Boston, Then and Now

I'm not so certain that a book like this should be judged solely on its age. If anything, it now serves the same purpose as the original round of pictures did when it was first published. This is a very different Boston from the modern one, you see -- Boston of 1980-82 was a crime-ridden, economically crunched failure of a city that had suffered the indignity of its historical places being ripped out for poorly-thought-out highway projects. A chronically depressed waterfront had been converted first to parking lots, then to high-rise apartment and office space; an architecturally conservative but rich city had disappeared under haphazardly built skyscrapers and prematurely decaying public works. And yet it still provides a view of places that in some ways haven't changed at all over the years, like Park Street, or places like Boylston St. near the Common that have changed profoundly yet are still very recognizable. It's not as good a book as its successor, Cityscapes of Boston, as it has a tendency to avoid some things that were too weird (the Borders bookstore on School and Washington where I used to work -- used to be the Five Cent Savings Bank) or too blighted, and shots of some notorious Boston events like the Great Molasses Flood are missing, but it's still a very interesting book. I do hope Vanderwarker and Campbell have a third book in the works to cover Boston during and after the Big Dig, but get this one and Cityscapes together anyway before your next walk around Boston.