Alter egos

The restoration of the Boston Public Library reveals the rewards of reinterpreting a master's plans -- and the penalties imposed by competing interests

Skyline by Douglass Shand-Tucci

Two men in a huddle, rather stiffly posed, inspecting a large roll of plans: "Architectural historian Douglass Shand-Tucci and Daniel Coolidge of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, Architects," the caption under the picture reads, "directing the restoration of the Research Library's art and architecture."

Yeah, sure. It was more like hoping against hope we'd be able to outsmart the politicians one more time -- library trustee Bill Bulger always excepted -- in what often seemed less a restoration of the Boston Public Library than an ongoing battle with the philistines. And I don't just mean politicians, either. Donors, too, can pose problems: Dan and I used to joke about the Boston Globe Foundation Reading Room and the Fleet Bank Staircase.

It was a battle that was lost in the end, as we always knew it would be; though, of course, the lavish and colorful 1992 library publication in which the picture of us appeared was in no danger of disclosing such truths. A much bigger truth it did emphasize, however, was how urgently the library -- Boston's greatest public building, designed in 1888 by the firm of McKim, Mead, and White -- required restoration. It was an undertaking that board of trustees president Kevin Moloney, when he launched the project in 1984, promised would be "a triumph of Boston's architectural history."

Thanks to Dan, it was that and more -- and, for me, a formative life experience.

Few people understand how creative restoration can be. It is not creative in the way that having an idea and then developing it into intellectual and literary form on the proverbial pad of yellow paper is creative; nor in the way an architect (who expresses ideas visually, not verbally) is creative in starting to cut and bend and shape some material into a model, or in filling a sketchbook with forms. That is primary creation -- de novo, in the old phrase (to think anew or afresh) -- the way a composer works.

The creativity of restoration is precisely not to think up something out of nothing, but, rather, to think through the mind of someone else -- usually a long-dead master. And it is the limitations themselves that spark the creative impulse of the restorer, who is, so to speak, more Yo-Yo Ma than Mahler.

Leonard Bernstein, in describing how he approached conducting other composers' work, caught the essence of the matter:

Perhaps the fact of being myself a composer . . . gives me the advantageous opportunity to identify more closely with the Mozarts, Beethovens, Mahlers and Stravinskys of this world, so that I can at certain points (usually of intense solitary study) feel that I have become whoever is my alter ego that day or week. At least I can occasionally reach one or the other on our private 'Hot Line,' and with luck be given the solution to a problematic passage.

My own rendezvous with Charles McKim, perhaps the foremost of America's classical architects, began when I advised the library's designer selection committee on the choice of Dan Coolidge as the architect who would be McKim's best alter ego. (The adviser, by the way, is often the same person who judges the completed project years later in an article like this. Nothing wrong with that. Rule number one of this column, however, will be full disclosure.)

Dan and I began our work with a weekend in New York, where we carefully studied the ongoing restorations of several buildings, including New York's main library. And to this junket, I am prepared to insist, Boston owes not a little of the splendor of its restored library -- for one of the things we saw at once was that much money (especially "new money") and little taste a disaster make, no matter how beautiful the historic interior.

A case in point was giving old marble a mirror finish, as Dan and I were quick to observe had been done (with Reader's Digest money) at the main building of the New York Public Library. Boston's marble was, indeed, tired-looking 100 years later. But we resolved to rejuvenate it, not glitz it up. Notice the beautifully honed and mellow sheen of the grand staircase. In the lobby, for example, though we had to renew all the elaborate brass inlay, we kept as much as possible of the timeworn stone. Nor was there any glassy sea!

On the other hand, Dan could be bold. His particular pride and joy was the design he and his team (led by Dan's able assistant, William Barry) evolved for the planned tearoom: the circle of free-standing columns topped by light bowls was a brilliant idea, picking up on McKim's classicism, but with contemporary flair.

Some decisions were relatively easy: entrusting the cleaning of the staircase murals to restorers from Harvard's Fogg Art Museum. Some were tough: Dan argued strongly for paving the courtyard, as would be proper in an Italian Renaissance building; I disagreed -- the library is also a 19th-century New England building, and its grassy court is characteristic.

We had our failures. The new elevator tries to suggest the elegance of the old (and now illegal) birdcage. It fails conspicuously. But failures sometimes generated our greatest successes. For example: we "wasted" many thousands of dollars, according to some, on a working mock-up lighting fixture for the great staircase hall so we could see what it looked like -- only to conclude it didn't look like very much at all. But Dan's final design for the hall's three splendid fixtures was a triumph.

