The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 282

Mmon fir 1935 I 2006 'T--' CITYSCAPES Coming Into Copley Four buildings in four styles made one great stretch of Dartmouth Street. 1881, a gem in the then-fashionable British style know as Queen Anne. It's by William Ralph Emerson, who obviously enjoyed the style's emphasis on invention, handicraft, and playful details. Still vital, the Art Club today is home to the Muriel Snowden International School, a public high school. Four buildings, four styles, one great streelscape.

S.S. Pierce was torn dow in 1958. It was replaced by access ramps to the Mass. Turnpike, and later by the characterless Copley Place shops and hotels, which could as well be in Houston or Atlanta. Part of Copley-Place can be seen in the new photo.

Robert Campbell ami Peter Yamlenvarker Library of 1895, by Charles Follen McKim, ho also designed Symphony Hall. The BPL can get away ith its calm. Hat Renaissance facade precisely because it's bookended by buildings that are so much more architecturally excited. The bookend to the right of the library is the New Old South Church of 1874, by Cummings Sears, this time in Northern Italian Gothic style. We see only a slice of it, a pinnacled gable end.

New Old South, too, is great urban design, a model of how to fit a big building into a street of smaller ones. Along its main Boylston frontage, it steps gradually from house-sied elements up to high gables and a tower near the corner. Farthest right is the Boston Art Club of The finest row of ch ic buildings ever built in Boston stands along Dartmouth Street in the old photo. We're looking south along Dartmouth. The building on the far left, now gone, is the headquarters store for S.S.

Pierce. Samuel Stillman Pierce (pronounced founded the store, which supplied gourmet foods to Boston's Brahminocracy, in 1831. The building came along in 1887, designed by little-known architect S. Edwin Tobey. It's no masterpiece of architecture, but it's great urban design.

A heap of dark Romanesque masonry, it anchored a corner of Copley Square as solidly as a mountain. To the right of it is the great Boston Public 16.