ArchiTalk

Summer Camp IV: Skin-and-bones Scouting

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 20:57:29 +0000

Webelos provisional Campsite Sequan at Yawgoog Scout Reservation, Rockville, Rhode Island. Photo by David R. Brierley.

The winding down of another summer on not so sweet a note—continued unemployment—prompted me to revisit my blogpost series on the summer camps I'd attended, to reminisce on simpler, closer times as well as the architecture that framed and shaped them.

T. Dawson Brown Gates, main entrance, Camp Yawgoog. Photo: KB1KOI.

Camp Yawgoog, a Boy Scout reservation in Rockville, Rhode Island that I attended in the summer of '77, is notable for a type of "organic architecture" that makes Frank Lloyd Wright's stab at that style seem even more slickly suburban, in terms of not really "roughing it" with his natural resources.

Sandy Beach Dining Hall at Camp Yawgoog.

Sandy Beach Waterfront Boathouse, Camp Yawgoog. Photo by David R. Brierley.

Designed primarily by Rhode Island architect D. Thomas Russillo (1902-1980), the Yawgoog campus parallels some of the earth-hugging horizontality of Wright's Prairie Style and Usonian houses but is a far better example of the kind of sticks-and-stones, skin-and-bones building that makes its users more aware of the nature that surrounds them than the structures themselves.

Three Point Waterfront at Camp Yawgoog.

It does this both by emphasizing the building materials' natural resources with hand-hewn logs, posts and beams and rough fieldstones, and also by eliminating most of the walls, allowing sun, breezes, green views and water views to permeate the interiors so we don't lose touch with nature.

Bucklin Memorial Building, Yawgoog Scout Reservation, Rockville, Rhode Island
designed in 1933 by architects Jackson, Robertson & Adams. Photo by J.P. Riley.

The Bucklin Memorial Building, built in 1933 from a design by Jackson, Robertson & Adams, was our "check-in" building and our formal introduction to the informality of nature, as expressed in its log-cabin woodwork and random-ashlar stonework. Its broad wingspread gave us an open-armed welcome to the open concept of nature we were in for once we passed through its gateway.

Tent at Yawgoog Scout Reservation. Photo by Robin Joubert.

But the hotel-like formality of Bucklin Memorial's design had us fooled. For we were not in for the kind of luxury, or even the basic cabin housing, that I discussed in my three previous summer camp posts. No, this time we were sleeping from Taps to Reveille in canvas tents in the great outdoors, in sleeping bags on basic bunkbeds, roughing it all the way, rain or shine, to learn survival skills.

Tents at Yawgoog Scout Reservation.

My tent was one of a circle of canvases around a central flagpole at Camp Baden-Powell. Named for Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell, it was a "sub-campsite" of Camp Sandy Beach, one of three camps comprising Yawgoog (the others were Camp Medicine Bow and Camp Three Point). Camp Baden-Powell was also one of the snootiest, boasting a self-righteous cheer:

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1!

Boomeracka-B! Poomeracka-P!

Boomeracka-Poomeracka, Who Are We?

We are the Scouts of Camp (clap, clap) B-P!

Scoutmaster Jim: "What's the best campsite in Sandy Beach?"

Us: "BADEN-POWELL! YEAAAAAAA!"

(On my first day, I was told to yell "Yeaaaaa!" whenever somebody said "Baden-Powell," so kids started saying it just to watch me react, until my tentmate Nick urged me to cut it out.)

Tents at Yawgoog Scout Reservation, Rockville, R.I.

Our biggest reaction was Reveille. After a far-off bugle-call while we tried to catch our last winks, a louder call burst from the flagpole: "Everybody UP!" Bump, thump, flip, rip, shake, rattle, roll. Bombs away from the top bunks as commotion filled my tent while we scrambled and scurried to cop the "FIRST UP" plaque at first light. "C'mon, Tent Two, let's move it!" (So long, plaque.)

Pebbles and pine-needles pricked our barren soles as we fell out in front of our tent (sometimes in the rain), as the dewy air permeated our PJs and our breath was as visible as campfire smoke. "Ten-SHUN!" All erect. "Hand-SALUTE!" Right hands stationed on foreheads as the colors fluttered their daily rise up the knotty tree-limb pole (except when it was raining). Their rope was bowlined securely in place. "TWO!" Hands dropped in a chorus of thigh-slaps. "All right, inspection's in thirty-five minutes! So let's get these tents cleaned up!" Which kicked off our mad dashes to the latrine, our helter-skelter scampers for the limited supply of brooms and dustpans, our on-the-double donning of our Scout uniforms, neckerchiefs, caps and sneakers. Floor-sweeps, trash-picks and bed-makes became the order of the day in dread of the military-style inspection on the way.

Tent at Yawgoog Scout Reservation. Photo by Joseph Schwendt.

Fast-forward thirty-five minutes. We stumbled and fell out in front of our tents, all uniformed, on the clock – mostly. "All right, that's five points off for Tent Two!" (Good-bye, "BEST INSPECTION" plaque.) One by one, Scoutmaster Jim stared down each tent leader, who shouted in full salute, "SIR! Flaming Arrows Patrol ready for inspection! SIR!"

Jim entered the tent to start the scrutiny: "There are pine-needles on the floor!" (But we swept everywhere!) He emerged and pointed toward our tootsies: "There's paper down there!" (But we picked up everything!) He jiggled our tent-ropes: "Too loose!" And then: "I'm taking off five more points because of that!" He pointed to me. I wasn't in my Scout uniform in time. At least the latrine squad got it worse: "The bathroom looks terrible! Sinks all dirty, hose left on the floor!" I broke into an impromptu cackle of giggles to relieve the letdown of flunking inspection and to start the rest of the day on a cheerier note.

On that cheerier note, we marched to the mess hall for breakfast: "Left, left, left-right-left! Sound off! One-two! Sound off! Three-four! Bring it on down! One-two-three-four, one-two—THREE-FOUR!" And so on.

The Camp Sandy Beach mess hall had the same open-concept design, just as open to the air as its interior space was, kudos to its network of hammerbeams, rafters and purlins, Because of its unobstructed openness (except for the "Blue" section in a separate space, used only when there was an overflow of Scouts), it had to be divided into sections, each marked by a color: Gold, Red, Yellow, etc., with a chart of left-to-right shifted color-names that were shifted to indicate when each section was scheduled to go get food or stay seated, when it had to bring in its plates or cups for the dishwasher, etc., to keep a reasonable order in a camp situation that could otherwise disintegrate into mayhem. This, of course, was subject to disruption, like the time one kid sprinkled pepper in another kid's milk when he went to the bathroom. I asked him why he was doing that, and he said, "He got me all wet! And José [the Scoutmaster] didn't do anything about it!" More giggles for me.

Another great space at Camp Sandy Beach was the stage, where that ever-dependable web of hammerbeams, rafters and purlins yielded a roomy auditorium for a smorgasbord of camp entertainment and song, from rousing choruses of "The Green Grass Grows All Around," "Bill Grogan's Goat," and "I Know a Man Named Michael Finnegan" (where each half of the audience tried to sing it the loudest, to the point where they'd yell it the loudest) to umpteen performances of the same old Three Stooges sketch ("NI-A-GA-RA FALLS! Slow-ly I turn! Step by step! Inch by inch!") and a lot of same-old others. And, of course, chats with Jim the Moose, a moosehead that hung in the hall, provoking cries of "We want the moose! We want the moose!" evolving into "We want the moose!" "SHOT!" "We want the moose!" "SHOT!"

To be continued...

Sources:

"Camp Yawgoog," Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/CampYawgoog1916

"Camp Yawgoog," Scouting America, Narragansett Council, https://campreservation.com/546/Camps/436

"Camp Yawgoog," Scouting America Troop 23 Brooklyn, https://www.t23b.org/locations/camp-yawgoog

"Camp Yawgoog, Yawgoog.org, https://www.yawgoog.org/

"Welcome to Camp Yawgoog," Boy Scouts of America 2026 Leaders' Guide, https://www.yawgoog.org/uploads/6/8/4/2/68426127/2400969_bsoa-2026_leaders_guide_final.pdf

Wendell, Bryan, "Mix tradition with high-flying fun at Yawgoog Scout Reservation, Narragansett Council," Scouting Magazine, https://scoutingmagazine.org/2016/08/mix-tradition-with-high-flying-fun-at-yawgoog-scout-reservation-narragansett-council

"Yawgoog Scout Reservation," Alchetron, https://alchetron.com/Yawgoog-Scout-Reservation

"Yawgoog Scout Reservation," Wikipedia, last edited on 10 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yawgoog_Scout_Reservation

"Yawgoog Scout Reservation, Narragansett Council," Scouting Magazine, YouTube, posted April 19, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJcA-Ae2-Ls

Rethinking kitsch

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:34:45 +0000

Does anybody remember these?

Did it jibe with your psychedelic wallpaper while rockin' you out on Elton John or Three Dog Night in the summer of '72?

Did it mingle with your macramé when you wore it on your wrist like a bracelet or strung it around your neck like love-beads?

Did you twist it while doin' the Twist in your bellbottoms or your miniskirt and go-go boots?

Did its sweetcake commercials turn you on soooooooo much it made the top of your list of must-haves for Christmas?

If you answered 'no' to any of the above—'cause either you weren't around back then or this kind of kitsch was just not that into you—these are examples of the Toot-a-Loop Crazy Color Radio, aka Panasonic R-72. People found it groovy, not so much for its sound (which was far from hi-fi, and was AM only), but for its portability, wearability, and twistability ("It's an S, it's an O, it's a crazy ra-di-o!" went its Mary Poppinsy jingle—though you had to twist it open to adjust the dial). Others dug its donut-hole familiarity, sensuous curves, and novel look and feel compared to the "square" transistor radios with the telescopic antennae they were getting bored of listening to on the beach.

Compared to those music boxes, others thought the Toot-a-Loop was just "ducky" (doesn't it resemble a duck?), so awestruck by its swoopy-swirly sculpture looking good on their dresser that they didn't care how its reception made Elton John, Alice Cooper or Chicago sound like they were being filtered through a cheesecloth.

But, yeah, I had an orange-yellow Toot-a-Loop of my own, just like the one on the left. And I slathered it with the psychedelic stickers that came with it, to mesh with my "mod room." But its novelty wore off quickly as I tired of its tinny reception and aimed for the higher-fi sound of the likes of the KLH FM radio that had been a fixture in my home at least since age 3.

Western Electric and AT&T got in on the act around 1973 with Donald Genaro's design for their Sculptura Round Donut Phone, in both touch-tone and rotary-dial (who remembers how to work one of those?) versions. Now the skinnier part of the negative space in-between the non-concentric circles became the hand-friendly receiver, while the heavier half held the cradle, buttons or dial, and wiring. But this was as temporal as the Toot-a-Loop, lasting until about 1989, when digital development turned them both into dinosaur doodads I dismissed for years as void of intellectual or archival value.

It turned out I was duped. An odyssey through Boston's Museum of Science revealed to me the mathematical origins of those gimmicks: the Dupin Cyclide. Instantly recalling the familiar Toot-a-Loop image of my preteens, this display presented itself as a geometric solid curving out of two nonconcentric circles as a tubular sequence of circles expanding halfway around and contracting back to the initial starting size to form a symmetrical solid of an off-center circle within an all-encompassing circle, bulging at one end and thinning back out at the other.

A complex model, to be sure, but basically this model I saw at the museum can fit 14 spheres inside it so that each sphere would touch its neighbor and all spheres would touch the cyclide's circular surface. In the computer-generated model to the right, the cyclide comprises multiple circles going both latitudinally and longitudinally, such that the latitudinal circles diminish in distance from each other as they near the thinner side of the cyclide but the longitudinal circles are always equidistant from each other. The cladding of the web the circles create forms a Dupin Cyclide solid.

The Dupin Cyclide (here depicted in more "hip" rainbow colors compatible with its Toot-a-Loop and Donut-Phone reductions) was discovered by, and subsequently named after, mathematician Pierre Charles François Dupin c.1802 while he was still a student at the École polytechique under the lectureship of Gaspard Monge, a pioneer of the descriptive geometry that is visually expressed in technical drawing. Dupin drew on Monge's mathematical theories and geometric drawing techniques to construct a cyclide as a product of the cross-hatching of latitudinal and longitudinal circles into a three-dimensional solid, such that the longitudinal circles would determine the cyclide's girth based on their diametrical reduction as they go around the solid, and the latitudinal circles would determine its circular form as they expand into the larger outer circle and contract into the smaller inner one. In this way the expansion and contraction of two diametrically opposed (really, perpendicular) sets of circles result in the Dupin Cyclide solid of nonconcentric circles, distinct from the "bagel" or "donut" solid of concentric circles. (Which means the Sculptura Phone wasn't a real donut, nor was the Toot-a-Loop a real "O" – but does "Dupin Cyclide" sell products?)

Phoenix Center's internal office building, taken in
2011 while under construction. Photo by Hat600.

And yes, the Dupin Cyclide model figures prominently in organic modern architecture. Perhaps the most remarkable example is the Phoenix International Media Center in Beijing, China, which applies the Dupin Cyclide form of bulging out at one end and thinning back out at the other to form a mathematically harmonic relationship with its alignment with the bending road beside it, its immediate street corner, and Chaoyang Park on one side of it.

According to its architect, Shao Weiping, the Phoenix Center's web network of mathematical spheres creates a twisting lattice "mesh" of a DNA-like double helix, wrapped in a loop in circular contours that serve as a living example of the yin-yang symbol of ancient Chinese philosophy, with two opposing geometric forces counter-forcing against each other yet complementing each other in a tension of harmony and a pushmi-pullyu of balance, just like the original Dupin Cyclide's cross-hatched circle groups.

Phoenix International Media Center, Beijing, China. Photo by EditQ.

Designed with parametric 3D modelling software, including Frank Gehry's Digital Project modeling tools, the Phoenix Center's Dupin Cyclide curves and contours have a scentifically practical use as well: they were manipulated to channel the building's surrounding airflow and convert the steel diagrid into a network of miniature canals that rechannel rainwater into reflective pools around the Center.

Montreal Biosphere, formerly the American Pavilion of Expo 67, by R. Buckminster

Fuller, on Saint Helen's Island, Montreal, Quebec. Photo by Philipp Hienstorfer.

Also, the diagrid enabled the Phoenix Center's construction in a more economical way than standard steel framing and glass or masonry walls, by creating a tensile web of circles holding the structure together with a cross-hatching technique like the original Dupin Cyclide. This is sort of a derivative of the geodesic dome pioneered by Buckminster Fuller and showcased at Expo 67.

