Change is coming slowly but steadily to the landmark Boston loves to hate—Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles’s 1968 Boston City Hall. Considered a Modernist béton brut masterpiece by many but reviled by others, the building has long faced threats to its existence: In 2006, the late Mayor Thomas M. Menino proposed selling and possibly tearing down the building—an idea revived as recently as 2013 in the Boston Globe’s opinion column. Now, having escaped the wrecking ball, City Hall’s 50th anniversary has prompted Mayor Martin J. Walsh (who once argued for demolition too, as a mayoral hopeful, in 2013) to commit to an overhaul of the interiors and the large and windy seven-acre, brick-paved plaza.
So far, the city has committed $60 million to the project, and a comprehensive feasibility study published in 2017 estimates that the tab over the next quarter-century will total some $91 million. “Over these 50 years, the urban context, public safety and security measures, and municipal operations have evolved to the point that the city needs the building and plaza to adapt for 21st-century civic life,” stated the report, called Rethink City Hall.
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