Court Street Boston

Scollay Square, Boston

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Scollay Square, looking north from the corner of Tremont and Court Streets, sometime in the 1860s. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

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Scollay Square on August 26, 1897. Image courtesy of the City of Boston Archives.

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Scollay Square around 1942. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

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The scene in 2015:

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These four photos reveal the dramatic transformations that have occurred at Boston’s Scollay Square over the past 150 years. The square once included a long, narrow row of buildings in the middle, which appear on city maps as early as the 1720s. The construction date for the building in the first photo is unknown, but it was once at the southern end of this row, and in 1795 it was purchased by William Scollay, a real estate developer for whom the square would eventually be named. By the time the first photo was taken, all of the other buildings in the middle of the square had been demolished, and Scollay’s building was taken down soon after, around 1870.

The second photo shows a very different scene. Some of the buildings along the square are still standing, but the Scollay Building is gone, as are the horse-drawn trolleys from the first photo. Instead, they have been replaced by electric trolleys, like the one shown in the photo. However, these would not last long, at least not on the surface. The second photo was taken only about a week before the Tremont Street Subway opened, and the photo shows some of the construction activity as the workers prepared the Scollay Square station for its opening day on September 3. The station itself is not visible, but its ornate entrance can be seen in this post, which shows the scene from a slightly different angle.

Scollay Square had long been a major commercial center in the city, but by the time the third photo was taken in the 1940s, it had seen a dramatic decline. Many of the old buildings were still standing, but the businesses had become seedier. The 1942 photo shows a number of bars, liquor stores, cheap restaurants, and burlesque theaters, and the area was particularly popular among sailors on leave from the Boston Navy Yard and college students from the many nearby schools. One prominent hotel and theater in both the second and third photos was the Crawford House on the far right. It was built in 1865 and underwent several renovations, including one in 1926 that completely altered the front. The building burned in 1948, and all but the first two floors were demolished a few years later.

By the 1950s, the area was being targeted for urban renewal. Looking to replace the area with something more respectable, the Boston Redevelopment Authority demolished over a thousand buildings in the vicinity to build the Government Center complex, which includes the Center Plaza to the left, the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in the center, and the Boston City Hall, just out of view to the right. The old Scollay Square subway station was also extensively renovated and renamed Government Center. When the last photo was taken, the station was undergoing a another renovation, so if there is one thing that the second and fourth photos have in common, it is subway station construction.

Washington and Court Streets, Boston

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The northwest corner of Washington and Court Streets in downtown Boston in 1891. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

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The scene in 2015:

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Boston’s first skyscraper was the Ames Building, which was completed in 1893 and was the tallest building in the city aside from the steeple of the Central Congregational Church. The first photo was taken shortly before these buildings were demolished to make way for the Ames Building. One of them in the distance to the left appears to already be in the process of demolition, and several of the others feature reminders of their impending doom, including a sign on the corner that reads “Our entire stock to be sold at a sacrifice. Summer and winter underwear selling at half price.” Further down Washington Street to the right, another sign reads, “Building coming down. Carpets & furniture at your own price. No offer refused.”

The Ames Building was designed by the Boston architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, and its design reflects the older Romanesque Revival style, which was popular in the 1870s and 1880s, but had largely fallen out of fashion by the turn of the century. In other ways, though, the building represented a transition between the old and the new. Two major limits to early skyscrapers were stairs and structural support; buildings beyond a certain height were impractical because of the amount of climbing to reach the top and the thickness of the walls that would be necessary to support the weight of the upper floors. To solve the first problem, the 13-story Ames Building included modern elevator technology. However, while the 1880s saw the introduction of skyscrapers with a steel skeleton, the Ames Building was instead built with load-bearing masonry walls, which explains the thickness of the granite base. Today, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and it still stands as the second tallest load-bearing masonry building in the world, after Chicago’s Monadnock Building.

Old Suffolk County Courthouse, Boston

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The old Suffolk County Courthouse at Court Square, Boston, between 1904 and 1912. Photo courtesy of Boston Public Library.

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The scene today:

The Boston Public Library Flickr page for the first photo estimates that it was taken around 1890, but it’s way off.  The signs on either side of the steps read “East Boston Tunnel,” which wasn’t opened until 1904.  The building itself, which was built in 1836, was demolished in 1912 to make way for the present-day building, so the first photo was evidently taken sometime in between.

The original building was the old Suffolk County Courthouse; Suffolk County at the time included a number of municipalities surrounding Boston, but by the time the second photo was taken, most of those had been annexed by Boston.  The courthouse, though, was conveniently located right behind the old Boston City Hall, which still survives today, although the city government has since moved a few blocks away.  The building can be seen in both photos, in the distance on the left-hand side.  The courthouse itself is long gone, but the building that replaced it retains the same footprint, and similar architectural features, although it is significantly taller.

Scollay Square, Boston

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Scollay Square in Boston, around 1906. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The same scene in 2014:

Scollay Square is one of the more dramatic, and perhaps infamous examples of urban renewal in Boston.  Located at the corner of Tremont and Court streets, it was a busy commercial center for several centuries.  However, by the 1950s it was a seedy neighborhood with low-income residents, so the entire area was demolished in the 1960s and replaced with Government Center, which included City Hall and City Hall Plaza (just to the right of where the 2014 photo was taken).

The two small buildings in the center of the square in the 1906 photo are two different subway stations; the one in the foreground is Court Street on the East Boston Tunnel (present-day Blue Line), and the larger, more ornate one in the background is the Scollay Square station on the Tremont Street Subway (today’s Green Line).  This was the original terminus of the East Boston Tunnel when it opened in 1904; it extended from Maverick Station in East Boston, and ran under Boston Harbor and up State Street to here.  In 1916, the line was extended to Bowdoin, and the Court Street Station was closed, and a new station was opened under the Scollay Square station; not surprisingly, it was called Scollay Under.

Today, very little remains from the 1906 photo.  Only two buildings survive; the one on the far left (modern-day Bank of America), and the Suffolk County Courthouse, visible in the distance in left-center (and no longer visible from this spot today, although it’s still there).  Even the subway station has changed; the Blue and Green lines still meet here, but it is now the Government Center station, and the entrance is further to the right, at City Hall Plaza.  The station itself was reconstructed in the 1960s, and is currently being reconstructed again.  It was closed earlier this year, and is not scheduled to reopen until 2016.