For my part, I am proudest of having solved the problem of how to avoid putting in fire doors to replace the beautiful old ironwork gates that lead into Bates Hall from the gallery at the top of the grand staircase. At my suggestion, Dan skeptically set his team to work to see if it was possible to design new iron frames that could carry the historic ironwork and heavy protective glass. It was.

And so it went, for 10 years or more. Every Wednesday Dan and I would lunch, at Maison Robert and later at the Somerset Club, planning and plotting. We were also careful to sit opposite each other (so we could catch each other's eye) at the monthly job meetings with Moloney and library director Arthur Curley, both of whom were dedicated to the project but needed, Dan and I thought more than once, to be somewhat led in aesthetic matters. And then, afterward, because in some respects the architects also needed to be led, Moloney and Curley and I would continue the meeting without Dan in the Copley Plaza bar. And while there certainly were shifting alliances, no one much minded among four people who grew to greatly like and trust each other.

Alas, the greatest triumph was denied us after Dan's death in 1992; the board of trustees just rolled over when the politicians balked at Dan's plan for Bates Hall. The problem that plan sought to address was that original designs called for richly colored murals in the halls' arches and in the apses, murals that were never carried out as the architect wished.

None of us was so timid as to want to just leave the blanks of the arches vacant, thus perpetuating a state McKim (and anyone else with any kind of eye at all) would have deplored. But contemplating a choice between new murals either realistic or abstract, none of us was very brave either.

I favored washes of subtle, changing color from hidden electrical fixtures, but rather nervously. The idea was to create "light murals" of unobtrusive colors; changing slowly enough so you'd never notice the change if you were looking constantly at the mural, but colorful enough that if you were reading a book, every time you looked up, the coloration of the "mural" would appear to be different.

But it was Dan who got it: he came up with the idea of filling the arches with mirrors divided up by bronze muntins that would echo those of McKim's windows in the arches overlooking Copley Square on the other side of the hall. The idea, of course, was to bring a more lively quality into what is, for all its majesty, a fairly funereal room with all those staring arched blanks, and to do so by appropriating a design of McKim's own (the window muntins) that would mirror the master's work as much as, of course, in a different way, would the mirrors themselves.

Full disclosure again: by the time this idea was abandoned, the same library trustees had bowed to far greater political pressure and surrendered control of the direction of the whole restoration to a city department, Public Facilities -- a proceeding I thought appalling. Accordingly, I too was dumped, though I suspect (of which more soon) that was not the only reason.

Still, Dan's idea -- a splendid example of what can happen when one establishes the kind of "hot line" he and I had to a past master -- survives too well in the mind's eye to pronounce it dead. Better stewards will one day carry it out, I'm sure.

Despite such disappointments, I realize that the tale as I've told it may seem surprisingly triumphant in view of my bitter opening remarks. But often silence is a condition of success in life. Dan and I never tried to thwart each other, as should always be the case between the architect (whose call, finally, it always is in any decision) and the architectural historian (who has no power, but needs none, having what is more important: influence). But others we frequently thwarted. And it was often the case, as it so often is in life, that the price for getting a thing done is not to take credit for it, even years later.

Generally, however, it is true to say that our problems were not just the work of politicians, ever anxious to assert their control over the no-longer-independent Boston Public Library. Other problems arose from how that control is accomplished: through a board rendered only nominally self-governing (in fact no longer autonomous at all) by the practice of packing it with lame-duck trustees. These, of course, serve entirely at the pleasure of the mayor, be his name White, Flynn, or Menino.

Librarians themselves, of course, come in all sizes, so to speak -- true of any profession. And some at the BPL have a view of the library so limited they all but resent the wall space the murals occupy, coveting it for more metal book stacks. The vehemence of their sort's opposition to our plan for a tearoom, where one might sit and read a book over a cappuccino when the New England winter closes the courtyard, can hardly be imagined.

If Bates Hall was Dan's Waterloo at the library, mine, I think, was my proposal to add to the names of famous Bostonians emblazoned in the entrance-hall vaults the names of a number of 20th-century figures (in the places McKim left for such names).

No one quarreled with John F. Kennedy, of course, or Charles Eliot or Louis Brandeis. Malcolm X, however, caused a furor I did not survive.

But that's another column.

Meanwhile, go look at our work at the library someday. Judge for yourself how creative restoration can be.

Historian and critic Douglass Shand-Tucci is the author of several books on American art and architecture and New England studies. His column appears biweekly in the Phoenix.