In this age of media-cooption of direct experience, how truly can we see a place, without our understanding being overwhelmed by previously-seen portrayals of that place?  This obviously comes up with New York, and L.A., and many tourist destinations, but for me it also came up with Baltimore.  I had been there several times before, but to be honest, my deepest understanding of Baltimore has come from repeated viewings of Homicide and The Wire.  This preconception had its negative effects – I was worried about walking down an alley, expecting that ferocious black-and-white dog from the Homicide credits to hurl itself against the fence at me – but it also had positive effects.  It reinforced my interest in the fabric of the city, spending time walking through neighborhoods, rather than just seeking out the architectural highlights.  This coincides with Greta’s predispositions too, as she’d much rather people-watch and see day-to-day life than look at major monuments of architectural culture.

We were staying with our former student Neelab, who lives on the north side, a couple of miles from downtown, so our limited explorations fanned out from there.  (Plus my Wire-based geographic understanding led me to think that wandering around the North side was preferable to the East or West.)  We walked up through the Hampden neighborhood, a straightforward place which seems to be gentrifying at this moment, judging from the presence of a frites shop and other yuppie establishments.  Everyone understands the Baltimore rowhouse as the building block of the city, but what most struck me was the variety of designs, sizes, and styles within this simple type.  There were the obviously high-quality masonry houses,

the simple ones enlivened by coordinated color

the ones enlivened by the lack of coordination

the ones with classic porches instead of stoops

and the deeply idiosyncratic.

It was also cool to see traditions that we think of as primarily suburban – such as holiday decoration – running amok in the city:

While most blocks are uniformly rowhousing, there were also freestanding houses, semi-detached and narrow lot houses breaking it up:

and some unique houses, such as this one built by a local sculptor about 100 years ago.

And as with any good neighborhood fabric, there were the mixed use and commercial buildings, and local institutions mixed in with the housing.

We saw Johns Hopkins, a not especially unusual campus where the hegemony of academic Georgian is once again strongly in evidence.

We walked to the downtown to get a better sense of the range of neighborhoods, and made it to the Inner Harbor, the redevelopment that put the city on the tourist map, with the groundbreaking aquarium and the Inner Harbor.  The Aquarium took up a lot of our time, as Greta’s architecture-quota had maxed out and we needed to see more animals.  Designed in the 70s by Cambridge Seven, it was the first to offer extreme spatial variety, huge tanks, and what feels like an immersive experience.  The interior spaces and experience are great,

and the exterior conveys that this is a unique building, adding a focus to the waterfront.

To some extent, aquariums need to be black boxes, to control light and marine growth, but this aquarium connects the inside to the outside as much as possible. Overall, a very good building, though not quite up the Monterey Bay Aquarium, according to our family aquarium expert ( who has written a post about the aquarium qua aquarium and not architecture).

The Inner Harbor was one of the first “festival marketplace” developments by James Rouse, whose company was based in Baltimore.It’s a pretty convincing, nicely-scaled area which obviously opened up the view of the harbor, replacing the waterfront uses that were in decline.  It started a trend to bring suburbanites back into the city, by convincing them that it could be safe and fun.  We saw it on a November weekday afternoon, not prime tourist season, so it was clear that the spaces were scaled for the tourists who must throng it in the summer.  With the exception of a repurposed power plant with giant Hard Rock Cafe guitar on top, it doesn’t try too hard;  it all seems to be related to Baltimore somehow, and isn’t just the latest manifestation of a market-tested, globally-repeated, Disneyfied, ersatz urban branding extravaganza.  That is probably because it is now so old – a more recent development would look more like Vegas.

The issue of eras of building is important in another way in Baltimore.  If you zoom in on the picture above, you’ll notice that there aren’t really many new skyscrapers.  Baltimore has its share of crappy skyscrapers from the 60s and 70s, but very few from later decades.  I think this is a good thing.  Probably since it is a relative economic backwater, and not a global city, Baltimore has been spared the crush of banal behemoths that dominate so many other cities on the ascendant, such as Dallas, New York, Charlotte, etc.  These new skyscrapers may not be any worse than the older ones, but they are much bigger (in both height and floorplate) and they completely change the character of the downtown.  Cities such as Boston, which have preserved a lot of older buildings, can survive the onslaught with a semblance of balance, but newer cities, such as Seattle, become all too much of one era, and unfortunately not a very good one.  We’ve been visiting a lot of second and third-tier cities on this trip, and it strikes me that these cities, which are more embedded in the local rather than global economy, may be much better cities in which to live – reasonable housing costs, a sense of history, a slower pace.  The global cities are exciting and hip, but a city which has been spared the tsunami of global capital looking for a place to buy up real estate may provide a more grounded, balanced and satisfying life for a much wider range of residents.

