The point is that nobody lives there. Yes, Faneuil Hall is a major tourist attraction and there are some restaurants and bars around there (and doesn't city hall plaza seem even more dead when you look at the crowds around Faneuil?). But the area is not a real neighborhood, it's a destination. Which I think is a major failure of American cities in general- our city centers are most often treated as destinations rather than places to live. This general attitude has some pretty bad outcomes for city dwellers, both historically and today. While Scollay Square is long gone, it's still a useful story to explain why Boston looks the way it does today, and it helps us talk about what direction Boston (and American cities) should take in the future.

My main issue with City Hall isn't the building itself, but rather that City Hall Plaza is an empty wasteland where a real neighborhood used to be. Scollay Square was a bustling working-class neighborhood, with its own unique character. Today, City Hall and most of the surrounding buildings see traffic only on weekdays, 9-5. That whole part of Boston feels like a monument to an era where we kicked people out of cities and reduced their neighborhoods to office parks.