The first lecture made me excited about the course. I am looking forward to learning about Boston and how to learn about cities in general. I have always found architecture interesting, but I have never been around it much, so this will be my first real experience learning about architecture and city planning.
I am looking forward to comparing the maps and different resources and comparing them to my findings on site in field work. I think Boston is beautiful, and I am definitely inspired by its beautiful layout and the way it is so heavily influenced by the coastline and the river. I am also intrigued by its anomalies and the mystery of how they came to be, especially when I see something and wonder if it is connected with a piece of history that it resembles. Every time I fly in and out of the airport, I always stare at Boston and think how different it is from the other cities I see, especially Detroit with the dark dead space encircling it and the perfect miles upon miles of lighted gridwork.
Even if I don't end up doing any further studies in city planning, I am sure what I learn in this class will be very interesting and useful to me in the future, if only to help satisfy my curiosity.
This week, I decided to find a site in the North End to study, since I like the atmosphere of that area. I looked at a few maps of the area, and noticed that a major bridge was planned in a 1984 map of the area. That bridge is now the location where I-93 crosses the Charles. I decided to look around that area to see how this development affected this older part of the city, and found that near the highway there are a lot of taller, newer office and industrial buildings, while further from the highway the older shops and narrow streets resume, so I chose a strip from the Rose Kennedy Greenway to Salem Street, which includes both the newer part by the highway and the older part on Salem Street, where several of my favorite cafes and bakeries happen to be. This is a six block area, and I am very excited to head over and start studying it this weekend.
I enjoyed learning about urban renewal and historical preservation in class this week. It's a very interesting conflict between the two because they both have purposes, and it largely depends on the culture of the time and the desires of the people as to whether they will have needs for newer areas and better development or want to preserve the older areas for social and historical reasons. It's kind of sad that entire areas are stripped of old and beautiful buildings, but at the same time it can be necessary for the progress and well being of the city to have newer areas that are better at meeting the needs of the population.
This week, I discovered lots of interesting things. I wasn't really sure what to look for or how to see the effects of "natural processes" until I realized they could be all kinds of things - water, plants, topography, etc. I realized that one of the breaks in my site is probably due to the fact that it is where the shoreline used to be, and the west side of the break is all filled land. That would also account for the somewhat sudden change in property size across the break.
I really enjoyed walking through my site the second time with specific types of things in mind to look for. The first time, it was snowing and 26 degrees F, and I almost froze frantically trying to find wind patterns and look for trees while stepping over puddles. The second time though, I took all kinds of cool pictures of water flow, sad street trees and flowerpots, and the stark openness of the Greenway. People looked at me a little strangely when I would stand in the middle of the street with my phone in the air trying to get good pictures of the trees, but I didn't really care.
I also was very glad that we got to learn about copyright laws in the US. I was very unclear as to what constituted copyrights and how it differed from plagiarism. They teach students a lot about plagiarism in high school, but almost nothing about copyright laws. Overall, it has been a very interesting week in this class and I am excited for assignment 3.
I really enjoyed the activity in class where we compared all of the maps from different dates in history. It was really interesting to see what changed and what stayed the same. I especially thought it interesting when a block was used for the same specific land use over and over again, like when three or four schools were built on the same half block throughout the history of the site.
I also got to visit my site while it was snowing hard a couple days ago and see a lot of cool wind patterns that I never noticed before. I wish I had seen them sooner so I could write about them in my second paper. I think writing the third paper will be a lot of fun since I enjoy comparing different maps with my observations.
This week, I learned a lot about how to compare maps and look analytically at change. It was really interesting looking at my site over time and seeing how it changed. I found a club that replaced a church that was torn down. The church was once the "Home for Little Wanderers", the first of a chain of orphanages that still operates today. I also found that many of the streets are in the exact same location as they were when they were first built, but then the highway was put in later and caused a small section to change. This explains the series of breaks that I found early on.
I found that one can learn a lot more by seeing how their site looked years ago than just from basic observations. Looking at old maps can explain a lot of things that seem odd or out of place, and the answer is usually very simple.
