most traffic, allowing pedestrians easy access to the stores on both sides of the street.  It’s one of the few cases where the “now” photo actually has less traffic than the “then” photo.

Today, Downtown Crossing is still a major shopping district, but almost all of the buildings in the 2014 photo are new – probably the only easily recognizable building in both photos is Old South Meeting House, which is three long blocks down the road.