Boston City Hall is objectively beautiful and photos of it are all universally awesome (though it could stand a good powerwashing). The problem that locals experience and cannot escape is that it happens to be located on a giant ugly swath of absolutely not a goddamn thing called City Hall Plaza. So the building itself is grand, but the experience of looking at it in person is pretty bad and ominous purely because of the surrounding environment.
> This opinion puts you in a very small minority...
Statements like this always make me think about how the majority of americans believe that buildings can be haunted by spirits or demons or that ESP or telekinesis are real.
I think we need to be honest about the low merit of appealing to how well the average person's brain works.
The building itself is stunning. Look at every ground-level photo of it ever taken that doesn't include the plaza. But the feeling of standing next to the building has always been devastated by the blight of the plaza, and people are mostly incapable of separating the two. It only feels ominous looming conspicuously over a barren wasteland.
This has been quite improved relatively recently by plaza renovation (https://www.sasaki.com/projects/boston-city-hall-plaza-renov...), but that project was only completed at the tail end of 2022 so most people who have capital O "Opinions" about the building have never actually seen it in a less blighted context.
> I think we need to be honest about the low merit of appealing to how well the average person's brain works.
This is the architecture equivalent of blaming software usability problems on the user. If the average person can't use your product or appreciate your building's design, then the design is flawed - end of story.
Hmm, lived there for a long time and walked by Boston City Hall almost every day. I'm not quite sure how to differentiate objective beauty and subjective beauty, but at least subjectively, in my opinion, it's an eyesore.
Agreed on all fronts that City Hall Plaza is a disaster, though. I thought there were plans to revamp it with the Government Center station green line revamp a few years ago, but not sure if that improved anything.
You're right that there was a plaza renovation project. It has helped massively, (though I think it didn't go far enough), and it was only completed at the end of 2022 so most people grousing about the building have never seen it.
I was born in Beantown and remember the site before construction (“Scollay Square”) as being pretty seedy and a place to avoid (still least for an eight year old). The new City Hall and Government Center were a huge improvement, and occurred during a period of rejuvenation for the city (addition to Boston Public Library, Copley Square expansion, final renewal of the city's red light district, aka the Combat Zone). I do remember the controversy of the design and public reaction — yes, it's not for everyone, but I've always had a fondness for the building.
I'd always placed the city's nadir when I was a kid, in the 70s-80s, during white flight, and figured the upswing started with the central artery project changes in the late 90s. I guess I really have no idea how bad it was before the 70s when you're talking about. My parents and friends parents definitely seemed to think it was better then, though.
In general, that's probably considered around the nadir of a lot of US cities. When I graduated from grad school in about the mid-80s, aside from some finance people in Manhattan, my classmates mostly didn't move into cities. I'm not sure anyone I knew went to live in Boston in spite of quite a few getting jobs in the area--but pretty much all the computer companies were in the suburbs/exurbs. Boston was losing population until the very late 90s or so.
The trend for many new college grads to strongly prefer cities is a relatively recent phenomenon.
In Boston's case specifically, the Big Dig did improve the living experience--after a fairly long period of time. (And there were some incremental public transit improvements.) But many US cities also had reduced crime rates and other quality of living improvements, the exact reasons for which are still debated and which led to many employment opportunities returning to cities.
My former company opened a relatively large near-downtown office and, while they're keeping a suburban office, it will be much reduced from its earlier main location.
I think partially it was because it was so cheap. In the late 90s I had an apartment a block from the lake in the Lakeview neighborhood in the Chicago north side and it cost $400 a month. Before that I lived out in the Chicago suburbs and my apartment was $800 a month.
That was a steal. I lived in Lakeview from 1995 to 2000 (with a brief detour in San Francisco) and every place we rented was north of $1500, nowhere near the lake.
That whole area of town, aside from maybe tourist-land on the harbor, was a combination of big finance buildings and all the seed along Washington Street. Basically never went there when I was a student in the area.
Well just that it’s none of these things, as expressed by countless people, online and offline. It was voted as world’s ugliest building more than once etc. etc…
I love it. It's an underdog of expression surrounded by bland forgettable towers. Maybe that says more about the neighbors but the contrast is striking.
