Cambridge, January 7, 2013
One last (at least for now) note
about looking at the city from above.
Bulfinch's Boston, let's say in the
first years of the 19th century, was largely a city of detached buildings, with
"downtown" pastures slowly giving way to more urban
construction. Fast forward fifty
years and you see a completely different picture: a very dense fabric of
5-story buildings tightly built up to the street line. Also a rather precise geometry--the
exact term would be something like radio-concentric--with curving blocks
following the convex arc of the shore and long narrow buildings extending the
pattern of the harbor piers.
That is the view that we get from
the 1860 (yes, 1860!) aerial photograph of
"Boston , as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It" (the phrase
comes form a 1863 enthusiastic write-up by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the "Atlantic
Monthly".) James Black, a
Boston photographer coming out of the daguerreotype studios, teams up the
ballooning pioneer Samuel King to produce the first aerial views in the US (only
two years earlier Felix Nadar, a frenchman, had taken the very first aerial
photographs.)
Up 1,200 feet in the air, Black
shows a new breed of American urban buildings, that Walt Withman, visiting Boston that same year, describes from the ground: "Noblest of all
State Street Block, east of the Custom House, rough granite. (...) probably one of the finest
pieces of commercial architecture in the world."
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