The Prudential Tower, part of Boston’s Prudential Center complex in the Back Bay, is the city’s second tallest skyscraper. It was designed by Charles Luckman and Associates for Prudential Insurance and built between 1960 and 1964. It towered over the nearby John Hancock building of 1947, which prompted the rival insurance company to build a taller tower in 1975.
The Nathan Appleton House, at 39 Beacon Street, and its partner, the Daniel Parker House, at no. 40, were designed for the two former business partners by Alexander Parris, a noted Boston architect. Built in 1818, a fourth floor was added to both houses in 1888. These two bowfront row houses which are transitional between the Federal and Greek Revival styles, at one time mirrored each other more closely, but the Appleton house had an extra window added on each of its floors. Nathan Appleton was a pioneering textile manufacturer. The marriage of the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to Appleton‘s daughter, Fanny, took place in the house in 1843. From 1914 into the 1990s, the building housed the Women’s City Club of Boston. In more recent times, it has been subdivided into condominiums. There is a video of the house’s exterior on YouTube.
The house at 51 Chestnut Street, on Boston’s Beacon Hill, was built in 1830. It was the home of Rev. Charles Lowell, who was the pastor of West Church in Boston from 1806 to 1861. Rev. Lowell, who was the father of the poet, James Russell Lowell and grandfather of the Civil War General Charles Russell Lowell, later acquired and moved to Elmwood, a Georgian-style house in Cambridge.
The 1872 Mansard-roofed house of industrialist and congressman Frederick L. Ames, originally designed by Peabody and Stearns and located at the intersection of Dartmouth Street and Commonwealth Avenue, in Boston’s Back Bay, was significantly enlarged in 1882 by the architect, John Hubbard Sturgis. Sturgis had earlier designed the Gothic Revival-style Museum of Fine Arts building of 1876 and in the Ames House he worked in the English Queen Anne style. The expanded Ames Mansion, which was occupied for 90 years by the Ames and Webster families, features a two-level conservatory, large tower and chimney and porte-cochere. The interior is lavish, with stained glass by John La Farge and murals by Benjamin Constant. In 1972, the house was converted to serve as offices, a notable example of adaptive reuse.
Founded in 1848 by an act of the Massachusetts legislature and first opened in 1854, the Boston Public Library moved to its current building, on Copley Square, in 1895. Designed by Charles Follen McKim, of McKim, Mead, and White, the building (built 1887-1895) is modeled on the style of an Italian Renaissance palazzo and is also influenced by Alberti’s San Francesco at Rimini, with an inner courtyard, based on the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome. McKim’s Beaux Arts training led to the classicism of the Library building, influenced in particular by Henri Labrouste‘s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (built 1843-1850) in Paris. This style would greatly influence the design of American public buildings in the following decades. The Boston Public Library, both inside and out, combines architecture with famous sculpture and mural painting. The neighboring Harvard Medical School building of 1883 was demolished and replaced by Philip Johnson‘s New Brutalist-style Library Addition in 1966 to 1972.
Built in 1871, the Mansard-roofed French Second Empire style corner building of the Hotel Vendome, on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, was designed by William G. Preston, who had studied in Paris. The western section, designed by J.F. Ober and R. Rand, followed in 1881. Hotel Vendome was for many years the city’s premier hotel, but by the late 1960s attempts were made to demolish the outmoded building. Renovations were almost complete in 1972, when a fire destroyed the southeast section of the original structure. Nine firefighters died when part of the building collapsed after the fire was out. There is a memorial to the nine firefighters on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall at Dartmouth Street. A 1970s addition to the Vendome by Stahl/Bennett in the Brutalist style replaced the destroyed section. The building today houses apartments, offices and stores.
The Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston was built in 1912 on Copley Square, at the site of the old Museum of Fine Arts building (1876), which was torn down in 1909. The hotel was designed by the local architect Clarence Blackall, working with Henry J. Hardenbergh, a nationally renowned architect of hotels, who had studied with the Ecole des Beaux Arts-trained Detlef Lienau. John Singer Sargent had a suite in the hotel in the early 1920s. The building is now the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel.
