There re two big issues that Boston has that other cities (like NYC) doesn't have.
First, it's really small. Most everything you hear about in boston is downtown/backbay/beaconhill, and you can walk end to end in less than an hour. It makes it a nice walkable city - but you very quickly run out of room to put things. In this whole central boston area there is about 10 square feet that isn't historic 🙂 So when historic buildings & preservation are discussed, it's more about Boston's smallness, and the fact that the little 'historic' stuff we have is all we have. Your historic districts are only going to get smaller.
Second, is we had urban renewal. the city saw hundreds of historic buildings torn down in the name of progress, including one entire neighborhood. So we tend to be more sensitive about such things now. Included in this was 70's style of construction, which clashed dramatically with our historic nature, but it was 'progress' and 'new' and 'modern architecture'. Today pretty much every one of those buildings is considered an eyesore. So when the next guy comes in and says he has new and modern and cool in his back pocket, we start heating the tar and plucking the chickens. 🙂
NYC has it easy - there's room for everything somewhere, you have transit going everywhere, and you can walk most places. Boston doesn't have much space downtown to build, limited transit, and huge barriers like highways and industrial areas between neighborhoods that prevent natural expansion of 'downtown like' districts. So yes, we tend to be more cautious and critical when a lot of stuff is proposed. (And yes, just because we question everything doesn't make our decisions are correct. That's something only time will tell)
I don’t want to respond to everything you’ve alluded to and I appreciate many of your points. And in one sense once we start getting into the particulars things become, to some extent, dizzyingly complicated and difficult to compare.
I stand by the general view that I was expressing before, which was really a question. Why can it be assumed correct that the buildings of a neighborhood must have a high level of homogeneity with respect to their appearance? And why it is the role of the government to step in and enforce this homogeneity on behalf of some population or some person, majority or not?
I don’t agree that Boston has to deal with smallness, but New York City doesn’t. As you know, Manhattan is an island, which means it’s limited in the theoretical upper limit of its development, at least two dimensionally (roughly). It’s not clear to me that this is the single or even the primary factor with respect to building and neighborhood. Nor is it clear why it would, even in the most confined cases, necessitate strict homogeneity in terms of building appearance.
Your second paragraph. I don’t see that history necessarily has to do with it. If Apple, for example, is going to build something there they’re going to build something. Many of the demands of people are not that they build nothing at all, it’s that they do not build something that has an appearance that they, for whatever reason, dislike or find too radical or too different, etc.
Your third paragraph. New York had profound urban renewal as well. But without getting into New York’s history. I know that much of the old Boston was destroyed and replaced to whatever extent. And I know about Government Center. But I think that because there were some bad developments before doesn’t mean that they’re bad forever. And some bad developments don’t mean they’re all bad. Also, those developments should only rightly be compared to what it would be like if no such development never took place. Which is to say one should consider the pros and cons that the development brought as well as the pros and cons of what it would be like had those developments not occurred.
I also feel that starting in the 1960’s many people have adopted this reflexive stigma against making things modern and against newness, against development. That anti-development attitude is now so commonplace and so deep in the minds of people who live in cities that it’s easy to get away with its application in all cases. But there may be instances where it’s right to say that development or newness in look is bad, but there may be others where it’s completely wrong.
It seems hypocritical, in the least, to say that one of the foundations of these philosophies is a love of diversity and a desire to avert changes that will bring about banality and homogeneity, but then to demand a lack of progress and development that ensures that, to the extent possible, the level of diversity is never tampered with, that the buildings conform to a particular appearance of decades past.
Stores.... they are amazing!