USA Pavilion at Expo 67, geodesic dome design by Buckminster
Fuller, with minirail running through it. Photo by CA2MI.

That dome showcased how the lattice-shell of a geodesic polyhedron distributes the stress of its tensile triangular elements throughout the structure, so it withstands heavy loads with lighter structural materials and elements. The Phoenix Center picked up on some of these dynamics, such that its circular contours formed tensile triangles in a yin-yang cohesion of opposing forces joining to create structural soundness, harmony, and physical beauty, as the diametrically opposed circle groups together formed the smooth curves of the Dupin Cyclide solid that were so sensuously appealing to the Toot-a-Loop and Donut-Phone user.

Museum of the Future (2022, Killa Design), Dubai, UAE. Photo by Lyonerov.

Yet another architectural application of the Dupin Cyclide – albeit more elliptical and less structurally revealing this time – is the Museum of the Future (Arabic: متحف المستقبل) in Dubai, UAE. Built in 2022 from a design by Killa Design of Dubai, it proclaims its intention with windows shaped like an Arabic poem about the future written by Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and inscribed by Emirati Matar Bin Lahej, and a cyclide form of two nonconcentric ellipses, bulging at one end and thinning at the other. This design sculpturally promotes the seven-story museum as the incubator for ideas and innovation it was designed to be, as a showcase of scientific exhibits of what the year 2071 will supposedly bring us, from an orbital space station to advancements in ecology and biodiversity and interactive, collaborative activities for children under 10 as producers of "future heroes."

The museum's window-poetry, in English, reads:

We won't live for hundreds of years, but the products of our creativity can leave a legacy long after we are gone.

The future will be for those who will be able to imagine, design and build it, the future does not wait, the future can be designed and built today.

The secret of the renewal of life, the development of civilization and the progress of humanity is in one word: innovation.

Museum of the Future at night. Photo by Shefiq Abdulla.

Innovation certainly went into the cyclide-based design, which was conceived from new parametric design and Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools. These included a growth algorithm that digitally grew the internal structure in an advanced digital rendition of the the geometric drawing techniques Gaspard Monge had passed onto Pierre Charles François Dupin in the early 1800s. To realize this vision physically, Killa Design and Buro Happold Engineering enlisted Danem Engineering Works of Dubai to develop the internal steel diagrid structure of 2,400 diagonally intersecting steel members and the 1,024 fire-retardant, stainless steel-clad composite panels that present the poem on the exterior, each with a unique 3D shape not like the others, so the Arabic calligraphy can look pen-written and flow with the building's organic curve.

Yes, this is where the groovy fads of Toot-a-Loop and Donut-Phone originated from and led us to, in ways more mathematic, scientific, architectural, and downright intellectual than I could fathom as a kid who couldn't get away from the radio or get off the phone. So switch off the radio, hang up the phone, put down the "ducky," and do the math about the generations and evolutions of thought that brought them on and continue to reshape the ingenious discovery of the Dupin cyclide as a useful tool, building form, and scientific catalyst for the future. In other words, grow up!

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Dupin cyclide," Wikipedia, last edited on 16 January 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupin_cyclide

"Expo 67," Wikipedia, last edited on 11 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_67

Gardiner, Ginger, "Building the Museum of the Future," CompositesWorld, September 29, 2020, https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/building-the-museum-of-the-future

"Geodesic dome," Wikipedia, last edited on 4 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_dome

Giovannini, Joseph, "Phoenix International Media Center, Designed by BIAD," Architect, July 14, 2014, https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/phoenix-international-media-center-designed-by-biad_o/

"Museum of the Future," Wikipedia, last edited on 12 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_the_Future#cite_note-:4-29

"Phoenix Center," Wikipedia, last edited on 7 May 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Center

"Sculptura Or 'Donut' Telephone, 1980-1989," The Henry Ford (Museum of American Innovation), https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/artifact/359260?AssetId=THF88084

"Western Electric 'Sculptura' Telephone, Circa 1978," The Henry Ford (Museum of American Innovation), https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/artifact/60237?AssetId=THF136638

Motel majesty

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:11:00 +0000

"Main Street is almost all right." — Robert Venturi

Photo by Jerry Huddleston.

I've always loved motels. They were what I looked forward to most of all on family car trips (aside from for root-beer-and-burger chow-downs at A&W).

Yeah, I know. Cheap. Cheesy. Chintzy. Gaudy. Junky. Tacky. Trashy. Ugly. Baaaaad. Boring. Drab. Dull. Fake. Lowbrow. No class. No taste. No vacancy. Urban blight. Suburban sprawl. If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all. Good for Joe Bag-o'-Donuts. Or Joe Six-pack. Or Johnny Smoke. Or a one-night stand. Or the Gideons. Or a towel to swipe from the bathroom.

So what merit can an architecture aficionado like me possibly see in a motel? I'll tell you. Class. Clean. Comfy-cozy. Convenient. Cushy. Cool (as long as the AC is on, the curtains are drawn and the blinds are down). And this seemingly sleepy Super 8 Motel down the road from me in Watertown, Massachusetts (below), is no exception. If I stayed here, I'd be...

HOME!

That's my gut reaction the moment I step into a motel room. No frills. No window-dressing. Just the basics. Beds. Lamps. Nightstand. Radiator. AC. TV. Wi-Fi. Window. Curtains. Cabinet. Carpet. Chairs. Table. Drawer (where Gideons' Bible pops out at you, whether you like it or not). Shower. Shampoo. Sink. Soap. Towels. Toilet. What more do you really need to live well?

That's what I love about motels — all the comforts of home with the clean lines of economy — the basic values we all long for in our living space (and where we'd stay forever, if we could afford it). But it's pointless to poeticize other Boston-area motels, for, as noted above, they're just like all the rest. So, to get some architectural ooh-aah in here, let's motor across America and see some motels made with more imagination...

HoJo's hiatus

Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge and Restaurant, Burlington, MA (1968-2000s).

The bright orange roof and turquoise spire of Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge and Restaurant were some of America's most recognizable roadside icons. Their very presence marked a dependably familiar place to stop for a greasy burger or mac-and-cheese (blecch!) and a rest after being a road-runner too long.

This one stood on the Middlesex Turnpike in Burlington, Massachusetts (no, HoJo's did not adjust its iconography according to the state it was in, in its quest for instant recognition anywhere) from 1968 (when it was part of America's largest dining chain, serving more away-from-home meals than any other organization save the U.S. Army) until its closure and demolition by 2006, when Wyndham Hotels and Resorts took over the chain and ran the roof into the ground. The last HoJo's, in Lake George, N.Y., closed in 2022 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. "Howard Johnson's influence is most apparent in two innovations: its pioneering use of franchising and its adaptation to the American highway," wrote Paul Freedman – but, ultimately, that adaptation became too unoriginal for HoJo's to last, being characteristic of every motel (hence its name: MOtorist's hoTEL).
Tom's territory

The Tom Sawyer Motor Inn was one of the first motels I ever stayed in as a kid — and where I first learned about Mark Twain's mischievous but memorable literary character. This one in Elmira, N.Y. (now the Mark Twain Motor Inn), stretches long across its lot, expressing its namesake's adventurous, freebooting wanderlust.

Dutchmaid's den

Today operating solely as the Dutchmaid Deck restaurant, the Dutchmaid Motel was more regional than HoJo's, boasting its presence "In the Heart of the Penna. Dutch Country" in Ephrata, PA, though in reality it was as "Dutch" as Dutch Masters Cigars, looking like any other motel along the Pike.

Star Lite stretch

Photo by White Writer.

The Star Lite Motel in Dilworth, Minnesota, is the quintessence of streamlined motel design: horizontal, one story, stretching all the way down its site to line up all its rooms in a row conveniently for cars, so it's a snap to park, check in, unload, unlock, change, brush, and sleep. For this is what a "motel" is: a MOtorist's hoTEL, one-stop off-the-road, into-bed convenience, no stairs to climb, no elevators to take.

Sunset's salutation

Photo by Gorup de Besanez, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This Sunset Motel on Route 66 in Villa Ridge, Missouri, gives guests a double welcome: by its neon sign right on the road (a way virtually all motels lure roadsters in for the night) and by the open-armed layout of its building, which is accented with gables reminiscent of regional architecture, presenting itself as a place to call home, if only for a night.

Cactus comfort

Photos by Gorup de Besaanez, courtsy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Cactus Inn Motel in McLean, Texas, capitalizes big-time on the desert image of its south-to-southwest location in the U.S. (as well as its own hot, dry area) to hook in guests.

Given a cactus's association with a climate that's generally too arid and torrid to live in (it can go without water for a long time), as well as its painfully prickly feel to the touch, I'll never know how the cactus can be so appealing, unless its green color, as used on its sign, roof and room doors, is the lure.

Or perhaps the image of the desert as unspoiled, open land that can be pioneered on, with the great natural beauty of sand, rocks and mountains, is a temptation. Besides, air conditioning and workable curtains and Venetian blinds are a given in a hotel, where you can enjoy your desert daydreams in the comforts of home.

Speaking of deserts...

Desert Sands' delight

Photo by John Phelan, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

A roadside sign is often catchier than a motel, as the way the owner hopes to hook the motorist off the road. This Albuquerque, New Mexico motel has a touch of Vegas in its signage, generating an image of the warm comfort of desert sands – though the shade from the balcony and roof and the AC you're virtually guaranteed in your room will make sure your sleep doesn't feel like a desert!

Straight as an arrow

Photo by Afiler from Seattle, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Another attention-grabber sign, on a straight-as-an-arrow strip in Gallup, New Mexico, where two 'LODGE' motels vie for equal time. The more Vegas-y the strip, the more Vegas-y the sign must be, for roadside prominence (see my first image). That was what Venturi meant when he said, "Main Street is almost all right" – competing signage makes up a colorful strip.

Sleepy teepee

Photo by Raleigh Muns.

This Route 66 curiosity, Wigwam Motel No. 6 in Holbrook, Arizona, gives guests the illusion of cozying in a wigwam, luring them off the road with a familiar Indian folklore image from childhood. Since I had a backyard teepee tent as a kid, I'd tell Dad to stop here in an instant. Fake or not, at least these cabins are freestanding, which means no next-door noise.

Macie's Motel

This motel in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, pictured in the 1950s, typifies the "L" layout many motels were designed in, to allot as large a driveway/parking area as possible for a multitude of cars and maximum clearance for cars to get off the road. The freestanding cabins gave people a quieter option, so they wouldn't be subject to next-door noise, akin to what Susie Vargas (Janet Leigh) had to put up with from Uncle Joe Grandi's wild bebop/jazz party in the abutting room at the remote desert motel in Orson Welles' 1958 film Touch of Evil.

Speaking of Hollywood motels...

Bates' bane

This is fictitious, of course – a Universal Studios stage set – but it happens to be the notorious Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 thriller Psycho, whose owner may have gotten some ideas from the sexually perverted motel night clerk in Touch of Evil, the late film critic Roger Ebert surmised.

If you happen to have seen Psycho, you know well what happens in this modest, lowly, innocent-looking motel complex, being watched over by the ominous Mansard-roofed mansion uphill, as a fitting symbol of the social exploitation and sexual voyeurism motels have been the subject of in movies, owing in part to their "nobody watching" isolation on the American landscape.

Lorraine's legacy

Lorraine Motel, now National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN, site of MLK's death. Photo by Oleksandra Ostashko.

Lorraine Motel, site of MLK's death. Photo by Erick Bzovi.

The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, opened in 1924 and renamed in 1945 by owner Walter Bailey for his wife Loree and the song "Sweet Lorraine," is now part of the National Civil Rights Museum, based on its real tragedy on April 4, 1968: the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was staying in Room 306 while planning protests around the Memphis sanitation strike.

Lorraine Motel, from the balcony where MLK was shot. Photo by Justin Metzger.

The building has been preserved as it was at the moment of King's assassination while he stood on the balcony, complete with a 1968 Cadillac and a 1959 Dodge that were parked below at the time. This frozen-in-time exhibit showcases the role of cars in a motel's design, as well as the preservation of King's memory in the context of what befell him during his civil rights efforts.

Lorraine Motel balcony where MLK was shot. Photo by Carol Edmiston.

(The ring-buoy wreath marks the spot where King was shot.) True, this is a very ordinary motel building, but its association with a pivotal turning-point in America's civil-rights history gives it (and especially its balcony) a powerful presence in our minds and memories, and its open-concept room layouts – findable in virtually any motel – suit it very well for its museum use.

Vacancy

An abandoned motel in the desert along Route 66.

Sorry to wrap up on such a sour note, but it goes to show that motels should be checked out with caution. They tend to be so isolated, as places to go off a long, lonely road for a rest, that the comforts of home they offer do not make them safe havens to hide from what one never knows can happen there, from mayhem to murder to abandonment.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Abandoned Motel Stock Photos," iStock by Getty Images, https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/abandoned-motel

"Desert," National Geographic Society, https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/desert/

Ebert, Roger, "Reviews: Touch of Evil," RogerEbert.com, September 13, 1998, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-touch-of-evil-1958

Freedman, Paul, "Howard Johnson's: As American As Fried Clams," Ten Restaurants that Changed America, New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018, https://archive.org/details/tenrestaurantsth0000free

"Howard Johnson's," Wikipedia, last edited on 13 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Johnson%27s

"Motel," Wikipedia, last edited on 10 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motel

"National Civil Rights Museum," Wikipedia, last edited on 21 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Civil_Rights_Museum

Roman on the reservoir, Georgian on the green

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 03:05:01 +0000

The Walter J. Sullivan Water Purification Facility is the finest example of 21st-century Romanesque Revival architecture I've ever seen. Historical details and millennial water engineering work in concert to form a cutting-edge water purification plant in the cloak of Cantabrigian custom.

While on a winter walk around Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Mass., I was awestruck by so many aspects of this edifying edifice at once: its long reach across 155,632 square feet (about 3.6 acres); the attention to detail the architects, Barry Giorgi and Camp, Dresser & McKee (now CDM Smith), put into its Romanesque arches, window banks, and landmark lookout tower, in ways reminiscent of H.H. Richardson and early Frank Lloyd Wright; its historically compatible choice of building materials; and its monumental majesty on the reservoir as a tribute to the city's age-old tradition of keeping Fresh Pond fresh.

