Government Center, Boston

Formerly the site of Scollay Square, it is now the location of Boston City Hall, courthouses, state and federal office buildings, and a major MBTA subway station, also called Government Center.

Early on, the area was a busy center of commerce, including the city's first daguerreotypist (photographer), Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808–1901), and Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, the first dentist to use ether as an anaesthetic.

Among the most famous (and infamous) of Scollay Square landmarks was the Old Howard Theatre, a grand theater which began life as the headquarters of a Millerite Adventist Christian sect which believed the world would end in October 1844.

The venue also showcased boxing matches with such old-time greats as local Rocky Marciano and John L. Sullivan, and continued to feature slapstick vaudeville acts, from likes of The Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello.

In 1953, vice squad agents sneaked a home movie camera into the Old Howard, and caught Mary Goodneighbor on film doing her striptease for the audience.

As early as the 1950s, city officials had been mulling plans to completely tear down and redevelop the Scollay Square area, in order to remove lower-income residents and troubled businesses from the aging and seedy district.

Attempts to reopen the sullied Old Howard by its old performers had been one of the last efforts against redevelopment; but with the theater gutted by fire, a city wrecking ball began the project of demolishing over 1000 buildings in the area; 20,000 residents were displaced.

Furthermore, it is resented for having replaced the Victorian architecture of Boston's Scollay Square,[5] a lively commercial district that lapsed into squalor in the twentieth century.

As Bill Wasik wrote in 2006, "It is as if the space were calibrated to render futile any gathering, large or small, attempted anywhere on its arid expanse.

All the nearby buildings seem to be facing away, making the plaza's 11 acres (45,000 m2) of concrete and brick feel like the world's largest back alley.

This irregularly shaped, sloping lot was the last parcel to be developed of the Government Center urban renewal plan; in the interim the space was used as surface parking.

In a 2014 article, architectural historian Timothy M. Rohan praised the building for having "a wondrous interior courtyard like something from baroque Rome, a space that even in its incomplete and neglected state contrasts sharply with nearby City Hall and its alienating plaza.

[18] This 720,000 square foot (67,000 m2) office and retail structure, built by developer Norman B. Leventhal, is across Cambridge Street from City Hall Plaza.

The golden steaming kettle mounted on the corner of the Sears' Block, 63-65 Court Street, pre-dates the Government Center redevelopment.

"[27] The map shows the Government Center portion of the district extending as far west as the Massachusetts State House and including all of the major structures listed in this article.

An undated Boston Redevelopment Authority map entitled "Government Center Urban Renewal Area Illustrative Site Plan"[31] showed similar boundaries.