Destroyers of the Dream

...There is nothing healthy in the squat slab arrangements of the modern city...

...With the turnpike extension, it is now possible to drive through the city without seeing it...

...Stand, citizen, on the flank of Beacon Hill...

...the CBS skyscraper which subtly, almost humorously, mocks the steel white sounding blues of the rest of Sixth Avenue...

...We need to orient our buildings to the phenomena and magic of the external world—light, water, wind—and of the internal world, our toys, our dreams...

...Finally Scollay, that marvelous, tumble-down, stone and brick town spilling over the shady side of Beacon Hill in uninterrupted, unpret-tified antiquity to river and harbor...

...You have removed wonder from around them...

...The Emperor is naked...

...Is a humane architecture possible...

...But these are fine things in isolation...

...As a child I played with worms, saw the violets and dandelions come up in the shadow of a rotting felled telephone pole, poked after snakes and toads in the empty lots of Dorchester...

...Kerry Village, the fascinating collection of tiny brick cottages, home of freed-slave Boston, is edged off our map by bulldozers...

...set of concrete stalls evacuating red clay...

...With the plaza and specifically because of it, the Boston Government Center can now take its place among the world's great city spaces," Huxtable continues...

...History gives us noble dreams...

...In a fit of romantic pique, Hitler drove the Bauhaus from Germany, not realizing that it shared his fanatical preoccupation with purity of line and efficiency and that long after his tawdry dreams would lie in ashes, a totalitarian shadow would be cast in concrete bunker on every major and minor city of the industrial world...

...Roughly the size of St...

...Years ago at Boston Public Latin School, I used to creep by stealth down the alleys from my father's office by the gold dome of the State House into the snaking line of Corn Hill, peering into the Hanover Tavern, where there was a plaque to that unhappy poet and Irish revolutionary, John Boyle O'Reilly, touching the mystery of his beating heart in the dark, ale-sodden shadows, tasting anarchist's blood...

...We have lifted our hands against the father...

...Of course there are exceptions: the Ford Foundation building, whose lofty glassed-in garden on the ground floor makes a fairy tale ending to its tedious block of New York concrete...

...When architects get together, as in the Government Center, the result is desolate pandemonium...

...I look with dismay at the concrete sewer pipes set in cement as permanent playthings in the municipal version of a park...

...in New York City the shattering aluminum foil of the Tishman Building...

...I walk about Boston in shock...

...I do not...

...We have architects with no sense of religion, of cosmos, of sun and shadow, of the mystical yet natural points of reference that directed the masters who built Stonehenge, pyramids, temples, towns of the past...

...We step in it without looking, without rubbing our backs against brick and iron lacework...

...The impiety which is the high social crime of both Greek and Hebrew tradition has become institutionalized, banalized, mechanized in the squat offices and restaurants of every modern smalltown shopping center...

...I want to cry, staring into this bleak boneyard, as dreadful as a concrete playground...

...Who the hell wants to work in a fuckin' garage...

...What is the consequence of being forced off our space, penned in...

...Millions are poured into the parking space beneath the Common...

...It is an offense in itself, but think of what it replaced: classic theaters like the Old Howard, the ring of fine, weather-burnished brick warehouse and granite setting Faneuil Hall off so perfectly that when you came down Cora Hill you could imagine Sam Adams rabble rousing in the midst of Eighteenth Century Boston, setting fire to the hearts of the massacre crowd...

...Xenophon's Anabasis, Greece, Rome, Ireland, Sam Adams—all were present to me and I accepted the task of unraveling the incomprehensible Greek, almost savored the cruel puzzle because the city, its Atheneum, its severe Doric columns, bursting Corinthian wreaths, were entangled with that classical education...

...Let us rip out those hideous brick and cement piles of the last twenty years, and construct cities that will inspire our grandchildren to sigh after our lives...

...They must breathe smoke anyway, why shouldn't it be narcotic...

...then stare down at the ribs of masonry, the repetition of window without reference to light, the brick pile oblivious to the catacombs of snow or summer haze, and tell me, truly, is the Emperor not naked...

...My palms sweat and beads break out on my forehead when I behold that tasteless horror, the Government Center, and especially its brick lavatory, the new City Hall, a Mark ]. Mirsky is an assistant professor of English at the College of the City of New York and the editor of Fiction magazine...

...Boston, the city on seven hills, dwindles down to a massive, reinforced gulch...

...In Roxbury, the Shirley Mansion stands rotting...

...the Carpenter Center in Cambridge, set in a decorous street of old lady edifice...

...Even the barest relation to any of the European plazas with their formal organization of arches, park space, fountains, restaurants, escapes me...

...But here is the comment of an expert, Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic of The New York Times: "The scheme has produced one of the best urban spaces of the Twentieth Century and that is no insignificant achievement . . . the vast nine-acre City Hall Plaza that is the urban and esthetic glue that holds the whole thing together...

...How often in the modern city does the veil of smoke lift from the streets and skies, so that suddenly we are part of a world so infinitely more powerful than our own lives that we surrender identity gladly to become part of the rhythm and color around us...