Travelers are often obsessed with history.  Many major tourist attractions are historical sites, and we’ve noticed that people we’ve met on this trip often focus on historical minutiae.  But in planning out a truck-schooling curriculum for Greta this year, we ran into a problem:  history was Greta’s least-favorite subject.  I was taken aback – wasn’t it my responsibility, as a parent, to drag her on a tour of historical sites and monuments (everyone should see Gettysburg, dammit, even if I hadn’t)?  I asked her if there were any part of history she’d enjoyed, and she mentioned the history of the railroads.  Further discussion clarified that she was interested in seeing historical stuff, artifacts from the past that showed how things were made or economies and regions organized. She wasn’t at all interested in staring reverently at a field where a battle had taken place 150 years ago, and I realized, neither was I.  Being in a place where something happened long ago is kind of cool, but going out of your way to visit such a place didn’t make sense to either of us.  Our historical agenda derived from this insight;  we would visit historical places where there were substantial, tangible remnants of history (and preferably cool, Steampunk-looking ones with lots of gears and parts), and avoid places with people in period dress.

a carding machine in Lowell

Mill towns jumped to the top  of this list.  Our friend Dan prepared an exhaustive map of every mill town in New England he could find, and we set out to find a few.  North Adams was interesting, especially as a large mill had been converted to the Mass MOCA museum.  But clearly the main goal was to be Lowell National Historical Park, which preserves the mill district  where the industrial revolution really took hold in America.  It was an early planned, industrial city – a group of Boston investors scoped out possible sites for development, and settled on Lowell because of the drop in elevation of the Merrimack River, and the opportunity to build canals and waterways off it. 

Lowell also continued our trip theme of Cities Which Were Really Important 100 Years Ago, but Aren’t Anymore.  Except in this case it was 150 years.  At its peak Lowell had 55 major mills, and dozens of smaller ones.  Lowell took the cotton from the South and turned it  into cloth.  The original work force was New England farm girls, and a highly controlled, paternalistic system was put in place to ensure their respectability while living in the city.  Within a few decades the work force shifted to immigrants, and Lowell was the site of early labor organizing in this country.

The National Park Service has preserved much  of this infrastructure.  The historical area is an interesting mix of remnants of the waterways, a few preserved mill buildings, such as the Boott Mill complex, where you can walk through rooms with operating looms:

and other parts of the district, where privately owned sites sit vacant, or are available for redevelopment. 

In this way, Lowell is similar to our experience at Ebey’s landing National Historical Reserve on Whidbey Island, where 90% of the land is in private ownership, and the Park Service provides an overall organization and focus.

Once you get away from the renovated buildings, Lowell is pretty depressed and depressing.  Some mill buildings have been turned to other uses – such as a large medical clinic or loft housing for artists and yuppies – but let’s face it, the supply of old mill sites is much greater than any foreseeable demand for redevelopment.  It’s a story we’ve seen repeatedly on this trip, cities which peaked economically 100 years ago, and there hasn’t been much new investment.  I remember an Atlantic article a few years ago, where Bernard-Henri Levy visited Buffalo and said that this was inconceivable to a European, that one of the most important cities from 100 years ago could be allowed to decline so precipitously.  But the economy moves on, technologies and transportation systems change, and when a city has lost its primary economic raison d’être, what really can be done?  Architects tend to focus on the potential of the amazing building stock left behind, but this supply-side view ignores the lack of demand to fill those buildings up.

The next important mill town we visited was Paterson, New Jersey, located on the Falls of the Passaic River.  Although Paterson is a short trip from New York City, I had never been there before;  the average New Yorker just can’t conceive of voluntarily visiting New Jersey.  Paterson also didn’t have the best reputation – when I recently mentioned this visit to a friend, he was astonished that we drove through the center of Paterson without having our trailer stripped while waiting at a red light.  (This may be a slightly outdated view – we drove through the center of Paterson and it seemed like a depressed, but not necessarily dangerous place to me.)  

The Paterson mill district is even older than Lowell.  The initial group of developers included Alexander Hamilton and it was the first substantial manufacturing area in the country.  The mills centered around the Great Falls of the Passaic River, a 77-foot drop into a narrow canyon.  A very cool spot, and one that you might have seen in the Sopranos, as people sometimes get thrown off the bridge pictured here:

A really knowledgable historian who grew up in Paterson and now works for the NPS gave us the rundown on Paterson, which was surprisingly important – most of the early steam locomotives in the country were manufactured here, it was the center of the silk industry, an it was the site of the first Colt factory.  There are a few remaining mill buildings in the district near the Falls, as well as a museum (which we didn’t have time to visit, as we got stuck in horrific traffic jams in Paterson, and then missed a turn to the parking lot and had to circle around narrow streets with a trailer, and then ended up in front of an elementary school just as it let out).  Despite its gritty reputation, Paterson didn’t see as depressing as Lowell.  Perhaps we just saw a lot more street life, with a clearly vibrant immigrant population.  Perhaps it was because dreams of urban redevelopment don’t seem so unlikely when you’re within an hour of Manhattan and you have some great building stock.  We wished we had more time to investigate the city further, as the downtown has many remaining civic and cultural buildings from its era of prosperity.

