---








BOLT IMAGING

Bunker Hill Monument












Bunker Hill Monument Commentary»

Bolt Imaging Home Page





The Bunker Hill Monument and Charlestown

In late 2004 I moved to Charlestown (a neighborhood of Boston) and was immediately struck by the contrasts. They seemed exaggerated by the fact they existed within its one square mile that is so distinctly bound by the Charles and Mystic Rivers, Boston Harbor and the Charlestown Neck. There are million dollar condos and the largest housing project in Massachusetts. A multi-star restaurant and a townie bar are a few blocks apart. The waterfront has medical research and automobile importing. There are clean streets and mean streets.

As I began exploring the town with my camera the Monument appeared in many pictures. They were of two types. One was the structure, its grounds and the activities related to them. The other was its ever, but mostly ignored, presence throughout the town.

That year a groundbreaking was held for a renovation of the Monument including new lighting. This will draw new attention to this historic structure in Charlestown and all of Boston. As the gentrification continues and the townies leave a Starbucks or a babyGap seems imminent. The Monument and its visual presence in Charlestown will never be the same.

Included here are some of the images from my extensive study of the Bunker Hill Monument and Charlestown. The project resulted in an exhibit of large fine art prints, some printed on canvas. The exhibit design also included a series of 8x10 prints hung about 36” high. They are intended to challenge children to ‘find the monument’ in each image hoping it would engage them in the exhibit and thereby contribute to their visual literacy.

All photographs were shot within the town’s borders between November 2004 and September 2005. Capture was 35mm film. Positives were scanned into Photoshop and prints made with Ultrachrome inks on fine art paper and canvas.

Below are excerpts from Daniel Webster’s address at the Monument and from the introduction to a recent novel set in Charlestown. These were included as part for the exhibition.
THE BUNKER HILL MONUMENT

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNERSTONE
OF THE BUNKER HILL MONUMENT AT CHARLESTOWN, MASS.,
ON THE 17TH OF JUNE, 1825.

BY
DANIEL WEBSTER
PRESIDENT OF THE BUNKER HILL MONUMENT ASSOCIATION

Copyright, 1893 by Houghton Mifflin & Co.

We rear a memorial of our conviction of that unmeasured benefit which has been conferred on our own land, and of the happy influences which have been produced, by the same events, on the general interests of mankind. We come, as Americans, to mark a spot which must forever be dear to us and our posterity. We wish that whosoever, in all coming time, shall turn his eye hither, may behold that the place is not undistinguished where the first great battle of the Revolution was fought. We wish that this structure may proclaim the magnitude and importance of that event to every class and every age. We wish that infancy may learn the purpose of its erection from maternal lips, and that weary and withered age may behold it, and be solaced by the recollections which it suggests. We wish that labor may look up here, and be proud, in the midst of its toil. We wish that, in those days of disaster, which, as they come upon all nations, must be expected to come upon us also, desponding patriotism may turn its eyes hitherward, and be assured that the foundations of our national power are still strong. We wish that this column, rising towards heaven among the pointed spires of so many temples dedicated to God, may contribute also to produce, in all minds, a pious feeling of dependence and gratitude. We wish, finally, that the last object to the sight of him who leaves his native shore, and the first to gladden him who revisits it, may be something which shall remind him of the liberty and the glory of this country. Let it rise! let it rise, till it meet the sun in his coming; let the earliest light of morning gild it, and parting day linger and play on its summit.

PRINCE OF THIEVES
A Novel
Chuck Hogan
Copyright 2004 by Multimedia Threat, Inc.


First, a toast. Raise a glass. Solemn now:
..........To the Town.
..........To Charlestown, our one square mile of brick and cobblestone. Neighborhood of Boston, yet lopped off every map of the city like a bastard cropped out of a happy family portrait.
..........This is the heart of the “Old Eleventh,” the district that first sent the Kennedy kid to Congress. The one square mile of America that shipped more boys off to World War II than any other. Site of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the blood of revolution sprinkled like holy water over our soil and our souls. Turf and Tribe and Townie Pride --- our sacred trinity.
..........But now look at these outsiders snapping up our brownstones and triple-deckers. Pricing us out of our own mothers’ houses. Yuppies with their Volvos and their Asian cuisine, their disposable incomes and contempt for the church --- succeeding where the British army failed, driving us off our land.
..........But sure, we don’t go away so easy. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” --- that was us, remember. This carnation here may be a bit brown at the edges --- but see it still pinned to the tweed lapel over my beating Townie heart.
..........Be a hero now, reach me that jar. We’ll have a hard-boiled egg with this last one, see how she goes down. It’s caps off, gents. Here’s to that towering spike on a hill, the granite battle monument that’ll outlast us all: the biggest feckin’ middle finger in the world, aimed right at good brother Boston and the twenty-first century beyond.
To the Town. Here’s how.

Back