Government Center, Boston, Massachusetts

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Government Center circa 2000

Government Center is a city square and plaza in Boston, Massachusetts, bounded by Cambridge, Court, Congress, and Sudbury Streets. The anchoring square, Scollay Square, is at the triple intersection of Court, Cambridge, and Tremont Streets. It is the location of Boston City Hall, a major MBTA subway interchange station, and a large open plaza used for large outdoor urban events, including free concerts in the summer and a large Santa's Workshop display in the winter.

1 History
2 Geography and transportation
3 References

[edit] History

[edit] Development and commerce

Scollay Square (Pronounced Skal-ee) was named for William Scollay, a prominent local developer and militia officer who bought a landmark four-story merchant building at the intersection in 1795. Locals began to refer to the intersection as Scollay's Square, and in 1838 the city officially memorialized the intersection as Scollay Square.

Early on, the area was a busy center of commerce, including the city's first daguerreotypist (photographer), Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808-1901), and Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, the first dentist to use ether as an anaesthetic. Local cultural landmarks took form, attracting visits from such intellectual contemporaries as Charles Dickens.

[edit] The Old Howard

Scollay Square in the 1880s

Among the most famous (and infamous) of Scollay Square landmarks was the Old Howard, a grand theater which began life as the headquarters of a doomsday cult. After the world failed to end on the cult's prediction, the building was sold in 1844 and reopened as a vaudeville and Shakespearean venue. Later, in the 1900s and 1910s, it would showcase the popular minstrel shows.

By around the 1940s the Scollay Square area began to lose its vibrant commercial activity, and the Howard gradually changed its image and began to cater to sailors on leave and college students by including burlesque shows, as did other nearby venues such as the Casino Theater and Crawford House. "Always Something Doing" became the Old Howard's advertising slogan. The venue also showcased boxing matches with such old-time greats as local Rocky Marciano and John L. Sullivan, and continued to feature slapstick vaudeville acts, from likes of The Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello.

But it was the success and prominence of the burlesque shows that brought the Old Howard down. In 1953, vice squad agents snuck a home movie camera into the Old Howard, and caught Mary Goodneighbor on film doing her striptease for the audience. The film led to the closure of the theater, and it remained closed until it caught fire mysteriously in 1961.

[edit] Abolitionism

Scollay Square was also a flashpoint for the early abolition movement. Author William Lloyd Garrison was twice attacked by an angry mob for printing his anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, which began publication in 1831. Sarah Parker Remond's first act of civil disobedience occurred in 1853 at the Old Howard when she was refused the seat she had purchased but was instead seated in the 'black' section. Many of the buildings in the area in and around Scollay Square had hidden spaces where escaped slaves were hidden, as part of the Underground Railroad.

[edit] Redevelopment

Boston City Hall

As early as the 1950s, city officials had been mulling plans to completely tear down and redevelop the Scollay Square area, in order to revitalize the aging and seedy district. Attempts to reopen the sullied Old Howard by its old performers had been one of the last efforts against redevelopment; but with the theater gutted by fire, a city wrecking ball began the project of demolishing over 1000 buildings in the area and 20,000 residents were displaced.

With $40 million in federal funds, the city built an entirely new development on top of old Scollay Square, renaming the area Government Center, and peppering it with city, state, and federal government buildings. The centerpiece of the main plaza is the uniquely imposing and brutalist Boston City Hall.

The plaza is not a well-loved space. As Bill Wasik wrote in 2006, "It is as if the space were calibrated to render futile any gathering, large or small, attempted anywhere on its arid expanse. All the nearby buildings seem to be facing away, making the plaza's eleven acres of concrete and brick feel like the world's largest back alley. … [It is] so devoid of benches, greenery, and other signposts of human hospitality that even on the loveliest fall weekend, when the Common and Esplanade and other public spaces teem with Bostonians at leisure, the plaza stands utterly empty save for the occasional skateboarder…" (Wasik 2006, 61)

[edit] Geography and transportation

Government Center T-stop

Government Center is located between the renowned North End and the affluent and politically significant Beacon Hill neighborhood.

It is directly across Congress Street from historic Faneuil Hall and popular Quincy Market and very near the Old State House. It is two blocks away from Interstate 93 (the 'Big Dig') which runs through the historic bloodline of the city.

There has been a subway station here since the first subway in America was built in Boston in 1897. Initially named Scollay Square Station, it was made famous in 1959 when The Kingston Trio performed a cover of a 1948 Boston protest song, known as Charlie On the MTA, about a man who is trapped to ride on the subway forever due to exit fares, an unpopular fare-collection method that survives today on some MBTA extensions.

Today the station, with its brick ziggurat-shaped entrance is known as Government Center Station and is the interchange for the Blue and Green Lines.

Many major city streets either surround or lead to the plaza, including Tremont, Congress, Cambridge, Beacon, State, Washington, and Devonshire Streets. Hints of another street, Cornhill Street, still exist along one edge of City Hall Plaza -- one of the few remaining old buildings (Sears Crescent) facing the square follows the original curve of the street, and one Cornhill Street address is still in use by a veteran's shelter.

Nearby skyscrapers include:

Neighborhoods in Boston, Massachusetts
Allston/Brighton · Back Bay · Beacon Hill · Charlestown · Chinatown · Dorchester · Downtown Crossing · East Boston · Fenway-Kenmore · Government Center · Hyde Park · Jamaica Plain · Longwood · Mattapan · Mission Hill · North End · Roslindale · Roxbury · South Boston · South End · West Roxbury