The Gothic Revival receiving tomb at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston is located not far from the iconic entrance gate and chapel/offices. The structure was built in 1871 and designed by architects, Carl Fehmer and William R. Emerson in the Gothic style, a prevalent aesthetic that the overseers encouraged for the various 19th century buildings constructed on the grounds. Historically, the Gothic Revival structure served as the entrance to underground holding tombs for the temporary storage of bodies awaiting burial or relocation, typically stored when the ground was too frozen for burial. The structure features a granite structure with oak ceiling and painted tile flooring. A massive project began in 2016 to excavate and build a new Garden Mausoleum, built into the landscape with the restored Receiving Tomb serving as the focal point. The tomb portico was adapted as a gateway to an open-air courtyard flanked by walls set into the slope which contain internment chambers for burials, with a restored fountain in front and woman archer statue atop.
This iconic Boston building is threatened with demolition!
The clock is ticking for the Alley/Eblana Brewery, a historically and architecturally significant building in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood. Located on Heath Street, the historic Alley Brewery, also known as the Eblana Brewery, stands as a striking reminder of the city’s once-thriving brewing industry. Founded by Irish immigrant John R. Alley (1822-1888) in the mid-1880s, the brewery produced the popular Eblana Irish Ale, a name derived from the ancient term for Dublin, reflecting Alley’s heritage and the strong Irish influence in the area. John Alley previously co-owned the Highland Spring Brewery nearby, but founded a brewery in his own name in 1885. For his brewery, Alley hired Philadelphia architect Otto C. Wolf, who was the nation’s premier brewery architect and engineer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The four-story complex was built in 1886 and showcased some of the most advanced brewing technology of its era while displaying an impressive blend of brick and granite craftsmanship. Its distinctive façade features a dramatic central bay, granite-trimmed arches, rough-faced stone braces, wrought-iron gates, and carved stone plaques bearing Alley’s initials and the date of construction. After John’s death in 1888, the business continued under the ownership of his two sons, Frederick and George. The brothers in 1899, added the adjacent bottling and refrigeration building, which employs similar architectural features and materials to the main brewery. Brewing here ceased with Prohibition and the structure later served a variety of manufacturing uses, when during the 1960s, many windows were filled with brick. The Alley-Eblana Brewery remains one of Boston’s most architecturally significant surviving brewery buildings, embodying Boston’s rich industrial and ethnic heritage, but it is threatened. Developers have owned the building since 2013 and have done nothing to preserve or even maintain the structure, making it a case of demolition by neglect. They are requesting to demolish both structures, but the demolition has been delayed 90-days through the Boston Landmarks Commission Demolition Delay review process. If you want to see the building repurposed and saved, reach out to the Boston Landmarks Commission and advocate for its adaptive reuse, which would provide housing and maintain a significant architectural landmark for the community.
While altered, the Milford Opera House Block on Main Street, stands as one of the architecturally distinctive and significant 19th century buildings in Milford, Massachusetts. As the town prospered in the decades following the Civil War, and wealthy residents, including William F. Draper, an executive with the Draper Corporation in nearby Hopedale, sought to use their wealth to improve their community. In 1880, planning began to erect an opera house building, which would bring the arts to the community, and after months of discussion and planning, funding and a site on Main Street was secured. Architect, Frederick Swasey was hired by the association, who furnished plans for the Victorian Gothic building to contain five retail stores on the ground floor with an auditorium above capable of seating 1,100. The building suffered from a fire in 1912 and use as an opera house ceased and starting in the 1920s and the building began showing moving pictures. Later in the 20th century, the building was altered with the storefronts enclosed, windows on upper stories changed, iron cresting at the roof and clock face removed, but the building still retains its ornate entrance and is an important landmark on the town’s Main Street.
