Architecture—particularly for government purposes—has both meaning and power. The quality of public buildings can transform our lives for good or for ill. Our civic monuments affect both how others view us and how we see ourselves—Brian M. Sirman, Concrete Changes: Architecture, Politics, and the Design of Boston City Hall (2018)

Let’s take a walk.

Last year, I wrote about Beacon Hill, an old-growth neighborhood in the center of Boston that’s been frozen in time. In some ways, it’s an open-air museum, a place where you can walk the streets and see what neighborhood development was like for centuries: fine-grained growth on small lots, plenty of people participating in shaping their environment.

But today, let’s go down the hill, cross the wide stroad that is Cambridge Street, and take in the plaza before us. 

They did work here recently, an attempt to break up the vast, flat expanse of red brick. They put in trees, benches, ramps, and a precipitously angled metal slide that shoots out its victims at a high velocity. Despite the improvements, the area still feels vacant, underutilized, oddly out of place for the heart of one of America’s oldest cities. 

It is hard to convey the sense of alienation—oppressiveness, even—that comes from being in this place. It is to be avoided, ignored, walked through as quickly as possible. 

This is Government Center. 

The story of Government Center is the story of what happened to many American cities in the twentieth century. Lofty ideals fatally executed, a deeply flawed attempt to save the city. A process that displaced and disenfranchised the very people it was meant to serve.

It was intended to be a progressive, transparent, and deeply democratic space—a paean to the people. But the way in which it was made doomed it from the beginning.

The Fall of Scollay Square

If you go down into the Government Center subway station, there are still a few relics from the district’s past life: a large mosaic reading “Scollay Under,” photos of the once-bustling square relegated to a stairwell—all to be quickly glanced at and then forgotten as you hurry on your way.

Before 1962, this area was known as Scollay Square, a raucous entertainment district that, during the war, was a haven for sailors on leave. It was known for its burlesque theaters (to which the old Boston Brahmins thumbed their noses), as well as “comedy performances, variety shows, movie theaters, a legendary hot dog stand, tattoo parlors, penny arcades, and pawn shops, with countless restaurants, bars, and hotels.” (It sounds delightful). 

But after the war, Scollay—and Boston itself—began to decline. Businesses decamped for more fashionable areas (like the Back Bay, about a mile to the west) or new development far out on the urban periphery. 

Scollay’s seedy reputation grew, and real estate values flagged—declining by over one third, by one estimate, from the Great Depression. This area, along with the nearby West End, was considered undesirable, populated by poor and working-class people, a neighborhood of immigrants and the marginalized, of Jews, Poles, Irish, Italians, and African Americans.

Demographic and economic decline were not an isolated trend, but it was felt rather acutely in Boston at this time. The city’s population shrank by 30 percent between 1950 and 1980, compared to Philadelphia’s 20 percent and New York City’s 10 percent. The crisis was severe.

The federal Housing Act of 1949 was an attempt to staunch the bleeding. The bill authorized one billion dollars in federal funding to “Remedy the serious housing shortage, the elimination of substandard and other inadequate housing through the clearance of slums and blighted areas.”

But whether a neighborhood was a “slum” or “blighted” was often in the eye of the beholder. State law defines blight as an “area which is detrimental to the safety, health, morals, welfare or sound growth of a community,” a designation which one could apply somewhat liberally.

A local government entity (in this case, the Boston Redevelopment Authority) could conduct a study and then deem a neighborhood “blighted,” thus qualifying for federal dollars to destroy and “renew” it.

Notably, this could be accomplished without the input, direction, or participation of existing residents. With the “blighted” designation, the Boston Redevelopment Authority could remake an area as they saw fit, buying out the existing property owners, and, if they refused, seizing their land by eminent domain. The lives of thousands of people could be—and were—wholly uprooted by the state with a few mere documents. 

This is what happened to Scollay and the West End.

The 1962 Government Center Urban Renewal Plan makes a brief mention of the 440 families that would be displaced by the project and in need of relocation assistance. But it is doubtful that many of their lives were improved by the endeavor.

Herbert J. Gans, in his 1965 article “The Failure of Urban Renewal,” summarized the reality: “A 1961 study of renewal projects in 41 cities showed that 60 percent of the dispossessed tenants were merely relocated in other slums; and in big cities, the proportion was even higher (over 70 per cent in Philadelphia, according to a 1958 study).” 

By 1962, Scollay had been razed. Sixty acres bulldozed into rubble. Looking at archival images of the area’s “renewal,” it looks like a bomb has gone off. Block after block eradicated, extinguished, pulverized into nothing. Streets have been erased. Any and all context disregarded. An utterly clean slate. 

As one former resident recalled, “To try and even imagine the way it looked compared to the way it is now was very difficult. It’s hard to believe it ever really existed.”

“A Democratic Antidote”

Today, Government center is a sprawling complex of aging government office buildings, each possessing a distinct architecture, often in conversation with each other. 

If we look at the buildings chronologically, we can see the progression of architectural movements, of Bauhaus-inspired modernism—all glass and steel—giving way to concrete Brutalism with its own variations.

The desolation of Scollay became a sort of playground for avant-garde architects to experiment. Master architect I.M. Pei decided the arrangement of buildings, placing City Hall at the focal point, but leaving specific designs to individual firms. 

