PANEL 3
A perspective of the northern end of Benefit Street, featuring rehabilitated historic homes (numbers 24 and 30 Benefit appear in the lower right) and a large apartment tower set within a depressed terrace area accessible from both Benefit and North Main Streets. On the opposite side of the street is a 3-story apartment building, set back with a forecourt and parking in the rear.
IAN BALDWIN &
JONATHAN BELL
A lot of folks probably don’t appreciate the architectural brio of planting a slender modern tower at the top of Benefit Street. But think of how it could function urbanistically: You’d get a higher residential density and further diversify the building type mix that today makes Benefit an appealing historic smorgasbord. Most exciting is the idea of the building as an alternative to the retaining walls, parking, and drab 80s townhomes that separate Benefit and North Main. The price would have been two existing properties on Benefit, but a simple stair scaling the hill would be a grand urban moment.
A a sketch showing the reverse view of Panel 3, along with the current streetview, by Ian Baldwin.
COLLETTE CREPPELL
"What is striking still today about William Warner’s urban architectural vision and Margie Olson’s arresting renderings for College Hill is the careful relationship they suggest between the architecture and the context: soaring modernist towers rise from, and modernist housing blocks are embedded in, a clearly depicted historic neighborhood context.
In these renderings, the historical and the visionary are admiring neighbors. Students of architecture and urbanism must admire and, in our turn, now nearly sixty years later, draw upon the inviting lessons of these optimistic and energetic images."
DAVID BRUSSAT
"Panel 3 represents the renewal sensibility of the survey at its most aggressive. And yet it is a beautiful rendering - the art, that is, not what it illustrates. There are old houses in the foreground and in the background, a block-long horizontal slab of flats in the Brutalist style between Jenckes and Halsey, and across Benefit Street a delicate empty Miesian tower. Balanced by a finely etched leafless winter tree of stupendous height, the tower rises over land whose seven Victorian houses and one post-1900 house were to be razed. Since their proposed demolition, they have all been restored. The survey’s criteria placed little value on Victorian houses.
I have often used this illustration to show the width of the gap between the survey’s recommendations and the public’s perception of them. The image probably ran in the Journal once, and on TV several times during a brief, intensive period of local coverage, then was mercifully forgotten. Without diminishing the credit the survey deserves, I would argue that its reputation today reflects how little the public now knows of the survey’s recommendations. They would be shocking to most dues-paying members of preservationist organizations nowadays, including at PPS."