It got better -- before the pandemic

The old John Hancock Tower and Boston skyline as it appeared in 1956, before the proliferation of skyscrapers in “The Hub’’.

“Boston is not a small New York … but is, rather, a specially organized small creature with its small-creature’s temperature, balance, and distribution of fat. In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild, electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous, excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great avenues and streets, the restaurants, theaters, bars, hotels, delicatessans, shops. In Boston the night comes down an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. . . . There is a curious flimsiness and indifference in the commercial life of Boston. The restaurants are, charitably to be called mediocre; the famous sea food is only palatable when raw. . . . Downtown Boston at night is a dreary jungle of honky-tonks for sailors, dreary department-store windows, Loew’s movie houses, hillbilly bands, strippers, parking lots, undistinguished new buildings. . . . The merchandise in the Newbury Street shops is designed in a high fashion, elaborate, furred and sequined, but it is never seen anywhere. Perhaps it is for out-of-town use, like a traveling man’s mistress.’’

— Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007; critic, short story writer and novelist), in the December 1959 Harper’s Magazine

Medieval beauty in 'Suck City'

Boston's famed Trinity Church, on Copley Square.

“Trinity Park lies directly across from the {Boston Public} library, Trinity Church rising like a medieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers'' {around Copley Square in Boston's Back Bay}.''

-- From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn

Trinity Church and its parish house were designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, and built from 1872 to 1877, when the complex was consecrated. Trinity Church established Richardson's reputation. It is the archetype of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, with its  clay roof, polychromy, rough stone, heavy arches and a massive tower. This style was soon adopted for many public buildings, and some churches, across the United States.

The church is considered one of the greatest buildings in America.

The church was  structurally damaged in the ‘70s by construction of  the 60-story skyscraper at 200 Clarendon St., first called the John Hancock Tower, and still colloquially known as The Hancock.  Among other problems with the tower were that a few panes of glass  fell from it until engineering flaws were fixed. The flaws added the thrill of possible decapitation of visitors to Copley Square – one of the grandest public spaces in the Western Hemisphere.

The structural damage to the church was fully fixed, with the cost borne by the developers.