November 10th, 2009
Queen’s Pier in 2006. Photo by David Wong
It was bad enough when they tore it down — now there’s the question of where to rebuild it. After the storm that swept through Hong Kong when the government tore down the Central Star Ferry pier in 2007, making way for a land reclamation project that is extending the waterfront by 300 metres, it was careful to avoid the same mistake when it removed the Queen’s Pier in 2008.
Instead of being knocked down, each piece of pier was carefully preserved and put into storage. Though it wasn’t particularly remarkable on its own, the pier was important as a symbol of British colonialism, being the place where British royals and Hong Kong governors landed when they arrived in Hong Kong. Together with City Hall and the Star Ferry pier, it formed part of a trinity of white Modernist structures that represented the straightforward ambition of postwar colonialism.
Now that the land reclamation project is well underway, the question is whether the Queen’s Pier should be rebuilt on the new waterfront, or in its previous location, on the shores of an artificial lagoon. The government is pressing for the former, which would allow the pier to continue functioning as a pier, but heritage activists insist on the latter. Yesterday, a group of them proposed that Edinburgh Place (the collective name for City Hall and its environs) be declared an historic monument, which would legally require the government to put the pier back where it originally stood.
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April 5th, 2009
Anti-capitalist street art, SoHo, New York
It’s a Saturday evening and the Boston subway is packed. The train is stalled on the platform at Downtown Crossing station, and the car has been filling up for nearly thirty minutes. Tensions are rising. One new arrival finds me slumped in my seat, impatient:
“Aw, look at this!” he announces to the train. “This guy can go wherever he wants, but can I go to his neighborhood? I’m not hating on him. I don’t know anything about him. I’m just saying, I’m angry, and I want to take it out. I want to do something to him. Because times have changed. It’s gonna be like the new 70s.” He is middle-aged, black, bedraggled, carrying a dusty briefcase. He looks like he is struggling, but not destitute. As he begins to be surrounded by more impoverished riders – and more affluent targets – he finishes his rant, asks for the time, and starts wondering, incessantly, when the train will move again.
Cities by their very nature are points of attraction for dense masses of people, compelling exchange, activism, and interaction. But when the world starts to become unpleasant, cities begin to manifest the dark side of these normally positive activities. The shimmering skyline becomes a symbol of excess; public spaces become fora for unrest rather than green lungs or safety valves; begging, crime, protest, and selfishness become more rude, more common, more crude.
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February 11th, 2009
Kendall Square now…
Kendall Square as it could be?
One of the beautiful things about an academic planning exercise is that you can indulge in a little flight of fancy. A recent quicky exercise here at the GSD lets people imagine a temporary urban intervention in one of Cambridge’s famous squares.
A square in Boston parlance really just refers to an intersection between two streets, and fittingly, many of them do look like an afterthought. Kendall Square, home to MIT, is one example: when JFK decided it was going to be the headquarter of the future space program, the entire area was cleared of its population. While that didn’t quite pan out, the area gradually became filled with high-tech spin-offs from nearby MIT. That however didn’t prevent Kendall Square from being filled with 70s campus-style architecture, which lent it a creepy extermination camp vibe quite at odds with homey (if a little staid) Cambridge.
The following is a little blurb about the proposal:
Kendall Square on a winter evening is bleak, empty, but also potentially atmospheric. Reminiscent of the menacing and enigmatic cityscape in Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, there is a psychological tension to this empty space that we seek to exploit in the installation Phantom City.
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January 30th, 2009
Boston, considered one of the most historic cities in the United States, has still managed to lose much more of its architectural past than it retains. Sacrificed to urban experiments from concrete piazzas to towers-in-the-park, generations of honeycombed alleys and densely-crammed pockets of housing have largely disappeared from the city center, their former presence registered only in ancient street plans and ghost-like remains. When I first moved to the area in the late 1990s, I would comb through books of old maps and photographs of the city – such as Jane Holtz Kay’s Lost Boston – with almost the same enthusiasm with which I set off to explore what was left of the city itself.
The internet has grown to include a wealth of resources to help track down the lost urban fabric of past centuries – not the least of which is the Library of Congress’ vast database of historical photographs. But my interest was piqued this week, when I discovered that the Boston Public Library released its much more intimate, if eclectic, collection on flickr. The photos, prints, and postcards it contains present a city that is both immensely altered and curiously unchanged from its 19th century self, providing the contemporary viewer the opportunity to reconsider just which “history” preserved Boston embodies today.
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October 23rd, 2008
I’ve always had a certain fondness for Boston. It was the first truly large city I visited, the first place that was effortlessly cosmopolitan, the first place that buzzed in an important-seeming way that was absent in the isolated and suburban city where I grew up. I was properly obsessed with it. I visited about once a year in the late 1990s, but even when I wasn’t there, I studied maps, poured over photos, read the Boston Globe and online discussion forums. Eventually, those regular visits stopped, and my fascination with Boston began to wane.
Last November, I sped down Vermont highways in a rented Toyota Matrix, on an impulsive road trip that brought me back to Boston for the first time in eight years. I was curious to see how the Boston of my memory stacked up to the Boston I would experience that late-autumn weekend. On a particularly chilly Friday evening, I wandered from Allston to Downtown Crossing and back again. Everything seemed vaguely familiar but strangely foreign. Maybe it was six years of living in Montreal, or maybe it was the rapid gentrification and upscaling that had occurred since 1999, but Boston seemed to have lost a certain big-city edge. It felt tame, relaxed, maybe even a little provincial.
My biggest problem was that nearly every inch of grime, disorder and unpredictability had been scrubbed out of large parts of the central city. There was some left around Chinatown, the edges of the South End, in Central Square, around Allston, but much of Boston seemed to have become similar to the park that replaced the old Central Artery: pretty but kind of a void.
It was a relief, then, to come across the Haymarket, which was as messy and lively as I remembered it. Here, just beyond the souvenir stands of Faneuil Hall and the Quincy Market, is a real street market — a wet market, as you’d call it in Hong Kong — selling fruit, vegetables and meat. It draws an eclectic and varied group of shoppers that stand in contrast to the more homogeneous tourist crowd nearby. It was here, more than anywhere else I visited on my brief return to Boston, that I got a feel of the city I remembered so fondly.
More Haymarket photos here.
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