Copley Square Information & Copley Square Links at HealthHaven.com

Northwest corner of Copley Square showing the Boston Public Library at left and Old South Church to the right.

Copley Square, named for the American portraitist John Singleton Copley (1738 – 1815), is a public square located in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. A bronze statue of Copley, by sculptor Lewis Cohen, is located on the northern side of the square. The name Copley Square is frequently applied to the larger area extending approximately two blocks east and west along Boylston Street, Huntington Avenue, and St. James Avenue. The square is adjacent to the finish line of the Boston Marathon, which is commemorated by a monument in the park.

[edit] Boundaries and history

Detail of 1888 map of Boston, showing Art Square and vicinity

The original building of the Museum of Fine Arts was located in Copley Square along St. James Avenue.

Historian Douglas Shand-Tucci argues that Victorian Copley Square was developed by Boston's Brahmin caste in the 1865-1915 period as a great New World agora of arts and sciences, faith and learning.^[1] Its cornerstone was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), founded in the square (including the first American school of architecture), within a block of which would be built the crown jewel of modern Harvard, its medical school; Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Natural History (today the Museum of Science), Trinity Church, the New Old South Church, the Boston Public Library, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Massachusetts Normal Art School (today's Massachusetts College of Art), the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In later years there first flourished there Boston University, Emerson College and Northeastern University. The square was the cradle of the great galaxy of educational institutions which made Boston the American intellectual capital in the 20th century. Shand-Tucci asserts the square presided over what he calls "the dawn of the modern American experience."

The square is bounded by Boylston Street on the north, Clarendon Street on the east, St. James Street on the south, and Dartmouth Street on the west. The square was created following the 1858 filling of most of the Back Bay Fens. Originally Huntington Avenue diagonally bisected the square, running from the southwest corner to the northeast corner at Clarendon Street. The Museum of Fine Arts was originally located on the southern side of the square, at the site of the present Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel. The founding buildings of MIT were located in the northeast corner of the square until the institution moved to a new campus in Cambridge in 1916.

In 1966 Huntington Avenue was terminated at the corner of Dartmouth Street and St. James Avenue, and the shape of the present square emerged. The 1966 plan lowered the grade of the square almost 12 feet (3.7 m) below sidewalk level and was mostly paved.

In 1983, to address public dissatisfaction with the lack of greenery and sightlines, the Copley Square Centennial Committee was formed. A series of public meetings and seminars established design criteria for a new park. A national design competition was held in 1989 and the current design was selected. In 1991 the new Copley Square Park was dedicated. In 1992 the Copley Square Centennial Committee was reconstituted as the Friends of Copley Square, a private, non-profit citizens' organization that raises funds to care for the square's plantings, fountain, monuments, and statuary.

The Boston Public Library defines the western side of the square. Walking in front of the library is the Fairmont Copley Plaza's Chef Concierge Jim Carey with the hotel's canine ambassador Catie Copley.

The Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel replaced the Museum of Fine Arts in 1912.

[edit] Architecture of Copley Square

Copley Square may be unique in boasting of three masterpieces of world stature in the medieval, classical and modern traditions. Indeed, Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library constitute perhaps the most famous confrontation in the history of American architecture. The various landmarks are listed below in the order in which they were constructed:

Old South Church, completed in 1873, was designed by Charles Amos Cummings and Willard T. Sears and built in the Venetian Gothic Revival style. The style follows the precepts of the British cultural theorist and architectural critic John Ruskin (1819 – 1900) as outlined in his treatise The Stones of Venice.National Historic Landmark
Museum of Fine Arts, completed in 1876, was designed by John Hubbard Sturgis and Charles Brigham and built in the Gothic Revival style. The building was located on the southern side of the square and was torn down in 1910, after moving to the Fenway neighborhood, to make way for the Copley Plaza hotel. The Copley Square museum was the first purpose-built public art museum in the world.
Trinity Church, completed in 1877, was designed by H. H. Richardson and built in the Romanesque Revival style. It is located on the eastern side of the square. Considered Richardson's tour de force, the 1893 Baedeker's United States pronounced it "deservedly regarded as one of the finest buildings in America." National Historic Landmark
Boston Public Library, completed in 1895, was designed by Charles Follen McKim in a revival of Italian Renaissance style. It is located on the Western side of the square. In the history of 19th century American architecture it is rivaled in importance only by the Capitol in Washington, and incorporates important art by John Singer Sargent, Edwin Austin Abbey, Puvis de Chavanne, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French. National Historic Landmark
Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, completed in 1912, was designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh in the Beaux-Arts style.
John Hancock Tower, completed in 1976, was designed by I. M. Pei is a minimalist example of late Modernism clad in reflective deep blue glass. The sixty-story tower has an elongated parallelogram footprint and presents its narrowest profile to the square.
Bostix Kiosk, completed in 1992, was designed by Graham Gund. A postmodernist addition to the square, the kiosk is an exuberant round structure built of mahogany, glass and copper, and inspired by Parisian park pavilions. The kiosk is located in the northwest corner of the square at the intersection of Dartmouth and Boylston streets.

[edit] Farmers' market

From late April until mid-November a farmers' market is open in Copley Square every Tuesday and Friday from 11 o'clock AM until 6:30 p.m. Farmers sell locally grown and produced vegetables, fruits, herbs, honey, baked goods, goat cheese, organic certified meats, annual and perennial garden plants, and cut flowers. The farmers' market is organized by the city of Boston, and is located along the south, and west edges of the square.

[edit] Transportation

Copley is a stop on the MBTA Green Line subway; the Orange Line and commuter rail trains stop at nearby Back Bay Station. The southern side of the square facing the Copley Square Hotel is an MBTA bus stop for the 9, 10, 39, 55, 503, and 502.

[edit] References

^ Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Gods of Copley Square, lecture series, 2009, sponsored by Back Bay Historical/Boston-centric Global Studies and the New England Historical Genealogical Society

Aldrich, Megan. Gothic Revival. Phaidon Press Ltd: 1994. ISBN 0-7148-2886-6.
Bunting, Bainbridge. Houses of Boston's Back Bay: An Architectural History, 1840-1917. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: 1967. ISBN 0-674-40901-9.
Forbes, Esther, and Arthur Griffin. The Boston Book. Houghton Mifflin Company: 1947.
Holtz Kay, Jane. Lost Boston. Houghton Mifflin: 1999. ISBN 0-3959-6610-8.
Shand-Tucci, Douglass. "The Gods of Copley Square: Dawn of the Modern American Experience, 1865-1915", www.backbayhistorical.org/Blog, 2009.
Shand-Tucci, Douglass. "Built in Boston, City and Suburb, 18800-2000". Little, Brown. (Third edition) 1999.
Shand-Tucci, Douglass. "Renaissance Rome and Emersonian Boston: Michelangelo and Sargent, between Triumph and Doubt", Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2002, 995-1008.