George Otis Draper (1867-1923) was born in Hopedale and attended MIT to prepare to help run the extremely successful family business, the Draper Corporation in town, which was experiencing a period of rapid growth and expansion of factories. With his position at the company, his wealth afforded him the ability to build a massive country estate known as The Larches. The shingled Colonial Revival style home featured a massive crenelated tower and appeared like a castle in the countryside. George O. Draper sold this home to his aunt Hannah Thwing Draper Osgood in 1909, and within a month, the home burned to the ground. She began construction on the “new Larches“, a shingled mansion with a stunning blending of Colonial Revival and Craftsman styles. The home was likely designed by Robert Allen Cook, who was based out of nearby Milford, MA. The property today is run by Crossroads Clubhouse, an employment and recovery center that offers people with mental health conditions opportunities to achieve their full potential.
Hopedale, Massachusetts separated from Milford and incorporated in 1886. The “downtown” of the community encompasses industrial, institutional, and residential buildings in Hopedale Village, also known as Draper Village after the long-driver of the local economy, Draper Corporation. Hopedale was largely developed as a planned company town, and its architectural significance and ultimate preservation was largely due to the success of the Draper Corporation as majority owner until the 1950s. The Draper Corporation was originally a small operation in Hopedale in 1841 managed by George Draper (1817-1887), but grew exponentially thanks to his son, George Albert Draper (1855-1926), who had a passion for finding innovative technology to make the production of cloth more efficient. He led the company’s charge to become the nation’s leading producer of machines for the cloth-making industry. In the ensuing decades the factory village of Hopedale became a “model” company town under his leadership, with the business controlling every aspect of the town and worker life in a paternalistic program that extended beyond social structure to include architecture and urban planning of the village. The company developed hundreds of homes for workers, a town hall, library, churches, schools, a fire station, and recreational facilities, along with its factory complex at the center. In1892, with the advent of the Northrop Loom, Draper became the largest producer of textile machinery in the country. Due to their success at the end of the 19th century, much of the complex was built and rebuilt in fire-proof brick factory buildings with large windows to allow light and air into the facilities. Draper’s dominant position within the textile machine manufacturing industry began to erode shortly after World War II, and the company began to sell its company houses to their occupants as private homes in 1956. During the 1960s American textile machinery makers such as Draper lost their technological leadership to foreign manufacturers due to cheap labor, and the general American textile industry collapsed. The plant eventually closed in 1980, and sat vacant until it was decided by the local officials to raze the once great complex, as adaptive reuse was not feasible in the market for such large structures. The mill was demolished in the summer of 2021 and the lot at the center of town remains a brownfield site.
Formerly located at the intersection of two historic turnpikes in Canterbury, Connecticut, the William Moore House was a historic and architecturally significant residence that stood over 200 years until its demolition in 2019. The large, Federal style house was built in 1803 for William Moore, a merchant who operated a store and also served as the town postmaster. The upper floor of this house at one time accommodated a ballroom where the local Masonic organization met. Later in the 19th century, the house became the home of prominent merchant, banker, and politician Marvin H. Sanger, Connecticut Secretary of State from 1873 to 1876. In 1921, it was the home of Lillian Frink when she became one of the first women ever elected to the Connecticut General Assembly, along with four other women elected that same year. The house with its projecting center pedimented bay, elaborate corner pilasters on pedestals, and elegant Palladian window represented the height of country Federal-period architecture until destroyed by a fire in 2018, leading the town to raze the building a year later in 2019. The lot remains vacant as of 2025.
