11 – Wanderings

Boston has a lot of statues.  Really, a lot.  Maybe it’s because this is such an old city.  I like to think the reason Boston has so many statues is because ‘back in the day’ this city thought it was a pretty happening place, and public officials or big cheese families commissioned public art as a way to make other folks believe Boston was a happening place.

Happening enough for CNN to park at Faneuil Hall for Election Day, 2012
(alas, none of the crew was from Atlanta) 

The attitude of commissioning public art persists; I’ve found some relatively recent examples of street-side sculpture, and I can assure you Bostonians still think this a pretty happening place.  Truth be told, I’m beginning to see some reason in their attitude.  It IS a pretty happening place.
  

All of the following statues are located within a 2-minute walk of Faneuil Hall, and most were photographed during one hour-long lunch break.

A few political movers and shakers …

James Curley as a young man in a waist coat,

Mayor, circa 1900 

James Curley, much older, as a Congressman

after 50 years of public service

   

Kevin White, Mayor, 1968 - 1984,
striding down North Street leaving footprints

Of course, some art is commissioned for people who have captured the public's imagination at some moment in time.  Politicians and athletes are good examples, and Boston so loves its athletes -- ask anyone here about the Red Sox, the Bruins, or the Patriots.



Bill Rodgers' marathon shoes, Larry Bird's Converse sneakers, and Red Auerbach with a stogie
(love the basketball under the bench)

Some art is statues of people, some art is just ART and doesn't pretend to look like anything in real life.  The following two examples are on top of the Big Dig; the North Market building in the background is where I work.

Kids love running around this circuitous flat sculpture, located atop the Big Dig

In memory of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 ... and other  genocide victims

[So, this Big Dig thing happened in Boston for about ten years, starting back in the mid 1990s.  They had this elevated highway, see, running smack through town.  Looked a lot like elevated roadways in the Bronx, or the El in Chicago: big, rusting steel structure that blotted out the sun and restricted travel from one side to the other.  It was a big physical barrier between downtown and the North End, one of Boston's oldest neighborhoods -- Paul Revere's house, Old North church, Mike's Pastry Shop, and a proud history of Italian immigration.  Still heavily Italian, the Big Dig injected new life into the North End, set as it is between the waterfront and Boston's business district.]
 

The Dig dismantled Interstate 93 and buried it in what is formally known as the Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Tunnel, and less formally as the Central Artery.  (pronounced SIN-trall AH-tuh-ree.)  It took forever to complete and cost more money than dragging the moon into the Pacific Ocean, but it resurrected downtown Boston.

 

A long thin park now extends across the Boston peninsula: the surface of the Big Dig's tunnel, which is also the central median in the John F. Kennedy Surface Road.  (Imaginative name, eh?)  By the way, the Big Dig also includes three major I-93 interchanges and two connections to separate tunnels under Boston Harbor, so it really was a Big Dig.  And I guess it still is a Big Dig.

As a newbie, I can't say how much of a difference the Big Dig made -- I wasn't here "before".  What I can say is that the JFK Surface Road is a very cool urban space.  The park/median is a half-block wide, so it’s more than a simple median.  Public art, benches, grass, trees, flowers, and decorative sidewalks fill the spaces with a National Park visitor’s center, a carousel, a gigantic public plaza, and one of the three interchange entrance/exit ramps (hey, there’s a multi-lane freeway down there!) along its mile-and-a-half run.  I’ve actually hustled from the office all the way to Chinatown and back over a lunch break.

There’s a marker to the engineering and construction workers who worked on the project, and there’s sculpture on the original entrance for the Callahan Tunnel going to Logan.  (The Ted Williams tunnel brings you back.  Going over is free; coming back costs $3.50.)  The concrete retaining walls show how deep the Tip O’Neil is below present-day ground level.

Lieutenant Callahan was killed in Italy (1945)
while commanding the 10th Mountain Division

A time capsule rests under the Big Dig marker

Charge!

Yeah, Boston is really old.  Like most cities, though, it has to evolve and grow.  At left is a ChargePoint station for refueling your electric vehicle.  There are three of them here, at the edge of “Government Center” – another giant open public plaza.  This one has City Hall on the north side and Federal Buildings on the west side.  Two 40-story office buildings and a T station complete the picture, although there’s a wide vacated-street-turned-pedestrian-mall between the office buildings that shelters a lively lunch crowd in the half-block between the 1960s-era Government Center and the Old State House, built in 1713.

The Old State House is so old ("How old is it?") that it was used by the King’s Royal Governor, and then, ironically, by the first meetings of the Massachusetts state government -- which was created after dumping tea, shooting muskets, killing a bunch of people, and kicking the King’s Royal Governor out of the Old State House and our brand new country.

 

(In an early example of mixed-use development, the Old State House had a public merchant’s exchange on the first floor, with government activities upstairs.  It is now a major T station,  and an historic site complete with gift shop.)
 

Boston is a strange mixture of the very old, the middling old, the almost new, and the very new.  It's got a strong tradition of speaking its mind -- again, ask anyone here about the Red Sox -- and placing a high value on the individual, the community, education, and doing the right thing.

 

As an interesting note, there are seven Massachusetts counties where County governments were voted out of existence by their residents in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  All public services were either being performed by the local cities or by the state, so the voters decided to eliminate one layer of government.

Revolutionary idea, isn't it?  

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While the plazas on the Surface Road have art, history, grass, flowers, and activities, Government Center seems to mostly have a chill, strong wind.
 

That wind has turned from chill to dagger-like cold since September.  It’s supposed to snow (again) on Sunday.  I hope it does, to fill up those ski resorts I’m dreaming about – but also because Boston’s “wintry mix” of rain, sleet, and snow is downright miserable.