I also noticed that the addition of the highway and then the greenway didn't really cause buildings to be torn down and rebuilt (other than in the direct path of the highway so it could be built), but it did affect land use a lot. Areas that used to be companies (like a marble company) and wealthy people's homes and rental houses are now full of apartment buildings and small shops, bakeries, and such. However, further from the site, there are still a lot of condos and apartments that are probably still in the original style they once were.
This week, I learned a lot of interesting things about my site. While trying to explain things in my paper, I made a lot of new connections that I hadn't realized existed before. For example, when trying to explain the existence of a Catholic Church almost 200 years old, I realized that my site has had a large Italian population for a very long time. It was also interesting to see how deeply changes in transportation in the area affected my site. In fact, most major changes on my site were caused by the introduction of a new transportation system.
I also enjoyed listening to the guest professor on Wednesday. I thought it was interesting how he didn't know the answers to a lot of questions, but could reason it out by piecing together information that he did know. It helped me do the same when writing my paper.
This week, I really enjoyed connecting physical observations to the changes I noticed from maps. It was particularly interesting to see the many layers on our class site. Seeing different layers firsthand and connecting them to maps helped illustrate the changes more effectively. It almost seems too easy to connect observations into a story when I have both firsthand observations and multiple maps over time as resources.
The most intriguing thing to me about our class site was seeing which buildings had stayed for a long time and which had been repeatedly torn down and rebuilt. For instance, the building that had been built as a garage on Main Street in the early 1900s and was later turned into a polaroid factory still stands today, yet across the street from it are brand new apartment buildings and a newer building that is completely run down and will probably be torn down soon.
It's also interesting to see how MIT continues to take over the surrounding area with labs and associated companies. They have literally just eaten entire residential neighborhoods and blocks and blocks of factories that existed in the 19th century. I wonder, with the planned expansions in Kendall Square, how much of Cambridge will eventually be taken over by MIT.
I am very excited to get to write more about my site after connecting the observations that I made in the third assignment to first-hand physical observations on my site.
I had some troubles writing my paper this week. I tried to go take pictures Tuesday (since I couldn't the day before), but I saw a bunch of armed guards and a military truck swarming into the Haymarket T stop and I panicked and left.
I'm having a little trouble trying to figure out how to organize my essay as well. I'm used to writing more argumentative or persuasive essays, where the writer starts with generalizations and uses details to back up the thesis rather than presenting details or observations and talking the reader through the process of drawing conclusions from that, as it seems we are supposed to do in this class. Therefore, I've been having a little difficulty trying to organize the paper in such a way that each paragraph or section starts with an artifact or trace, such as a road or building, and works from there rather than using themes such as industrialization and culture and using observations to talk about them as I tried to do in the last paper. In this paper, thinking about my site in terms of traces and artifacts that lead to conclusions about trends rather than trying to think about trends first has been interesting. I hope that this is what was intended in the assignment and that I am not misreading the prompt.
I think realizing that my site can be discussed with observations and hypothetical causes of these observations rather than with themes and details will help me rewrite my third paper effectively. It's almost like going backwards for me in terms of writing. Before, I made observations and sat there for a while drawing conclusions and piecing everything together and then grouping my conclusions thematically by trends to write about them, rather than just writing about the process of drawing conclusions from my observations. It's actually a little easier to write about artifacts I can see now, like the Greenway, St. Mary's Church, and the Haymarket T station rather than writing abstractly about how they changed over time.
It's kind of weird using only traces I can see now as observations when I know about things that existed that there is no trace of now. I guess the best I can do is talk about the artifacts that remain and use the details I know about the facts to explain why the artifacts exist as they do today - at least, that's how I've written my paper.
I spent most of this week asleep because I was sick, but yesterday I received feedback from Louise and I realized that even though I tried to include more detail in my assignment, I didn't focus it around visual observation as much as I should have. I'm going back through and changing every section so that it works off of a specific photo or detailed visual observation instead of a taking a more distanced viewpoint. I'll also rewrite the introduction and conclusion to accommodate this change, and hopefully I will have it uploaded to my website sometime tomorrow.
In terms of visual observations that are most noticeable on my site, I would say the major ones are the big open space where the Greenway is, the big construction projects nearby, and the narrow streets and alleys with buildings tightly spaced on the eastern side of my site. I'm going to incorporate the pictures that I took of these things into my essay and hopefully make it more vibrant and visually centered for the reader.
