Despite his troubling opinions about the conviction of three state Probation Department officials in the so-called O’Brien Scandal, I still have high hopes for Marty Walsh, Boston’s new mayor. How one thinks about situations like the probation episode, nevertheless, discloses a lot about values.
In terms of urban values, I follow my mentor, Walter Muir Whitehill, in being sure of the contribution skyscrapers can make to Boston and am thus excited by the striking angular designs of Donald Chiofaro's Waterfront towers, a project I sense the new Mayor is more willing to give a hearing to than the former mayor.
But the more I hear of Mayor Walsh, the less likely it seems my general hopes will be fulfilled.
The other side of design in Boston is historic preservation, which is an aspect, of course, of the city's history as a whole.
My head first turned sharply when the new mayor decided to use again, after years of disuse, the so-called "Curley Desk", given that name because the former mayor and Jamaica Plain resident James Michael Curley is identified with it.
Mayor Curley figures a lot in my research these days for a projected book of mine, The Gods of Copley Square. In this book I will argue that evidence is clearer and clearer that Curley was not only the corrupt politician everyone acknowledges he was, but, more importantly, he was one of the two arch-bigots and ethnic-haters of his era.
Curley's only rival in this department was Boston's other chief bigot and hater, Back Bay resident and Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell.
These men poisoned the atmosphere of Boston (until then famously liberal -- remember the Abolitionist Movement) --almost irretrievably.
How they deserved each other, the pedigreed Yankee and the immigrant-descended Irish-American, is too big a story for here. But if you are of Anglo-Saxon or Irish or Jewish descent, or are African-American, or gay, between the two of them, Curley and Lowell had all the bases covered. Both had their gifts, and their achievements, but seen now from the perspective of nearly a century, each stands for the worst of Boston.
Lowell presided over a decline in Harvard's fortunes only arrested by James B. Conant, his successor; while Curley hardly needed the Great Depression to drive the core city into the most precipitate decline of any American city before present day Detroit. It was a decline only ended by mayor John Collins.
Curley's desk should be retired; better yet, burned.
I had barely recovered from strike one than the new mayor began to share with us his architectural tastes.
Now, it was economist John Kenneth Galbraith who by comparing medical judgment to architectural judgment made the obvious point that "the architect is society's 'arbiter of taste' . . . . beauty, no less than measles or syphilis, is to be entrusted to the uninstructed intellect."
That's our mayor, all right: the uninstructed intellect running loose all over the place. Witness his frequent and colorful -- and very uninstructed -- condemnations of Boston City Hall. It is true that the greatest of American architecture critics, Ada Louise Huxtable, once candidly explained her job as "to let the public know what's going on in the large and small issues and to let them know the difference between good and bad, how to distinguish a work of art." But Mayor Walsh is no more an architecture critic or architectural scholar than he is an architect.
In fairness, Walsh is not alone. Politicians of his stripe are legion. At every level of government. Go look at the Fireman's Memorial behind the State House. Asked to critique it once, I ventured that were I standing in the window of a burning building I would want very well instructed fireman of excellent repute manning the ladder; not, certainly sculptors. Similarly, in the matter of a fireman's memorial I would want equally well instructed sculptors of equally good repute in charge, not firemen, firemen prevailing upon politicians to hire panderers to pop taste, who we have ever with us. If the Fireman's Memorial behind the State House depresses, however, go visit the Fireman's Memorial on Commonwealth Avenue at Dartmouth Street. It is possible to succeed at such a task if you take good advice, something a good mayor should learn quickly I would imagine.
Am I being too polite -- and taking too long -- in suggesting that while Mayor Walsh might have a good deal to offer at a seminar on local politics at the Kennedy School, he is architecturally totally uneducated and should bridle his tongue in a field about which he is stunningly uninstructed; realizing that by majority consensus the Boston City Hall is one of the top ten American Buildings of the 20th century and indeed an architectural masterpiece of global stature people come from everywhere to see. In fact his job is to stop trashing it as it has been now for decades!
Which brings up the third indictment: the new mayor's sermon about how to introduce disabled ramps (which both sides support) into the brick sidewalks on Beacon Hill, where the civic association wants them built of wire-cut bricks and granite and the mayor favors plastic and concrete.
Furthermore, Wash opined at a public meeting that "this community is historic not because of sidewalks," the sort of pronouncement he is not competent to make, and should be saved from making by better advisers.
One wonders if anyone in the mayor's office knows the history here, going back nearly a century now, of Boston mayor's and Beacon Hill's brick sidewalks. Certainly Mayor Walsh is tempting fate to take on this issue, for Curley himself fought a similar historic preservation battle with Beacon Hill and, unusually, did not emerge the victor. Nor is the reason hard to see.
Beacon Hill, after all, has long been a national preservation powerhouse. The Hill’s Society for the Preservation for New England Antiquities was a pioneer American preservation group. An early president of the preservation group once went so far as to suggest that Mayor Curley and his lieutenants were "surely ridiculous rulers".
Furthermore, the Beacon Hill Civic Association, with which Mayor Walsh is fighting his current battle, was famously founded in 1922 (the first year of Curley's second term) precisely to defend the Hill’s brick sidewalks, an issue that arose again in 1947 during Curley's last term when the by- then-legendary mayor was forced to back down by elderly Yankee ladies who staged sidewalk sit down demonstrations to stop attempts to replace the bricks.
Mayor Walsh is most unwise to take up these cudgels. He is perhaps confusing Savin Hill in Dorchester, where he lives, with Beacon Hill. Now I know Savin Hill well. I grew up on the next hill over, Jones Hill, in my Yankee mother's family home in an era when Dorchester was (as it has happily become again) a truly diverse place; I went away to prep school from Jones Hill and later commuted from there to Harvard, where my Italian-American father, a physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital, had gone to college before me. Indeed, I'm proud to say one of my books is a history of Jones Hill, a book the Dorchester Historical Society, with which I still have a relationship, keeps threatening to republish. But I never confused Jones Hill, or Savin Hill, with Beacon Hill.
The new mayor needs to recall that history and architecture lie deep in Boston's soul and, indeed, tourism is a huge part of Boston's economy. While no tourist comes to Boston to see Savin Hill or Jones Hill, they come from all over the world to see Beacon Hill.
Again, the major needs to take better advice. He is trifling not only with our soul, but also with our bread and butter. A point I made in an email about this commentary to an official of the mayor's hometown historical society, and got this reply: "I don't see any commitment in our new mayor's activities or words to architectural preservation anywhere in the city."
At first surprised, the more I thought about it, the more I agreed. Meanwhile, when I hear people from the Beacon Hill Civic Association and people from the Dorchester Historical Society making the same point I pay attention. That possible alliance should concern our new mayor a great deal.
Douglass Shand-Tucci, a historian and biographer of note, is completing an architectural history of MIT.
