Here are links to some web sites with photos of Scollay Square during and after its heyday.
Please, if you know of any others, send me an email!
Thank you, Jim Botticelli for telling us about this amazing archive of city photos which, somehow, we'd never seen! (Be patient... takes a while to load.)
Getty Images is a great source of rare images. (Here, we see Phil Silvers clowning backstage stage at the Old Howard in Scollay Square. Silvers had performed here as a young comic, he returned a big star after the release of his film "Top Banana") Getty has a pretty good search tool but it's not perfect - for example the search I did here for "Old Howard" returned pictures of several old men who are apparently named Howard ;)
The M.I.T. Library photo collection
The MIT Libraries support the Institute’s programs of study and research. Five major
subject libraries, for Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Humanities, Science,
Management and Social Science, as well as several specialized libraries and the
Institute Archives, offer access to a wide range of materials, both print and electronic.
The link above takes you to their fantastic collection of Scollay Square photos.
The Kepes-Lynch photo collection
In 1954 Kevin Lynch began a five-year research project funded by The Rockefeller Foundation,
The Perceptual Form of the City, co-directed by Lynch and Professor Gyorgy Kepes at the
MIT Center for Urban and Regional Studies. The research conducted in the study was the
foundation of Lynch’s theories on city planning discussed in his seminal work, The Image of the
City, published in 1960. Part of the collection focused (no pun intended) on Scollay Square.
Thanks to John Keith (no relation to Sally, sorry) who runs a real estate blog
and who told us about this fantastic collection of color photos of Boston
during the urban renewal era, including some of Scollay Square.
A site for those interested in urban planning. A user of one forum, linked above,
has posted some FANTASTIC photographs of old Boston, including Scollay Square.
The world's greatest library features an amazing on line collection
of photos including, of course, Scollay Square. A click on the logo
above will take you to a sample of some Scollay Square images.
Click HERE to go to the L.O.C. home page.
An absolutely remarkable site you have to experience, it features maps,
photographs (from the Bostonian Society collection), and city records,
all indexed, cross-referenced, and easily search-able. Wow.