Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Report Made to the Boston Society of Architects by Its Committee on Municipal Improvement, 1907
Nature blessed Boston with a beautiful site. Our forefathers handed on to us an old fashioned English city that was prosperous and convenient and of great beauty. Is it a better city in orr hands, and are we preparing properly for its future? Old Boston is full of local charm that we all want to preserve, but how is it with the New Boston? These are the questions we have had to consider.
It is easy to point out fatal errors that have been committed when, in recent years, large municipal works were in progress. They arose because of the lack of such forethought as we are now urging. When a court house was built on Beacon Hill, and a city hall was proposed between it and the State House, an Opportunity was lost that has rarely been presented to any city. If Beacon Hill had thus been crowned by these three important public buildings, the city would have been dominated by a worthy Acropolis. The Common would have formed a park-like approach to them, and we should have had a dignified municipal centre. Again, we have lately built great railway stations at the north and south ends of the city. The stranger emerging from these, instead of being greeted by grand or stately effects, in one case is puzzled to find his way beneath the intricacies of an elevated railway, and in the other finds himself in an ill-arranged and unsightly quarter. We surround Copley Square with costly buildings, and as we cannot agree how to treat the square itself, we leave it unarranged and half finished. Commonwealth Avenue, which is a fine street for any city, is lost in a gravel waste at the Cross Roads. Our parks are defaced by a fringe of cheap tenements, when we might have preserved them by restrictions on the lands that border them. They and our streets are defaced by advertising signs, although by taxing these we might control them or at least make them add to our revenue. Our harbor islands were once wooded, but now are bare. The waters of our harbor are defiled with sewage, and the fresh sea air is made noxious by the rendering plants on its islands. A girdle of danger ous and in?ammable wooden tenements surrounds the city. Our streets resound with a deafening noise, and over the whole town hangs an unnecessary cloud of soft coal smoke.
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