Keith N. Morgan of the Society of Architectural Historians put it best: "Ten years in planning, this facility reconceptualized waterworks as community center. Camp, Dresser and McKee—a global corporation begun in 1947 as a partnership of MIT sanitation engineers Thomas Camp, Herman Dresser, and Jack McKee—undertook the project from design through construction. Site studies led to demolition and replacement of the former facilities, a Neo-Georgian 1915 structure by George A. Johnson and a 1922 pump house. Recognizing Fresh Pond as a recreational asset, architect Barry Giorgi's design welcomes the public with Romanesque Revival styling and multiple materials (cast stone, granite, brick, and slate). It displays the awesome water process systems through large arched windows."

The 1915 Neo-Georgian structure by George A. Johnson that
the Walter J. Sullivan Water Purification Facility replaced.

A facility of this archi-technological caliber made me optimistic that the new millennium would revive the historical styles we had spurned over a half-century, until Post-Modernism signaled a new nostalgia for them, coming full circle with a fuller revival of them to revive the classic civic pride with which we had once bestowed our buildings, while casting the classics in the contemporary context of 21st-century technological advancement.

A parallel structure enunciating comparable optimism was Robert A.M. Stern's Spangler Center at Harvard Business School, built the same year (2001) in a Georgian Revival that similarly spread its walls and wings far across campus to encompass 29 project rooms, a 350-seat auditorium, IT support services, and much more in old-school brick, arches, keystones, quoins, cornices, columns and porticoes.

Upon its completion, Witold Rybczynski wrote in Architect Magazine that Spangler Center "resembles a large country house," while Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell deemed it "the best piece of traditional architecture to be built in Greater Boston since the early decades of the twentieth century."

These edifices marked another revival for the first time in a century, being some of the most ambitious paragons of the extension of rich historical architecture for blocks and blocks since the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

This West Side castle hybrid of Gothic, Romanesque and Neoclassical comprises 21 interconnected buildings housing 45 halls exhibiting 32 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts over an urban extension of four street blocks and one avenue block, while being surrounded by its own parkland (Theodore Roosevelt Park) to give it the open space it needs for architectural self- expression. The museum was built from 1871 to 2023 from designs by multiple architects, most notably Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould (the original Gothic castle), J. Cleaveland Cady (the neo-Romanesque wings along West 77th Street), Candy, Berg & See (the Romanesque Revival granite façades), John Russell Pope (the neoclassical Central Park West entrance façade with the mighty columns, and the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall Rotunda), Jeanne Gang and Davis Brody Bond (the 2023 Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation), and Gary Hilderbrand of Reed Hilderbrand, as the landscape architect for the rejuvenation of Theodore Roosevelt Park.

The sheer magnitude of this museum filled me with all the awe of an awestruck admirer when I was a kid. I especially couldn't fathom how its front castle of conical turrets and lancet finials could extend all the way from W. 81st Street to W. 77th Street.

Especially awesome is the moment you pass through Pope's monumental columned entry into a barrel-vaulted ceiling of octagonal coffers, a Diocletian transom, and polished marble columns with leafy capitals, which make up a majestic showcase space for a suspended fossil display, as a high-style tribute to Teddy Roosevelt as a naturalist and conservationist.

The museum's vast, never-ending halls, replete with natural, sculptural, dioramic, fossil and crystal exhibits, were even more indescribable in a child's mind, best expressed by Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye:

Then you'd pass by this long, long Indian war canoe, about as long as three goddam Cadillacs in a row, with about twenty Indians in it, some of them paddling, some of them just standing around looking tough, and they all had war paint all over their faces. There was one very spooky guy in the back of the canoe, with a mask on. He was the witch doctor. He gave me the creeps, but I liked him anyway...

The Whitney Hall of Oceanic Birds at its official
dedication in 1953. AMNH Photograph #319645.
Boy, that museum was full of glass cases. There were even more upstairs, with deer inside them drinking at water holes, and birds flying south for the winter. The birds nearest you were all stuffed and hung up on wires, and the ones in back were just painted on the wall, but they all looked like they were really flying south, and if you bent your head down and sort of looked at them upside down, they looked in an even bigger hurry to fly south. The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

But I digress... I was just as overjoyed as a child would be the year the Walter J. Sullivan Water Purification Facility and the Spangler Center were dedicated as upright monuments to water conservation and higher education, that people were building big and beautiful again, in the grand old-hat but high-hat tradition of the American Museum of Natural History, as opposed to those mammoth modern megablocks they'd been ripping down historic districts for from the fifties forward. But, alas, the full-scale Romanesque and Georgian revivals spearheaded by Sullivan and Spangler were short-lived, giving way once again to unmemorable modernist mediocrity by the time a quarter of the new century had lapsed. So let's enjoy these big, beautiful bonanzas while they're still with us, because their kind will never be built again (unless, of course, you're a Mar-a-Lago mogul in the White House with a ballroom on the brain, which I don't look forward to).

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"American Museum of Natural History," Wikipedia, last edited on 20 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Museum_of_Natural_History

"American Museum of Natural History – Exterior and Interior," Historic Districts Council, https://hdc.org/buildings/american-museum-of-natural-history/

"Cambridge Municipal Facilities Energy Use Disclosure Report," Calendar Year 2015, https://www.cambridgema.gov/cdd/news/2014/07/~/~/media/3db131e0716f4e7ab215d8070ff503ed.ash

"Classics, Old and New," Harvard Magazine, March 1, 2001, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2001/03/classics-old-and-new-html

Morgan, Keith N., "Cambridge Water Purification Facility," Society of Architectural Historians Archipedia, 2001, https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MA-01-NC3

Rybczynski, Witold, "Tata Hall and the Art of Adding to the Harvard Business School Campus," Architect, October 14, 2014, https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/witold-rybczynski-tata-hall-and-the-art-of-adding-to-the-harvard-business-school-campus_o/

Salinger, J.D., The Catcher in the Rye, New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951, 1979, 1991 and 2014, pp. 134-135.

"Spangler Center," Wikipedia, last edited on 28 May 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spangler_Center

Built in Boston the Wright way?

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 01:20:14 +0000

Stumbling upon this Instagram image of Frank Lloyd Wright standing before a model of an office tower (left), I was struck by its striking resemblance to World Trade Center West in Boston's Seaport District (above), as if the latter were derivative of the former. If so, it was about time something Wrightian surfaced in Boston, where Wright never practiced, despite his far-reaching influence across the American map and Boston's reputation as a major architects' mecca. The closest he got to the Hub was his Theodore Baird Residence in Amherst for an Amherst College professor, and his Zimmerman and Toufic H. Kalil houses in Manchester, N.H. Otherwise, he steered clear of Beantown, perhaps finding its architecture too old-hat to find a progressive niche there.

But the hills of San Francisco were clearly not too passé for Wright's far-reaching ambitions, for this 1912 model was intended for the unbuilt San Francisco Call Building for one of the city's most widely circulated newspapers. It was a pure celebration of skyscraper verticality, alternating slender piers and fenestration stacks, climaxing in a wing-like cantilevered cornice pierced with openings to let the sun's rays filter onto the façade for an added effect of light.

Doesn't that look familiar in the Seaport? The cantilevered cornice pierced with sun-emitting holes is right there, as is the vertical emphasis of the lean piers and upright window strips. Yet the architects, Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood, were certainly not out to be copycats of Wright. They were out to put their own postmodern stamp of squared columns articulating the building structure on World Trade Center West, as it pertained to its district's maritime ambiance. In their words, "The form, language, and materials of the building relate to the maritime character of the site. The weighty masonry, substantial cornice and protective canopies recall the adjacent warehouses and pier buildings, while the steel construction and wind mitigation 'sails' of the lower building refer to the ships, cranes and bridges of the harbor."

The bowfront (deviating from Wright's flush façade) allowed occupants that full harbor view, and its elegant vertical lines clearly expressed the upward mobility of not only the building, but also its district. For this was one of the first buildings built in Seaport, in 2003, to kick off a new Boston neighborhood with innovative architecture, along with the over-the-water cantilever of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Institute of Contemporary Art, the welcoming horizontal canopy thrust of Rafael Viñoly's Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, the open-armed circular wingspread and concave curtain wall of Harry Cobb's John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, and the curvilinear curtain wall of SOM's Manulife Financial headquarters. These environmental characteristics that determined World Trade Center West's form are certainly a far cry from Wright, who was tailoring his flat, razor-thin San Francisco Call Building for a densely settled, hilly community that was just starting to be on the up and up, long before the Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid became its skyborne iconography.

Wainwright Building (1891, Louis Sullivan), St. Louis, MO.
Photo by W. LeMay (CC BY-SA 2.0).

But another thing both Call and WTCW have in common is their apparent inspiration from Louis Henry Sullivan, which I discussed in a post last year. Wright himself called Sullivan's Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Missouri, "the very first human expression of a tall steel office-building as Architecture." And he should have known, having worked in Sullivan's office, until accepting private commissions caused Sullivan to expel him – and propel him to become America's greatest architect. The influence of the Wainwright's squared vertical piers and window stacks and boldly embroidered cornice on both Call and WTCW is obvious, in their upward expressions of verticality, cantilevered climaxes, and smooth-skinned delicacy. For that was what Sullivan meant by "form follows function": a skyscraper's soaring vertical form is shaped by its function as a tall office building.

That is how World Trade Center West is paying tribute to two pioneering architects who never practiced in Boston (though Sullivan was born there, and Wright briefly lived in Weymouth as a child) by bringing their spirits into Boston as a living demonstration of their long-standing influence on office-building design regarding the clear, honest expression of structure, the smooth soar of the verticality of building upward into the sky to get as much office space on a limited footprint as possible, and the presentation of such a building as a monument to America's economic growth, the progress of architecture, the advancement of building materials (steel) to make those advancements possible, and, for WTCW, the nativity of a new neighborhood on the Boston Harbor where it all began.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Frank Lloyd Wright; ‘The San Francisco Call Building’, 1913," Instagram, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/DC90KNWSU8k/

Gonzalez, Jaime, "Press Building San Francisco," Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/25262447894722671/

"Hooked on the Past David Romero," Flickr, 2016, https://www.flickr.com/photos/143771393@N04/

O'Malley, Eric, "Recreating The Call Building Model for Taliesin," The Whirling Arrow: News and Updates from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, January 6, 2021, https://franklloydwright.org/recreating-the-call-building-model/

"Wainwright Building," Wikipedia, last edited on 11 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wainwright_Building

"World Trade Center West," KMW Architecture, completed 2003, https://www.kmwarch.com/world-trade-center-west

Guess the Architect!

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 18:42:44 +0000

These three buildings (one of them an historic restoration) were all designed by the same architectural firm. Can you guess which one? (Hint: They are all in the city the firm practices in.)

I took these three photos before I knew who designed these three buildings, because each of them had that certain something special about them that I couldn't place – until I ended up working at the very place that designed them. Then I knew why they were special: the firm brought their distinctively pragmatic yet aesthetic personal touch to each of them. For more clues to who their architect is, they're described below.

Cambridge Fire Dept. Station 10 (a giveaway to where the architect practices!), completed in 2024, was the city's first fire station to be built in modular, kit-of-parts construction. It was erected as temporary quarters for the department's Engine 1, Ladder 1, Rescue 1, and Dive Rescue Unit fire engines during the firm's environmentally sustainable gut-renovation of the historic Cambridge Fire Headquarters (right).

For a modular building, Station 10 has an unusually crisp, clean-lined, set-in-place design, with apparatus-bay doors topped with geometric variations on the window lintel hoods seen on some of the city's mid-19th-century houses. A "trailer" attachment, made up of six combined trailers, houses the firefighters' kitchen, common areas, fitness center, bathrooms, and sleeping quarters, one bunkroom per firefighter.

But the four-bay fire engine garage looks as professional as any fire station, expressing the speed, efficiency, and no-frills, no-nonsense dedication of the department's first responders. In the words of Tom Flan on Facebook, "Gotta love it, looks just like it should, highly functional!" Echoed by Christopher Golomb: "This kind of municipal planning is to be admired."

The modular building providers were Extreme Modular Buildings (EMB) of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, which transported the station parts and trailers all the way from Canada to 15 Hovey Street over a distance of 2,500 miles. Each modular component measured 54’ x 14’ x 17’2” so it could house one of the four fire engines. All parts were assembled onsite upon their cross-country arrival there.

Choosing the site in a densely settled city replete with untouchable historic buildings was almost as herculean a task as shipping the station there. After 44 feasibility studies were made of 27 sites, surplus space on a Spaulding Hospital parking lot was selected to minimize fire-engine din in residents' back yards and to complement the noise the hospital's emergency vehicles were already generating. The first responders are delighted with the new station, temporary and modular as it may be, particularly for its accommodation of one bunkroom per firefighter, instead of being crammed and cramped into one multi-bed dormitory.

This is how Cambridge Fire Department Station 10 is a useful model for cost-saving modular design and construction for other public safety facilities and for temporary housing of firetrucks during a fire station renovation. Its recognition in the Firehouse Magazine Station Design Awards for 2025 attests to this.

The Harvard Faculty Club, first built in 1930-1931 from a design by Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch & Abbott in the brick Georgian style that has defined the Harvard campus from the beginning, was carefully restored to reflect that tradition. The reconstructed bay windows bear the academic marks of arched windows with keystones, complemented with mullion-lined cornices along the rooflines and pediments. Brick stringcourses articulate the floors. Slate roofs, dormers, and paneled chimneys complete the picture.

Built the same year as the Gold Coast Harvard Houses and the Biological Laboratory designed by the same architects, the Harvard Faculty Club is noteworthy for its more residential human-scaled stature than those other developments.

This was an important quality I noticed about the building and its bay windows while reading a book in its garden (Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper): the building's diminutive height enforced the garden's intimacy, helped along by the architect's thoughtful restoration. This motivated me to record this effect on my camera.

The two-family home at 137 Mount Auburn Street has been garnering attention on the Nextdoor chatroom site as of late, for not being one of the "ugly" or "boring" new buildings that the post-writer was complaining about (click here) and that Neighborhood Conservation Districts and the Cambridge Historical Commission are curbing with professional architect, engineer and attorney reviews of new developments. And well-deserved attention at that. It was built to complement the historical styles along Mount Auburn Street without bringing "fake history" to the scene. The traditional symmetry and lintel-lined sash windows of the gabled, porched façade are broken by the contemporary corner-bay, corner window and balcony, with the effect of a newer building growing out of an older one in a way that is offbeat but not offensive, and clarifying the house's younger age.

