The secret city

Local historian Douglass Shand-Tucci has shown how three-deckers, college dorms, and turn-of-the-century gay intellectuals gave Boston its architectural soul. As a backward-looking city confronts its future, how much of that soul does he think is worth saving?

by Tom Scocca

As an aging urban center like Boston grapples with matters of development and preservation, its cityscape can be broken down into two distinct but related parts: buildings, and people's opinions about buildings. And as far as Douglass Shand-Tucci, historian of Boston architecture, is concerned, in some cases the connection between the two is nil.

Consider Harvard Square's celebrated and embattled Tasty Sandwich Shop. "There's no architectural character to it at all," he declares, as he relives a recent 3 a.m. visit to the Tasty, which has become local preservationists' latest rallying ground. "Except maybe the tilework outside going in, and the smallness of the space, and the notion of this is kind of like some crazy Edward Hopper painting that has come alive in the middle of the night in 1997."

"Except," he goes on, after a moment's reflection, "that in the lunch counter that Hopper paints are newspaper men, or whores, or late-night revelers like me, or maybe a homeless guy or something, sitting there in decent silence, contemplating the world in their coffee cup, and that interests me. Nobody was doing that at the Tasty. They were all either asking me for money or throwing up."

The people who are rallying around the Tasty, Shand-Tucci says, are "the same Brattle Street aristocracy that would never find themselves there in a million years." He recalls asking one of them what was so good about the place. "He said, didn't I think it was `funky'?" That last word hangs drily in the air. "I just said, `I'm not quite sure what your definition of funky is, but I think funky is not something you preserve.' I can't imagine what a preserved Tasty would be like. Do we actually put a couple of derelicts on stipend to have them there?

"The people who want to preserve it are so amazing to me," he says. "I'm much more interested in why they're so fascinated by the Tasty than I am in whether the Tasty should be preserved or not."

Not that Shand-Tucci is regarding the Brattle Street "aristocracy" from an anthropological distance. He is dissecting the elites, in fact, from a comfortable chair in the tranquil, sunlit front parlor of the St. Botolph club on Comm Ave, of which he is a member. But the Boston native seems at ease with any apparent contradictions; indeed, by all signs he thrives on them. For an interview at the club, he meets the dress code by wearing the requisite necktie over a purplish sport shirt, and eschews socks with his loafers -- the very picture of the polite iconoclast, contrary but agreeable.

In Shand-Tucci's line of work, it may help to have things both ways. For the past 25 years, he has been studying the architecture of a city simultaneously bound by tradition and aspiring to innovation. To make sense of it, he has expanded the very field he works in; in his first major book, Built in Boston: City and Suburb 1800-1950, he turned his attention away from famous and sophisticated buildings to champion the unfashionable, the common, and the forgotten. And his later work has helped move architectural history out of the shadow of fine-arts criticism, interweaving it with cultural studies and biography to create a whole new account of the city's past -- particularly, in 1995's Boston Bohemia, of the role Boston's late-19th-century gay community had in shaping the city's history and buildings.

This makes for, among other things, a matchless source of cocktail-party facts. There's the revelation, for instance, that Beacon Hill's well-known rows of townhouses were formed by wedging newer generations of buildings in between original free-standing homes. Or that the crests of the various Harvard houses, displayed at commencement on stalwart heraldic banners, were the fancies of a turn-of-the-century Wildean aesthete who went around calling himself "Pierre La Rose."

Shand-Tucci's gift has been to weave together such facts and stories into an account of how Boston became what it is. Together, they suggest the possibility of somehow reconciling the city to itself, of something coherent emerging from the disparate influences -- a vision that Shand-Tucci already seems to be living. He makes his home at the Second Empire, white-marble Hotel Vendome, built in 1871, but he doesn't mention the past when explaining why he lives there: "It has a beautiful view of the Hancock Tower out the window, which is . . . my favorite building in Boston by far now."

Part 2

Tom Scocca can be reached at tscocca[a]phx.com.