 In New York,  we decided to focus on cool new stuff we hadn’t seen.  And pastrami.  Our pastrami quest was thwarted as we trekked up to Carnegie Deli, only to discover that it was closed for repairs.  (And while we considered our next move, a dozen other people came along to be equally disappointed. Someone should set up a pastrami cart there.)  We did see Alwyn Court (even if we couldn’t afford to eat at Petrossian).

We only had two days to spend in New York, less than we did in Cincinnati. The focus on this trip has been on places where I haven’t been in a long time, places where we’re not likely to go to again soon, and places that you need a car to reach.  We had just been in New York last winter, and it’s likely we’ll be back soon, since we have a lot of family and friends there.  Then Greta and I came down with colds while staying with my brother in Mamaroneck, so our time in City got cut in half.  We decided to not spread ourselves too thin, and missed a lot of places and people we wanted to see (including an abortive attempt to schedule a Facebook-based meet-up with a lot of friends).  It was disappointing, but we’ll be back soon.

We wandered through the Park, and felt the full impact of the new residential tower at 57th and Park.  It’s kind of unbelievable, the tallest residential building in the western hemisphere, and a portent of things to come. 

The Century used to be considered a tall building.  

On to some favorite blocks on the West Side.And over the the 79th St.Boat Basin, where the rotunda is looking a lot spiffier than it did when I kept a boat there in the 80s.

The redevelopment and park extension at Riverside South was interesting.  The new apartments were a tiny bit less banal than most of their era.

But the real pleasure was in the park.  Back in the 80s, I was one of very few people who ever roamed into this territory – some homeless people managed to find gaps in the fence, and I would come from the river side in a row boat.  I was especially drawn to the remnants of the wharves that were there, as seen in these photos from the late 80s:I expected that some day this would all get swept away in a real estate development, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that the park design, by Balsley Studio, incorporated these pieces into a sophisticated design that covers the range from hard to soft and industrial to natural.  

And at the end of the park, there’s something else new to see:Bjarke Ingels’s new condo  building is his usual showstopper.  Once again, he lets the building form be driven by the site conditions, and doesn’t worry about conventional ways of making buildings.  I think this has worked really well in some of his projects, such as the 8-house, and less well in some others, such as the Mountain, where the concept may be strong but the execution is flawed.  It may be too early to tell with “Via 57West”, but I do wish they had hired a Danish branding consultant too and come up with a better name.  (Maybe they’re trying to attract Italian residents, and want to distinguish it from the buildings full of Russian oligarchs down the street.)  I haven’t seen the plans, but we spoke to a construction worker who said there were lots of weird, unusable spaces, which has certainly happened in some of his other projects, and seems like a natural result when you let the building volume drive the scheme.  I’ll withhold judgment.

But I think this may be a real New York building at heart, with the form driven by real estate economics.  One way to look at the massing is that it provides a graceful transition from the 57th St. canyon to the open space of the River:

Another interpretation arises when you find out that the whole block is being developed by the Durst organization.  The more conventional building further back on 57th St., seen to the right in this photo,now has a view of the River because the Ingels building slopes back.  So instead of one building with a view of the River and one with a view of 11th Avenue, you now have two buildings with river views.  The first one may be inefficient, not maximizing its potential floor plates and with funny unit designs,, but you can sell the units to hipsters who want to be in the cool building with great views, regardless of functionality.  Then you can have conventional units with normal floor plans in the second building, which will be bought by more pragmatic people.  The origin of this building is similar to that of Central Park – it may be a good design, but it would never have happened without the financial rationale.  I just wish it had a less cheesy name.

Boston does change, and it has probably added as many new buildings as other cities its size in the past 30 years, but the percentage of change seems smaller, since so many old buildings remain.  There have been two big changes, and many more localized ones:

There are small changes to existing building, such as the art installation on the Hancock.

