It’s massive, it’s divisive, but no matter what you think of it, it’s undeniably emblematic of a key moment in city history.
And now, Boston City Hall has the historic landmark designation to prove it.
The Boston Landmarks Commission officially designated the building as a local landmark, Mayor Michelle Wu announced Friday with a statement praising the often-maligned building’s role in civic life.
“This milestone serves as an affirmation of our commitment to preserving this space as a vital symbol of our democracy and a center for civic engagement. Our administration is proud to help the building evolve into a space that is accessible to the community while maintaining its historic character,” Wu said.
City Hall, the neighboring John F. Kennedy Federal Building and the massive brick plaza between them, plus the Center Plaza office building across the street, were built on top of Boston’s old bawdy district, Scollay Square. Known by the 1950s for burlesque shows, vaudeville stages, partying college students, working-class entertainment and prostitution, the neighborhood was a prominent target of the postwar Urban Renewal political moment.
Building Intended as Statement for New Age
Under former mayor John F. Collins, whose portrait is emblazoned on giant metal panels near City Hall’s main entrance, the area was scraped clean by bulldozers as one of many parts in a wide-ranging political and architectural project. Part of the aim was to make what was undeniably a central location – next to three subway lines, the Central Artery highway and the Financial District – into a catalyst for keeping jobs downtown at a time when Massachusetts and America were rapidly suburbanizing thanks to racist lending policies, massive government subsidies for highway and single-family home construction in what had once been farmland.
And with those residents flocking to the Route 128 belt went new investment and jobs.
“[W]e are at work downtown trying to restore our economic and employment base and encourage private enterprise to participate in the renewal of downtown,” then-Boston Redevelopment Authority Director Ed Logue testified to a U.S. Senate hearing in 1966. “We must create the jobs downtown. We must expand the tax base downtown, not to mention keep it from eroding.”
But the megaproject was also intended to show both suburban residents, the region’s business leaders and the nation at large that Boston was leaving what was then seen as a shabby, largely corrupt, working-class and backward-looking past behind by physically wiping it away and replacing it with bold architectural statements.
“From the start, the way that Logue and Collins planned and implemented Government Center signaled a new way of doing business in Boston,” historian Lizabeth Cohen wrote in her 2019 biography of Logue, “Saving America’s Cities.”
The firm of famed New York City architect I.M. Pei was brought in to master-plan the project “to ensure that Government Center embodied the latest in urban design and avoided any taint of provinciality,” Cohen wrote. The design for a new city hall building, a replacement for Boston’s stuffy French Second Empire-style civic headquarters on School Street, was intentionally chosen by a juried competition at Collins’ insistence “to remove the selection of an architect from the culture of cronyism that he felt prevailed too often in Boston.”

Boston City Hall. Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman Staff
Ugly or Democratic?
The monumental, avant-garde concrete building and surrounding plaza by unknown young architects Gerhard Kallmann, N. Michael McKinnell and Edward Knowles shocked some, and has divided the city ever since.
Many frequently deride it as a “bunker” or “ugly” – Collins himself reportedly gasped when a model of the design was first unveiled – or even hostile to the public and “anti-urban” as former Boston Globe columnist Paul McMorrow wrote in 2013.
But some – like Wu herself – celebrate its democratic design. While its designers’ use of concrete, then seen as a fairly proletarian building material, is often lost on contemporary Bostonians, City Hall partisans note how its service windows are large and have seating built into the walls next to them. The City Council chambers’ amphitheater-like design is also often cheered for de-emphasizing politicians’ power and raising up voters, both physically and metaphorically. Supposedly, its office spaces are specifically designed so that the mayor’s and city councilors’ offices can’t escape the chants of irate protestors.
Under former mayor Marty Walsh, efforts were made to bring the building into the 21st century, and sand down some of its rougher edges and preserve the building for future generations. Architecture firm Utile led master planning and interior renovations, completed in 2018, and landscape architects at Sasaki began a thorough renovation the building’s surrounding plaza, completed under Wu, to replace much of that monumental-scale brick “wasteland” with a hugely popular playground, groves of trees and a smaller area for protests and festivals.
But going forward, any changes to the building will now need to pass muster with the Boston Landmarks Commission.
“This landmark designation affirms Boston City Hall’s place as a cornerstone of our city’s architectural and civic heritage,” Kathy Kottaridis, director of the city Office of Historic Preservation said in a statement. “This decision ensures that the building will continue to inspire and serve future generations while adapting to meet the needs of a modern, vibrant Boston.”