Category: Boston

Old South Meeting House (1729)

by Dan//Boston, Churches, Colonial

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Built in 1729, Boston’s Old South Meeting House was the largest building in the colonial town. The congregation began in 1669, when it separated from Boston’s First Church (becoming the Third Church of Boston). In the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the American Revolution, citizens would gather in the Old South Meeting House to debate and argue in the aftermath of events like the Boston Massacre. On the night of December 16, 1773, over 5,000 colonists, angered over the tax on tea, met at Old South and after hours of debate, Samuel Adams gave a secret signal which began the famous Boston Tea Party. During the war, occupying British troops took revenge for the Tea Party by ripping out the church‘s pews and using the building as a riding stable. They also set up a bar on the first balcony. The church continued to be used as a house of worship, but after it was nearly destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872, the congregation built the New Old South Church at Copley Square. In danger of being torn down, pioneering preservation efforts led to the restoration of the building, which has been a museum and historic site since 1877. It is also a stop on the Boston Freedom Trail. The steeple has been replaced twice, after storms in 1804 and 1954.

William Hickling Prescott House (1808)

by Dan//Boston, Federal, Houses

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William Hickling Prescott was an important nineteenth century historian who is best known for his works, History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847). The latter work was written in a house that Prescott lived in on Beacon Street in Boston from 1845 to 1859. The 1808 house (on the left in the photo above) was designed by Asher Benjamin and features Greek design motifs and a Federal style doorway. William Makepeace Thackeray, a friend of Prescott, visited the house. Thackeray was as inspired to write his novel, The Virginians (1859), after seeing two crossed swords displayed in the home, one belonging to Prescott‘s grandfather (Col. William Prescott) and one by Prescott’s wife’s father (Capt. John Linzee), each on opposing sides at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The Prescott House is now a museum and the headquarters of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Francis Parkman House (1830)

by Dan//Boston, Federal, Houses

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Francis Parkman was one of nineteenth century America’s most noted historians. His first book, The Oregon Trail (1849), became a classic and he went on to write his multi-volume epic, France and England in North America. From 1865 until his death in 1893, Francis Parkman resided at a house at 50 Chestnut Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill. It is one of several houses built sometime in the late 1820s or 1830s by Cornelius Coolidge.

Here’s an additional photo and a list of Parkman‘s works (with links to Google Books) which, although dated in many ways, are considered to be significant literary works: Continue reading “Francis Parkman House (1830)”

Phillips School (1824)

by Dan//Boston, Federal, Schools

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The former school building, built in 1824 at the corner of Pinckney and Anderson Streets in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, originally served as the Boston English High School. In 1844, it became the Phillips Grammar School, named for John Phillips, Boston’s first mayor. It became the first integrated school in Boston in 1855. In 1861, the Phillips School moved to a larger building and was renamed the Wendell Phillips School. The old building was then used by the Sharp School, a public school. In the 1980s, the building was adapted to house condominiums. Today, it is on the Black Heritage Trail.

New Old South Church (1875)

by Dan//Boston, Churches, Gothic

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Boston’s New Old South Church, on Boylston Street, is located off Copley Square, not far from Trinity Church, and was built in 1874-5. At that time, the congregation moved from its famous eighteenth century meetinghouse. Designed in a Venetian or Northern Italian Gothic style by Charles Cummings, based on the High Victorian Gothic ideas of John Ruskin, the church makes a strong architectural statement on its prominent corner location, contrasting with the neoclassical Boston Public Library across the street. John Evans, a sculptor from Scotland, carved the exterior sculpture of both New Old South and Trinity churches. The original tower began to lean and was removed in 1931, eventually being replaced by a newer and shorter tower in 1941.

Trinity Church, Boston (1877)

by Dan//Boston, Churches, Romanesque Revival

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Boston’s Trinity Parish (established in 1734) lost its church on Summer Street in an 1872 fire. They held a design competition for the building of a new church on Copley Square. The winner was H. H. Richardson, whose Romanesque design contrasted with his competitors’ preference for the Victorian Gothic. Richardson, who would produce in Trinity Church one of America’s great buildings, planned the building as a compact Greek Cross with a very prominent central tower. This centralized plan contrasted with the more typical narrow Latin Cross, in which clergy and congregation were separated. In the course of construction (1872-1877), the plan for the tower was eventually altered to a more complex design, inspired by the Cathedral of Salamanca and possibly influenced by Stanford White, who was apprenticing under Richardson at the time. Granite and Longmeadow sandstone were used in the construction. The interiors were realized by the artist, John La Farge, assisted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Richardson wished to rebuilt the two front towers, lowering them. Alterations were eventually made after his death when the portico and new towers were added between 1894 and 1897 under the successor of his practice, Hugh Shapley (of Shapley, Rutan, and Coolidge). More recently, geothermal wells have been drilled for heating and cooling. The adjoining Parish House (1874) has features which link it stylistically to the church.

Charles Street Meeting House (1804)

by Dan//Boston, Churches, Federal

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Designed by Asher Benjamin in 1804, the Charles Street Meeting House in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood began as the Third Baptist Church of Boston (it was built on reclaimed land near the Charles River where baptisms could be performed). In the 1830s, abolitionist members, led by Timothy Gilbert, challenged the church’s segregationist seating arrangements and went on to found the integrated Tremont Temple Baptist Church. In the years before the Civil War, the church became a center of abolitionism, with many notable speakers addressing audiences there, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. From 1876 to 1939, the building was the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1920, the church was moved ten feet west to accommodate the widening of Charles Street. With the departure of the African-American community from the north slope of Beacon Hill, it served as an Albanian Orthodox Church and lastly a Unitarian Universalist Church to 1979. In the 1980s, the Charles Street Meeting House was converted to secular use as offices. The building is on the Black Heritage Trail.