Jane Holtz Kay’s seminal work, “Lost Boston,” is a thick, haunting catalogue of buildings and landscapes torn down or destroyed in Boston over the past 380 years. To study its carefully selected black-and-white photographs, poignant essays, and clever captions is to experience one of the greatest love letters to a city ever written.
Kay, who died this week at 74, idolized the city of her childhood in the 1940s and ’50s — a “place,” as she described it, “of smudged but endearing glamour,” a “maze of masonry and greenery.” And as much as she loathed urban planners whose idea of progress took the form of parking lots and office towers, she understood that part of living in an urban environment was embracing change. Neighborhood-focused development in Boston, she argued, proved that change could be “a creative act,” that there could be a “joy in city making.”
Comments
What building is that in the photograph?
I think it's the original Museum of Fine Arts, built in 1876, on what is now the site of the Fairmont Copley Plaza.
Thank you for this remembrance. I wish you had identified the building in your article which was the point of Ms. Holtz Kay's scholarship. The Victorian Gothic building in the photo was the original Museum of Fine Arts at Copley Square designed by John Hubbard Sturgis and Charles Brigham which was torn down in 1878. I've never forgotten this book which should be treasured by all local historians.