Photographers

Trinity Church, Boston (2)

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Another view of Trinity Church at Copley Square, taken around 1909. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The scene in 2015:

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As mentioned in the previous post, Trinity Church has been a prominent landmark at Copley Square since its completion in 1877, and this scene shows the view from in front of the Boston Public Library facing east across Copley Square and down Boylston Street.  It is essentially the opposite direction of the photos in this post, which were taken from the steps of Trinity Church. The church itself is still standing, but not much else from the first photo survives today.  The original MIT campus, seen in the distance on the left side of Boylston Street, is gone; the school relocated across the river to Cambridge a few years after the first photo was taken.  The other buildings behind the church to the left and right have also since been replaced with modern skyscrapers, so today the only other buildings that remain are the ones on the far left on Boylston Street, which were featured in this post.

Trinity Church, Boston (1)

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Trinity Church at Copley Square in Boston, around 1906. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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Copley Square in 2015:

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Trinity Church has been the defining feature at Copley Square since it was completed in 1877, and over the years it has remained the one constant in this scene.  It was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, and its architecture helped to spark the Richardsonian Romanesque style that was popular in the late 1800s, especially in the Northeast. The congregation itself is much older than the church building, though; the Episcopalian parish was established in 1733, and for many years it was located on Summer Street.  However, the Great Boston Fire of 1872 destroyed the building, along with the homes of many of the church members.  Many began relocating to the newly-developed Back Bay, so Trinity Church, along with many other city churches, moved as well.

Today, the church still stands essentially unaltered from its original appearance, even as the city has grown up around it.  Behind the church is the old John Hancock Building, now known as the Berkeley Building.  It was completed in 1947, and in 1976 its much taller successor, the current John Hancock Tower, was completed just to the right of the church.  The base of the tower is less than 100 feet from the church, and its construction actually caused substantial damage to the church by disrupting the soil and groundwater levels.  The tower later had other design faults, including problems with the 4′ x 11′ glass windows detaching from the building and falling to the streets below; the problem was eventually resolved by replacing all 10,344 windows, and thankfully there were no injuries from falling glass.

Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Boston

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The Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Tremont Street in Boston, around 1900-1910. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The building in 2015:

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This historic church was built in 1819 as St. Paul’s Church, making it the third Episcopal congregation in the city after Old North Church and Trinity Church.  It was designed in the Greek Revival style by Alexander Parris, whose other works in the Boston area include the United First Parish Church in Quincy as well as Quincy Market in Boston.  All three of these buildings still stand today, and all of them clearly show the Greek Revival influence of Parris’s work.

Only a few years after the first photo was taken, the church became the cathedral for the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, and it has served in that role ever since, even as the buildings around it have grown taller over the years.  As of the 2015 photo, the church was under renovation, which explains the construction area in front.  The most obvious change to the exterior, though, is the design on the pediment.  The church’s original design called for a relief design of Paul preaching to King Agrippa II, but it never came about.  Instead, in 2013, the church added the nautilus shell design with the bright blue background, which looks completely out of place on a 196 year old Greek Revival church.  As one Episcopal priest put it, “it looks more like the entrance to a fancy seafood restaurant than a cathedral.”

Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

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Looking east on Commonwealth Avenue from near Kenmore Square, around 1910-1914. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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Commonwealth Avenue in 2015:

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When the first photo was taken, the Kenmore section of Boston was still being developed. The apartment building on the right, which is missing in the first photo, was built in 1916, and the other houses in the photo aren’t much older.  These late Victorian-era homes were built in the late 1890s, around the same time as the Hotel Somerset, which can be seen in the distance in the lower center of the photos.  To the left is the median of Commonwealth Avenue, which was part of the original design of the Back Bay to have a wide avenue with a large, landscaped central median.  Although today Commonwealth Avenue has one way traffic on each side of the median, this apparently wasn’t the case in the early 1900s; the first photo shows traffic traveling in both directions on what is now the eastbound side of the road.

Around 100 years later, most of the buildings from the first photo are still standing today.  The houses to the right now have stores on the ground floors, but despite this there haven’t been any drastic alterations.  As mentioned in the previous post, the Hotel Somerset is still standing on the other side of the elevated Charlesgate, but it was converted into condominiums in the 1980s.  To the left in the median, part of the old subway portal is visible in the 2015 photo.  This section of the subway opened in 1914, probably not long after the first photo was taken, with the trolleys coming to the surface at this spot in the median before crossing Kenmore Square.  This portal has since been closed off, but the arch at the top is still above ground.

Hotel Somerset, Boston

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The Hotel Somerset at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Charlesgate East in Boston, around 1910-1920. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The building in 2015:

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When this historic building was completed in 1897, it was at the very edge of the city.  There were parts of Boston further west of here, such as today’s Fenway/Kenmore neighborhood, but at that point there was very little development going on.  Even the 1898 city atlas didn’t cover further west of here, and it shows that many of the building lots around the hotel were still vacant.

Although the Hotel Somerset was initially surrounded by vacant lots, the city soon grew up around it, as the first photo shows. It was a prominent city hotel, with notable guests such as The Beatles, who stayed here during their visit to Boston in 1966, as well as visiting baseball teams, since Fenway Park is just a quarter mile away.  Ted Williams also stayed here during the baseball season, renting Room 231 for many years.

In the century since the first photo was taken, many of the surroundings have changed.  The Massachusetts Turnpike passes within 50 feet of the building on the other side, and on this side an elevated roadway crosses Commonwealth Avenue, with an off-ramp on the right side of the photo in front of the building.  The hotel itself was converted to condominiums in the 1980s, but from the outside it still doesn’t look much different from the first photo.

Post Office, Boston

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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.