An exemplar of late International Style, this stucco-clad concrete building stands apart from its traditional Back Bay neighbors and is located on one of the city’s most busy streets, Newbury Street. Built as the showroom and offices for Knoll International furniture, its crisp design is an elegant statement in form and details of Bauhaus- and Le Corbusier–inspired architecture, including its asymmetrical composition, curvilinear lower facade, horizontal window bands, and stairwell located behind a glass brick wall. The building was designed by Gwathmey, Siegel and Associates who have a great diversity of commissions, all with thoughtful site-specific designs. The building reinforced the positive qualities of modernist architecture at a time when some architects were advocating for historic revivals and Post-Modernism. The building was later occupied by DKNY and is presently rented out by Lenscrafters.
The only building that survived the wrecking ball of Urban Renewal on the stretch of Boston’s Boylston Street, south of the Public Garden was this six-story commercial building, known as the Garden Building. In 1911, architect Julius Adolphe Schweinfurth furnished plans for the new commercial building which was in the Beaux Arts style. The first floor was originally planned for three stores, with the upper five floors containing offices. A recessed penthouse floor served as studio space for artists and photographers with the large windows and skylights, the unobstructed views of the Public Garden didn’t hurt either! When the bulldozers of urban renewal came in the 1970s and 1980s to the area, this building surprisingly survived, and was reincorporated into the larger Heritage on the Garden condo development.
This one took me a while to write about because it still pains me to see it was demolished… The Arlington Building was constructed in 1904 as a mid-block building on Boylston Street, across from the Public Garden for the Bryant and Stratton Commercial School. It was designed by architect William Gibbons Rantoul of the firm Andrews, Jacques & Rantoul in the Beaux Arts style. The school building was significantly altered when Arlington Street was extended southward through Boylston Street, making this building suddenly a corner landmark. The new Arlington Street elevation was modeled after the Boylston Street facade. By 1929, Shreve, Crump & Low, established in 1796, the oldest purveyor of luxury goods in North America, moved into the building. The next year, they hired architect William T. Aldrich to add Art Deco embellishments and storefront designs, along with interior renovations to modernize the structure. The luxury company had downsized and moved out of the building, and its prominent site was threatened when owner/developer Druker Co. submitted for a demolition permit to raze the building (and others on the block) to erect a modern office/commercial building. After years of fighting between local preservationists and business interests and developers, the latter won and the building was demolished by late 2022. The new building, 350 Boylston Street, is presently undergoing construction, and in my opinion, is a poor attempt to fit into the surrounding context and is neither as unique or inspiring as the former building.
The Middlesex Reservoir and Spot Pond are located just north of Boston and have long been a little piece of the outdoors near the heart of New England’s largest metropolitan area. In 1894, the Massachusetts Legislature established the Metropolitan Parks Commission, which was endowed with the authority to acquire, maintain, and make recreational spaces available to the public. By 1900 the new commission had acquired 1,881 acres for the reservation. Part of this reservation, Spot Pond, is a natural water feature that for a number of years was integrated into the Boston area public drinking water supply, servicing the towns of Stoneham, Melrose, and Malden with drinking water. As part of this, gatehouses were built with hardware to open and close the pipes delivering the water to the adjacent towns. This gatehouse is in Stoneham was built in 1900 by the architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, to not only protect the machinery inside, but to beautify the parkland, then maintained by the Metropolitan Parks Commission. The Renaissance Revival style building is today surrounded by a tall chain link fence, which really diminishes its presence in the landscape (but it does help prevent graffiti).
About ten years after the nearby Carlisle building (last post) was completed by owner Jonas Gerlusha Smith (1817-1893), he began construction on another large, apartment hotel next door. He again retained architect Arthur Vinal, who was acting City Architect for the City of Boston to furnish the plans on the building, which would be attached to the older portion which fronts Gray Street behind. The building is extremely well-preserved and has some stunning metal bays with decorative details which really pop!
