Scollay Square (MA) (Images of America) Review

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(More customer reviews)Being a Bostonian, and studying the History of Boston at Harvard, I am painfully familiar with all the reasons why Scollay Square was decimated in the name of "urban renewal" to make way for Government Center, one of the most awful public spaces in the country.
Boston itself is a superb city, with a rich and varied history. Being a seaport, it was always a haven for immigrants, and with them, came new ideas. One rather infamous place for congregating, which later became somewhat of a den of iniquity, was Scollay Square. The area was a hotbed of activity, where international seamen and merchants frequented rather bawdy taverns, took in vaudeville and burlesque shows, and other intriguing entertainment.
The idea behind the tearing down Scollay Square was that if you removed the places that attracted the "seedy element", the "seedy element" would vanish. What was never taken into account was who would congregate in this very public space afterwards - which was basically no one. Government Center proved to be one of the most alienating, ugliest, out of scale, non-public places ever created. Knocking down Scollay Square resulted in making everything vanish - good and bad.
However, in looking back, what is saddest about the destruction in my mind, is the architecture we can never have back. So much of historic downtown Boston was destroyed by fire, that to knock down perfectly good historic buildings is a crime.
This wonderful book chronicles all the unpublished secrets of Scollay Square. It is especially poignant for Bostonians.

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Scollay Square is a pictorial history of the infamous Boston entertainment district that was wiped away by urban renewal in the 1960s. Now Government Center, this twenty-two-acre area was once an entertainment hub where entrepreneurs, scientists, politicians, performers, and even con artists worked side by side. Inside are dozens of never-before-published photographs of the Old Howard and Ann Corio, the Crawford House and Sally Keith, Joe and Nemo, and the Casino Theater, along with the many characters and landmarks that made this area a favorite of high-school truants, businessmen, and sailors on leave.

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A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston Review

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(More customer reviews)Stephanie Yuhl's study of Charleston is a great read, organized brilliantly with metaphors from theatre, and wonderfully well written. As a newcomer to Charleston but a long time South Carolinian, I was fascinated by her account of how Charleston has marketed itself. Her analysis of the literature of the Charleston Renaissance is extremely insightful as is her critique of Charleston's most well known painters. But perhaps most astute is her analysis of class and race relations. This book is definitely a prize winner!
Carolyn Matalene
Distinguished Professor Emerita
University of South Carolina

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Charleston, South Carolina, today enjoys a reputation as a destination city for cultural and heritage tourism. In A Golden Haze of Memory, Stephanie E. Yuhl looks back to the crucial period between 1920 and 1940, when local leaders developed Charleston's trademark image as "America's Most Historic City."
Eager to assert the national value of their regional cultural traditions and to situate Charleston as a bulwark against the chaos of modern America, these descendants of old-line families downplayed Confederate associations and emphasized the city's colonial and early national prominence. They created a vibrant network of individual artists, literary figures, and organizations--such as the all-white Society for the Preservation of Negro Spirituals--that nurtured architectural preservation, art, literature, and tourism while appropriating African American folk culture. In the process, they translated their selective and idiosyncratic personal, familial, and class memories into a collective identity for the city.
The Charleston this group built, Yuhl argues, presented a sanitized yet highly marketable version of the American past. Their efforts invited attention and praise from outsiders while protecting social hierarchies and preserving the political and economic power of whites. Through the example of this colorful southern city, Yuhl posits a larger critique about the use of heritage and demonstrates how something as intangible as the recalled past can be transformed into real political, economic, and social power.

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Historic Preservation and the Livable City Review

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Everything old is new again. This book tells us why. Not since Jane Jacobs' THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES has a book so clearly drawn out the things that make a city livable. Turns out a lot of it has to do with a sense of time and place.

I learned a lot about myself and where I live (Greenwich Village). Though I guess the target audience is also planners, economic development people, preservationists, housing people, etc. - professionals whose job is making a city work and thrive. But this book is a gift for curious and innocent city dwellers like me who half killed themselves restoring old housing stock because it felt more like a place to live than some modern sheetrock box. Now I understand a lot more about why I did it.

The authors are also out to change opinions. The main argument is that heritage (historic) preservation needs to be integrated into the planning and upkeep of cities as an integral part of creating and maintaining livable environments, not treated as an impediment. Turns out it's actually cheaper in many cases to restore existing sturdy housing stock than to bulldoze it for structural crap. (No wonder luxury Park Avenue housing always advertises itself as "pre-war," code for plaster, not quarter-inch sheetrock.)

The book also provides a library's worth of case studies of cities across the country that have seen the light and renovated and saved their architectural heritage. This annotated catalogue (with a treasure trove of photos) is itself reason enough to include the book in any collection of record. It also convincingly argues for cities to include sustainability and heritage preservation in any comprehensive planning, cutting across all the different agencies involved. Given how historic preservation enriches us all, it should be a starting point, not an afterthought.

This book tells us in detail where we've been. I hope it also tells us where we're going.
Thomas Hoover
www.thomashoover.info


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For both the preservation professional and urban planner, this book shows how preservation is a key to the creation of livable cities. The author Eric Allison, the founder and coordinated of the graduate historic preservation program at Pratt Institute in New York City, offers tools and case studies that preservationists and planners can learn from in implementing preservation projects or plans in cities large and small. This book is a must read for anyone working in or interested in these fields and the creation and maintenance of livable cities.

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