Poles Apart

At Boston’s City Hall Plaza, there are three flagpoles that fly the American flag, the Massachusetts flag, and the City of Boston’s flag, respectively.

Now, Boston City Hall has the dubious distinction of being named the “world’s ugliest building” in a 2008 online poll. In the 1960s, then-Boston mayor John F. Collins reportedly gasped as the design was first unveiled, and someone in the room blurted out, “What is that?” (Then again, in a 1976 Bicentennial poll of historians and architects regarding America’s greatest buildings, sponsored by the American Institute of Architects, Boston City Hall received the sixth-most mentions. Go know, as they say.)

Ugly or not, the city has on occasion turned its flagpole over to private groups that requested use of it to raise flags of their choosing, and in the past 12 years, Boston approved 284 requests to fly dozens of different flags. It did not deny a single one until 2017, when Harold Shurtleff, the director of a group called Camp Constitution, asked to fly a Christian flag for one hour at an event that was to include “short speeches by some local clergy focusing on Boston’s history.”

But Boston refused the request, and Camp Constitution sued. Each party claimed the other’s position would violate the First Amendment, the city arguing that flying the flag would be governmental endorsement of religion, and the group contending that the city’s decision violated its right to free speech.