In 1880, Jonas Gerlusha Smith (1817-1893) received a permit to erect a multi-family apartment building on Warren Avenue in present-day South End. The lot was close to his personal residence at 13 Warren Avenue and would have been easy to maintain and oversee tenants in the building. Mr. Smith hired 26-year-old architect Arthur H. Vinal, who furnished the plans for the handsome Queen Anne building. Vinal would later become the City Architect of Boston from 1884 to 1887, designing the High Service Building at the Chestnut Hill Reservoir just seven years after this building. By the late 1880s, the building was known as The Carlisle and it remained in the Smith family holdings under Walter Edward Clifton Smith until the 1930s. Walter attended the Cambridge Episcopal Theological School and later worked at various churches in the Boston area, serving as pastor in his later years. He lived on Follen Street in Cambridge while he held the Carlisle for additional income. Under new ownership in 1950, a retail storefront was added to the first floor which was occupied as a florist for some years. In 1979, after years of deferred maintenance, the property was purchased by Louis G. Manzo and his son David W. Manzo, who meticulously restored the building over time into the time-capsule that it is today!
Not much remains of one of Roxbury’s once grand rural estates, but as there is some left, I want to feature it before it’s all gone, possibly any day now! Horatio Harris was born in Dorchester (present-day South Boston) in 1821 and ran a prominent auction house in Boston. He built his country estate in Roxbury beginning in 1857 in the Gothic Revival style, adding on and updating numerous times. During the Civil War, the firm of Horatio Harris & Co. obtained the contract to sell at auction all goods which were confiscated by the United States’ land or naval forces and brought to Boston. He made a lot of money and added to his land holdings and estate house in Roxbury. The mansion’s construction was timely as Roxbury was transitioning from a rural town, with farms and country estates of wealthy Boston merchants, to a streetcar suburb, increasing the land value of his holdings. The estate included nearly 30 acres of meandering paths, a lake with an island, outbuildings, and an observation tower – one of which remain today besides the ruin of the former mansion. Horatio died in 1876, in the decades following his death, his heirs began subdividing the estate, developing some and selling other plots off for houselots. By the early 1900s, Jewish people began moving into Roxbury, mixing with the predominantly Yankee population. By 1915, the Harris manor house was owned by the Hebrew Alliance of Roxbury, Inc. By the 1920s, they expanded facilities, adding a school building to the front of the former Harris Mansion, completely obscuring the facade of the old estate. In the 1940s, the upper stories were removed. Seemingly the death knell of the old Harris Villa was a fire in 2019, which gutted much of the remaining original fabric of the estate. All that remains is a bay window, some window trim details and a Gothic porte-cochere at the rear of the estate. See it before it’s too late!
Harriswood Crescent was built in 1889-90 at the height of Roxbury’s development as a streetcar suburb which coincided with the electrification of the streetcar lines in Boston. The area of Roxbury in which the Crescent is located, known at the time as Boston Highlands due to its rocky terrain and steep grades, was an extremely desirable residential location. As land values raised, middle and upper-class families looked for varied housing types that fit their demands. Seen as a great investment of the family estate, the heirs of wealthy businessman Horatio Harris (1821-1876) redeveloped lots on one side of a rocky park for fine townhouses, which were named Harriswood Crescent. The name was probably chosen for its historical associations with Boston’s Tontine Crescent and the great Georgian crescents of London and Bath in England. Architect J. Williams Beal designed the row, which was one of his first commissions upon returning to Boston in 1888 after employment as a draftsman at McKim, Mead & White and a long study in England to view architecture. Built at 15 separate units, the row of Tudor style houses is among the only of such developments in Boston, and New England at large.
People don’t explore Roxbury enough! The neighborhood is full of amazing architecture with buildings in a great state of preservation and some waiting for the overlapping vinyl siding to be removed. This restored beauty sits perched above the road and is one of the best examples of a Second Empire merchant’s home in Roxbury. The house was built around 1870, within a year of owner Henry A. Thomas purchasing the lot here for $4,800. Mr. Thomas owned a boot and shoe retail store in Downtown Boston for years. The lot was later subdivided and stucco apartments were built to the side, notable at the time when Roxbury began to really densify with housing construction in the early 1900s.
With funds for expansion at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Roxbury, the hospital’s board commissioned architect Willard T. Sears (also the architect of the earlier Cary Cottage and Zakrzewska Building) to design a new surgical building at the hospital’s growing campus. Construction began on the new Cheney Surgical building in 1899 on the birthday of its namesake, Edna Dow Cheney an original incorporator of the hospital and then President. The Cheney Surgical Building was designed in the Colonial Revival style in brick, with a four-story central block with three-story wings. The central entranceway is accentuated by a classical porte-cochere topped by a Palladian window, in keeping with the Georgian Revival tradition of symmetry and classical vocabulary. The building is one of the first you see when climbing the hill into the campus.
Buildings of New England 