Bahstin: Then and Now

thank you for sharing! I love these kinds of things. Whoever put this together was great, love the way you can scroll back and forth!

I didn't even notice that the first time!

It tells you on the first page.

When I see pictures, I stop reading.

OK, this caption is just dumb:
"Many familiar sights remain near the intersection of Brattle Street and
Massachusetts Avenue, including the storied Harvard University in the distance."

Gee, Harvard is still there? Wow.

we own this book by Peter Vanderwarker, which takes a more in depth look at how the city had changed (or hadn't) from ~1880 to 1980...

i've posted this before -- the street we live on, circa 1910




as close to the same view as i could get from google maps, circa 2009
(yeah, i've been meaning to walk outside and snap a photo...)

Oh I love it.

Same house, same porch, no shutters, no awnings, vinyl or aluminum siding replacing shingles, no little girl in a pinafore, paved street. Some change, some the same. How're the interior details? Any 60's--get rid of all the great interior trim renovations? Show's how much of Boston's housing stock is at least a century old, and that the "if it's old it should be painted white even if it wasn't originally": school still has its adherents.

I'm generally a modernist, but I love our old buildings, the art deco overlying the Victorian overlying the Federal overlying the Colonial. Not sure about our modern stuff tho--the Strata Center at MIT? Leaky, hard to use. Corbusier's Carpenter Center at Harvard--dark and dank. Boston City Hall, dark, brutal, windswept and harsh. A major city with so much still at a human scale is great (but you look at some of those slides, and see all the huge buildings that have risen in the background of the familiar iconic buildings in the foreground over the last half century).

Sometimes the mix can be interesting -- like Trinity Church reflected in the
Hancock Building.

I believe that was the idea behind the polished windows -- the view of the old, reflected in the new.

I like the urban context of the Old State House as well.
This has gotta be the only colonial-era building with a
subway station in its basement.

It's the same way all over Massachusetts. In the small towns where most of my relatives live, there are sections with buildings from the 1800's, mostly painted white.

The West Hanover three-bedroom two-story house my dad and his four brothers and a sister were born in at the turn of the century is still standing, and still owned and occupied by his sister and her family. She's almost as old as that tiny house and has lived there all her life. The house hasn't changed much in all those years.

Most of the houses in the surrounding streets are just as old and are also still occupied by members of the same original families. About the only thing that has changed is that they now have double-paned windows and better insulation in the walls. The kitchen wallpaper in my aunt's house is probably from the late 50's early 60's and she still gives it a good scrubbing every spring.

before and after the Big Dig...