I spent the afternoon walking up Astor Street, the grander part of Chicago, where there is a wealth of individual houses in a medley of architectural styles with correspondingly eclectic detailing, beginning with two houses on Schiller Street:-

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Before leaving Boston, I thought I would try and find out about my Bostonian step-grandmother, Ethel Moors, whom I never met because she died ten days after marrying my grandfather in the year of my birth (in fact, she was dead before my parents met her off the boat at Southampton).   Thanks to the glories of the internet, I have been able to find out much more than I have ever known previously.   That she came of an old Boston family, I knew.   She married John Cabot Moors, who was a nonconformist banker and member of the Harvard Corporation.   Both were liberal progressives and worshipped at Trinity Church.   When they were not in Back Bay, they summered either in a house on the South Shore at Cohasset or in a farmhouse out in Heath in the Berkshires, where she encouraged fellow radicals to settle.   ‘Unconventional iconoclasm and a radical devotion to social justice were the unspoken requirements’.   On this day of all days, I am pleased to discover that they were vigorously internationalist and hostile to the ‘bigoted isolationism of so much of America’s political classes’.

The last of my posts from Boston is the Carpenter Center for the Arts, the only building designed by Corbusier in North America, sandwiched between the Fogg and the Faculty Club and designed to be ‘une demonstration des théories de le Corbusier’, including ‘a wealth of his lifelong basic ideas’:-

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The morning after, we headed off to the seafront in South Boston where the ICA (founded 1936) acquired a small area of land and commissioned Diller Scofidio when they were relatively unknown.   It’s a clever building – very spacious, with big, high-ceilinged galleries, all on the top floor and a huge central void filled by the passenger and service elevator:-

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I suppose I should record, since it is one of those things that will probably be remembered – where one was on the night of the election – that I spent the evening in an Iranian restaurant, Lala Rokh, on Beacon Hill where people were watching television lined up silently at the bar.   I had my back to the television in order not to be perpetually distracted, but at 9.10 it was pretty obvious that Trump was winning and by 10.30 when we left that Ohio and Hillary were lost, inducing the deepest uncertainty and, in the only voter in the party, the most wretched gloom, not improved by a parking ticket on the car.

We spent the afternoon at the Harvard Art Museums.   I hadn’t seen them since the Fogg was closed, gutted and radically reinvented by Renzo Piano, who has transformed it from a traditional Italian palazzo into a high-tech laboratory of Italian, German, French and contemporary art, beautifully and intelligently displayed in relatively small-scale galleries.

This is the old 1920s neoclassical entrance on Quincy Street where one enters from Harvard Yard:-

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We’re staying in the Back Bay, an area of grand Victorian houses laid out after 1870 on what had previously been tidal flats.

The view down Newbury Street:-

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I went out early in order to get a feel of what it was like on the streets of Boston.   Of course, one can tell nothing of what is going to happen, just parents taking children to school and people lining up to vote outside the Charles Street Meeting House, no hint that their vote will decide the fate of nations for the next four years.   There was a long queue outside the Boston Public Library:-

I have been mourning the death of Giles Waterfield, who died wholly unexpectedly of a massive heart attack on Saturday, although aged only 67.   I admired him for what he achieved as the Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery, where he went after a brief period working under John Morley as an Education Officer at Brighton Art Gallery.   He wrote about the history of Dulwich and transformed it from a forgotten oddity into a flourishing independent museum with an active Board of Trustees and a small endowment.   He brought John Sainsbury in as chairman of Trustees and then satirised him in The Hound in the Left Hand Corner.   But his best novel was probably his first, The Long Afternoon, based on the lives of his parents.   I’m glad that he had at least published his magnificently authoritative history of municipal art museums, which derived from the exhibition, Art Treasures of England, which he curated in 1998 at the Royal Academy.   He was very dry and very knowledgeable, on every committee in the country, including chairman of Charleston Trust.

I am pleased to have a chance to see and get to know H.H. Richardson’s Trinity Church, which dominates Copley Square opposite the Public Library, squat, but grandly ornate, an idiosyncratic composite of Romanesque design, as much German as French, with a magnificent interior space and much good stone carving.   Richardson had been trained at the École des Beaux Arts, returned to the States in 1865, and designed a lunatic asylum in Buffalo before the commission to design Trinity Church:-

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