At the Athenaeum: Boston on fire then, the Athenaeum renovated now – The Boston Globe

The present’s curator is the Athenaeum’s Christina Michelon.

“Revisiting” contains some 70 gadgets. They embrace, as one would possibly anticipate, pictures, work, prints, and a map. There are additionally 36 stereographs. A stereograph is a pair of very comparable pictures which, when considered via a stereoscope, give an phantasm of depth. In a visitor-friendly contact, three viewers can be found to be used.

“Reviewing” additionally consists of issues one won’t anticipate: a key to a constructing destroyed within the fireplace, a militia cross permitting the bearer entry to the burnt district, an adolescent’s journal, a bit of sheet music, and a “relic” of the fireplace: a bit of once-melted metallic, wrapped in newsprint and string. It’s like a gift one would possibly discover in Vulcan’s Christmas stocking. Better of all, in an impressed curatorial flourish, the fireplace alarm within the gallery (a Simplex TrueAlert) will get a wall label. It’s a reminder of the continuity between Boston then and Boston now — and of how far fireplace prevention has come.

The title “Revisiting the Ruins” has a double that means. It describes what the present is doing but in addition what lots of the works within the present have been doing. Solely James Wells Champney’s pencil sketch “Rooftop View of the Nice Boston Hearth, November 10, 1872″ was made as the fireplace was occurring. This implies the present is as a lot concerning the fireplace’s aftermath as the fireplace itself. That will appear to be an odd distinction immediately, when information media function in actual time. Again then, technological limitations dictated in any other case.

To offer only one instance, newspapers and magazines as but didn’t have the means to breed pictures. Fairly, an engraving could be made out of {a photograph}, and that’s what readers would see. The present presents each James Wallace Black’s panoramic view of the devastation and an illustration carefully derived from it which ran in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

That weekly journal was based mostly in New York. Protection of the fireplace prolonged so far as England and France. The Nov. 30, 1872, subject of The Illustrated London Information ran three engravings of the fireplace based mostly on Black’s work. Each the images and the engravings are on show.

Black’s 13 pictures are the guts of the present. They’re easy and unflinching. The city moonscape they seize appears like nothing a lot as a conflict zone. The presence within the present of {a photograph} Alexander Gardner had taken seven years earlier of Richmond in ruins underscores the resemblance. Recollections of the Civil Struggle will need to have been in lots of Bostonians’ minds, in addition to an consciousness of a newer occasion. The Nice Chicago Hearth had taken place simply 13 months earlier than.

Astonishingly, reconstruction was accomplished inside two years (a superb a part of the rubble was used as landfill in Boston Harbor and to increase Atlantic Avenue). A lot of downtown hadn’t been destroyed, in fact. The steeple of Outdated South Assembly Home is seen in a number of pictures. And the fireplace was contained simply two blocks from the Athenaeum.

A really totally different type of reconstruction is on show in Tira Khan’s “Studying the Room: Reconstructing the Boston Athenaeum,” which runs via Might 13. Khan’s eight pictures are very good-looking, with a fullness of shade that’s virtually tactile.

Her purpose was to doc the library’s current renovation. “Patched and Spackled” isn’t a title one would usually affiliate with a view of the Athenaeum’s inside, although others, like “Circulation” and “The Paper Room” one would. These pictures, not not like that fire-alarm wall label in “Revisiting the Ruins,” testify to continuity, on this case institutional.

REVISITING THE RUINS: The Nice Boston Hearth of 1872

READING THE ROOM: Reconstructing the Boston Athenaeum

At: Boston Athenaeum, 10½ Beacon St., via July 29 and Might 13, respectively. 617-227-0270, bostonathenaeum.org

Mark Feeney could be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.