Church on the corner of Mass Ave and Beacon

The amount of details that are missed in a day is simply astonishing. We take our mundane surroundings and blur them into a haze of feelings and preconceptions. As cliché as it sounds, we never stop to look around and “smell the roses.” Thus, the places that we see every day are the ones that we pay the least attention to, the ones that we know the least about. This is why I chose my site to be somewhere near me, somewhere that I should know well. But in looking closer, it was clear that I knew very little about the place I live in.

My site is a collection of blocks in Back Bay, centered around Mass Ave. More specifically, it is comprised of the first couple of blocks when you cross the Harvard Bridge: the first two on the east side, the next two on the west side, and the next two on the east side.

The red, brick building on the left and the stone church in the middle are actually the same building

The most compelling thing about the site is one of the first apartment buildings that appear on the east side as you cross the bridge, right on the corner of Beacon Street. I first noticed this building during orientation of Freshman year, while I was doing the Architecture and Urban Planning FPOP. The group took walking trips of Boston with the Urban Planning professor as he pointed out interesting features of the urban landscape. This building is one of the most memorable of that tour. It seems to be a church at first sight, towering and made of stone. But upon closer investigation, it is clear that the church has been gutted out, and inside of it has been placed a rather odd-looking apartment building.

The façade of the church serves as a sort of fence for the courtyard of this building. I had never before seen one building literally inside of another. The church that stood there is now merely a shell for a collection of not very impressionable apartments. And though it seems a shame that such a beautiful and classical structure should go to waste, the Grady Clay reading has an interesting point in that “… the remodeling and re-use of places is as predictable as the slow aging of a seemingly more stable familiar landmark…Each scene follows the rules of appearance and behavior observable over time; and in each there is a change, decay, replacement, adjustment, and new uses for new times.” It is inevitable that a place that is no longer in use (or in profitable, frequent use) must be changed. And in this case, it is so much better that the church be reused for such an interesting purpose than the alternative scenario, which is that the church be completely torn down. In this way, a story still remains of what used to be.


Another point of interest are the Public Alleys. They run between main streets, housing the parking and the dumpsters that cannot be put on the busy broadways. Coming from the suburbs, I find it rather odd that you can, essentially, just walk through other people’s backyards. The view of these brownstones, so gorgeous and elegant from the street view, is quite different from the back. These Public Alleys tell the secret stories of these buildings. The alleyway between Marlborough and Commonwealth on the west side of Mass Ave is the smallest I’ve ever seen. The only way to get to it is through this tiny street in the middle of Marlborough. It is so small that it isn’t even labeled as a street. On Google Maps, it has the name of “unknown street.”

Public Alley

As mentioned earlier, I come from the suburbs. Everything there is new. Everything is uniform. Everything is laid out according to one plan. So Boston is endlessly fascinating for me, as a place where periods clash and build on top and around each other. As the article states, “one generation’s epitome district may become the next generation’s candidate for oblivion.” What was once important, is no longer relevant, and becomes erased or somehow changed. And all this information and rich history is hidden within the landscape of “Oh, yeah, I know Boston, I live there and go out all the time.”

Google Map satellite view of my site

Back to top