OK, if you haven't guessed the architect yet, the answer is The Galante Architecture Studio (TGAS). Located across from 137 Mount Auburn Street at Mount Auburn and Brewer Streets, TGAS practices in a corner shop with display windows showcasing the creative design process that goes into their buildings, as TGAS, and into their designer chairs, napkin-holders and wall-hangings layering cutout archival maps of cities at various historical development phases, as Galante Design Studio (GDS). Buildings and household objects originate in prototypes in their studio workshop, which evolve into models and' drawings. This process enables Ted Galante, his team, and his clients to develop a complete comprehension of a building or object, its place in its social context, and its best use to its client or buyer, and thereby develop the final product thoroughly to meet the owner's needs thoroughly.

These three buildings certainly exhibit that commitment to craftsmanship in their crisp, simple forms, their respect for their social and architectural contexts, and the down-to-earth pragmatism of their residential, academic and municipal functions.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Blier, Suzanne, "Why is everything so ugly? Why are buildings so boring?", Nextdoor, October 19, 2026, https://nextdoor.com/p/HgCTgqZRrPsh?utm_source=share&extras=NzI1NDI2NTI%3D&utm_campaign=1792411155230&share_action_id=f6656ec1-58e9-443e-9035-3493f867a88f

"Cambridge Fire Station 10," The Galante Architecture Studio, 2024, https://galantearchitecture.com/portfolio/cambridge-fire-station-10/

"Faculty Club," Harvard Property Resource Center, Harvard University Planning & Design,

https://harvardplanning.emuseum.com/sites/875/faculty-club

"Our Fire Station 10 on Hovey Avenue has been recognized in the Firehouse Magazine Station Design Awards for 2025," Cambridge MA Fire Department, Facebook, January 13, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/CambridgeMAFire/photos/our-fire-station-10-on-hovey-avenue-has-been-recognized-in-the-firehouse-magazin/1183917370571014/

"Temporary Fire House – Station 10," Cambridge Fire Department, October 4, 2023, https://www.cambridgema.gov/cfd/news/2023/10/workinprogresstemporaryfirestation10hoveyav

"The Harvard Faculty Club," CambridgeHistoricalCommission, Instagram, 2025, https://www.instagram.com/p/DEpmIIEOHcK/?img_index=5

How New Formalism has grown on me

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 22:52:47 +0000

Kennedy Center. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, courtesy of Library of Congress.

Donald Trump's seizure of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, from stocking its board with "yes men" to renaming it after himself to threatening to rip it down if he doesn't get his way with it, has made me see it in a new light.

Kennedy Center at night. Photo by Aude.

Initially dismissing it as the "cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried" that Ada Louise Huxtable called it in her New York Times review on September 7, 1971, I now view this Washington venue as more of a jewel-box, a marble temple, and a work of art.

Lincoln Memorial, east side, Washington, D.C. Photo by Martin Falbisoner.

The slender bronze-painted steel columns against the solid Carrara marble exterior wall, complemented by the stacked setback of its top deck from its cantilevering roofline, now present the Kennedy Center to me as sort of a New Formalist reinterpretation of both the columned walkway of the Lincoln Memorial (right) and the riverfront verandah of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate (below), picking up the flat-roofed Acropolis of the former and the sweeping shelter of the latter.

Mount Vernon, west face, Alexandria, Virginia. Photo by Ken Lund.

The Kennedy Center's architect, Edward Durell Stone, himself thought along those lines: “In considering the general building type, I would say that Washington is primarily a city of white buildings in a park-like setting. I would see no reason for departing from that.” (That could be one reason why Trump wants to tear the Center down: it's not "classical" enough for him, given his first term's executive order to make all new government buildings in Washington in the classical style, as he plans to build his White House ballroom and the triumphal arch on Memorial Circle.)

The entrance façade of the Kennedy Center. Photo by Ajay Suresh.

I admit I've had a mite of affection for the Kennedy Center from the start. For one, its gala opening on September 8, 1971, premiered one of my favorite choral works, Leonard Bernstein's Mass, commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for the occasion. The music's blend of avant-garde abstraction and harmonic mellifluence seemed to find its architectural expression in the Center.

Radio City Music Hall (1932), New York. Photo by Smart Destinations.

Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by George Marks.

Two, Edward Durell Stone was my mother's first employer after she got married and my parents settled in New York. "Hire her!" was the reaction to the charming impression she made at her interview, based on her office efficiency and conversational prowess. So she became Stone's dependable secretary until her maternity leave when I came along.

Initially making New York history in Art Deco with the Radio City Music Hall (above) and Modernism with the Museum of Modern Art (left), Stone went on to reinvent Classicism in a Modernist framework. He and Minoru Yamasaki brought forth the New Formalism – new as Modern, formal as Classical – that would become their trademark, for better or for worse. At its best, it soared architecture in a flight of spindly columns with the heavenly uplift of a Gothic cathedral, Greek temple or Venetian palace, but with bare-bones assembly befitting the New Frontier. At its worst, it collapsed under its own weight amid the flames of exploded airplanes when Yamasaki's World Trade Center telescoped downward on September 11, 2001, leaving shards of neo-Gothic tracery and bones of fleshy bodies in its wake.

Photo by Richard Taylor.

The Kennedy Center is New Formalism at its partial best. Its land-side façade, solid and pure in its marble-wall consistency and lightened up by its regiment of delicate columns, extends a friendly invitation to us to promenade around its parameters before we go inside to see a play, a concert, or an opera.

Photo by Y.C. Wu.

In a brief but beautiful scene in the 1976 film All The President's Men, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) exits a taxi in front of the Kennedy Center, just as a big crowd is jubilantly exiting a performance there. This gives him a chance to lose himself in the throng and throw off potential pursuers while he changes cabs on his way to his 2 a.m. meeting with Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), his secret source of information about the June 17, 1972 burglary in the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex right next door (see first photo). Though it was unrealistic for a Kennedy Center performance to end as late as 2 a.m., its architecture in the scene had a certain lilt about it, a certain lift, that added to the drama.

Kennedy Center's Grand Foyer. Photo by JohnnyK.

Kennedy Center's Grand Foyer. JFK bust by Robert Berks. Photo by Josh Bowers.

A truly dramatic soar for such a crowd to enjoy is right in the Grand Foyer, which the building's relatively squat, horizontal, ground-hugging stature belies, making it an eye-popping, jaw-dropping surprise for the newcomer. Measuring 630 feet long and 63 feet high, the Grand Foyer is said to have room for the Washington Monument laid on its side along the red-carpeted floor, with 75 feet to spare.

The ascent of the cathedral ceiling is accentuated by the 16 hand-blown Orrefors crystal chandeliers dangling from above, a gift from Sweden. Together with the salutatory red carpet, they offer guests an internationally warm welcome as a prelude to the Hall of Nations or one of the three auditoriums that comprise the Center.

Hall of Nations, Kennedy Center. Photo by Rupal Desai.

The Hall of Nations extends the welcome with flags of nations with whom the Ufvv.S. has diplomatic relations along its 250-foot-long, 63-foot-high corridor, as a living symbol of Kennedy' s foreign policy goals:

To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support – to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective – to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak – and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.

Hall of Nations, Kennedy Center. Photo by Ahmad Karimi.

Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.

We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.

But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course – both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war.

So let us begin anew – remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

— From President John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961

The three auditoriums – the Concert Hall, the Opera House, the Eisenhower Theater – vary in style according to the types of arts that are mounted on their stages. But they all avoid the New Formalism of their housing in the name of fine finishes, to immerse their audiences more fully in the concert, theater or opera experience before them, as contemporary interpretations of classic concert halls, opera houses and theaters.

The Concert Hall, home to the National Symphony Orchestra, has seating akin to that in the Musikverein in Vienna, and is illuminated with Hadeland crystal chandeliers gifted by the Norwegian government.

The red velvet Opera House, home to the annual Kennedy Center Honors, boasts a red and gold silk curtain given by the Japanese government and a Lobmeyr crystal chandelier with matching pendants, gifted by the Austrian government.

The Eisenhower Theater, named for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who signed the National Cultural Center Act into law on September 2, 1958, securing the planning of the Center, mainly puts on plays, musicals, smaller operas, ballet, and modern dance.

But I'm not much for the Center's riverfront face. Its ceiling-high windows look uninviting to water-commuters and interrupt the façade's Carrara marble continuity...

Kennedy Center on Potomac River. Photo by Brooks Kraft.

...though this was partially redeemed by the row of 40 weeping willow trees planted in memory of the 35th President, that were cut down last year, reportedly due to decay and the shallow beds that gave them short lifespans. There's talk about replacing them with weeping cherry blossoms, but fingers crossed...

...and by its distant view on the Potomac at night, especially when the sea and sky form a dark background to the light of the living symbol of JFK's passion for and commitment to the arts in full view, as if waiting with bated breath for Trump's last term to end so it can reaffirm the artistic identity Kennedy and Stone intended for it.

2 Columbus Circle

2 Columbus Circle by Edward Durell Stone, c.1964.

A Stone work of New Formalism that I sheepishly admit I miss, now that it's been altered beyond recognition in a shameless, sloppy way, is 2 Columbus Circle, aka the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art, in New York City. Lambasted by Ada Louise Huxtable in 1964 as resembling "a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops [that] begs for a canal or garden setting," its creative use of elongated arches, a palazzo arcade with oculi, and a concave curve with the circle had a way of reducing historical forms to their barren geometries with a circusy playfulness that definitely made one stop and stare, like it or lump it. And its plain off-white walls of exposed aggregate concrete – presumably used to display giant banners of upcoming or current art exhibits – gave it a visual flexibility akin to the ever-changing decorations of the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, or the ever-more-changing LED display ads in Times Square. Regardless, I miss it now. Because look what they did with it:

2 Columbus Circle today. Photo by Stefan Weisman.

Kudos to a botch-up job by architect Brad Cloepfil for the Museum of Arts and Design in 2008, 2 Columbus Circle now looks like an ink-spill from Charlie Brown's pen in an attempt to write "HI" to his Pen-Pal. This has to be the weirdest fenestration in New York history. The angular protrusions of the windows on Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum were weird for their time, in their radical disruption of Madison Avenue trad, but have acquired a sculptural appeal over the years that makes this building (now Sotheby's Global Headquarters, housing auction spaces and public art galleries) a pioneering milestone of modernism. But this mess will never pass for innovative architecture. It will only serve to bring up memories of that "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops," which at least brought some of the high spirits of Piccadilly Circus to Columbus Circle, as a rare moment when New York architecture had a sense of humor.

The Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow Center for International and Public Affairs at USC

The Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow Center for International and Public Affairs at USC. Photo by Bobak Ha'Eri.

The Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow Center for International
and Public Affairs at USC. Photo by Sitao Xiang.

This New Formalist cloister by Stone, formerly the Von KleinSmid Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, may be familiar for its use as a film and TV shooting location. In the movie The Graduate (1967), it was the setting for Elaine Robinson's classroom at UC Berkeley, when Benjamin Braddock followed her through the cloister all the way to her class, pressuring her to get her birth certificate in preparation for the marriage he wished to have with her. In The Paper Chase TV series (1978-86), it was a backdrop for the nameless Law School where Hart, Ford, and Bell struggled to meet the demands of the tyrannical Professor Kingsfield.

Photo by Sharon Mollerus.

In reality, it is one of the best mid-20th-century interpretations of the Roman cloister and temple. In fact, it may be Stone's New Formalist masterpiece, for the way it gives students and faculty a sense of logical direction through its corridor and temple courtyard of evenly spaced arches to the academic destination it invites them to at the end of the archway – as the Romans did.

Photo by Nick Grasu

It is also remarkable for the way it invites students and faculty to come forward and partake of its programs in anthropology, art history, international relations, political science, globalization, and applied social sciences by landmarking itself on the USC campus with its international peace symbol of a globe-crowned tower tapered with concave-curved sides, as a guiding light. Its status as Stone's New Formalist masterpiece was cemented in "Stone" in 2021, when it was renamed in honor of Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow, Native American tribal historian and chief of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation, who earned his master’s degree in anthropology at USC in 1939.

“Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow was an ambassador and bridge builder who used education to create intercultural understanding and promote collaboration between peoples and communities,” said USC President Carol L. Folt. “Likewise, this building is an important nexus of interdisciplinary study that unites people across differences. Naming the building — and establishing a scholarship program — in his honor pays tribute to his life and legacy and ensures future generations of students have the opportunity to learn his remarkable story...

“This building serves as a crossroads for different cultures and communities from around the world, and it is a gathering place for our students. We wanted to rename it for an individual who embodies the qualities we strive for at USC, and when we asked the university community to nominate people for this honor, the selection of this beloved and inspiring figure — one of our most cherished alumni — became clear. I know the USC community will welcome this name with the enthusiasm and joy it deserves.”

Kennedy Center. Photo by Shekhar Mehta.

Edward Durell Stone's personal brand of New Formalism has grown on me over the years all the way from pre-childhood to the present, by virtue of my mother's early connection with him, the roots of the style in his pioneering Art Deco and Modernist designs, and the style's ultimate function as a bridge-builder among nations, architecturally, materially, politically, artistically, and academically.

Stone found that happy architectural medium among disparate disciplines and worlds as a simple but elegant expression of the peace the liberal arts and positive international relations can bring to the world if judiciously applied. Donald Trump's self-serving interference with that process should be a wake-up call to reaffirm these positive goals that were originally set for the Kennedy Center by its namesake himself.

Thank you for visiting.
I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Alexander, Jimmy, "From George Washington to JFK: A History of the Kennedy Center," WTOP News, September 18, 2026, https://wtop.com/dc/2026/09/from-george-washington-to-jfk-a-history-of-the-kennedy-center/

Backus, Alex, "Claim Trump Cut Down Weeping Willow Trees Outside Kennedy Center Debunked," Newsweek, September 1, 2026, https://www.newsweek.com/claim-trump-cut-down-weeping-willow-trees-outside-kennedy-center-debunked-12393047

"Ben asks Elaine to Marry Him - The Graduate," Jinghong Lin (Fiona), YouTube, posted April 8, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZJ2LE2OldA

Dunlap, David W. "Ada Louise Huxtable's New York," The New York Times, January 8, 2013, https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/ada-louise-huxtables-new-york/

Gomez, Melissa, "A USC building stripped of eugenicist’s name will instead honor a Native American alumnus," Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-18/usc-native-american-alumnus-building-renamed

"Kennedy Center," Wikipedia, last edited on 17 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Center

"Kennedy Center: Frequently Asked Questions," National Trust for Historic Preservation, March 23, 2026, https://savingplaces.org/stories/kennedy-center-faqs

Kennedy, John F., and Ted Sorensen, "President John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address (1961)," Milestone Documents, National Archives, last reviewed on February 8, 2022, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-john-f-kennedys-inaugural-address

Lindberg, Eric, "Historic campus building to be renamed in honor of alumnus Joseph Medicine Crow," USC Today, November 18, 2021, https://today.usc.edu/joseph-medicine-crow-building/

Scott, Pamela, and Antoinette J. Lee, "Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts," Society of Architectural Historians Archipedia, https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/DC-01-FB14

"2 Columbus Circle," Wikipedia, last edited on 18 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Columbus_Circle

Harvard's hideaway

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:35:59 +0000

What does "Harvard" bring to mind?