Walter Gropius, who’d fled Nazi Germany and taught at Harvard, designed the Federal Building according to his philosophy of rejecting “regional or local architectural influences.” His buildings were an architecture anywhere (or, less charitably, of nowhere).

Across the plaza was City Hall, designed by the firm of Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles, who’d won the commission through an international design competition. It was an attempt to “convey the dignity and openness of contemporary government,” a High Brutalist construct of angular concrete. Instead of aspiring to placelessness, it is incredibly distinct. Alone in a great plain, it resembles an alien spaceship, a great technocratic brain built to lord over us. 

Nearby, a nine story, 5,300 space parking garage—also made of concrete—was built, and a block over, perhaps the most perplexing of the new structures: Paul Rudolph’s Government Service Center.

The Center was conceived as half state offices, half in-patient facility for the Department of Mental Health. Architect Paul Rudolph designed the building with stray staircases, catwalks, and turrets, making it to resemble an eccentric castle, an Escher drawing, a Möbius strip. The concrete was given the texture of corduroy, adding to the uncanniness. The Center’s director in the 1970s went so far as to say that the building was “disconcerting and disorienting to persons not suffering from mental disorders.

At its core is another plaza, this time cloistered, and dotted with trees and concrete benches—itself a criticism of City Hall Plaza’s empty eight-acre expanse. But today it is somewhat unused, filled with weeds and stray debris, the rotting concrete waiting for the wrecking ball. 

It is difficult to argue that Scollay’s destruction was warranted for this.

Repairing The Scar

Government Center has its admirers. Admittedly, the buildings are interesting as sculpture. The modernists love Gropius’s use of glass and steel. The Brutalists view the concrete as “Heroic” rather than oppressive. 

Indeed, it is less productive to critique the aesthetics (worthy of their own essay) than the way in which these buildings were made, and how they relate to the city and each other here.

We can say that the trauma of urban renewal echoes through Government Center—you can sense the meat ax swinging, feel the state as an indomitable, oppressive force. 

Visually, too, it is a tear in the city’s fabric, utterly distinct from the adjacent neighborhoods and other downtown office buildings. Large setbacks and the lack of adjacent structures to fill in the space make Government Center feel cold—alienating, even. 

In many ways, the place can’t escape the methods by which it was made, the story it physically tells. The traumatic rupture of large-scale demolition and displacement. 

The medium is the message.

The Boston Public Library publishes Atlascope, an interactive mapping tool with dozens of digitized antique maps dating back to the 1860s. 

You can poke around and compare the decades, watching the city grow and unfold. Layer by layer, the parcels change. New land is created, lots consolidated and split—and, in a largely decentralized manner, the city changes.

Scollay Square was part of that old growth urban forest. Shifting through the maps, you can see the hundreds of buildings, built by hundreds of people, growing at their own pace—a healthy structure for a city, a complex ecosystem. 

When Scollay was razed, this particular ecosystem wasn’t just disrupted, it was destroyed, replaced with just a few dozen parcels, a handful of superblocks.

Scollay was struggling, but this scorched-earth approach opted for amputation when less severe treatment would have sufficed.

Think of the declining square as a low-burning fire, the embers still warm. Instead of trying to feed it, to stoke back the blaze, it was doused, and the coals swept away entirely. 

I like to think we’ve gained some wisdom in the intervening years, away from the tired style of “transformative” top-down planning to an ethic of stewardship and repair, of respect for the people who live in a place—even if it is struggling—and working with, rather than against them, parcel by parcel. A diversified approach to urban revival.

It is not terribly difficult to build a government building in an urban area that punctuates a space without obliterating it. Humans have been putting state structures at the focal points of their cities and towns for as long as we’ve been building them. Think of Puerta Del Sol in Madrid, with its oval-shaped square facing the regional government’s seat. The Roman Forum. Philadelphia’s City Hall. 

Why is Government Center different? The scale, the empty space, the lack of visual continuity, the dearth of other structures. Beyond its traumatic inception, the architects forgot about what makes a place great.

A government plaza needs other uses, other buildings to surround it, other reasons for people to populate it. The plaza and its buildings must be appropriately scaled to one another. While the piazzas of Siena and Venice inspired the architects of Government Center, they evidently forgot to include the arcades and accompanying shops and restaurants of St. Mark’s Square, or the variety of other buildings (each with their distinct builders, ages, and uses) that populate and humanize Siena’s Piazza Del Campo. 

The frame is just as important as the focal point. And, when there is no context to work with, to adapt and respond to, an organic, welcoming form becomes elusive. 

I worry that the size of Government Center’s structures and plaza makes the work of repair difficult. It is challenging to disrupt a superblock’s monotony without committing the original sin of total redevelopment. Indeed, as these buildings age, a choice will have to be made. Will they be renovated, or razed?

The parking garage has already been demolished, and Rudolph’s state office building is next—slated to be reimagined with affordable housing as a focus and some of the original architecture preserved.

The JFK Federal Building and City Hall’s time will come, too.

Instead of long, oblong blocks of government buildings, one can imagine a spirited variety of buildings, some private, some public, with streets converging on a much smaller plaza. There is City Hall as a focal point, but not the only point.

Above all, it is filled with people, with housing, with shops and restaurants and offices to draw others in. There are opportunities for the descendants of those who were displaced to return. Government is still present—but it is not all that there is, not the only defining attribute at the heart of the city.

A bustling square reborn.