Buildings of New England

Located on the prominent corner of Beacon and Charles streets in Beacon Hill, the aptly named Public Garden Apartment Building overlooks one of the best shopping streets and public parks in the country. The handsome nine-story apartment building was constructed in 1917, replacing four townhouses previously on the site, and was developed by the legendary newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), who had acquired three Boston-area newspapers in the early 20th century and for some reason, engaged in Boston real estate development, though he spent most of his time in New York and California. The building originally included a 15-room penthouse apartment on the top floor of the building, with the other floors divided into two apartments per-floor, suggests that Hearst may have thought to make it his Boston residence, though it is not clear if he ever did. Hearst hired architect, Harold Van Buren Magonigle, who apprenticed under Calvert Vaux, Rotch & Tilden, and McKim Mead & White, before opening his own practice in 1903, to design the Public Garden Apartments. The apartments inside were rented to upper-class residents, typically small, older families including widows and their unwed children almost all of whom, according to census records, employed between one and four live-in domestic servants to maintain their homes. The handsome multi-family building has walls of buff-colored brick masonry and sits upon a granite foundation with arched openings on the ground floor and bracketed cornice. Today, the building is a co-op and rents out space to the Friends of the Public Garden, one of the oldest public-private partnerships in the nation established in 1970, that takes care of, and advocate for the Boston Common, Public Garden, and Commonwealth Avenue Mall for everyone to enjoy.