The High Victorian Gothic soar of Memorial Hall?

The glimmering white spire of Memorial Chapel?

The Teutonic clock tower of Adolphus Busch Hall?

The crimson-crowned cupola of Dunster House?

The colossal columns and spine-tingling steps of Widener Library?

The twisty-turny paths and exploding brises-soleil of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts?

Do a glass pyramid, a copper cylinder, and a golden-ball clock tower come to mind at all? If not, no worries. These sculptural components of the Harvard Business School Class of 1959 Chapel are so far off the beaten path, literally and figuratively, that they're the university's best-kept secret: a little-known hideaway in nature, peace and light enveloped in pure geometric form.

Built in 1992 from a maverick design by Moshe Safdie and the vision of Dean John H. McArthur to introduce a community-generator to the otherwise corporate, business-as-usual Harvard Business School, the Chapel combines variations on the glass polygon of I.M. Pei's Louvre Pyramid, the cylindrical drum of Eero Saarinen's MIT Chapel, and the scintillating orb of the Times Square Ball in a confounding contrast of forms, surfaces, curves, angles, solids and voids that makes you stop and stare, especially if you've never been in these parts before.

Then again, unlike the perpetual pedestrian crisscross through Harvard Yard, Harvard Business School isn't exactly a tourist mecca, being far and away across the Charles in Allston.

But if you've come this far and think you're seeing things when this it-came-from-another-planet contraption crosses your path, think again as you enter its spatial dimensions – the light-filtered chapel in the patina-green cylinder, the terraced garden in the glass pyramid, or the bronze ball that drops like the sand in an hourglass as the hours pass.

The multitiered sunken garden offers a panoply of peace-inducing transports of delight: terraces of lush garden beds and flowering trees, a bubbling waterfall, a koi pond replete with rainbow-hued fish, shallow pools teeming with aquatic flora, square steppingstones along the groundcover, stair-flights to the balcony entrance to the chapel, window panoramas of the metamorphoses of seasons and sunrises and sunsets, and lots of places to sit and assimilate the restorative powers of nature, study amid the calming trickle-splash of the water, or contemplate the tensile crisscross of the diamond panes and the circular structure of the chapel. This is how the pyramid bridges the gap between outside and inside, with the garden as the intermediary and the verdant and patina greens as the binding elements.

Other tropical delights that merge outside with inside include plants that grew in Cyprus, Greece, during the childhood of Chapel Caretaker Agni Thurner, now Manager of Executive Education Building Services; native vegetation from the Americas; and arboricola, ferns, liriope, lemons, oranges and tangerines. All form a miniature arboretum that thrives all seasons.

The nondenominational chapel with Shaker-style chairs filters raking light and rainbow effects through a skylight of thin windows and long prisms. Designed by Charles Ross, this light-sculpture radiates the refracted sunshine across the 27-foot-high scalloped concrete walls, creating an illusion of soft, billowy curtains.

This effect creates a serene spiritual ambiance for weddings, chamber music, prayer, contemplation, meditation, or just winding down.

The 26-foot, 11-inch-high "sun clock" tower, designed by German artist Karl Schlamminger, is inscribed on its black granite base with the names of the Harvard Business School Class of 1959 – Dean McArthur's graduating class – that donated the chapel and clock to the campus.

This innovative timepiece marks the hour by ascending and descending its golden bronze ball by an electronic motor gradually throughout the day, such that the ball's arrival at a particular line on the glass enclosure indicates the time of day.

Like a sunrise and a sunset, the ball reaches the summit of the tower at high noon and sets at the base toward the evening.

Beyond relaxation, meditation, contemplation, and reminders of the time of day, the Harvard Business School Class of 1959 Chapel aimed to "recognize the wholeness of its members’ lives — people who may be grieving for a parent, or worried about their children, or in need of withdrawal from the pressure of work or study, or who wish to celebrate their religious traditions,” chapel planners told Harvard Magazine in 1993.

Or, in the Chapel's engraved words, "...to make our community complete and remind us of our higher purpose and ideals." Harvard's many landmarks fulfill that purpose, from Victorian to Neoclassical to Germanic to Georgian to Modern, but none rebalance the soul and refresh the spirit like the Class of 1959 Chapel.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Cautela, Mark, "School News: Historical Places and Cool Spaces," Harvard Business School, September 1, 2026, https://www.hbs.edu/news/historical-places-and-cool-spaces

"Class of 1959 Chapel," SmartGuide, https://app.smartguide.app/en/destinations/f0976a22-07ea-40fb-ab21-b9d6d42e3c12/harvard-business-school/places/6f16eb44-97b8-43da-8a8b-c312c997869a/class-of-1959-chapel

Grandaw, Sam, "Class of 1959 Chapel," Atlas Obscura, July 26, 2019, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/class-of-1959-chapel

"Harvard Business School Class of 1959 Chapel," Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992, Safdie Architects, https://www.safdiearchitects.com/projects/harvard-business-school-class-of-1959-chapel

Lincoln, Rose, "Hidden spaces: The Class of 1959 Chapel at HBS," The Harvard Gazette, April 30, 2014, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/04/hidden-spaces-the-class-of-1959-chapel-at-hbs/

"MBA Class of 1959 Chapel," Harvard Business School, https://www.hbs.edu/about/campus-and-culture/campus-built-on-philanthropy/class-of-1959-chapel

"The Class of 1959 Chapel," Wikipedia, last edited on 31 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Class_of_1959_Chapel

Too much independence

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 22:51:18 +0000

Independence Hall, Philadelphia, c.1948. Courtesy of LIFE Magazine.

My July 7 post, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of our Declaration of Independence in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, neglected to mention the considerable sacrifices made to showcase Independence Hall independently in a historical theme-park context. I stumbled upon this Instagram image of the Hall in its pre-park years, and it recalled a snatch of conversation I'd overheard in college: "When they created Independence National Historical Park, they tore down a lot of Victorian buildings." Yes, preservation of the site of the founding of our country and the ratification of our Constitution was, ironically, one of its city's worst historic preservation efforts.

Here's some of what was lost for Independence Mall, and what tour guides and Independence Visitors' Center staff don't tell you about:

President's House (1767)

President's House, sketch by John Fanning Watson, pre-1823.

Yes, the remains of one of Independence Hall's contemporaries – and the White House's predecessor – were unknowingly sacrificed, with little left of the original, but just enough to allow a reconstruction rather than the "ghost" exhibit that's there now. Built by widow Mary Lawrence Masters as a dowry house for her eldest daughter, it became the home of Richard Penn, grandson of Pennsylvania founder William Penn, when she married him.

President's House, lithograph by William L. Breton, 1830.

Penn entertained George Washington and other Continental Congress delegates there, who entrusted Penn to deliver Congress's Olive Branch Petition to King George III in an 11th-hour effort to avert war with Great Britain. While Penn and his wife were away in England to do the honors, Gen. Sir William Howe occupied the house during the 1777-1778 British occupation of Philadelphia, and Gen. Benedict Arnold made it his headquarters in 1778 two years before his defection to the British Army. Revolutionary War financier Robert Morris purchased the house in 1780, and, yes, "George Washington slept here" as Morris's houseguest during Washington's presidency of the four-month 1787 Constitutional convention.

Sketch of the President's House Replica for the
Sesquicentennial Exposition, R. Brognard Okie, 1925.

While serving as our first President in the temporary national capital of Philadelphia, Washington rented the house as his residence, bringing in nine African slaves from his Mount Vernon estate in Virginia, and gradually replacing most of them with German indentured servants. His slaveless successor, John Adams, also lived there until the capital transferred to Washington and he moved into the not-yet-completed White House on November 1, 1800, as the first President to occupy the White House.

President's House site, Market Street between
Fifith & Sixth Streets, south side. Photo c. 1903-08.

Following the gut-renovation and partial demolition of the President's House for retail use beginning in 1804, including Nathaniel Burt's hardware stores in 1832 and John Wanamaker's first clothing store in 1836, original party walls survived until they were unknowingly demolished in 1951 as the preliminary site clearance for Independence Mall. Archaeological excavations revealed the L-shaped foundations of the Presidential House's kitchen, the remains of its icehouse pit, the main house's rear wall, the curved foundations of the bow window of the State Dining Room that Washington had added, and enough vestiges for an open-air "ghost" pavilion of suggestions of the house, President's House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation, built on the site by 2010.

Memorial at the site of the President's House. Courtesy of RevolutionaryPA.com.

The pavilion places mock window and door casings, fireplaces, chimneys and walls at their estimated original locations to let visitors imagine the house while perusing the exhibits on the roles of slaves in Washington's household and slavery in general, until Trump's executive order had the exhibits removed this year.

Memorial to Washington's nine slaves (their names are carved in the wall).

Their removal is an outright denial of the history that Abraham Lincoln famously said "we cannot escape" in his Second Annual Message to Congress on December 1, 1862, less than three months after issuing his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation

Independence Hall, Philadelphia, pre-1910.

giving Confederate states 100 days to end their rebellion and free their slaves. And more history is denied here, like everywhere else on Independence Mall: the President's House itself, which reportedly contained enough of its original walls to be reconstructed, just as the 19th-century growth of Philadelphia around Independence Hall contained enough buildings to merit preservation of the intact Central Business District that had taken shape around the Hall over the years, as a living demonstration of the evolution of the city from a colonial village to a prosperous yet aesthetically diverse, attractive, European-styled metropolis – a true City of Brotherly Love.

Jayne Building (1848-1851)

Jayne Buildng, c.1859, Library Company of Philadelphia,
Frederick De Bourg Richards Photograph Collection.

Considered to be Philadelphia's first skyscraper, the Jayne Building was designed by William L. Johnston as a Gothic Revival edifice of Quincy granite featuring strongly vertical lines and a castle-like tower crowned with crenellations, expressing the upward mobility of the edifice, its owner, and its city.

When Johnston died of tuberculosis during the building's construction, Thomas Ustick Walter supervised the rest of it and designed the building's six-story wings. Afterwards he was named Architect of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., for which he designed its iconic dome and House and Senate wings.

Dr. David Jayne, a physician, owned the Jayne Building as the headquarters for his patent medicines, which he claimed could treat cancer, gout, lung and skin diseases, rheumatism, scrofula, scurvy, syphilis and ulcers, dubious as his asseverations were.

Architect Charles E. Peterson advocated for the preservation of the Jayne Building and many other 19th-century structures in this district earmarked for clearance for Independence Mall. Peterson's argument was that the Jayne Building had inspired the design of more skyscrapers, particularly those of high-rise pioneer Louis Henry Sullivan, whose office was once across the street from it, and who went on to change the face of the Chicago, St. Louis, Buffalo and New York skyscraper to an honest expression of their rise, pier structure, and Celtic Revival ornamentation. But, in the eyes of Independence Mall's planners, no tower could out-rise that of Independence Hall. Today the Museum of the American Revolution occupies the Jayne Building's site, offering no clues to the skyscraper revolution its predecessor led.

Penn Mutual Building (1850-1851)

The Penn Mutual Building, c.1951.

The Penn Mutual Building stood near the Jayne Building and was considerably dwarfed by it, but was still distinctively handsome as Philadelphia's first cast-iron building. It featured an innovative method of cast-iron plate sheathing with an advanced jointing and bolting technique, round-arched windows and doors, decorative window hoods, bracketed cornices and pressed-iron reliefs defining its floors, and a Mansard roof and corner location giving it enough semblance of height and independence for it to stand out on its block. Peterson wanted this gem preserved too, but its stylistic competition for attention with Independence Hall was unacceptable in the sight of the planners, so down it went around 1956.

20-22, 24 South 5th Street (c.1850-1860)

20-22 South 5th Street, c.1949.

24 South 5th Street, c.1949.

These mid-19th-century brick and masonry buildings, cleared for Independence Mall as part of "Mall Project A," housed such businesses as the Bulkley, Raiguel & Co. paper manufacturer and rag dealer, Hershman's Men's Clothing, Ezra Levinson Paper, the American Shuffleboard Company, and the Variety Sandwich Shop. No. 20-22 is noteworthy for its corbelled brickwork and its brick paneling hinting at its internal structure, as well as its vertical stack of "Juliet" fire-escape balconies. No. 24 has a crisp simplicity to its façade, effecting a smooth transition between the left-hand cast-iron building and the right-hand brick masonry edifice. The wooden water-tower, recalling the iconic ones in New York City, is another distinctive feature.

Guarantee Trust & Safe Deposit Company Building (1873-1875)

Guarantee Trust & Safe Deposit Company, published in Moses
King's Philadelphia and Notable Philadelphians (1901).

Designed by Frank Furness before his renowned Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and most closely resembling it with its squared twin turrets, the Guarantee Trust & Safe Deposit Company Building was designed to offer secure storage for currency, securities, jewelry, and silver. One of the most imposing structures on Chestnut Street, rising like a commanding castle in front of Carpenter's Court (rear), it was built in Italianate polychrome brick, carved stone, and encaustic tile trimmings in a square layout with two bold tower pavilions topped by square Mansard roofs. Pioneering a fireproofing technique for secure storage of valuables, the building used as little wood as possible. But its solid stone structure, fortress-like presence, and stylistic flourishes (probably outdoing Carpenter Hall and Independence Hall in visual prominence, in the eyes of the planners) didn't stop its demolition in 1957.

Provident Life & Trust Building (1876-1879, 1888-1890)

Located catercorner from the Guarantee Trust & Safe Deposit Company Building, the Provident Life & Trust Building was also designed by Furness before his Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, with a more elaborate Gothic château presence sprouting gables, turrets, arches, compressed columns, and a floating corner turret in a multitude of directions, as an ornate circus of forms and finials. The building was extended with the triangle-capped, grand-arched Provident Building next door, which was demolished in 1945.

