Vacation, part three: Copley Square

All things considered, you’d think I’d know Boston better. But it has always been a place of only middling interest to me. When I was a kid I knew people who went to various colleges there, but I didn’t visit often. With no driving need to ever go there after that, it’s always been low on my list. With in-laws nearby, we’ve done the Freedom Trail or the like over the years, or the odd meal with Kt when she was at Brandeis, and of course the various visits to Cambridge, but that about sums it up. So when we went to the Isabella S.G. museum last Christmas and drove through town, I might as well have been driving through Shanghai. Some of the architecture we passed was intriguing, so we figured, what the hey, we should take a closer look some day. Which turned out to be last week.

We stayed off Copley Square, and right away you’ve got some interesting sights. There’s a few skyscrapers that have popped up sort of incongruously (it’s not a particularly high city overall), and they’re attractive enough in a sterile sort of way; you’re not awed by them, but they’re okay. The Trinity Church, on the other hand, is quite the place. Neo-Roman, which is sort of like neo-Gothic without the doodads, but a great space inside with a fascinating assortment of stained glass by various artists, including Bourne-Jones (a PRB type). It’s a squared-off place, so there’s no dramatic vaulting overhead (cf. Westminster), no domes, but impressive nonetheless. There’s an odd steeple effect from what looks much more like a central turret than any sort of steeple you’re normally familiar with, but it does the job. The joint is run by the Episcopalians, whose gift shop has all manner of Episcopal souvenirs, if you need any. Practically made me want to convert, just for the tee shirt.

Across the square from the church is the Boston Public Library, which I would have to say has a very “eccentric uncle we hardly ever talk about” feel to it. It’s a fine building, and they’ve got the damnedest stuff in there. Dioramas from children’s books, dreadful J. S. Sargent murals, dreadful other people murals, WWII posters, miniature books, galleries, whatever. Even some regular books in one nice big open reading room, but mostly it’s as if you’ve stumbled into that eccentric uncle’s attic and you can’t for the life of you decide why, exactly, this is here. Worth a side trip, in any case.

Speaking of the Sargent stuff, he also did some murals for the MFA. Apparently he felt that his paintings were ephemeral, and if he wanted to be remembered for the ages, being a muralist was the way to go. The thing is, his murals, which have this semi-classical art-nouveau blandness about them, can’t hold a candle to most of his best paintings. His mastery of light and of character simply don’t come through. How little we know ourselves…

If you head down from Copley to the MFA, you pass, in turn, the mall that easily fits into the “end of the streets” mentality, i.e., a private space replacing the public space at street level, but it’s a busy enough neighborhood that this might not matter. We spent about 2 minutes in there, which was more than enough. Beyond that a ways, there’s the Christian Science area, which is absolutely a bizarre anomaly. There’s a church about the size of Peoria, which unfortunately wasn’t open for a looksee, but from the outside I would rate it as one of your more solid domed basilicas and not to be sneezed at. There’s also other buildings, postmodern (or, maybe better, non-modern or anti-modern reactionary) where they take the basic modernist glass and steel and cover it with stone-like facing to hide what it really is. Normal enough in its day (the 60s and 70s). There’s also a wonderful pool about as long as the campus that, from most angles, looks as if people on the other side are standing in it. All in all, a most impressive area filled with contrasts. Around that neck of the woods there is also the home of the BSO. Now, again, we didn’t go in, but I have to say, I do hope that the acoustics are exceptional, because this has to be the ugliest building I’ve seen in quite a while. It is, essentially and at best, a brick arsenal, and at worst, a refurbished baby buggy factory. Heaven forbid if it were actually built as a concert hall; I don’t know, and I’m sort of afraid to find out. No wonder these folks hightail it out to Tanglewood every summer. If I were them I wouldn’t want to have to enter this dungeon in nice weather either. At least in the winter you can crawl directly from the T into the arsenal and not spend too much time thinking about it…

The best part of Boston was absolutely revelatory and transcendent. And that’s something for next week.