When Boston developer Norman Leventhal shook the money tree, it had most likely been grown in an orchard of his making. And then, he redistributed a lot of its yield back onto the orchard, often to grow and nourish trees for others to shake.
With his passing on April 5, the city of Boston lost a civic leader whose connection to the city – just as the late Mayor Thomas Menino – was melded by walking around. Leventhal and Menino walked the city in different ways and paths, but with the same mission, which was to make its resources the most fruitful for the most people. Leventhal did good by doing well.
His signature development projects range from the unseen to the seen. There’s Post Office Square, which includes a 1,400 space underground parking garage that frees up vital above-ground space for a public park named after him. A renovated South Station serves hundreds of thousands. But then there are Center Plaza, Rowes Wharf, the Hotel Meridien, Fan Pier and 75 State St.
The relatively modest beginnings of Beacon Construction Co., co-founded after World War II with Leventhal’s late brother Robert, blossomed into 1960s projects, quite a few of them outside Boston. The company would later become Beacon Cos.
But every good endeavor encounters difficult times. Beacon Cos. weathered the tough times of the late 1980s with the creation of a REIT, Beacon Properties Corp., which would later be sold in 1997 for $3.9 billion.
Leventhal’s $10 million gift in 2004 to establish the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library was a deliberate choice, based on his early life experience of the BPL’s openness to all, regardless of means.
Beware, all ye who enter the Map Center site. Here be dragons, and they’re the dragons of curiosity – the same curiosity that drew Leventhal to map collecting in the first place. Click on any map image in the digitized collection and it will likely draw you on to the next one. And the next. The images reveal both the cultural and geographic mindset of its authors, contemporaneous to their time and place, locally, globally and across history.
There’s the 1581 map that represents the world in three different lobes that look like three lungs – Europa, Asia and Africa – with an emblem at their apex representing Jerusalem. Then there’s the 1757 map spanning the Northeast to mid-Atlantic states, which includes “Staten Eyl” and “Insula Longa.” Boston maps from the 1700s include records of landownership that served the equivalent of U.S. Census tracts.
History teaches. Those who look forward to the next trajectory of development can learn from past cultural thinking, which has always informed initiatives going forward, like it or not.
Those able to see the old roads and pathways as the precursors to today’s vital supply networks may benefit in terms of value to their communities. Through the maps one can chronicle the life and death of regions that contributed to a bigger economic picture.
In conveying this map collection to the public, Norman Leventhal became one of the local and global economy’s most faithful reporters.