PANEL 9
A perspective of Benefit and Pratt Streets, showing a continuous strip of terraced rowhouses and apartment, with their own private court and garden behind historic fabric on Benefit. A new alley is inserted between Benefit and Pratt, providing access to off-site parking. The uphill side of Pratt shows one and two-family unites in scale with the historic fabric. Hidden street has been cut through to provide access to Pratt and to extend backyards to Onley Street.
MARISA ANGELL BROWN
"At first glance, one doesn’t immediately apprehend the difference between the proposed strip of terraced row houses and apartment buildings and the historic homes running along Benefit Street at right and hovering over Pratt Street at left. This was intentional; they share similar massing and roof lines, and though the proposed new housing is more densely planted – creating interior courtyards and voids – it tries to follow the rhythm established by the older homes. Yes, weep tears of relief that this proposal did not come to fruition, but also remember that in many cities, what would likely have been proposed in 1959 would have been the whole-cloth razing of this entire neighborhood."
DAVID BRUSSAT
"Panel 9 represents another instance where street names would be helpful. The long building extending just off the image, set back from Benefit, suggests that the street running uphill just south of the blocks rendered in perspective is Jenckes. So the block of infill seems to be where modernist private houses on Pratt were in fact eventually built. And those houses are just as alien to their neighborhood context as most of the infill proposed in the survey. This continued disrespect for the historic patterns of design and urbanism is not what most people today think the survey was all about. It was really all about urban renewal.
You cannot tell for sure but it seems as if existing houses survived within this block of infill housing northwest of Prospect Terrace. Interestingly, on page 74 of the survey, in reference to the impact on colonial neighborhoods of revivalist and Eclectic period styles, a passage reads: “When these radically different buildings were inserted into earlier neighborhoods, the relationships of scale were often disturbed.” Soon after, it continues: “The break of contemporary buildings with the past makes the problem of relationship to earlier architecture a delicate one.” But evidently not so delicate that it can be systematically ignored by the survey."
COLLETTE CREPPELL
"Much has been written about the International Style as it swept Europe and then was brought to the United States in the post-war and mid-century period. More often than not, mid-century modernist architectural renderings appear to rise out of a tabula rasa.
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. The kites in Panel 10 symbolize this soaring optimism."
RAYMOND TWO HAWKS WATSON
"I know it [Urban Renewal] caused a lot of division and a lot of poverty and to see that this is what they planned to do to the entire neighborhood, my stomach says thank you to whoever told them not to do that at the time. And, as we were also discussing these things [triple deckers] that were seen as so useless and easily removable, are now seen as the crème de la crème...It tells me that at any point in our history...we have to be mindful of how our actions are going to impact the future and keep in mind that perhaps we’re wrong.
I suppose if I were an architect, this would be a very nice looking place - trying to be cutting edge and be at the lead of something. I suppose you could argue that there’s a very good mix of modern and traditional landscape, and that we’re making sure to preserve the buildings that are the most valuable, I could see that— but the planner in me just says, ‘what about the people?’”