Review of The Hub’s Metropolis in Architecture Boston (Boston Society of Architects), Fall 2013
The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth
James C. O’Connell
MIT Press, 2013
Reviewed by David Luberoff
Preparing to move to Boston in 2000, James O’Connell went “scouting for a home to buy” in Milton near the Blue Hills Parkway. As an urban and cultural historian, he recognized that the road and nearby neighborhoods were typical of Boston’s inner-core suburbs and thought it would be interesting to learn more about how they were built. Thus began a more than decade-long exploration that culminates with The Hub’s Metropolis.
O’Connell, a community planner for the National Park Service in Boston, fills three notable gaps with this book. First, rather than focusing on the city’s historic core, O’Connell turns his eye on the entire region. Second, rather than focusing on well-known epochs and structures, he is interested in the full sweep of development, including the region’s ubiquitous and largely undistinguished split-level houses, Cape Cod–style homes, and McMansions. Finally, O’Connell recognizes that there is a gap between guidebooks, which tell us what to see but not why, and history books, which tell us why but often ignore the what. To fill this third gap, he describes nine waves of development, starting with “Traditional Village Centers and Proto-Suburbs,” continuing through such eras as “Metropolitan Parkway Suburbs” and “Postwar Automobile Suburbs,” and ending with the current “Smart Growth Era.”
The book’s “guidebook” elements point to extant buildings and communities that exemplify each era. In Newton, where O’Connell ultimately settled, he not only suggests well-known sites such as the Jackson Homestead and the MBTA Green Line station in Newton Centre but also points to Oak Hill Park, a development of 418 small, cottage-style homes the city built in the late 1940s for veterans of World War II and their families.
Although useful, the book does have its limits and flaws. Because it spans vast amounts of both time and space, the accounts of specific projects cannot convey the wide array of values, goals, beliefs, and forces that drove them. Writing about the Middlesex Fells, for example, O’Connell notes that it was part of a seminal plan prepared by Charles Eliot and Sylvester Baxter, creators of the Metropolitan Park Commission, a notable example of regional governance in an otherwise fragmented region. However, he does not mention the significant class and religious differences behind the park’s creation. Indeed, as historian Michael Rawson has pointed out, the park’s very name was a 19th-century fiction designed to suggest a nonexistent Anglo-Saxon past for an area called The Five-Mile Wood, popular with Irish-Catholic immigrants.
Such gaps become more striking when O’Connell, who has strong views on what he considers desirable policies, writes about contemporary issues. He laments the state’s decision not to construct a second major airport at Fort Devens when that facility closed in the early 1990s, but does not note that funding the new airport probably would have required enormous increases in landing fees at Logan Airport during construction and possibly closing Logan after the new airport opened. Nor does he mention that a successful airport at Devens would have spurred the sprawling development he frequently decries elsewhere in the book.
Despite these drawbacks, The Hub’s Metropolis is a welcome addition to my shelves of “books about Boston” and will accompany me as I travel the region.
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The Hub's Metropolis 