...Peter's Square in Rome, it lends a unity and style and sense of logical and rewarding spatial relationships to the complex that are a clear illustration of the best and most basic principles of urban design...

...His most recent novel, "Blue Hill Avenue," was published by Bobbs-Merrill...

...It is in the direct tradition of historic Italian plazas and European squares...

...The air is bad, the view is bleak, humanity is crowded together not to soar toward a hilltop or cluster around the springs of water but for the squalid efficiency of monstrous chicken coops...

...The old, mangled souls of civil servants in the new City Hall, displaced from the Corinthian capitals and pillars of their former haunt—a baroque post-Civil War structure that echoed the Greek dream of city-state and ennobled service and patronage alike—they know what has been done to them...

...it is an attack on history...

...Say me nay...

...It stills the echo of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century music and light that softened the harsh features of the downtown businessman, gave him a unique eye and ear akin to those of the townsmen of London and Dublin, an eccentricity of accent and humor bound up not only in the cruel parochialisms of family and church but in the sweet private voice of the city, its winding alleys, out-of-the-way restaurants, weathered fronts,, and high windows...

...Mirsky, it's a garage," they whine to my father, a retired politician...

...All this deprives the average Bostonian of the hallowed, strange sense of walking through his town's annals...

...He is rooted somewhere else, outside the cosmos...

...Then I would plunge lower into the gloom of the book cellars just before Faneuil Hall's classical Georgian splendor, combing the stalls for the illegal "trots" that would illuminate my assignments at Latin School...

...The past is a powerful chain of sanity, tying us to covenants and secrets which we do not understand, but which reassure us that life before us and after us has meaning...

...It is to live in heightened anxiety, in terror...

...What have we in exchange for Eighteenth Century courtyards, Nineteenth Century cornices floating on the warehouse tops, streets like tunnels bowing under arches, an elegant profile no matter how seedy or shabby it showed through at the elbows...

...The bankers, contractors, politicians may wonder why their children are lost in a haze of marijuana smoke...

...Did you never read Villon and Rabelais, do you have only dirt under your nails under the lawn at Mount Hope, New Calvary, Sharon...

...Holiness," said Rabbi Soloveitchick, the orthodox Jewish philosopher, "is possible only for man...

...Under the slogan of progress, a curse which has a most stupefying effect on common sense beyond the wildest hope of any magician's mumbo jumbo, a combination of arrogant bankers, corrupt politicians, and seedy contracting interests (the adjectives are interchangeable) has bilked and milked millions from the Commonwealth and the City...

...There was a plaza here before, Scollay Square, not a wide, paved-over cemetery...

...This insistence on a progress which annihilates the past, is it not a deep sickness—patricide...

...I still can't believe what has been done to this New England city...

...in Boston, the pure vulgarity of the State Street Bank advertising itself from a blunt steeple as if the Gullivers of Finance were lowering their drawers to piss publicly on the diminished citizenry...

...What is the consequence of living without history...

...It is living without holiness—existing in a bleak vista of No Exit...

...Leveling Scollay Square and the West End, chasing the Flower Market from Dover Street, drawing an elevated highway through the harbor access, putting high rises on the Atlantic Avenue docks—this isn't funny business which we subsidize, like television, with pennies hidden in the cost of living...

...This in description of a sprawling sixty-acre plot without a single interesting avenue of light or shadow, a hodgepodge of concrete eggshell crates set in no discernible relationship to one another, relating in no way to the terrain in which they are placed, either hill or vale (and they are between two of the historic mountains of Boston...

...There is an insane craving to wipe the memory of our fathers off the earth...

...We are in a state of shock, running, standing still, doping ourselves, suicidal finally because the time we acquire has no meaning...

...Boston has turned on her history and I despise her for it...

...You have put them in a garage...

...A garage...

...Boston, like all the other metropolises of America, has become a ghost...

...The architecture which ought to point us toward mystery, which ought to inspire dreams and vanities, pomp and pride, confines us instead to the smallest plot and space practical...

...We, all of us city dwellers, are living in death camps...

...Look up to the gold of Bullfinch's dome on the State House...

...No language is extreme enough to express the outrage of the living dead, of tearing out the raffish Boston, Kerry Village, the old West End, Dover Street —ay, even Dover, with its whores and winos...

...What is humane architecture...

...Breed...

...The sun, wind, water by which we used to set the reference of our architecture did not make man seem smaller than himself but rather endowed him with a sense of his mystery against the natural elements...

...It is irrational, but without it we are left alone craving the irrational, the mysteries in our present, making demands on our relationships that can only be realized from the energy of self-destruction, where heavy drugs and wife-swapping stand for the futile craving after something more than ourselves...

...And in the large cities, a more appalling spectacle arises: the vanity of mediocrity, a willful display of the ultimate in our worship of cost cut and small mind...

...It is a house, building, aggregate, which gives dignity to man and his tasks...

...Instead, we get barracks, public housing, playgrounds that asphalt over everything of real interest to children...