For my presentation on Monday, I intend to focus on the large visual differences between the eastern and western sides of my site, and how the historical changes, or lack thereof, have affected this high contrast. I think I'll focus on the Greenway and its history (and a little about the early influence of trains at Canal Street) and how this has left a big open space that is very visually unique, and then compare it to the very different North End with small businesses and steady culture, and how its change in economic status over time has allowed it to remain as it is. I'll bring up the church here too.
It has been really interesting so far to see how inter related the trends are on everyone's sites. While some sites were influenced more by some things than others, you can see how the main things that influenced people's sites are social and cultural influences, changes in transportation, and to a lesser degree, wealthy owners or public policy. It seems that transportation has affected everyone's site in some way, whether positively or negatively. Some said that increased transportation allowed the area to be better utilized, while in other cases, the artery or other large streets and highways made pollution and caused people to move away. It will be especially interesting if we could tell if certain places were positively influenced by the central artery, or if owners that moved away from certain parts along the interstate moved to a specific area away from it.
I am excited to hear more presentations next week and learn about different social changes that have influenced people's sites to see if what is a positive change for one site influenced a nearby site negatively. This seemed to possibly be the case of Chinatown and the Leather District, where a highway was put in between a commercial area and a residential area, and the highway allowed easier access to the commercial area, but made the residential area even less desirable to live in.
I hope my presentation was considered acceptable, as I changed the order of topics to discuss at the last minute and thus was not able to utilize the slides in my powerpoint appropriately. I wish I had included some historical maps instead of just pictures.
It was interesting this week to see which areas experienced the most change due to having desirable surrounding structures and physical features. Some sites, like Sarah's, were in an undesirable location, such as right next to noisy trains and highways, and thus were never developed much and are now very poor residential neighborhoods. Some sites, like Thomas and Angela's, were great transportation crossroads or intersections and so were not developed like most sites since they were loud and congested with traffic until much later when space was more valuable and there were better ways to deal with traffic. It seems that the desire to utilize any open space was the driving factor for developing these sites with more useful buildings, like the tall offices in the Financial District and the new shiny industry in Kendall Square.
In contrast, other areas like Downtown Boston and certain spaces on the shoreline have been prime land since Boston was first settled and have been constantly updated with the most modern and expensive land uses, including really nice apartments and row houses, fancy shops, and skyscrapers. Kelly, Ellen, and Kalin talked about how their sites had been epitome districts in Boston since they were first built upon or when surrounding developments increased the desirability of the property.
I thought it was interesting how Thomas and Danilo's sites both were used for industry for many years. They were both sort of an "armpit", as Thomas called his site. Thomas's was sort of a hole where nothing was developed due to so much transportation traffic, so it was industrialized and then not used for anything better for a long time. Danilo's site was similar; it was an armpit because it was brand new filled land and not in a prime location to be residential, but is now turning commercial. Jack's site also relates to this because it was industrial due to the easy ocean access, but is now being developed more modernly into a commercial and residential area.
Eduardo and Abraham's sites were similar in that they both had an institution that dominated the area; Eduardo's was the jail and courthouse and Abraham's was the giant church.
I think the sites most similar to mine are Danilo's (which overlaps with the west side of my site) and Lynn and Sarah's. Danilo's site, like mine, changed from industry to being abandoned to being a nice commercial center, all due to major transportation changes from trains to highways. It was very interesting to hear that when the freight line moved, the industry did not follow it to another part of Danilo's site (the part that didn't overlap with mine); instead, it just disappeared since the industrialization era was ending and freight trains were less important with the advent of large trucks.
Lynn and Sarah's sites are both like the east side of my site due to the fact that a transportation line caused a barrier that allowed a low-income culture or ethnic group to thrive over the decades, as the Italians North End, Chinatown, and the Polish and Irish Andrew Square. These two sites interested me the most because they paralleled the trends that caused my site to remain so constant, with very similar effects (the exception being that the Greenway is not on Sarah's site, so it is not causing a new wave of commercialization that makes it a desirable destination).