Studio Building, Beacon Hill // 1914

The Studio Building on Charles Street in Boston’s historic Beacon Hill, is a unique, Arts and Crafts style building constructed of brick with stucco walls and a red tile roof. Built in 1914 by William Coombs Codman, a real estate developer and member of the Beacon Hill Associates, a group of preservationists who bought and resold properties in the neighborhood with the aim to limit unsympathetic development. The group helped the Beacon Hill Flat area, which was a higher concentration of former stables west of Charles Street, a gentrified artist and residential enclave. Codman hired the young architectural firm of Loring & Leland, to design the Studio Building, which in its original configuration, contained three stores at the ground-level, two dwellings, offices and artist studios with oversized windows. Just years after the building was completed, Charles Street was widened in 1920, chopping ten feet off the facades of all buildings on the west side of Charles Street, including this building. Charles G. Loring was retained by Codman to oversee the renovations to the new facade and storefront, likely replicating what was once there. After 1920, the building was largely occupied by apartments for single women of means and remains one of the neighborhood’s most iconic and enchanting buildings.

Chemical Engine #13 Firehouse // 1909

Just a block from the Bethel AME Church (last post) in Jamaica Plain, Boston, you will find this absolutely charming old fire station. The station was built in 1909 about the same time as the new Forest Hills Train Station was completed, signaling a huge population and development boom in the area. To provide emergency and fire service to the newly developing neighborhoods surrounding the train station, the City of Boston hired the architectural firm of Moller and Smith to design a new station that would allow for horses and related apparatus as well as a new fire automobile to enter the building. The Arts and Crafts style building is constructed of brick supported by structural steel finished with Carolina pine at the interior. The building retains its pyramidal hipped roof in slate and a unique corner tower capped with a castellated parapet.