SAUGUS — Let’s start with the obvious: If the Kowloon Restaurant, an unabashed icon of mid-20th century anti-architecture, is to be cratered — and it will be, with proposed plans just revealed — building almost 200 apartments in its place is a good thing. Greater Boston desperately needs housing, and quick. And Route 1, a plain of parking lots littered with rundown, low-slung, mostly commercial buildings, is a problem in need of solving.
But does it have to be like this? Last week, architects for the Wong family, who owns the Kowloon, made the redevelopment plan public: In place of its landmark A-frame and hip-roof style building, a pair of boxy six-story apartment blocks would rise.
The contrast is jarring. The Kowloon stands out on Route 1, a gleeful mash-up of stick-on motifs — a ’50s-style font meant to mimic Chinese Hanzi characters pinned to a Polynesian-style totem, built into the front of an asphalt-shingled version of a Forbidden City-esque roofline. It will be replaced by what could generously be described as cut-and-paste utilitarianism, an architecture of nowhere and everywhere, with all the aesthetic charm of a 1990s Wal-Mart.
As anyone from the North Shore would tell you, this hurts: The Kowloon is a particular landmark of urban whimsy, belovedly bold, built in an era where such playful caprice was architectural sin. When it rose shiny-new in the 1950s, Modernism reigned supreme — particularly in Boston, where the Graduate School of Design at Harvard was chaired by Walter Gropius, one of the forefathers of the high-Modern Bauhaus movement.
That, of course was in the city of Boston, soon to bulldoze dense urban neighborhoods and rebuild them in a concrete-monolith style — Government Center, City Hall — which has evolved into a vast monument of urban regret. But out here in the patchwork of towns that were then just starting to knit together in an evolving network of suburbs, no such design strictures applied.
The free-for-all wasn’t universally a good thing. Route 1 today, a trashy pastiche of impermanent built form, feels so random that when I first moved to the North Shore seven years ago, I used to drive out-of-town visitors home from the airport along I-93 — a good 20-minute diversion — to shield them from the first impression Route 1 would give them.
But there’s charm, and history in that trashiness that I’ve warmed to and the Kowloon is at its heart. A monument to the immigrant fairy tale of the American dream, its local status has only grown over the years, a Northeast beacon of Las Vegas-esque excess. On a badly mistimed drive home (which these days is pretty much any time), the Kowloon is a soothing waypoint amid the gridlock, perched on a rise above the blacktop. Like the best buildings, it has come to define its place in the urban landscape, not the other way around. You don’t have to eat there to embrace it; that’s what placemaking is all about.
And it’s not too much to call it inspiring: In the jumble of built forms along here, you can read almost a generational homage to its gaudiness. A nearby McDonald’s abandoned its typical logo-on-stick signage in favor of two swooping golden arches, ’50s diner-style. A neon-green cactus (a preserved relic of the Hilltop Steakhouse that opened in 1961 and closed in 2013) glows roadside to announce an otherwise nondescript cluster of strip mall. Maybe following the Kowloon’s lead most closely is the Leaning Tower of Pizza at Prince Pizzeria, built in 1961, which sprouted addition after addition; it’s immediately a low sprawl of discordant boxes strung alongside the gridlock.
Like so many of its Route 1 peers, the Kowloon’s parking lots sprawl far too much, and the dire need for better land use — and transit — has been clear for ages. But there’s a heritage here worth preserving. In their landmark 1972 book “Learning from Las Vegas,” the architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote that “Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect. … Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and begin again … but another, more tolerant way; that is, to question how we look at things.”
The Kowloon commands your eye; it makes you look, and consider the where and why. Its replacement will draw not so much as a second glance — a disappearing nowhere, signifying nothing.
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
About the Author
