It has been a very photographic February with the cycle of snow, freeze, thaw, and freeze we've endured. Ed said it was as if Mother Nature wanted to add a fresh coat of makeup to the snow piles so they wouldn't look dirty.
Icicles added a touch of frosting to the Victorian townhouses along Commonwealth Avenue.
On Newbury Street, some took on the look of waterfalls.
On Boylston Street, the stonework and icicles set off one another beautifully.
Here's a view of icicles from inside one of the glass crossovers at Copley Place.
Bacchante does not seem to mind the snow at all and just continues to dance in the Courtyard of the Boston Public Library.
As much as we may complain about the endless snow and cold, it's hard to resist photographing the way it changes our neighborhood.
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February has been an icicle month, so far, in Boston. We are learning to look up to be sure the buildings we're passing are not about to drop a lethal spear on us.
These on a Back Bay home had formed over a front yard garden so they were not a danger to pedestrians.
"Icicles typically form on days when the outdoor air temperature is subfreezing but sunshine warms and melts some snow or ice. As it drips off your roof, a water droplet freezes when it loses its heat to the cold air. An icicle starts with a few frozen droplets. When it reaches a certain size, drops begin to drip along the side of the structure."
Any Boston phenomenon sends Penny off to search the Leslie Jones Collection at the Boston Public Library to see how this photojournalist documented it in his day.
She loves this 1919 photo of icicles on the Brewer Fountain on the Boston Common. We don't know if the fountain was still full and running when there was a sudden cold snap or if rains had filled the basins and wind had whipped the water over the edge. The angle of the icicles certainly seems to indicate that wind had some influence on their formation.
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Since February is Black History Month, Ed and I have been photographing subjects that help us think about this aspect of Boston's past. The sculpture of slave and poet Phillis Wheatley on the Boston Women's Memorial has long been one of my favorite photographic models. (Click on the photo for a larger view.)
At the dedication ceremony, memorial sculptor Meredith Bergmann said,
“External, legal freedom was denied to Phillis Wheatley. But she sought the inner freedom that enabled her to write and here she makes her pedestal a desk.”
I've read Bergmann's proposal for the memorial so I know how much thought she put into the smallest details of this artwork. But, I wonder if she considered how serene Phillis would seem with snowdrifts wrapping her and her desk? Did she plan for the light to outline this young face against the misty haze of winter trees?
Planned or not, the result can be stunning in the right light and, on one of our rare partly sunny days last week, I found that light.
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When I shot this photo of the angel sculpture on the perimeter wall of the Church Court Condominium for a Back Bay Sun Cover, I never imagined how much snow we would have in the days to follow.
The winter had been calm and as the first snow came down, I grabbed my camera and went out to capture a wintry cover for the paper.
The sculptor, Gene Cauthen, calls it "Church Court Angel" and provides these close up photos on his site.
He explains that it is:
" 5' 6" bronze, commissioned by architect Graham Gund, installed on the exterior wall of an architectural ensemble at Church Court, 492 Beacon Street, Boston, MA."
The condominium is a mixture of old and new. In 1978, the Mount Vernon Church (designed by Walter & Kimble in 1891) suffered a serious fire. The shell of the building remained until the 1980s when Graham Gund added new elements and created the building we see today.
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With the first storm of the current series, Ed took this photo of a team of men clearing a sidewalk in the Back Bay. Those signs should read "Don't Stop!"– shoveling that is.
It made me remember some photos I once saw in the Boston Public Library's Leslie Jones Collection.
This one is titled Men shoveling snow into trucks.It's from 1939 and shows a much larger team of shovelers who seem to be clearing both the street and the sidewalk on Tremont Street across from the Boston Common.
Some horses were added to this team in February of 1936. Jones titled this Workmen shovel snow.
Downtown, Summer St., coffee break is a good reminder for everyone out there working in the cold and exerting themselves in the storm. Take it easy, take some breaks, get inside, warm up, and don't do more than you are able. Those shovels look heavy. (1934 – 1956 approximate)
And, if you are fortunate and don't have to shovel out your home, consider adopting a hydrant or catch basin to make you and your neighbors safer in case of fire or local flooding.
Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott (January 17–September 13, 2015) traces Parks’ return to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas and then to other Midwestern cities, to track down and photograph each of his childhood classmates. On view in the MFA’s Art of the Americas Wing, the exhibition’s 42 photographs were from a series originally meant to accompany a Life magazine photo essay—but for reasons unknown, the story was never published. The images depict the realities of life under segregation in 1950—presenting a rarely seen view of everyday lives of African-American citizens in the years before the Civil Rights movement began in earnest.
We Say:
This has been on our calendar since we first read about it. We have so much to learn from this multi-talented man.
Make this exhibition more enjoyable by doing your homework before attending.
The MFA gives you some tools for learning about an exhibition like this on it's website. We often rely on the press releases they send out to understand why a particular subject was selected and about the people and organizations that make an exhibition possible. Here's a link to the press release for Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott.
And, if you want to attend the exhibition at a time when there is something special scheduled around the topic, you'll find a "More Events" button near the top of that page.
We've also taken advantage of the Boston Public Library's resources on Gordon Parks and are reading some of his poetry and his memoir.
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It was one of those times when my camera captured the same thing I thought I was seeing with my eyes – colored baubles floating down amid the snowflakes.
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Today, the gateway to Primus Avenue off Phillips Street on Beacon Hill is locked with only residents and their guests allowed entry. In 1843, this path was called Wilberforce Place. Back then, the word "place" was used to identify a location as a square or short street.
Wilberforce Place is described in Boston Ways: High, By, and Folk by George Weston as “a dark, dirty, and dismal place it was then—truly a slum, with three cold-water tenements housing a horde of the city’s dregs.”
They also explain the name change, "We believe that sometime in the 1860's, Primus Avenue came into being, replacing the name of Wilberforce Place, in honor of Primus Hall who once lived on this alley." And, they give a nice history of the namesake the avenue honors.
In his book Built in Boston: City & Suburb, 1800-2000, Author Douglass Shand-Tucci writes that Architect, Clarence H. Blackall, "… carved out of several Beacon Hill tenements in the 1920s the imaginative Primus Avenue apartments off Phillips Street …"
Penny used it as the subject of one of her Attention to Detail columns for the Beacon Hill Times, a few years ago. In the process, she discovered some interesting tidbits about this place. But, she always loves learning more about the historic streets, buildings, and people of Boston. If you have a Primus Avenue story or tidbit to share, please add it in the comments below.
Three books with information about Primus Avenue are:
"Electric street lamp on converted gas post with electric light fixture with white dome & clear glass globe. Installed in 1909."
Here's the same scene in 2011 with a new gaslight replacing the old gaslight that had been so proudly electrified in 1909.
Today, a street tree stands in the place of the former electric lamp and you see fences and gardens in front of the townhouses but not in early photos. Many homes in the Back Bay were winter residences where families lived for the "winter season." In the summer months, they would have been closed up while the family moved to their summer estates.
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, Author Douglass Shand-Tucci writes that Architect, 
