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When you think of art deco, the iconic architectural style that favors intricate geometry, bold colors, and stylized depictions of humans mastering modernity, you probably don’t think of Boston. The Chrysler and Empire State buildings in New York, seaside hotels in Miami Beach, and even the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles seem to have cornered the market in the popular imagination.
The centennial of art deco — it burst onto the scene at a 1925 Paris exhibition — got me wondering why that is. So I did what any recently arrived Bostonian should: I took a tour. And as I learned, there’s plenty of art deco in the city to enjoy, provided you know where to look.
Boston By Foot started giving tours about the city’s architecture in 1976. I met Tom Coppeto and Terri Evans, two longtime volunteer guides, in the shadow of one of downtown’s most recognizable art deco landmarks: the John W. McCormack building in Post Office Square.
As Coppeto and Evans explained, the McCormack building (pictured above) has several hallmarks of the style. Its vertically arranged stone, metal, and glass draw the eye upward, making it look taller. Symbolic carvings of stylized eagles and the twin-snaked staff of the Greek god Hermes communicate its original purpose as a federal post office. Like castle battlements, its three towers anthem the skyline at different heights.
The McCormack building also suggests one reason Boston art deco may be underrated. Construction began in 1931, less than a decade after growing demand for downtown office space forced the city to change zoning rules that had capped building heights at 125 feet.
“New York had skyscrapers galore,” said Evans, and was bigger and richer. “Boston didn’t.”
‘Architecture’s always speaking’
But in a timely coincidence, Boston’s zoning changes launched a building scramble just as deco became ascendant. Its style celebrated humanity’s technical prowess and mastery of the natural world. As Coppeto and Evans led me around, we saw buildings that featured organic-looking doorway arches, balustrades designed to mimic swoopy vines, and wave-like chevron patterns.
Art deco also tells a story. Years ago, when Amy Finstein worked at a downtown architecture firm, she’d walk over on her lunch break to admire the State Street Trust Building, constructed in 1929. A series of second-story bronze relief panels on the facade depict a comic strip of technological progress: humans harnessing horses, tilling fields, building airplanes, even designing the building itself.
“Iconography plays a much bigger role in art deco,” said Finstein, who immediately teaches American architecture and urbanism at the College of the Holy Cross. “Architecture’s always speaking, but it’s not always speaking in that narrative way.”
It sometimes speaks with a regional accent. The earthy brick exterior of the Batterymarch Building, built downtown in 1928, features cod and a bean pot.
Art deco may be the most widely recognized architectural style. “It’s nothing that is so precious that only architects use this terminology,” Evans said.
Finstein thinks that’s because art deco came out of an optimistic age that reveled in the opulence and possibilities of technology, from giant skyscrapers to intricately machined doorknobs. “There are all these objects that reinforce the design vocabulary of the art deco moment in a way that is really visible and palpable for people,” she said.
The Great Depression and World War II changed that, helping to send art deco out of vogue. The ziggurat-shaped New England Telephone and Telegraph building on Franklin Street, finished in 1947, looks muted compared to earlier art deco peers, as though suffering had leeched some of the joy from its design.
Once you start looking, you’ll see art deco throughout Boston. There’s the Landmark Center in Fenway, a former Sears Roebuck. Boston by Foot offers a walking tour of art deco in Back Bay. Running errands last weekend, I happened to drive by a school whose deco-patterned facade is one of the few in Jamaica Plain.
Coppeto and Evans have been giving tours for decades. Their clientele includes the expected tourists and architecture enthusiasts, but also residents like me who just haven’t paid enough attention. As we walked, I realized we were traversing some of the same streets I use to get to the Globe’s offices. I’d noticed the facades — bronze is hard to miss — but, whether out of laziness or haste, not the stories they were telling.
“On this specific tour I get people who’ve been through, they work in the area. They never looked up,” Coppeto said. “You just have to look up, see what’s up there once in a while.”
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This newsletter was edited by Andrew Caffrey and Heather Ciras.
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Ian Prasad Philbrick can be reached at ian.philbrick@globe.com.
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