In his new book, the author marks a path of twists, turns through urban history
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff, 11/24/2001
R.M. Fogelson is an urban historian. His new book is called ''Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950.'' So it seemed like a good idea to interview him while taking a walk - where else? - downtown.
We met at 10 a.m. outside the Kendall Square T station, which is near MIT, where Fogelson has taught since 1968. It was a weekday, but with the morning commute over, the train was only about half full.
The most famous tribute to downtown came from England, Petula Clark's 1964 number one single, but Europe has no real urban equivalent. ''It is very much an American concept,'' Fogelson said. The idea of a central district where people work and shop but few live is unique to the United States.
''In the busiest [European] commercial districts people live all along the side streets,'' Fogelson explained. ''That's true of Madrid, Paris. London does have the City, its financial district. But once you get outside of there, people live everywhere.''
Fogelson, 64, still has a trace of New York in his accent. He grew up in the Bronx and remembers taking the subway to Grand Central Station to visit his father, a lawyer, in his midtown office. (New York was, and is, unique in having not one but two downtowns: the Wall Street financial district and midtown.)
Why a book on this subject? Fogelson said the answer was simple. ''Nobody had done it! You could easily spend an entire summer reading first-rate books about suburbia. You could spend another summer reading first-rate books about ghettos. Somehow, downtown just got missed.''
We got off our train at (of course) Downtown Crossing and began to walk down Summer Street. It was a brisk, sunny day. Many of the pedestrians were shoppers. Filene's was on our left, Macy's to our right.
Long before there were shopping malls and shopping centers there was a shopping district: singular, never plural. This was Boston's. In addition to Filene's and Macy's (which many Bostonians still call Jordan Marsh), the ghosts of such establishments as Raymond's, Gilchrist's, R.H. Stearns, White's, and Kennedy's hover nearby.
The great department stores were a key part of downtown, as much an emblem of city life as skyscrapers or crowded sidewalks. ''Before 1925,'' Fogelson pointed out, ''there wasn't a department store in the country that was located anywhere but downtown.''
A gust of wind hit us as we turned left on to Devonshire Street. We come to Winthrop Square, which encapsulates within its small confines a century of downtown history. The Second Empire opulence of One Winthrop Square, with its shrubbery and small plaza in front, shows the 19th-century city at its best. Looming over it are two towers. 75 Federal Street, the old State Street Bank building, dates from the '20s and is one of the city's finest Art Deco structures. 101 Federal is perhaps the most elegant skyscraper built during the '80s boom.
Far less prepossessing than those three buildings is the city of Boston parking garage at 240 Devonshire. Yet the automobile is one of the big reasons Fogelson's story ends in 1950.
Transportation has always posed problems for downtown - and that was just as true if the conveyance was a horse-drawn tram, elevated train, or even subway - but the automobile was different. The mobility it offered made downtown an option for the middle class, not a necessity.
''The logic of 1950 was that, by then, downtown was no longer the only business district,'' Fogelson said. ''In some cities, it is the central business district in name only. And the assumptions about downtown that had emerged in the early 19th century, that every city had to have a downtown, was inevitable, desirable, this balance I talk about between the concentration of businesses and the dispersal of residences, those assumptions which nobody questioned in the late 19th century are all up to question by 1950.''
Traffic wasn't that bad, though a truck going down Franklin Street almost ran us over as we tried to beat the light. To our left was the old New England Telephone Building, a block away. It was tempting to head down there and admire Post Office Square, whose southern end it anchors. But we stayed on Devonshire.
Part of the fascination of downtowns is that, for all their similarities (skyscrapers, department stores, theaters, congestion), they're all different. Philadelphia, San Francisco, and midtown Manhattan are grids. New York's financial district and Boston's follow the curves and twists of 18th-century pathways.
With a delivery truck pulled up on the sidewalk, we could appreciate just how narrow Devonshire was. The bland, chocolatey ugliness of One Federal tower on our right made the passage seem that much tighter. It was a pleasure to cross Milk Street and enjoy more congenial architectural company, the splendid Deco facade of the back of the old federal courthouse.