And at dusk you can see other changes, such as how the various tenants have designed their lighting:

Boston may preserve its pre-modern heritage, but its lack of affection for some modernist classics is becoming evident.  Paul Rudolph’s complex at Government Center was never finished, and now it looks like it’s falling apart. We used to throw frisbees on the plaza, and watch in dismay as they fell through one of the large holes into the netherworld of the parking garage below.  That plaza is now full of chain-link fences – perhaps in our insane post-9-11 security mania someone decided that the holes violated the security perimeter, so they have been enclosed.  Between the fences, weeds and general lack of maintenance, the building looks like a wreck.  Maybe it is Boston’s attempt to catch up with Detroit as a center for ruin porn.

Even more surprising is what has been done to the City Hall.  It is a building Bostonians love to hate, similar to our scorn for the Portland Building.  I’ve always saved my scorn for the pointless, overscaled, empty plaza, thinking that the building itself is a pretty rigorous Brutalist icon.  But it is now suffering the death of a thousand cuts.  The big ramps and access points to the building have been closed off, no doubt in another security frenzy.

What was once an awe-inspiring interior formal stair hall has been strewn with junk – a random potted plant

garbage cans at important points, brightly colored tape on all the brick stairs, a painted blue tarp which obscures the stair to the council chamber, and a truly crappy coffee bar right in the middle.

It’s just depressing.  I know the building has problems, but it would be nice to deal with them in a systematic and thoughtful way, rather than letting everyone add whatever junk they wanted to.

And of course we can’t blog about crappy new things in Boston without revisiting the master of kitsch, Philip Johnson.  HIs 500 Boylston building is appalling, the kind of embarrassing banality that caused the downfall of postmodernism.  I can’t decide whether I hate this or his PPG Place more.

There have been many new towers built downtown in the past decades. Most of them are awful – under-detailed and overscaled, the same as has happened to every other big city.  But once again Boston’s heritage comes to the rescue – there are enough good old buildings that the new ones don’t overwhelm it.  The old ones certainly make the new ones look bad, but the counterpoint between them is not unpleasant.

It does look much better at night.

One big new thing is the redevelopment of the harbor edge of Southie.  This has a new meaningless developer name, the Seaport District, probably because SOuthie NOrth (SONO) was already in use somewhere else.  There’s a new gargantuan convention center, a bunch of monstrous hotels, and now condos are popping up everywhere. 

The one good building is Pei’s federal courthouse.  Not a stunner, but a simple parti with historicist leanings.  It was the first new building in the area, but it had no impact upon what followed.

Diller Scofidio’s Institute of Contemporary Art is just trying too hard.  Is anyone else getting tired of giant cantilevers for no reason?  I guess it shelters the seating below, an amphitheatre for Boston Harbor, but frankly, looking across the water to East Boston is not a view that should be emphasized. Maybe the district will grow up around it it, but right now it looks like every other piece of starchitect branding.

The general level of work in the district is not promising, but no worse than this stuff in every other city.  And maybe that’s the saddest part – Boston has always been a distinct place, with its own character, style, history, etc.  Even when it got its festival marketplace, Quincy Market, it made use of fabulous older buildings.  But this Seaport District looks like it could be in Orlando, Dallas, Indianapolis, or Miami.
 

The other big new thing in Boston is the Big Dig – the removal of the Central Artery and its replacement with tunnels carrying the traffic.  It is now called the (Rose Kennedy) Greenway, and it took me a while to get my head around it.  You know how hard it is to remember what exactly was in a certain place when it’s gone?  The Greenway is that to the nth degree. You recognize the old buildings and streets that were there before, but the relationship among them is totally different.  You try to figure out where the nasty little tunnel to the North End was.  Then you realize you have a view out to the harbor that was never there before.

The Greenway doesn’t seem to have much of an identity, and I mean that in a good way.  There isn’t a grand formal vision for the whole.  It is a series of connected, but not totally unified pieces;  the whole is not necessarily greater than the sum of the parts.  The Greenway is not a thing, it is the absence of the horrible thing that was there before.  I think the designers wisely decided not to replace it with another thing, but rather to create a number of smaller-scale pieces, each of which can relate to its immediate context, and try to pull the pieces together.  Once you get away from the Common, downtown Boston never had a lot of open space, and with the advent of giant new buildings, it might have been overwhelming, without the giant new open space.  To be hurrying through the financial district’s winding canyons at rush hour is intense, then stepping out into the Greenway on the way to South Station is a contrast and a relief.

There are some very good parts. 

Of course it was way over budget, and of course it took way longer than predicted and created a lot of controversy, but in the end, it is a Very Good Thing.  Perhaps it says something about Boston – what other city would spend billions of dollars on a project that made the city better, but didn’t produce a big shiny object that jumps up and screams look at me!  New York couldn’t do it – the urban design downtown at the World Trade Center is a disaster, with gigantic, pointless open space and preening object buildings.  The Greenway is Boston at its best, a simple, understated, classy solution.