Perhaps the Independence Mall planners feared the Provident Life & Trust Building would outshine Independence Hall in historical and architectural prominence, so down it went in 1959-1960. The Omni Hotel occupies its site today.

Drexel & Co. Building (1885)

Drexel & Co. Building, in an undated image.

Erected on the site of the original Library Hall of the Library Company of Philadelphia (built c.1790) and razed in 1956 for the Library Hall's reconstruction, the Drexel & Co. Building was home to one of the city's leading investment banks. Its dominant partner, Anthony Joseph Drexel, founded Drexel, Morgan & Co. in 1871, later J.P. Morgan & Co. (now JPMorgan Chase), with John Pierpont "J.P." Morgan as his junior partner. Drexel also founded Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1891. The building was noteworthy for its "twin" Renaissance Revival façade interconnected with a smaller central one with a Diocletian window, forming a pleasing composition expressing the influence of the banking industry. The Signers' Garden marks its site today.

Irvin Building (1890-1931)

Irvin Building, c.1912, before its expansion.

The last of the Central Business District "holdouts" to go for Independence Mall – and the largest to be torn down, in 1974 – the Irvin Building was a jigsaw composite of two structures that solemnly expressed the gradual growth of their owner, the Fire Association of Philadelphia, an alliance of five volunteer hose companies and 11 volunteer engine companies formed to cooperate in first responses and to provide a new kind of fire insurance. First built in 1912 (right) as an expansion of an 1890 building from a neoclassical design by Edgar V. Seeler, it soon proved to be inadequate for the Fire Association's rapid growth and acquisition of smaller insurers.

Irvin Building, expanded in 1931.

So an obscure architect named Ernest Matthewson was hired to expand the building, which he did by replicating its neoclassical façade on the addition's initial six floors and transitioning its style to a muted Art Deco for a sequence of 10th-floor and 14th-floor setbacks for visual variation in its massing, raising the building to a total of 17 stories. The skyscraper was renamed for Elihu C. Irvin, former president of the Fire Association of Philadelphia. Following its name-change to Reliance Insurance Company and its relocation to larger quarters, the company leased the Irvin Building to the Chilton Book Company before plans for Independence National Historical Park were announced in preparation for the Bicentennial 20 years on. Razed in 1974, its site now contains a model 18th-century garden.

Independence National Historical Park in its early stages in the
mid-1960s, with the Irvin Building still standing on the right.

Clearly dwarfing the Colonial structures of Independence Mall, the Irvin Building typified the soaring setback "Superman" skyscraper of the 1930s, bringing the New York aesthetic of the Daily News Building and the Empire State Building into Philly as a towering symbol of the growth of fire insurance and its guardianship of the city.

Independence Hall, c.1952.

By 1969, 143 buildings had been razed for Independence Mall, so Philadelphia could re-create its Colonial city for the Bicentennial. This ironic combo of historic preservation with "urban renewal" favored the latter, in league with Boston's bulldozing of Scollay Square for Government Center and the West End for Charles River Park.

Independence Hall in 1940 and 2010.

As a result, Independence Mall strangely looks more like a football field than a Colonial village, as if pandering to the contemporary taste for recreational space rather than showcasing the Colonial predilection for grazing meadows, pastures, farms and gardens. This awkward arrangement focuses all our attention on the main attraction the land was cleared for, Independence Hall, which was given too much independence on its site. It therefore seems lonely on its void of green, barren of the buildings that once integrated it into a panoply of historic edifices that brought a rich tapestry of stylistic diversity and European flavor to Philadelphia, as a logical, gradual outgrowth of the Colonial landmarks that were its foundations. Which once again proves that a few isolated Colonial shrines doth not an historic city make. A truly historic city tells a story about its growth and evolution, from Colonial to Federal to Victorian to Modern times, through preserved architectural representations of all those periods in its history, not vapid Disney-esque theme parks that tell only a smidgen of the story to restless tourists.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Carlisle, Dennis, "An architectural graveyard at Independence Mall," Hidden City: Exploring Philadelphia's Urban Landscape, December 12, 2016, https://hiddencityphila.org/2016/12/an-architectural-graveyard-at-independence-mall/

Cohen, Amy, "A History of Slavery: President’s House Monument Turns 10," Hidden City: Exploring Philadelphia's Urban Landscape, December 17, 2020, https://hiddencityphila.org/2020/12/a-history-of-slavery-presidents-house-monument-turns-10/

Evans, Bill, "Original 1683 plan for Philadelphia by Thomas Holme," Vintage Philadelphia, Facebook, March 19, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1434456940102314/posts/3806480519566599/

"Evolution of a Shrine," Independence National Historical Park (handbook), last modified December 2, 2002, https://npshistory.com/handbooks/historical/17/hh17g.htm

Falcone, Alissa, "Drexel in Philly: The Founder’s Old City," Drexel News, March 24, 2025, https://drexel.edu/news/archive/2025/March/drexel-in-philly-the-founders-old-city

Finkel, Ken, "The Jayne Building: Chestnut Street's Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda," The Philly History Blog, November 11, 2013, https://blog.phillyhistory.org/index.php/2013/11/the-jayne-building-chestnut-streets-woulda-coulda-shoulda/

Graziano, Alex, "Delorean Moment: Provident Life and Trust Company," OCF Realty, July 11, 2011, https://www.ocfrealty.com/naked-philly/old-city/delorean-moment-provident-life-and-trust-company/

"Guarantee Trust & Safe Deposit Company," Free Library of Philadelphia, Digital Collections, https://libwww.freelibrary.org/digital/item/46812

Harrington, Nate, "Independence National Historical Park and its demolished history: What you need to know," WHYY, July 5, 2025, https://whyy.org/articles/independence-national-historical-park-philadelphia-colonial-history/

"HistoryInPhiladelphia," Instagram, October 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd9vgdsv8WS/?rpxt=MXBnYW0xNDVrdXEzNA%3D%3D

"History of Franklin Square," Historic Philadelphia, https://historicphiladelphia.org/stories/history-of-franklin-square/

Holme, Thomas, "A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania in America. [with] A Letter from William Penn Proprietary and Governour of Pennsylvania in America, To The Committee of the Free Society of Traders," Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection, Stanford University Libraries, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ruderman/catalog/jj125yt6481

"Independence National Historical Park | President's House Site," National Park Planner, 2014-2025, https://npplan.com/parks-by-state/pennsylvania-national-parks/independence-national-historical-park-park-at-a-glance/independence-national-historical-park-historic-sites/independence-national-historical-park-presidents-house-site/

Krupinski, Milosz, "Jayne Building," The UnTour Podcast, https://untour.org/node/4

Lawler, Edward, Jr., "The President's House," Part II, U.S. History, 2001, https://ushistory.org/historic-places/presidentshouse/history/pmhb/ph2

Lincoln, Abraham, "Annual Message to Congress – Concluding Remarks," Abraham Lincoln Online: Speeches and Writings, December 1, 1862, https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/congress.htm

"Old Images of Philadelphia's Post," Old Images of Philadelphia, Facebook, December 22, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/oldimagesofphiladelphia/posts/this-view-depicts-a-five-story-commercial-property-20-22-south-5th-street-that-i/1647384898657775/

Strahan, Derek, "Jayne Building, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania," Lost New England, March 7, 2022, https://lostnewengland.com/2022/03/jayne-building-philadelphia-pennsylvania/

"What was lost? Independence National Historical Park," National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/independence-lostbuildings.htm

Winberg, Michaela, "William Penn's plan: How Philly became a model for American cities," Billy Penn at WHYY, October 27, 2019, https://billypenn.com/2019/10/27/william-penn-375-years-philadelphia-model-city-street-grid/

Dudley's demise – and development

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:50:44 +0000

While visiting the construction site of a new housing development in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood earlier this year, I couldn't help noticing something else in need of some construction: this rickety relic of what appeared to be once the noble, princely manor of a high-ranking baron in Bostonian society.

Standing cold and solitary in the snow like an abandoned stage-set from Hollywood's Golden Age of Gone with the Wind, this shell-shocker of a shrine seemed to cry out for TLC, by virtue of both its historic stature and its ruinous state – the two qualities that force us to turn, face, and fix our gaze on an old building, pity its plight, and relish its rebirth.

David Dudley House (c.1825) in 1886. Photo courtesy of the Roxbury Historical Society.

A quick bit of research revealed it to be the David Dudley House at 167 Centre Street (its rusting, cemetery-like gate still indicates its number), a rare surviving example of the Federal architectural style in Roxbury. It was built c.1825 as the country estate of David Dudley, first president of Trader's National Bank of Boston, and his wife, Hannah Davis Dudley.

Hannah and David Dudley, by Chester Harding, c.1836, Harvard Art Museums.

Hannah and David Dudley, whose c.1836 portraits (left) by Chester Harding hang in the Harvard Art Museums, lived with their family of ten in this manse until David's death at 54 in 1841. Hannah continued to occupy it as part of her marriage settlement until her death at 94 in 1886.

Chester Harding House (1808), Boston. Photo by Adam Lenhardt.

(BTW, their portrait painter's house is a National Historic Landmark on Beacon Hill in Boston. Built in 1808, it was occupied by Chester Harding from 1826 to 1830 during a short period of his illustrious career painting portraits of British royalty and nobility and such American celebutantes as Presidents James Madison, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, as well as John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Stephen van Rensselaer III, Daniel Boone, Civil War General William T. Sherman, and many others. The house has headquartered the Boston Bar Association since 1963.)

"Meeting House Hill," 1799 copy by Samuel Curtis of original by John Ritto Penniman.

Born in 1787 in Roxbury (when it was a separate township from Boston) to Revolutionary War soldier Lt. Thomas Dudley, David was a direct descendant of Massachusetts Bay Colony Gov. Thomas Dudley, chief founder of Cambridge and namesake of Roxbury's Dudley Square (now Nubian Square). David Dudley was an extremely wealthy landowner with numerous property holdings in his town.

Site of Thomas Dudley's homestead, Roxbury, Massachusetts.

His family was as prominent a political dynasty in the 17th and 18th centuries as the Kennedys were in the 20th. They also included poet Anne Dudley, wife of Simon Bradstreet, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's last governor from 1679 to 1686; Thomas' son Joseph Dudley, President of the Dominion of New England in 1686 and Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire from 1702 to 1715 under Queen Anne; Joseph's son Paul Dudley, Attorney-General of Massachusetts from 1702 to 1718, and Chief Justice of the province's highest court, the Superior Court of Judicature; and Paul's brother William Dudley, with whom Paul served as the first proprietors and the namesakes of the town of Dudley, Massachusetts. The Dudleys' family traditions of slaveholdings and support of slavery led to Dudley Square's rechristening as Nubian Square in 2019.

David and Hannah Dudley raised ten children in their home – which explains its later addition of a rear ell and side verandah entrances. It was one of the first country estates in Roxbury's Highland Park neighborhood, built on a sweeping parcel extending out to the Stony Brook.

Highland Park, Roxbury, Massachusetts, c.1925.

The David Dudley House stood firm on its meadow lands as its Highland Park neighborhood grew more populous and densely settled with the 1835 arrival of the Boston-to-Providence railroad along the Stony Brook (near where the Southwest Corridor Park and Orange Line/Amtrak extension run today) and evolved from farm and orchard country to a wealthy suburb for Boston's Yankee elite to an immigrant mecca attracting Irish, Germans, Jews, Scandinavians, Italians, Latvians, Maritime Canadians, Jamaicans, Barbadians, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and ultimately African Americans, as one of Boston's "streetcar suburbs" when Roxbury was annexed to Boston in 1868 so Boston could take better advantage of the industries emerging along the Stony Brook, which included rubber factories, machine manufactories, breweries, and textile mills. By the 1960s, redlining, blockbusting, "urban renewal," and "white flight" morphed Roxbury's demographics into Boston's largest Black community, while architectural remnants of its Yankee era like the David Dudley House fell victim to benign neglect, waiting for salvation.

All Saints Church and Rectory, Highland Park, Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1897.

Following Hannah Dudley's passing, her house remained in the family until Rev. John J. Williams, Fourth Archbishop of Boston's Roman Catholic Archdiocese, acquired it in 1897 as the rectory of his new All Saints Church next door and added the third story, hipped roof, and columned circular two-story portico, preserving the house's Federal form.

Demolition of All Saints Church and vicinity in Roxbury for The Inner Belt, 1968.

In 1968, the house, the church, and surrounding structures were seized by the state Department of Public Works by eminent domain for The Inner Belt, or I-695, a ten-mile, eight-lane, mostly elevated highway planned to circle from Boston's Back Bay through Roxbury, Cambridge and Somerville and connect to the I-93 Central Artery. The house's historical significance spared it the demolition done to the church and 1,200 Roxbury homes, which displaced the German and Irish immigrant families whose grandparents had been workers in the old rubber factories, machine shops, breweries and mills that had sprouted along the Stony Brook throughout the 19th century and are all but gone now. "People Before Highways" community protests and an executive order by Gov. Frank Sargent aborted the highway project in 1970, giving rise to the Southwest Corridor Park and train lines in the 1980s, and leaving the Dudley House sitting alone by a Roxbury Community College parking lot that shoulders the ghost of the house's once-generous acreage.

The latest plans for this amazing survivor of neglect and bulldozing are for Roxbury Community College to restore, renovate and sustain it as its Center for Economic and Social Justice, which will prepare students of color and low-income families to gain employment in the green-tech sector and build their own businesses in energy efficiency, green tech and sustainable design. Funded in part by a $12 million investment secured by state Sen. Liz Miranda through her BRIGHT Act amendment and by a $4 million grant arranged by U.S. Sen. Ed Markey through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the house's renovation will integrate sustainable green technology as a model for its intended enterprise, as well as careful restoration of its exterior historical details. As the first net-zero historic renovation in Massachusetts, it will expunge the David Dudley House's slavery legacy and rejuvenate it as a shrine to Roxbury's heritage, history and hereafter.

And I hope that will happen soon. As I gazed at the house's frail façade of boarded-up windows, portico barely held up by a trickle of scaffolding, clapboard front marked with the red X sign that it was unsafe to enter – I was shocked that such a significant structure, rich with historical associations extending all the way to Beacon Hill, Harvard University and the former Dudley Square, could be left to go to pot.

But then again...

Shirley-Eustis House (1747), Roxbury, Massachusetts, c.1963, before restoration.

