Neither Festival nor Marketplace

Is there something amiss with Boston's Faneuil Hall, Ben Thompson's 1976 project that originated the concept of the "festival marketplace"? After all, it just won an AIA award for having "stood the test of time:"

The award is called the Twenty-five Year Award. It goes to only one American building each year. The building must be at least 25 years old, and it must have "stood the test of time" in the words of the sponsor, the American Institute of Architects. In other words, it must have proved to be an architectural classic. I don't think any prize is more highly valued by architects.

The Marketplace is unlike most winners of this award in that it isn't a new building. The architect, the late Benjamin Thompson, conceived the idea. He renovated three blocks of old warehouses, built originally in 1826, into a new kind of shopping complex that he dubbed a "festival marketplace."

...In its press release, the American Institute of Architects sings of the Marketplace in very up-to-date language. It's called "a great model of vital environmental principles" and praised for "creating a high-density urban environment where people can work, shop, play, and enjoy life as pedestrians."

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Above, Faneuil Hall in context.

Boston Globe architectural critic Robert Campbell wonders if the festival is over, given not only the turnover in Faneuil Hall's retail mix, but also its changing relationship to the greater city. What was conceived as a creative re-purposing of historic buildings to house the public realm while bolstering local identity has awkwardly morphed into something else:

I can't help wondering whether what we're hearing in all this is the tolling bells of an era that is ending....[Faneuil Hall] opened back in the bicentennial year of 1976, in a very different era. Public life, street life, was moribund in Boston. So dead were the streets that few thought the Marketplace would succeed. Boston bankers refused to lend until Mayor Kevin White twisted their arms.

But the Marketplace was a huge and instant hit, drawing more visitors in its first year than Disneyland. It had arrived, it turned out, at exactly the right moment. A generation of people who had moved to the suburbs or grown up in them, and who tended to think of the city as dangerous and alien, found in the Marketplace a magic door into a cleaned-up, safe, dramatized version of city life. I called it "a halfway house for recovering suburbanites." People, it turned out, were starved for the experience of city life, even a slightly ersatz experience.

Ironically, its success may have spurred its demise. Its manipulation of what's local and historic enabled residents to see their surroundings in new ways. Elsewhere, other Thompson projects had the same effect:

After Boston, festival marketplaces popped up everywhere, most of them done by Thompson himself with his developer, James Rouse. American downtowns and waterfronts began to come back. But there's a hidden twist in this. Once Boston, or any other city, achieved a revival, it no longer needed its festival marketplace. With shops and bars and restaurants everywhere, as they are now here, the Marketplace ceases to be a unique destination. Today, Faneuil Hall Marketplace is largely a tourist mecca. Bostonians go elsewhere.

I can vouch for that. When I lived in Boston, I rarely went there.

Campbell touches on the possible preservation of Faneuil Hall and other sites like it across the country, such as South Street Seaport in New York. But he notes that any preservation--or even just a sympathetic renovation--is unlikely. The retail numbers don't look the same:

Many of the Marketplace stores are national chain outlets now, although these were banned in 1976. Nothing about these chains speaks of Boston, a value Thompson felt strongly about. The Marketplace was in part a victim of its own success, or you could say a victim of the economic ambitions of its owners. They charged higher rents that drove away the local merchants who once gave the place its character.

Is Faneuil Hall Marketplace ripe for another reinvention, just as it was reinvented in 1976? Will someone appear who is as timely and inventive as Ben Thompson? Is the festival marketplace concept now dead?

It would be interesting to brainstorm ways that places like Faneuil Hall could be reinvented, especially given a surge of interest in local craft and food markets nationwide, the popularity of online micro-retail alternatives like Etsy, and today's bleak economic climate (maybe not so dissimilar from the one that spawned the original concept). Perhaps future redesigns of the tired festival marketplace concept are less architectural and more economic. Maybe it becomes a set of webfronts. What do you think?

Comments

[Kat]

The only times I've regularly been to Faneuiel Hall was to 1) go to Durgan Park or 2) to sing in their Christmas choir, back in 2000 when they had money for that sort of thing. The year I sang with them I bought all my Christmas presents from the little stalls and carts---not from the big chain stores starting to worm their way into the marketplace. I suspect if they were willing to put back all the little non-chain stores, the tourists would buy more, and the locals might come, too.

[Daniel Nairn]

Cities cycle through fashionable commercial districts and neighborhoods all the time, as those on the cutting edge "discover" places and the everyone else follows. Faneuil Hall hasn't been trendy for a long time, but I don't think it really needs to be.

It's always sad to see the chains take over, but if the tourists and suburban families coming in for the weekend want a place to go - by all means, Faneuil Hall works well. At least a couple of years ago, I remember it being a very lively place. It seems well loved by those who choose to spend time there.

Rather than reinvent it into something hip, to me it makes more sense to just start another place.

[Chester]

Look no further than Seattle's Pike Place Market, which, despite being a major tourist attraction, is enjoyed and patronized by locals and visitors alike. One of the keys to its survival has been the non-profit status of the organization that runs it, the local base to all of the businesses in it (even Starbucks!) and the continuous support it gets from the public; in fact, in the last election the citizens of Seattle voted to tax themselves to pay for much-needed upgrades to the market's infrastructure. Sustainable model, indeed.