This article is about the public park. For the adjacent hotel, see The Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel. For the privately-owned indoor shopping mall located nearby, see Copley Place.
Copley Square/ˈkɒpli/[1] is a public square in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, bounded by Boylston Street, Clarendon Street, St. James Avenue, and Dartmouth Street. The square is named for painter John Singleton Copley. Prior to 1883 it was known as Art Square due to its many cultural institutions, some of which remain today.
Architecture
Several architectural landmarks are adjacent to the square:
The BosTix Kiosk (1992, Postmodernist), at the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston streets, by Graham Gund with inspiration from Parisian park pavilions[2]
Notable buildings later demolished:
Peace Jubilee Coliseum[3] (1869, demolished the same year) A temporary wooden structure, seating fifty thousand, was built on St. James Park for the 1869 National Peace Jubilee. Replaced by World's Peace Jubilee Coliseum (1872), which was replaced by the Museum of Fine Arts.
S.S. Pierce Building, (1887, demolished 1958) by S. Edwin Tobey, "no masterpiece of architecture, [but] great urban design. A heap of dark Romanesque masonry, it anchored a corner of Copley Square as solidly as a mountain."[5]
Hotel Westminster[6] (1897, demolished 1961), Trinity Place, by Henry E. Cregier;[7][8] now replaced by the northeast corner of the new John Hancock Tower. Razed in 1961 by owner John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company for a parking lot.[9]
Grundmann Studios (1893, demolished 1917), home of the Boston Art Students Association (later known as the Copley Society), contained artist studios and Copley Hall, a popular venue for exhibitions, lectures and social gatherings.
One of the most popular attractions in Copley Square is the Farmers Market, held Tuesdays and Fridays from May through November.[12] (During the 2023–2024 reconstruction of the park, the market is held in front of the Public Library on Dartmouth.)
Annual events include First Night activities and ice sculpture competition, the Christmas tree lighting, the Boston Book Festival, and, for several years, the Boston Summer Arts Weekend. The park's central location also makes it a natural gathering place for protests and vigils.
The water level in the fountain pool can be lowered, turning it into a stage for concerts and theatrical performances.
Copley Square, looking east (top) and west, c. 1905
By 1876, with the completion of the Museum of Fine Arts, Walter Muir Whitehill noted that "Copley Square which — unlike the rest of the Back Bay — had never been properly or reasonably laid out, was beginning to stumble into shape".[14] But the land comprising the current square, bisected diagonally by Huntington Avenue, was still available for commercial development. The city purchased the larger triangle, then known as Art Square, in 1883 and dubbed it Copley Square.[note 1] The smaller plot, known as Trinity Triangle, was the subject of several lawsuits against the property owner, who planned to put up a six-story apartment building directly in front of Trinity Church. Foundations were laid but further construction was delayed by various injunctions.[16] The city council appropriated funds for purchase of the triangle in 1885.[17] Calls to close off Huntington between Dartmouth and Boylston streets began almost immediately, but that was not accomplished until 1968.[18]
In 1966, a proposal by the Watertown, Massachusetts, landscape design firm Sasaki, Dawson, DeMay was selected from 188 entrants in a national competition sponsored by the city and private development concerns. The design centered on a sunken terraced plaza, intended to separate the pedestrian from the noise and bustle of the surrounding streets, but it also isolated the square from the community. As the architecture critic Robert Campbell noted, "From the day it opened, it didn't work".[19]
In 1983 the Copley Square Centennial Committee, consisting of representatives of business, civic and residential interests, was formed. They announced a new design competition, funded by a grant of $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts. The winner, announced in May 1984, was Dean Abbott of the New York firm Clarke & Rapuano.[20][21] The park was raised to street-level and a lawn and planting beds were added. The fountain, which had rarely functioned as intended, was re-configured. The updated park was dedicated on June 18, 1989, and received mixed reviews.[22]
By 2021 the park, now heavily used, was again in need of redesign; requirements included alleviating stress on existing trees, adding more trees, making the fountain safer, and prioritizing ease of maintenance. After a series of public meetings, the final proposal by Sasaki Associates was presented to the city in May 2022.[23] Renovations began on July 20, 2023, and are expected to take sixteen months.[24]
The non-profit membership organization Friends of Copley Square was formed in 1992 as a successor to the Copley Square Centennial Committee. It raises funds for care of the square's plantings, fountain, and monuments, and also manages the Copley Square Charitable trust.[25]
The Boston Marathon foot race has finished at Copley Square since 1986.[26] A memorial celebrating the race's 100th running in 1996 is located in the park, near the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth streets.
[27]
Unrealized proposals
1874 A surveyor's map shows a "Chemical School, Inst. Tech." (never built) and four house lots on the larger triangle.
1894 A circular, sunken garden combining designs by Rotch & Tilden and Walker and Kimball, ringed with trees and marble balustrades, centered on a small fountain.[28]
1912 A plan by architect Frank Bourne eliminated the Huntington Avenue crossing and sunk the square 2.5 feet below street level. One version featured an enormous monumental column in the center of the plaza.[29]
1927 A proposal for a State War Memorial, from plans by Guy Lowell, placed a large, cylindrical granite structure in a basin. The inner chamber rose fifty feet to a domed ceiling and the memorial was topped with bronze representation of Hope.[31]
2012 A juried competition held by SHIFTBoston invited designs for creative illumination.[32] First prize was awarded to the firm Khoury Levit Fong for their conceptual chandelier of LEDs suspended over the square.[33]
On April 15, 2013, around 2:50 pm (about three hours after the first runners crossed the line) two bombs exploded—one near the finish line near the Boston Public Library, the other some seconds later and one block west. Three people were killed and at least 183 injured, at least 14 of whom lost limbs.
Transportation
Copley is served by several forms of public transportation:
^Some local wits suggested "Copley Skew" or "Copley Corners" as more appropriate for the non-square shape.[15] Others were against honoring a man who had left America in 1774 and never returned.
^"Boston Marathon Memorial". publicartboston.com. Archived from the original on January 26, 2016. Retrieved June 13, 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
^Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Gods of Copley Square, lecture series, 2009, sponsored by Back Bay Historical/Boston-centric Global Studies and the New England Historical Genealogical Society
^"100 Public Artworks"(PDF). Boston Marathon Memorial. Boston Art Commission. p. 3. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved January 13, 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
Whitehill, Walter Muir (1968). Boston: A Topographical History (Second, enlarged ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN0-674-07951-5. Retrieved June 11, 2022.
Bunting, Bainbridge (1967). Houses of Boston's Back Bay: An Architectural History, 1840-1917. Cambridge: Belknap Press, an imprint of Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0-674-40901-9.
Shand-Tucci, Douglass. "The Gods of Copley Square: Dawn of the Modern American Experience, 1865-1915", www.backbayhistorical.org/Blog, 2009. All chapters archived at Open Letters Monthly.
Shand-Tucci, Douglass. "Renaissance Rome and Emersonian Boston: Michelangelo and Sargent, between Triumph and Doubt", Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2002, 995–1008.
Copley Connect pilot project Held in June 2022, the city closed one block of Dartmouth street to create a plaza. "For the first time in its history, Copley Square was unified as a grand civic space, bookended by Boston Public Library's McKim Building and H.H. Richardson's Trinity Church."