Photo by Steve Adams | Banker & Tradesman Staff
Gazing at the Charles F. Hurley Building and the adjacent Erich Lindemann Mental Health Center in downtown Boston for any extended period of time threatens to leave one with a migraine, if not a mild case of depression.
It’s a sad little irony given the state’s mental health services are headquartered in the Government Center complex, a hulking, dingy, 1960s-era concrete pile that’s looks like it was left over from Communist East Berlin.
The good news is Gov. Charlie Baker is pushing ahead with plans to sell the Hurley Building to a developer, likely leading to the demolition of the eye-sore and its replacement by a more appealing structure.
The bad news? Not only has the Lindemann Center has been spared the wrecking ball, but “preservationists” and oddball architects with a misbegotten love for Brutalist architecture are riding to the rescue of the Hurley Building, unable or unwilling to acknowledge its frankly totalitarian overtones and sheer, grinding, oppressive and unrelenting ugliness.
These opponents of demolition have latched onto the fact that the Hurley was the brainchild of noted, Harvard-trained architect Paul Rudolph, who won accolades among the architectural elite in the 1960s and 1970s helping design a number of concrete monstrosities.
While declaring the Hurley Building “less impressive” than City Hall, that other Brutalist masterpiece around the corner, Architectural Digest, citing many critics, argues “it’s worth saving.”
Where I see a concrete hulk with all the charm of a second-rate parking garage, Architectural Digest sees a masterpiece.
The Hurley Building showcases Rudolph’s “signature material of corduroy concrete” that “makes his makes his buildings look almost like primordial, rough-hewn stone,” the magazine gushes.
The Hurley “was intended to celebrate the power of government to improve people’s lives,” the magazine notes, asking in horror whether the Baker administration will replace this landmark with “a cube of blue glass with a Shake Shack at ground level?”
The horror!
Don’t Underestimate Opponents
Among those planning to fight plans to save the Hurley Building are Kelvin Dickinson, president of the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation.
“This building is bigger than Boston,” he told WBUR.
Preservationists say Boston’s Hurley office building should be spared from demolition. Others aren’t so sure. Photo courtesy of Justin Kerr Sheckler / CC BY 2.0
The Boston Preservation Alliance is also rallying to the cause, the piece by WBUR’s Amelia Mason noted, observing the Hurley appears to have a “fighting chance” of survival.
It’s a small but vocal contingent, and not one to be dismissed lightly.
A similar outcry also helped save City Hall a decade ago when Mayor Thomas M. Menino unveiled a grand plan to sell off that concrete pile and build a modern municipal headquarters on the South Boston waterfront.
It was a cause I championed, myself, in a business column I wrote at the time for the Boston Herald.
Still, fans of Brutalist architecture are half-right in one regard.
When City Hall and the Hurley Building took shape in the 1960s, they were symbols of a muscular, activist city government, alright, but also of one that also had just leveled Scollay Square and part of the West End to clear the way for these massive, concrete structures.
At least to the residents of the West End, the buildings were symbols not of government’s power to improve lives, but to wreck them.
Architecture for a Time Gone By
Decades of neglect have transformed these concrete monsters from symbols of public might to ones of government impotence.
To all but a few architectural critics, the Hurley and Lindemann buildings, not to mention City Hall around the corner, look shoddy, old and rundown, with the use of concrete implying not power or design brilliance, but rather the use of the cheapest possible building materials.
The message these structures send today is that government is a grubby, irrelevant backwater, not worthy of respect, a message driven home by the contrast with all the gleaming steel and glass towers on the city’s skyline that proclaim the might of the corporate sector.
But if the defenders of concrete eyesores like the Hurley and Lindemann buildings truly believe in the supposedly democratic roots of the Brutalist style, then it’s only fair to look to the public for direction.
There is little – if any – love among the public for the Hurley and Lindemann buildings, which invariably look half–deserted year–in and year–out. No one is lining up to take photos by these eyesores or gazing, rapt, at their architectural magnificence.
Scott Van Voorhis
In fact, for years the Lindeman and its dark concrete mass looked like it had been all but abandoned, cordoned off by rusty, chain-link fences, its odd flourishes like a concrete stairway to nowhere on one side giving it the look of an ancient, half-baked construction site.
Tellingly, Martin Scorsese thought the Hurley Building to be the perfect backdrop for the crooked cops in his Whitey Bulger-inspired crime thriller, “The Departed.”
Clearly, Scorsese has an eye for the sinister and ugly, which about says it all.
It’s time to turn the page on Boston’s unfortunate fling with Brutalism and knocking down the Hurley Building would be a great place to start.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