A source of local pride, the Milford Armory building on Pearl Street in Milford, Massachusetts, is an architectural landmark in the community and shows how adaptive reuse can give old buildings new life. The structure was completed in 1912 and constructed of locally quarried and cut Milford granite, a pinkish-grey granite that covers an area of approximately 39 square miles, centered around present-day Milford. Between the Civil War and WWII, the town of Milford became famous for its “pink” granite as a building material, with over 1,000 men laboring in dozens of quarries supplying the stone for some of America’s most iconic buildings including: the Boston Public Library, Worcester City Hall, as well as the original Penn Station and Natural History Museum in New York, among many others. Besides being built of local granite, the Armory was also designed by local architect, Wendell T. Phillips, who followed nationwide trends designing the building like a fortified Medieval castle with crenellated towers, with long and narrow windows recessed, emulating the slit windows used in similar medieval structures. Like in many communities all over the country, the need to store firearms and major National Guard trainings declined with some being demolished, others sitting vacant, and others like the Milford Armory, seeing new life. The Milford Armory was slated for closure in 2002 and was ultimately saved when the Town of Milford and the National Guard struck a deal to initially rent the building for a Youth Center and gymnasium and share the space with the Guard. The armory was home to the popular Youth Center, which needed gym space not available anywhere else. The building was ultimately purchased by the town and underwent a massive restoration, being rededicated as the Milford Youth Center in 2016.
The town of Milford, Massachusetts, is somewhat a hidden gem in the region, but it sure does have some architectural landmarks! Located on Main Street, the Milford Town Hall stands as an early American example of the Romanesque Revival architecture style, and is one of the earlier works of ecclesiastical architect, Thomas Silloway, who would design over 400 churches before his death in 1910. The Milford Town Hall has a somewhat ecclesiastical design to it with a pedimented facade, rusticated base, and pilasters breaking up the bays. The elaborately ornamented cupola rises nearly 50 feet in height and contains a round clock and scroll trim on all four sides with round arched openings and surmounted by a gold dome. As the town grew in the late 19th century, a large cross-axial rear addition was designed in 1900 by local architect, Robert Allen Cook, who appears to have also made the facade more Colonial Revival in style, changing some arched windows to pedimented windows and a Palladian in the gable. An interesting feature of the building is that it is built of wood and not the iconic local Milford “pink” granite that the town became known for. The Milford Granite was actually discovered after the Civil War, and the building material was quarried and transported all over the country for large institutional buildings.
This handsome two-story brick stable on Byron Street in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood was built around 1865 for the Sigourney family, and its front façade retains a distinctive appearance associated with that period. The brick façade sits on a granite base, and the first story contains two entrances characteristic of its stable use: a vehicle door providing access to ground floor and a domestic entrance connecting to stairs leading to upper levels including stableman’s quarters on the top floor. Around the time of WWI, the property was owned by James F. Burke, who added the painted sign over the carriage entry. The stable was converted to a residence in about 1964 for owner, Jay Schrochet by architect, Benjamin S. Fishstein and remains a single-family home today.
This iconic building at 84 Beacon Street in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, is best-known for its bar, which in 1982, became world-famous as the locale for the bar in the television sitcom Cheers, one of the most-watched programs in television history; but its history begins earlier. This five-story building was constructed in 1911 as a mansion for Bayard Thayer (1862-1916), who split his time between Boston and his country estate in his home-town of Lancaster, Massachusetts. Thayer hired architect, Ogden Codman Jr., a favorite designer of Boston and New York high-society, to design his Boston mansion, which is an expressive and overscaled example of a Colonial Revival style townhouse. Bayard Thayer died in 1916 and his widow, Ruth Simpkins Thayer, lived here with her granddaughter, Ruth, and nine domestic servants. After Ruth Thayer’s death in 1941, the property was conveyed to the Colonial Properties Trust in 1944, operating the building as a small luxury apartment hotel. From this point on, the hotel became known as Hampshire House. In about 1969, the basement space in the Hampshire House opened as the Bull & Finch Pub, which later became the inspiration of the iconic sitcom Cheers. Pictures of the exterior of the building were used in the show’s credits and scene changes, and the interior was faithfully replicated from the set in Hollywood, where the show was actually filmed. The Bull & Finch Pub has permanently been renamed Cheers Pub and visited by many who wish to visit the place where “everybody knows your name”.