As we approached the Old State House, it seemed a good idea to raise a larger historical question about downtown. Why is it that, at least since Thomas Jefferson, Americans have been leery of cities?
''Americans, for a very long time, have developed a concept of the good community,'' Fogelson said. ''The trouble is it's very hard to live in the good community in cities because that concept is what [University of Michigan historian] Bob Fishman calls, `the bourgeois utopia': It's a single-family home on a lot with nice trees and a lawn.
''Increasingly, that vision was available to most people only on the periphery. If you were very wealthy, in some cities you could still live that way. In Cambridge, people live on Brattle Street. But that's so expensive it's available only to a few. I think lots of Americans would be happy to live in cities if they could somehow find a way to live in that single-family house on that quarter acre and raise their kids there. When that became increasingly difficult, because of the nature of American cities, they began to move out.''
Fogelson lives in Cambridge - though not on Brattle Street - in an apartment building between Harvard and Porter squares. He also has a house on Martha's Vineyard. Unmarried, he has a longstanding relationship with a Spanish businesswoman. She lives with him on the Vineyard during the summer; he frequently travels to Madrid during the rest of the year.
During the '60s, Fogelson served on two government commissions, one on law enforcement and another on civil disorders. What, he was asked, if he were named to head some similar commission today on cities? ''I think the answer is I wouldn't take the job! Almost all my colleagues in the urban studies department are involved in solving problems, offering solutions, designing stuff. I just don't do things like that.'' His concerns, Fogelson added, were with the past rather than present.
By now, we had reached the Old State House. We walked up to Washington Street and took a left at the Old South Meeting House. Part of the appeal of downtown is the way it blends past and present. The juxtaposition here of the forthright Brutalism of Kallmann & McKinnell's old Boston Five Cent Savings Bank, now a Borders bookstore, with the equally forthright red-brick primness of the Globe Corner Bookstore (the former Old Corner Bookstore) is a particularly striking example.
As we headed up School Street and passed between Old City Hall, on the right, and the Parker House, on the left, Fogelson described how he came to be an urban historian.
He had majored in history at Columbia, mostly studying politics. Coming to Harvard to do graduate work, he had been hired by Oscar Handlin as a teaching assistant in his social history course. ''It was a revelation,'' Fogelson said. ''So I thought it would be very interesting to look at urban history. This must have been, what, 1960. So the question was what: What [aspect of urban history] should I study?''
The what turned out to be that least-urban of cities, Los Angeles. Fogelson made it his dissertation subject, and the result was his first book, ''The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930.'' He later published books on ghetto riots, urban police, and armories.
''I began getting my first job offers,'' Fogelson recalled. ''So I said to Oscar, `Am I an urban historian?' Remember, I'm all of 26, 27 years old. And he said, `Well, if there's a good job out there for an urban historian, you're an urban historian. If there's a good job out there for a social historian, then you're a social historian.'' So the first job was for an urban historian. I said, `Well ...,' and it's worked out fine.''
We turned left on Tremont and went past Tremont Temple and skirted a construction site across from the Old Granary Burying Ground. (In ''Downtown,'' Fogelson notes the Board of Health predicted in 1877 that the bodies would eventually have to be disinterred and the land used for development.)
After crossing the street by the new Suffolk Law School building, Fogelson began describing his current project: ''a very short book, which attempts to reinterpret the history of suburbia in the US in the late 19th and early 20th century.'' Does that mean this lover of cities will have to take up residence in the suburbs for research? The question brought him up short. He pointed out that, in fact, he'd almost lived in suburbia: His father had bought a lot in New Rochelle, N.Y. - when Fogelson was a boy - but never built on it. Noting his narrow escape, he gave a mock sigh. ''I guess I'll never live in suburbia.'' He didn't sound displeased.
We'd reached Park Street Church. The golden dome of the State House shone at the top of the street. We crossed over to the subway kiosks, both of them covered with scaffolding and mesh, just another example of the constant flux that is downtown.
Mark Feeney can be reached by e-mail at mfeeney@globe.com.
This story ran on page F1 of the Boston Globe on 11/24/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
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