American Landscapes

Prospect Hill Tower // 1903

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Originally part of the town of Charlestown, Massachusetts, Prospect Hill is now located in the nearby town of Somerville, established in 1842. As one of the hills closest to the city of Boston, the hill played a pivotal role in the line of defensive works constructed after the Battle of Bunker Hill. The area developed slowly, with old farms around Prospect Hill, largely subdivided in the late 19th century for residential development. Around this time, in 1886, the Prospect Hill Park Association was formed, and in 1898, land here was purchased for a public park. The focal point of the iconic neighborhood park is the stone castle structure at the top. Completed in 1903 to commemorate soldiers of the Revolutionary and Civil wars, the rusticated granite tower was designed by Ernest W. Bailey, the City Engineer of Somerville, who also worked to landscape the surrounding park. The granite blocks were shipped in from Deer Isle, Maine. By the 1960s, the structure began to suffer from deferred maintenance. The City of Somerville added the concrete retaining walls to shore up the landscape, which worked for some time. Decades later in the early 2000s, the structure was at risk of further deterioration. Through Community Preservation Act funds, the tower and surrounding landscape were restored and made safer, making this important memorial accessible and enhanced for all to enjoy. 

The Elms – Gardens // c.1911

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For my last post on the spectacular Elms Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, I wanted to highlight something I rarely feature on this page, a garden. When the mansion was completed by 1901, architect Horace Trumbauer and his firm went to work to produce plans for a natural landscape with a large lily pond at the far edge of the property. After 1907, the Berwind’s and high-society shifted and landscape ideals were influenced by newer theories in American landscape architecture, which sought influence from historical European gardens. Trumbauer reworked The Elms’ garden to reflect this new emphasis on reviving classical European garden design alongside landscape architects Ernest W. Bowditch and Jacques Greber advising on the parterre design in the sunken garden. A grand allée on the scale of 18th century French palace gardens extends across an expansive lawn toward two formal marble pavilions situated along a minor cross axis above a sunken garden. The marble pavillions appear to have been designed by Trumbauer and are inspired by 18th-century French garden pavilions. The grand context for the gardens is a park-like collection of specimen beech, elms, maples, linden and other large canopy trees. Many of the large trees have since succumbed to disease, but the formal Italian sunken garden remains one of the finest in the United States.