...other long-neglected historical treasures in Roxbury have found their way back from the dead. Notable among these is the Shirley-Eustis House, built in 1747 as the country estate of William Shirley, Royal Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. It was later occupied by William Eustis, Secretary of War under President James Madison during the War of 1812. After suffering neglect as an abandoned rooming house and antiques storage facility, it was restored in 1991 as Roxbury's leading house museum.

Shirley-Eustis House (1747-1751), Roxbury, Massachusetts, today. Photo by Tim Sackton.

Dillaway-Thomas House (1750-52), Roxbury, Massachusetts,
before restoration. Courtesy of MIT Special Collections.

Another is the Dillaway-Thomas House in John Eliot Square, built in 1750-52 as the rectory of the First Church in Roxbury, but requisitioned by Brig. Gen. John Thomas of the Continental Army as his headquarters. Its superior views of Dorchester Heights and the Boston Neck enabled Thomas to observe Henry Knox's transport of cannons from Fort Ticonderoga, New York, through Roxbury to Dorchester Heights for their fortification to force the British Army to evacuate Boston on March 17, 1776, under the command of Gen. George Washington. By 1835 the house was occupied by Charles Knapp Dillaway, headmaster of Boston Latin School, and his wife Martha, who lived in it until her death in 1909. It was acquired by the City of Boston in 1927 with plans to replace it with a school, but public resistance to this caused the Art Deco-styled James P. Timilty Middle School to be carefully built around the old house. After miraculously surviving a boarding-up, a looting, and two fires, the Dillaway-Thomas House was restored in 1998 as a Roxbury history exhibition space as part of Roxbury Heritage State Park.

Dillaway-Thomas House (1750-52), Roxbury, Massachusetts, today. Photo by Grk1011.

With any hope, and many doses of TLC, the David Dudley House will join the company of the Shirley-Eustis and Dillaway-Thomas houses as a Roxbury relic rejuvenated.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Adams, Fred, "Dudley house history in Roxbury | Boston, MA," Roxbury Historical Society, Facebook, March 14, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1252706132740679/posts/1634461511231804/
Adams, Fred, "Thomas Dudley's homestead in Roxbury, Massachusetts," Roxbury Historical Society, Facebook, February 21, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1252706132740679/posts/1618148399529782/
Batista, Elisa, "A brief history of the founding and development of Roxbury," Bay State Banner, June 15, 2018, https://baystatebanner.com/2018/06/15/a-brief-history-of-the-founding-and-development-of-roxbury/
Byrdsell, Auzzy J., "Roxbury Community College breaks ground on Center for Economic and Social Justice," The Boston Globe, updated June 21, 2024, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/06/21/metro/rcc-breaks-ground-center-economic-social-justice/
"Center for Economic and Social Justice," Roxbury Community College, 2024, https://www.rcc.mass.edu/explore/visit-rcc/cesj.html

"Chester Harding House," Wikipedia, last edited on 14 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Harding_House

"Chester Harding (painter)," Wikipedia, last edited on 17 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Harding_(painter)

Davis, Samuel, "Roxbury," Global Boston, https://globalboston.bc.edu/index.php/home/immigrant-places/roxbury/

Dudley, Dean, History of the Dudley Family, with Genealogical Tables, Pedigrees, Etc. Number VIII, Dean Dudley (Wakefield, MA, 1893), ill. opp. p. 850.

"HBI Submits Proposal for the Historic Dudley House," Historic Boston Incorporated, February 28, 2020, https://historicboston.org/hbi-submits-proposal-for-the-historic-dudley-house/

Horn, Christina (author) and Jaydie Halperin (editor), "The Inner Belt: The Highway Massachusetts Didn't Build," The West End Museum, https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/modern/the-inner-belt-the-highway-massachusetts-didnt-build/

"H693: David Dudley (1787-1841)," Paintings, Harvard Art Museums, bequest of Caroline Dudley Taylor, 1988, https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/305145

"H694: Hannah Davis Dudley (Mrs. David Dudley) (1792-1886)," Paintings, Harvard Art Museums, bequest of Caroline Dudley Taylor, 1988, https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/305199?position=9

"Meeting House Hill," Historic New England, copy by Samuel Curtis (signed and dated, 1799) of an original by John Ritto Penniman of Roxbury, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/17065

Montague, Deidre E., "RCC receives $12 million to renovate Dudley House," Bay State Banner, March 18, 2026, https://baystatebanner.com/2026/03/18/rcc-receives-12-million-to-renovate-dudley-house/

"Paul Dudley (jurist)," Wikipedia, last edited on 7 February 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dudley_(jurist)

Reyes, Max, "50 years after Inner Belt protest, activists gather again," The Boston Globe, January 25, 2019, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/01/25/remembering-highway-that-never-was/PS1jnevsnKzmFx4a1o5dqN/story.html?event=event12

"Roxbury Heritage State Park," Wikipedia, last edited on 24 February 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxbury_Heritage_State_Park

"Shirley-Eustis House," Wikipedia, last edited on 4 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley%E2%80%93Eustis_House

Smith, Dana, "Restoration of Boston's Shirley-Eustis House, a Georgian colonial mansion | Roxbury, MA," Boston Mass, Vintage, July 14, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/1207954711473390/

Stebbins, Theodore E., Jr. and Melissa Renn, American Paintings at Harvard, Volume One: Paintings, Watercolors, and Pastels by Artists Born before 1826, Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA and New Haven, CT, 2014), pp. 244-45, cat. 195 & 196, ill.

"The David Dudley House," RoxburyRoamer, Instagram, November 9, 2021, https://www.instagram.com/p/CWDc8sfLjI9/

"The Faces Behind Roxbury's Dudley House," Historic Boston Incorporated, December 31, 2019, https://historicboston.org/the-faces-behind-roxburys-dudley-house/

"The Forgotten All Saints Church," Historic Boston Incorporated, April 10, 2020, https://historicboston.org/the-forgotten-all-saints-church/

"Thomas Dudley," Wikipedia, last edited on 16 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dudley

Walker, Grant, "Roxbury Community College to begin work on social justice center," Boston Business Journal, June 21, 2024, https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2024/06/21/roxbury-community-college-building-new-center.html

Homes of the brave

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 02:19:57 +0000

The stretch of Boston's Commonwealth Avenue from Kenmore Square to Packard's Corner has never been the same since its two primary historic landmarks and social magnets disappeared – one partially, the other totally. Braves Field and the Commonwealth Armory were legend-breakers and history-makers, now obscured by Boston University's "new uses" for their sites.

They were built concurrently in 1914-1915, the former as the home of the Boston Braves National League baseball team (yes, Boston once had two teams!), the latter as a post and drill hall for the Massachusetts Army National Guard. Coincidentally, the Commonwealth Armory was designed by James E. McLaughlin, architect of Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox American League team, which explained the armory's festively ceremonial and tastefully Bostonian design.

Like Fenway Park (built three years earlier), Braves Field was aligned in a northeastern direction, in the name of player safety and competitive fairness. Since most baseball games are played in afternoons and early evenings, this orientation of the field's central axis from home plate through second base kept the setting afternoon sun out of the eyes of the batter, catcher and home-plate umpire for ease and accuracy of tracking, catching and calling, say, a 95 mph fastball.

This arrangement also determined afternoon shadow patterns in the stadium. As the sun set in the west, the third-base seating was the first to catch a shadow, so its spectators received early relief from summer heat.

Also like Fenway, Braves Field's size, configuration and compass-points were governed by the established street-grid of its neighborhood, which set it within a similar square street pattern to that of the auto showrooms, service stations and Boston University buildings along its strip.

Yet, unlike Fenway, Braves Field was built on a foursquare parcel rather than the snugly skew block that morphed Fenway into a polygon, to allow the field more latitude for in-the-park home runs, per the wishes of Braves owner James Gaffney. This gave it ample foul territory, which favored pitchers over batters. Breezes from its Charles River location further impeded out-of-the-park homers.

But their city settings made Braves Field and Fenway Park truly urban ballparks that attracted crowds within walking and transit-riding as well as driving distance from all over the city, as handy alternatives to the far-off, isolated stadiums in other cities that are long walks (or long drives, in the case of Gillette Stadium in Foxborough) away, hence out of reach to many.

Braves Field and Fenway Park were thus some of the nation's most universally accessible ballparks. Furthermore, their dense urban settings did not stop them from being open, airy green oases from urban congestion with bountiful breathing space for all spectators.

On Braves Field's opening day, August 18, 1915, a 46,000-strong crowd saw the Boston Braves defeat the St. Louis Cardinals, and J. C. O'Leary reported in The Boston Globe that it was "the finest ballpark in the world. There is not another like it anywhere, and the probability is that it will stand preeminent for the next 25 years." It was also that era's largest baseball stadium, served directly by a streetcar system.

Braves Field, 1916 World Series. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Which attracted the Braves' sort-of rivals, the Red Sox, to Braves Field for the 1915 and 1916 World Series – and the gamble paid off: the Sox won both series 4 games to 1. (Craig Breslow, are you listening?) And, yes, it was a fair trade: while Braves Field was being built the Braves played their 1914 World Series at Fenway Park, sweeping the Philly Athletics in four games.

The breezy, open design of Braves Field (albeit with some obstructed views – tough noogies if you were stuck in the nosebleed seats, if that was all you could afford) allowed a few more nuggets of history to be made there, but "the finest ballpark in the world" – not to mention the "Miracle Braves" moniker sportswriters tagged the team with after their improbable World Series win – were stretching it a bit. It took until 1922 for a homer to be hit there (by New York Giants catcher Frank Snyder, clearing the left-field foul pole), inner fences on the field were built and shifted around several times, and the whole field was shifted clockwise toward right field. Something always seemed off about the design, perhaps due in part to the field's unusual location, and that it had been the site of the Allston Golf Club's golf course when Gaffney purchased it shortly after Fenway Park opened in 1912. Perhaps the river breezes were more favorable toward the flight of golf balls than baseballs.

Nonetheless, the Boston Braves won the 1948 National League Pennant before 1.5 million spectators. This was their first pennant victory since 1914, and it was timely with their cofounding of the Jimmy Fund, the cancer research arm now associated with the Red Sox. The Braves lost the World Series to the Cleveland Indians 4 games to 2.

Sam "Jet" Jethroe became Boston's first African-American major-leaguer in
1950, when he joined the Boston Braves. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

In partial redemption of their weak record, the Braves became the second MLB team to break the color barrier, hiring outfielder Sam “Jet” Jethroe in 1950, a year after Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African-American major-leaguer. By 1952, the Braves had three Black players; one was George Crowe, Robinson’s old teammate on the Los Angeles Red Devils basketball team.

Boston University graduation on the former Braves Field,
soon after its 1953 transfer to the university.

After losing their final Braves Field game to the Dodgers 8-2 in 1952 (Roy Campanella socked in the deciding homer), the Braves moved to Milwaukee (followed by Atlanta in 1966), forever depriving Boston of a National League team. The next year, Boston University purchased Braves Field, beginning the process of depriving Boston of one of its baseball shrines.

After the newly named Boston University Field (renamed Nickerson Field in 1963, in honor of BU Trustee William Emery Nickerson, main inventor of the machinery that manufactured Gillette's first safety razor) was shrunk down in 1955 for campus housing at the parameters and football and soccer on the field (as that added freestanding row of bleachers in some images shows), the gabled, arcaded entrance, the under-bleacher concourse, and part of the old wall are all that remain of old Braves Field, as a monument to major-league majesty.

The same cannot be said for its most immediate neighbor...

...the Commonwealth Armory. Built for Troops A, B, C, and D of the First Squadron Cavalry, Battery A of the Massachusetts Field Artillery, and the Field Hospital, Ambulance, and Signal Corps, it had to be a vast, spreading arena to accommodate all those guardsmen, with a commanding presence on the avenue.

So James E. McLaughlin dressed up its sandstone-trimmed brick edifice with a sequence of segmental arches like those on Fenway Park to visually emphasize the building's wide reach along the street and far-reaching space inside. To give it the castle-like regality worthy of its occupant, he fronted it with a Jacobethan headhouse and buttressed tower, accessible drawbridge-style by a gated, arched entry bridge over a "moat." The broad springing arcs of these arches and the elliptical dome roof seemed to signify the broad-jump spring of the vaulted elliptical ceiling inside the drill hall, structured to create the widest open space possible for the drills of the growing National Guard troops, living quarters for 700 officers and men, stables for 250 horses, storage for armaments, and more.

Mounted State Police training on horseback at the Commonwealth Armory, c.1925.

Troops stationed there were called to action on the Mexican border in 1916, and later deployed to France during World War I. The Armory also hosted a myriad of public events, including the Boston Auto Show, sportsman's shows featuring Ted Williams, dog shows, international food festivals, an address by President John F. Kennedy at a celebration of his 44th birthday on May 29, 1961, and the

President John F. Kennedy (center) introduces his brother, Massachusetts
Senator Edward M. Kennedy (right), at the "New England Salute to the
President" on October 19, 1963, at the Commonwealth Armory in Boston.
Photo courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

"New England Salute to the President," a Democratic fundraising dinner honoring Kennedy on October 19, 1963. "I must say it is a constant source of pride to me that I come from this State, that I represented Massachusetts, that I am identified with this State. It has the longest and, I think, most distinguished history. But I think in 1963 as well as the last 30 years, as well as the last 150 years, this State and the people in it have been willing to meet their responsibilities, and particularly those who are Democrats," he said – a month and three days before his assassination.

On March 13, 1969, less than a year after the assassination of civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his widow Coretta Scott King spoke at the Armory at the Boston University Founders' Day Convocation upon receiving an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree from BU, where her husband had received his Ph.D. Also accepting a posthumous award on his behalf for his service to humanity, she addressed her determination to advance her late husband's legacy of nonviolent social change, structural injustice, and global human rights, tying it in with the critical need to address the "triple threat" of society – namely the interlinked crises of institutional racism, poverty, and militarism, specifically pertaining to the ongoing Vietnam War. She also explored the transformation of her husband's philosophy from the dream and mission of one individual to a structured, organized social movement, in her promotion of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change she founded in 1968 in Atlanta to provide research, education and training programs on the principles, philosophy and methods of the nonviolence her husband advocated passionately.

On October 10, 1969, The Who performed at the Armory as part of the North American leg of their Tommy Tour, in support of that year's release of their seminal rock opera Tommy. They performed the full opera to a cheering audience that packed the space.

In the wake of the killings of four Kent State University students by Ohio National Guardsmen during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration on the campus on May 4, 1970, ironically the Commonwealth Armory became a site of vehement antiwar protests in its own right.