The Pawtucket-Central Falls Railroad Station is a crumbling relic of a time once dominated by rail travel. This architectural landmark spans the border of the cities of Pawtucket and Central Falls, along with the tracks of the former New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad and is one of the more unique buildings in Rhode Island. The station opened in 1916 to replace separate stations in the two cities from plans by F.W. Mellor, architect for the New Haven Railroad with Norcross Brothers of Worcester facilitating the construction over a structural steel base spanning the tracks. As many as 140 trains per day once passed under this station, but in 1959, it closed. The building was purchased by a private owner and plans failed to materialize for decades, leaving us with a crumbling masterpiece in architecture and engineering. In 2007, the lot was partially developed with the addition of a suburban, soulless CVS store and parking lot, which today, directly abuts the station. In 2023, a new Pawtucket/Central Falls station opened nearby, which has brought new calls to demolish this building, with people actively seeking grants to fund the estimated $10 Million dollar demolition.
John Gordon Wright (1843-1912), was a Boston wool merchant who purchased farmland on this site in the 1890s and hired architects Chapman & Frazer, to design this stone mansion as an estate house. He previously moved into an earlier wood-frame home on the site and a decade earlier, had the architects design his carriage house and stable, which survive today as the Soule Recreation Center. The stone Tudor Revival style mansion house was massive and featured in national periodicals when completed. The estate was beautified by landscaping designed and laid-out by the Olmsted firm. In 1942, the property was purchased by the Rivers School (now located in Weston) and converted into classrooms and administrative offices for the private school. When the school moved to Weston, the Town of Brookline in 1961 bought property for recreational purposes. Sadly, in 1967, the mansion house burned down, but the carriage house and gate lodge remain as lasting remnants of a once great Brookline estate.
Built in 1857 at the prominent intersection of Boylston and Tremont streets in Boston, the Hotel Pelham is said to have been the first apartment building of its type in America. Seen as a high-end apartment building, not like the slum-like tenements in New York and elsewhere in Boston, the units were like French-flats for medium-term renters, rather than short-term stays. The Hotel Pelham was developed by Dr. John Homer Dix, a doctor who took a keen interest in providing healthy accomodations for city-folk. The Hotel Pelham was designed by architect Alfred Stone, as an early example of the Second Empire style, with a French Mansard roof and stone facades. Just about a decade after the building was completed, Tremont Street (which runs along the side of the building) was set to be widened. This work would require the partial (and likely full) demolition of the Pelham Hotel. Rather than see his building face the wrecking ball, Dr. Dix, in 1869, had the Hotel Pelham slid off its foundation, and moved westward thirty feet to accommodate the expanded Tremont Street. This incredible feat of engineering was undertaken by John S. Blair, with architect Nathaniel Bradlee overseeing updates to the facades and interiors. The building would survive a gas main explosion in 1897, but succumbed to redevelopment during WWI, when the building was demolished for the present building on the site, the Little Building.
Established in 1848, the Boston Public Library was the first large, free municipal library in the United States. The Boston Public Library’s first building of its own was a converted former schoolhouse located on Mason Street that opened to the public in 1854. As soon as the library occupied the building, it was apparent that the amount of visitors and collections could not effectively be held in the cramped quarters. Planning began almost immediately for it’s first purpose-built library. Less than a year later, in December 1854, library commissioners were authorized to purchase a lot and fund the construction of the new library. A desirable building lot on Boylston Street, opposite the Boston Common, was purchased and a public invitation for proposals from architects was held. The requirements for the building included: a library hall with alcoves capable of containing on fixed shelves at least 200,000 volumes, a general reading room with ample accommodations at tables for at least 150 readers, a ladies reading room, an adjacent library room for the arrangement of 20,000 books “most constantly demanded for circulation,” and quarters for the Trustees and Librarian. The facade was to be of brick, with stone dressing”. The selected design by architect, Charles Kirk Kirby, was for this handsome Italianate style building which took nearly three years to build, opening in September 1858. Twenty years later, as the library outgrew that space, the Trustees asked the state legislature for a plot in the newly filled Back Bay, and planning began on the McKim Building, built in 1895 down Boylston Street. This building, the first purpose-built Boston Public Library building, was demolished in 1898, and replaced by the ten-story Colonial Theater Building. It stood just 40 years.
