Background
The history of our city – and our nation – lays silent and unseen beneath the sea of red brick that is City Hall Plaza.  It is all there, from Revolutionary War heroics (instructions for lighting the lamps that sent Paul Revere on his famous “Midnight Ride” were sent from the Hanover Street home of Joseph Warren), to medical breakthroughs (in Brattle Square, Zabdiel Boylston developed the Smallpox vaccine and saved thousands, using his own son as a “guinea pig”), to scientific milestones (in the same Sudbury Street building where Thomas Edison invented his first patented invention – the stock ticker - Alexander Graham Bell first heard recognizable sound through a telephone).
 
 

Yet commuters who race from their offices to the Government Center subway station have no knowledge of the proximity of the building from which William Lloyd Garrison published the anti-slavery magazine The Liberator, and for his trouble was dragged by an angry mob who, but for the intervention of the police (who took him into protective custody,) would have likely been tarred and feathered - at the very least.  Nor do tourists who use the plaza as a way to reach Quincy Market imagine how along their route buildings contained secret, hidden rooms where run-away slaves sought shelter as they made their way along the Underground Railroad to freedom.  Residents don’t fare much better when it comes to knowledge of their neighborhood’s incredible pedigree.
 

The Making Time Visible project
Radical physical change is an intrinsic part of Boston’s history.  While some decisions were economic, some political, some aesthetic, some functional, and some sociological, most have been some combination thereof.  We have filled in wharves and the Back Bay, built housing and parks on what was once water or wasteland, and “erased” areas of the city to try new ideas.  The city evolves.  The Big Dig continues this evolution.

When Boston's City Hall, the JFK Federal Building, 1-2-3 Center Plaza, and the surrounding plaza were built in the 1960s as part of a massive urban renewal program, they destroyed in the process almost any trace of Scollay Square.  And while Boston's lagging fortunes revived, all traces of those historical landmarks were lost.  Making Time Visible intends to "peel back" the red brick of City Hall Plaza and reveal that history.

In its initial proposal to the City of Boston, the project was described this way:

In brief, the proposed installation will be a temporary public art piece that uses City Hall Plaza today as the canvas on which we draw (in chalk) a life-size map of the same area 100 years ago.  A handout brochure will accompany the installation.  The brochure will explain the project, frame it in its broader historical, sociological, and architectural contexts, and include contemporary and historical text and photographs from throughout the century, helping to make the abstract drawing more direct.  Drawn by local architects and students from Citizen Schools, the installation will occur on one day.  The drawing is ephemeral; slowly rain will wash the chalk away...

Testing of the drawing materials on the plaza, August 16

At its best, this project will add a meaningful illustration and layer of depth to the public debate over the future of City Hall Plaza.  At its least, this project will illustrate a century of change to our city’s most important civic space, as it highlights one chapter in Boston’s ongoing role as the United States’ foremost urban planning experiment of the past three and a half centuries.  As architects, we know that we are one small piece in the larger collaborative process of 21st century urban design.  By “making time visible,” in one more way suggesting that we learn from our history, we help all parties concerned - current and future design professionals, business executives and public officials, and all ages of the general public - lead Boston’s civic landscapes into the next century.

Scollay Square just after World War Two