The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 December 2013
by Elihu Rubin
I was born in the year the Prudential Center in Boston was finally dedicated. It opened after more than a decade of planning, political maneuvering and on-again-off-again construction. The center occupied a superblock in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, which until that time, had been a decaying thirty-acre rail yard built on landfill and prone to seepage and flooding from the Charles River. The Pru, as it came to be called, became a modern landmark, a vertical suburban office and retail development unlike anything before seen inside the city limits.
As a kid, I saw the Prudential tower from rundown South End brownstones. The tower was a massive rectilinear presence with a flickering white strobe illuminating a small forest of antennas on its roof. The quiet letters of the corporate name glowed up there, out of reach and beyond my own understanding. When my family returned from drives west of the city, coming back in a VW bug on the Mass Pike, we drove through Allston to the tunnel that passed beneath the Pru. We popped out the other side, the building seeming to float over the highway. We didn't live near enough to shop at the small mall at its foot. As I grew older, and became aware of the changing landscape of the city, I was more curious about the troubled construction of the John Hancock tower on Copley Square, the Plywood Palace given to dropping its windows on the narrow streets below.
As a student at Boston University, I had a view of the Pru from my dorm window. It served as a landmark in navigating the puzzle of streets, many of which were laid out in Colonial times. The grid of the Back Bay was deceptive when it spilled into the disarray of Brighton and Allston, and all we had left was the Prudential building, illuminated at night, to lead us back to campus. In an intoxicated haze one autumn night, I watched as the Christmas tree at the foot of the tower was lit with great fanfare and holiday tunes.
Living in Boston in the late eighties, I learned more about the building and the place that it tried to make there in the Back Bay and I developed a curious nostalgia for the world-view that fed its design, its assumptions about city life and how to repair the problems of postwar urban decay and economic recession. The windswept plazas were depopulated. The echoing hallways of the shopping center, with so many of its storefronts empty, the modernist voids of white plane and glass walls worn and abandoned, still reflected the boosterish optimism of their time. The granite plaque in the tower lobby read: The Future is for Those Who Prepare for it. The Prudential was one of several big urban redevelopment projects in Boston I remember from my youth. The Government Center, the old West End, the Esplanade and the waterfront were characterized by brutalist architecture, chilly expanses of concrete and brick, the kind of development that would one day bring the whole idea of urban renewal into well-deserved disrepute. But there was a sci-fi quality to these developments, a modernist vision of the future free of the chintzy dark coziness of architecture of the past. Followed in the coming decades by post-modern pastiche, these older redevelopments now looked worn and tired, and yet maintained a kind of self-contained architectural integrity reflected in the present-day resurgence of midcentury design. A few Brutalist civic buildings are finally being recognized and preserved. Paul Rudolph's striking Government Services Center in Boston was never completed and now sports a much later tacked-on building of little architectural significance, but designed by the same team that designed City Hall.
This isn't true so much of the Pru, though, as it was never considered by critics to be particularly innovative or aesthetically appealing. As a result, the redevelopment of the Pru is characterized by a mish-mash of infill suburban mall construction with residential and business towers, erasing any design unity the site once had. The Prudential tower, once a dubious landmark, is slowly being enshrouded by lesser buildings and isn't even owned by the Prudential any longer. Meanwhile, the decaying brownstones of the seventies are premium townhouses for well-heeled Bostonians, and the focus of economic activity has subtly shifted back downtown after the undergrounding of the Central Artery below a long linear park through the city.
Elihu Rubin has very ably captured the Prudential, its moment in the development of postwar Boston, and its trailblazing invention of civic constructs that promote corporate development. In the 1940s, the Prudential, one of the largest companies in the world, pursued a plan of decentralization by developing regional home offices in cities around the country. Rubin describes the development of buildings in Houston, Los Angeles, Jacksonville and Chicago that preceded the building in Boston. The Prudential had a forward-thinking dedication to construction within city limits, bucking the trend toward suburban corporate headquarters then (and still) in vogue. The men who ran the company saw a role for themselves in promoting a kind of civic economic and infrastructural health that attended their role insuring the many individuals who held their policies. It was good corporate image making, highly visible structures projecting a benevolent quasi-civic presence in the urban landscape.
Boston, at the time, had severe tax and regulatory structures that had prevented any significant corporate development for many decades. The system, such as it was, was corrupted and ossified. The Prudential quietly courted city and state officials to loosen laws so that a large parcel of soon to be abandoned land could be developed. At the same time, they demanded tax breaks and asserted a claim that the development should fall under urban redevelopment regulations by using tenuous arguments that it benefited the people of the city and that the land could not be developed by any entity not sufficiently large and incentivized. In other words, nobody but the big benevolent Prudential would have them.
Intoxicated by visions of clean modern development, jobs and eventual tax revenue, the city and state rewrote laws specifically designed to benefit the Prudential. A complex agreement was made with the equally assertive Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, and construction began at the end of the 1950s.
In the end, the new laws and agreements between Boston, Mass Pike, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Prudential served as models for redevelopment plans and the use of eminent domain in many cities ever since. The corporate-civic partnership resulted in some notable redevelopments with widely varying success. Anyone reading Rubin's excellent and dense book is likely to have a personal example that fits the model.
A common characteristic of these proposals is a sort of bait and switch by developers and their boosters. A publicly-oriented element designed to make the proposal more popular is never built. An historic element promised to be preserved is finally declared too far gone to save and is demolished. A key desire of the developer is portrayed as crucial to the success of the project, only to be reimagined once construction is under way. In the case of the Prudential, the developers declared that the Victorian-era brick and brownstone Mechanics Hall on Huntington Avenue obstructed a majestic view of the tower from the south. The Pru purchased and demolished the historic hall, only to subsequently build a dark office tower arguably more of an obstruction than the low-slung Mechanics Hall ever had been. But, at the time, and in the heyday of urban renewal, such dark old brick buildings were considered depressing and unsanitary.
Every big corporation from the East India Company to Exxon-Mobil has portrayed itself a vital part of the global economy, enriching itself while presenting its developments as marks of human progress and community goodwill. This posture provides massive corporations with a quasi-governmental identity. They wield power beyond democratic oversight. The big job-creators are too big to fail. Our communities concede benefits to these rich businesses in return for jobs and tax revenue. Increasingly, the trade-off has been revealed to be a pretty raw deal. Today, taxpayers subsidize low wages and cities give generous breaks in land and taxes to companies -- and, more visibly, large sports franchises -- if only they would choose to build there. In the end, the giveaways provide marginal or break-even results. And, when the corporations depart for greener pastures, communities are saddled with unusable real estate that must, once again, be redeveloped at the cost of tax breaks and incentives (witness the modern spectacle of imploding old sports stadiums). Great developers cite the free market and corporate freedom of movement while simultaneously demanding freedom from taxes and other responsibilities to the communities which they supposedly serve proudly. The Prudential is a prominent example of the early development of this scenario which has been repeated across American cities in the last half century and more.
Elihu Rubin's book is an engrossing object-lesson for this kind of development strategy while also being a nearly comprehensive history of this one development. The writer evokes, also, another kind of nostalgia for the Boston that struggled through the middle of the twentieth century, recovering in the postwar years, seeking investment and eventually becoming one of the more successful rising urban centers in the country. This reader, anyway, was put in the mind of the old iron elevated mass transit trains, the sterile newness of brutalist development, and the gritty old Boston of decades past.
(For this book, Rubin was awarded the 2013 Lewis Mumford Prize for best book on American city and regional planning history.)