SECOND BOSTON OBJECT LESSON 69 
Meantime, where is the builder’s occupation gone? 
Is this health for a body politic? If not, will some 
wise physician furnish a prescription? 
Do the I231,600 worth of nearly worthless buildings 
shown in Fig. IX represent those business interests 
of Boston for which a Washington Street subway 
is being completed; fof which aTremont Street parallel 
subway was completed only a few years since, and 
but one square away? These subways add nothing 
to the value either of these old buildings or of the new 
ones which might replace them. Yet they soon will 
have doubled the value of the land. 
It is submitted in all honesty and seriousness that 
this Washington Street, from Adams Square to Eliot 
Street, is a veritable economic monstrosity. When 
ever any section of a city is in a state of transition, 
like the West Street and Tdmple Place of a generation 
ago, or like the Summer Street of to-day, altered fronts 
and other makeshift devices are for a time natural 
and inevitable. But here in Washington Street, for a 
couple of centuries the main business artery of a great 
city, there are not on its whole length more than three 
°r four buildings which you could point out with 
special pride to the visitor from Chicago, or Kansas 
Qty, or Marblehead, or Cape Cod. For this condition 
there must be a cause, and this cause is the private 
appropriation of a public value; a value publicly 
created, and publicly maintained. If this is not the 
cause, we ask you to help us find what is. 
Query. Is it the Old Corner Bookstore (Fig. VIII), 
n °w almost two hundred years old, valued at $2.62 
Per square foot, that needs a new Washington Street 
subway? Is Washington Street land at $50 to $300