Famed author Edgar Allan Poe was born in this house on Carver Street in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, the second child of American actor David Poe Jr. and English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe. His father abandoned the family in 1810 and his mother died a year later from pulmonary tuberculosis. He would be adopted by John Allan, a merchant and slaver in Richmond, Virginia, his adopted family gave him the name “Edgar Allan Poe”. He would live a somewhat nomadic life, moving around often to cities all over the East Coast until his death in 1849 in Baltimore. Although it was his birthplace, Poe’s troubled early childhood likely contributed to his disdain for Boston, where he often referred to Bostonians as “Frogpondians,” after the frog pond on Boston Common, though as an insult. The poet’s seminal work The Raven was published in January 1845 to widespread success. Several months later, Poe was invited to read at the Boston Lyceum with the support of James Russell Lowell, a Harvard professor and editor of The Atlantic Monthly. It did not go well. His childhood home on Carver Street would be razed by 1962 and is presently a surface parking lot for an electrical substation. The city would honor its macabre author by renaming an alley off Boylston Street, Edgar Allan Poe Way, and in 2014, the City commissioned a public statue titled, “Poe Returning to Boston“. Designed by Stefanie Rocknak, the statue depicts Poe walking, facing away from the Boston Common. His figure is accompanied by an oversized flying raven; his suitcase lid has fallen open, leaving a “paper trail” of literary works embedded in the sidewalk behind him.
Few buildings in Boston showcase the evolution of its neighborhood (or bring out the architectural critics) quite as well as the Lincoln Street Garage in the Leather District of Boston. This Post-WWII mixed use building was originally constructed in 1956, on the former site of the United States Hotel (1839), one of the first major hotels in the nation, which was razed in 1930. The original building was designed by architect Archie Riskin, and stood three stories high with parking on half of the second floor and on the 3rd floor and roof. A fifth floor of office space was designed and constructed by 1959 also by Riskin. Due to its site at the edge of a historic commercial/industrial district and adjacent to the Central Artery, a raised highway that snaked its way through Downtown Boston, the building was minimally visible and faded away to obscurity until the late 1990s when the highway was buried under the city as part of the “Big Dig”. The open scar and subsequent re-greening of much of the former highway spaces necessitated the owners to re-work the building, due to its newfound gateway presence into the neighborhood. Brian Healey Architects renovated the building, adding an additional floor of offices and reworked facades. The result is a Post-war mixed-use hodgepodge of a building that expresses its use visually on each floor in a no-nonsense way, making it a unique urban building. Additionally the building has long been rented to small businesses, almost all Asian-owned with direct ties to the Chinatown and Leather District neighborhoods. Recent plans have been approved for a new office tower on the site and supported by preservation groups stating that “the existing garage is historically significant or beneficial to the neighborhood”, but to me, the further erasure of quirky buildings for more out-of-context developments is not the way to go.
When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, New York City’s advantageous water connection through the Hudson River threatened Boston’s dominance as a historic trade center. Since the topography of the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts made construction of a canal infeasible, Boston turned to the emerging railroad technology for a share of the freight to and from the Midwestern United States. The Boston and Worcester Railroad was chartered in 1831 and construction began the next year. Stations and rail lines were built westward of Boston and would eventually reach the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley with three existing lines merging in 1867 as the Boston and Albany Railroad, becoming the longest and most expensive point-to-point railroad yet constructed in the United States. The B&A undertook a significant program of improvement and beautification in the 1880s and 1890s, when the railroad hired architect Alexander Rice Esty to design this building, the Boston passenger station which was completed in 1881, the year of Esty’s death. That same year, the B&A hired architect Henry Hobson Richardson to design a series of passenger stations, connecting suburban villages west of Boston to the city. This station was located on Kneeland Street and serviced passenger service from Boston until the new South Station, a consolidated train station of various lines, was completed in 1899. This station later became a freight and storage warehouse for the railroad until the 1950s when the building was razed for the Central Artery, signaling the death of train travel as we knew it for decades to come. The site of the former station has remained undeveloped since then.
Buildings of New England 