The Fleur-de-Lys Studios is of the most architecturally significant and unique buildings in New England and can be found on Thomas Street in the College Hill section of Providence. Built in 1885 and a vivid expression of the Queen Anne style and showing the emergence of the Arts and Crafts movement movement in America, the handsome building blending is the result of a partnership between artist, Sydney Richmond Burleigh and architect, Edmund R. Willson as a dedicated creative hub for working artists, a purpose it still serves today under the stewardship of the Providence Art Club, who received the deed of the property in 1939 by Burleigh’s widow. Its design draws heavily on medieval English and Tudor Revival influences, with a striking half-timbered façade, stucco panels, carved heads as hanging pendants, and projecting casement windows that break dramatically from the surrounding colonial streetscape. What truly sets the structure apart, however, is its richly symbolic ornamentation—allegorical figures representing painting, sculpture, and architecture adorn the exterior. More than a century later, the Fleur-de-Lys Studios remains both a National Historic Landmark and a living workspace, preserving its original spirit as a place where art and architecture are inseparably intertwined.
The Luther Store in Swansea, Massachusetts, is a historic commercial building constructed in 1815 and uncommon as a rare brick block with saltbox roof. The structure was built for John Brown Luther, and was operated by the Luther family as a store until 1903. The Luther’s Corner area was in the mid-19th century the economic center of Swansea, and Luther’s Store served as post office and library. The building was acquired in 1941 by the Swansea Historical Society, which now operates it as a local history museum following a restoration by Fall River architect, Maude Darling-Parlin.
The First Baptist Church of Swansea may look like a traditional, Greek Revival style church from the 1840s, a common form and style found in nearly every community in New England, but the church is home to the oldest Baptist congregation in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and is the fourth oldest in the United States! The church (and town’s name) was founded by Reverend John Myles (c. 1621–1683), a Baptistminister who immigrated to present-day Swansea from Swansea in Wales, who was a founder of the earliest recorded Baptist churches in Wales. During the King Philip’s War, Reverend Myles fled from the fighting to Boston and pastored the new First Baptist Church in Boston. The present Greek Revival structure, the fifth of the congregation, was built under the direction of the English-born Reverend J. J. Thatcher, pastor of the church from 1846 to 1854. The vernacular Greek Revival church features a pedimented facade with pilasters dividing the bays, and a square belfry.
The Wrentham Congregational Church is the oldest house of worship in the suburban community, and the fourth consecutive meetinghouse for the congregation at the town center that was originally established in 1692. The frontier town grew slowly as a largely agricultural community and three houses of worship were built nearby the town common until 1833, when it was decided that a church worthy of its historic congregation be built. It is not clear who designed the Greek Revival church, but timbers were transported to town in 1834 for the new edifice which was completed that year. Over the following century, the church was expanded and modernized, all-the-while retaining its historic character. The four-stage steeple toppled during the New England Hurricane of 1938, and was rebuilt. The congregation remains active in the community and is a visual landmark at the town center.
Jonesville Academy is a historic schoolhouse located in the village of Jonesville, in the town of Richmond, Vermont. The large, wooden schoolhouse was constructed around 1868 in the Italianate style with center entry tower, bracketed cornice, window and door hoods, and round arched windows, all hallmarks of the style. The building was constructed at the height of the area’s success as an industrial village, and operated as a high school and later as an elementary school until 1955, when schools in Richmond were consolidated. After the school closed, the building operated as a grange hall for a number of years until it reverted back to private ownership, and is today a single-family residence.
The old Carriage Shop on Water Street in Warren, Rhode Island, is an early and surviving industrial building from the late 18th century that adds to the charm and history of the great waterfront town. The two-story building has a three-bay facade with a center entrance and 48-pane fixed sash windows on the first floor and 12-over-12 sash windows on the second floor. The stepped parapet masks the low gable roof of the building behind that extends far back in the lot. The building was a workshop and paint shop for Gardner & Hoar, builders and carpenters, in the mid-19th century, and later as a blacksmithing shop and carriage shop before the turn of the 20th century. Luckily for us, the building has been preserved and while not finding a place in architectural journals, the building is an important remaining building that strongly contributes to the character of the town.
Buildings of New England 