The State's reactionary law-and-order wing struck back with a GOP gala dinner there on October 31, 1972. While First Lady "Pat" Nixon spoke, about 8,000 protesters assembled outside with chants of "Sign it now!", insisting that President Nixon sign the nine-point peace program the North Vietnamese had offered.

Of course, the protest did not stop Nixon's landslide reelection a week later. But nor did the GOP gala stop Massachusetts from being the only state to vote for Senator George McGovern. Which famously gave rise to the bumper-sticker slogan "Don't Blame Me, I'm from Massachusetts" after Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace on August 9, 1974, in the aftermath of the Watergate break-in cover-up.

The Armory's enormous space also suited it for many public services, including college registrations, Certified Public Accountant and Nursing Board exams, ROTC physical training, and even a makeshift morgue following the tragic Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston on November 28, 1942.

(It might have come in handy as a temporary hospital for COVID patients during the pandemic had it still been around then.)

All those historical events and community services, plus its quintessence in progressive drill-hall engineering, should have been reason enough to preserve the Armory as a Boston landmark. But no. In 2002 it made way for BU's Agganis Arena, which the Armory would have fit comfortably...

...as the curves, roof ellipse, and size of its replacement suggest, being not much bigger than its predecessor. As designed by Cannon Design in its typical hack corporate style, Agganis Arena shows that the Commonwealth Armory's crumbling into the trashbin of oblivion was unnecessary, and is yet another blemish on BU's bland, bric-a-brac, chockablock campus.

A cast-iron gate and lantern, refurbished by Ryan Iron Works, are the sole mementos of the intricate craftsmanship of their castle, which crowned its neighborhood regally and served its community nobly as a convention hall, political arena, concert venue, and much more. Now it has solely a private function for BU, robbing Boston of another community asset and historic landmark. So that's how we remember two vanished venerable institutions where baseball, political and social history were made: by their gates, not their buildings.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Agganis Arena," Wikipedia, last edited on 30 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agganis_Arena

Bellon, Bernard, "Outside the Nixon Dinner," The Heights, Volume LIII, Number 7, November 7, 1972, https://newspapers.bc.edu/?a=d&d=bcheights19721107.2.30&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-----------------------

"Braves Field," ballparksofbaseball.com, https://www.ballparksofbaseball.com/ballparks/braves-field/

"Braves Field," Wikipedia, last edited on 2 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braves_Field

"BU Yesterday," BU Bridge, Week of 9 January 2004, Vol. VII, No. 15, https://www.bu.edu/bridge/archive/2004/01-09/bu-yesterday.html

"Commonwealth Armory," Wikipedia, last edited on 3 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Armory

"Coretta Scott King Speaks at Boston University," Getty Images, https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/coretta-scott-king-center-is-escorted-into-the-commonwealth-news-photo/936027432

Derby, Samantha, and Clio Admin., "Commonwealth Armory," Clio: Your Guide to History, May 14, 2018, accessed October 12, 2026, https://theclio.com/entry/49102

Johnson, Richard A., "The Jet, Boston Braves Center Fielder Sam Jethroe," The Sports Museum, https://www.sportsmuseum.org/curators-corner/the-jet-boston-braves-center-fielder-sam-jethroe/

Kennedy, John F., "Remarks in Boston at the 'New England's Salute to the President' Dinner," October 19, 1963, The American Presidency Project, posted by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-boston-the-new-englands-salute-the-president-dinner

Landry, Peter, "8000 Demonstrate at Pat Nixon Speech," The Harvard Crimson, October 31, 1972, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1972/11/1/8000-demonstrate-at-pat-nixon-speech/

Lewis, David (author), Kristen Dahlmann and Jan Haenraets (editors), "Braves Field and the Afterlife of a Baseball Stadium," BU Arts & Sciences Preservation Studies, 2023, https://www.bu.edu/preservation/scholarship/student-work/braves-field-afterlife/

Nevins, Joseph, "Braves Field/Nickerson Field," A People's Guide to Greater Boston, April 15, 2022, https://bostonbook.org/2022/04/15/braves-field-nickerson-field/

Nowlin, Bill, "Sam Jethroe," Society for American Baseball Research, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/sam-jethroe/

Osinski, Stan, "History of the Commonwealth Armory in Boston, Massachusetts," Boston Mass, Vintage, Facebook, February 25, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/626987122903488/

Ruzzo, Bob, "Braves Field: An Imperfect History of the Perfect Ballpark," Society for American Baseball Research, Fall 2012, https://sabr.org/journal/article/braves-field-an-imperfect-history-of-the-perfect-ballpark/

"Sam Jethroe, Boston Braves (1950-1952)," Instagram, 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/DUmULpvF-9m/

Swanson, Daniel, "Nearing the End: The Election," The Harvard Crimson, November 3, 1972, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1972/11/4/nearing-the-end-pthe-long-1972/

"The Ballparks: Braves Field, Boston, Massachusetts," This Great Game: The Online Book of Baseball, 2023, https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7533833769922697149/1991195619466870267

"The Who concert Boston Commonwealth Armory 1969," Today in Whostory, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/todayinwhostory/posts/on-friday-october-10-1969the-who-begin-their-second-tommy-tour-of-north-america-/122204766746883016/

"The Who, Oct. 10, 1969 (57 years ago), Commonwealth Armory, Boston, Massachusetts, United States," Concert Archives, https://www.concertarchives.org/concerts/the-who-b2c2775a-c078-4c59-971f-5777be863dc9

Hancock's haunt

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:55:52 +0000

When I was a Ghost City Tours tour guide, I'd point out Boston's sole surviving ghost of John Hancock, a little-known landmark sequestered in the shadows of the city's oldest street pattern, the Blackstone Block, as the sole remnant of that pattern's period in history. The Ebenezer Hancock House, which John built in 1767 as the home and office of his younger brother, Deputy Paymaster-General of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, has an angular shape unusual for its time, being built within the confines of the skew lanes and cowpaths that defined it. Since it changed hands last month and has an iffy future, perhaps it's time to revisit its architecture, history and backstory.

What makes us stop and stare at it the most is that it thinks outside the box, having no right-angled corners – as well as a cropped corner, which John may have arranged to bring his brother more sunlight or to allow freer passage of cows and horses there. Its iron S-ties secured its structure at another corner, and the stringcourses in its Flemish-bond brickwork defined its floors. Its larger first-floor windows likely illuminated Ebenezer's disbursements of payments to troops during the Revolutionary War. But despite its less-than-erudite form (compared to brother John's manor, which I'll go into later), it can proudly boast that George Washington Slept Here when it was an inn later on, as well as Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette.

In 1778, the house stored a loan of 2 million French silver crowns from Louis XIV of France, negotiated by Benjamin Franklin as Minister to France and brought into Boston by Admiral Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, as back payment to Washington's Eastern Continental Army. In 1798, Benjamin Fuller opened America's longest continually operating shoestore on the first floor.

William H. Learnard took over Fuller's shoestore in 1821, and ran it until 1886, but it miraculously remained in the building as a shoestore until 1963, as other enterprises in the house and the Blackstone Block came and went over the years, including the Marshall House restaurant, inn and tavern, which operated mainly in the 1890s and the 1910s.

By the early 1970s, the East India Trading Co. antique and souvenir shop was operating in that space. Over the years the house fell into disrepair, even though most of the original interior details remained amazingly intact, probably due to underutilization. I remember walking past it with my father around that time and noticing that its storefront was smashed; my father suspected a break-in. Later the house was "left vacant following a serious car accident in the 1970s, which nearly destroyed the storefront at the corner of the building,” wrote city archaeologist Joseph M. Bagley in Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them. Swartz & Swartz came to the rescue, acquiring it as their law office in 1974 and restoring it to its colonial condition, preserving as much interior detail as possible.

And look at what they did...

Of course, their intricate preservation of all those rooms in their original dimensions, materials and structural elements, from hand-hewn beams to brick walls to wrought-iron cauldrons and andirons, entailed considerable sacrifice of valuable space to conduct legal business. So Swartz & Swartz built an addition on the back in the parking area, careful to hide it from the view of Freedom Trail tourists and to distinguish its modern architectural style from the original.

Incidentally, that parking area once contained a row of houses John Hancock had built on spec to abut Ebenezer's digs. Sadly, they did not survive past the 1950s, leaving the Ebenezer Hancock House as a "holdout" from Boston's Colonial-Revolutionary era:

Hancock Manor (1737-1863), Boston. Photo c.1859.

Engraving of Hancock Manor, Alexander Jackson Davis & Thomas Illman, 1832.

They don't compare in social standing, do they? More than a holdout, the Ebenezer Hancock House is the sole surviving building in Boston associated with its favorite son, due to not only the razing of his spec rowhouses but also the leveling of his own manor, which stood on Beacon Hill on Beacon Street by the site of the Massachusetts State House from 1737 to 1863.

View of Hancock Manor from the Boston Common by Christian Remick, 1768.

Built by Joshua Blanchard for John's merchant uncle Thomas Hancock and later willed to John, this brown Braintree granite and Connecticut sandstone manse was bedecked with corner quoins, a gambrel roof balustrade, and a Juliet balcony from a French window capped with baroque volutes, and it commanded a peerless view of the Boston Common's pastureland.

A view of Hancock Manor and the Boston Neck, Richard Williams, 1775.

As these drawings show, Hancock Manor had the advantage of being built on many acres of rural virgin land. This afforded it a full pasture and garden and a breathtaking view of the Boston Common that extended into the Boston Neck, which attached the town to the mainland by a narrow isthmus at the time, making John Hancock feel like master of all he surveyed. By contrast, the Ebenezer Hancock House had the disadvantage of having to conform to densely settled, firmly established urban street patterns, which hemmed it in considerably.

Hancock Manor staircase. Wood engraving from Ballou’s Pictorial
Drawing-Room Companion, March 26, 1859. Courtesy Bostonian Society.

Hancock Manor's lavish interior began with a paneled parlor with a bridal stair of carved twisted balusters leading up to a landing with a circular-headed window overlooking the garden of ornamental flower-beds, fruit-bearing box trees, mulberry trees and other exotic plantings. "As you entered the governor's mansion, to the right was the drawing or reception room, with furniture of bird's-eye maple covered with rich damask. Out of this opened the dining-hall [...] in which Hancock gave the famous breakfast to Admiral D'Estaing and his officers," reported Eliza G. Gardner, who lived in the Manor for many years.

John Hancock House, painting by Charles Furneaux, c.1859.

The house was occupied by Lt.-Gen. Hugh Percy during the British Army's 1775-1776 Siege of Boston, and then Gen. Henry Clinton set up his headquarters there, all while Hancock was in Philadelphia as President of the Second Continental Congress, and shortly before he inscribed his venerable "John Hancock" on the Declaration of Independence. After the Second Treaty of Paris concluding the Revolutionary War in 1783, Hancock entertained luxuriantly at his Manor, attracting the likes of le Comte d'Estaing, le Marquis de Lafayette, and, yes, George Washington, and Hancock lived there as the first and third Governors of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. On his death bed he dictated his will to give his home to the Commonwealth but died before the will could be finalized in writing.

Protest sign calling for the preservation of Hancock Manor. Courtesy of Historic New England.

Following many failed attempts to preserve Hancock Manor – ultimately because the Legislature were too preoccupied with Civil War matters to agree upon the terms of acquiring the house – it was sold at public auction for $230 on June 16, 1863, and demolished, despite a rallying cry to preserve this icon of history. But its demise sparked one of the first historic preservation movements, which led to the salvation of Boston's Old South Meeting House (1729) and Old State House (1711).

What replaced Hancock Manor were these very erudite, elegant townhouses, developed by prosperous merchants James Madison Beebe and Gardner Brewer, from plans by Gridley James Fox Bryant, architect of Boston's Old City Hall and Charles Street Jail. These bowfront rowhouses boasted rare examples of exterior paneling, festoons and rustication, bracketed lintels, and a rare Eastlake interior of carved mahogany, outwardly expressing the wealth and ambition of their developers and the upscale clientele they were catering to.

Ultimately, we lost John Hancock's historical treasure for nothing, for those fancy rowhouses were removed for the construction of the State House's marble wings in 1916, leaving but a ghost of what once stood there and should still be standing there today, as well as a plaque marking its sad site:

Ebenezer Hancock House at night. Photo by Ryoko Sha.

So Ebenezer Hancock's old haunts are all the architecture we have left to memorialize John Hancock's immeasurable legacy in the growth of our city, the founding of our Commonwealth, and the declaration of our independence as a nation. Now that the house is under new ownership, it'll be interesting to find out what ghost will haunt it now, and how well it'll preserve the ghosts of the past...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Brewer and Beebe Townhouses // 1863-1917," Buildings of New England, July 17, 2024, https://buildingsofnewengland.com/2024/07/17/brewer-beebe-townhouses-1863-1917/

"Ebenezer Hancock House," Wikipedia, last edited on 4 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebenezer_Hancock_House

Floyd, Margaret Henderson, "Measured Drawings of the Hancock House by John Hubbard Sturgis: A Legacy to the Colonial Revival," Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume 51: Architecture in Colonial Massachusetts, https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1965

"Hancock Manor," Wikipedia, last edited on 13 July 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hancock_Manor

Killen, Dave, "Ebenezer Hancock House, 10 Marshall Street," LandVest, 2026, https://landvest.com/listing/MA4941/10-marshall-street-boston-ma-02108/

Lankston, Charlie, "Founding Father John Hancock’s Boston Home Is on the Market for First Time in Half a Century—More Than 250 Years After It Was Built," realtor.com, July 17, 2025, https://www.realtor.com/news/unique-homes/john-hancock-founding-father-home-boston-sale/

Marian, Sara, and Clio Admin., "Ebenezer Hancock House," Clio: Your Guide to History, June 3, 2022, accessed October 12, 2026, https://theclio.com/entry/22660

McDonald, Danny, "For sale: the only house left in downtown Boston that was built in the run-up to the American Revolution," The Boston Globe, updated July 13, 2025, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/13/metro/for-sale-house-boston-american-revolution/?event=event12

Rosen, Andy, "The Massachusetts governor’s mansion that might have been," The Boston Globe, November 27, 2014, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/11/27/the-massachusetts-governor-mansion-that-might-have-been/B06ZY75VkWCVkjnVbVGjbO/story.html

Smith, Dana, "John Hancock House, a historic Georgian estate in Boston, MA," Boston Mass, Vintage, Facebook, May 25, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/1167845008817694/

Strahan, Derek, "Ebenezer Hancock House, Boston," Lost New England, August 14, 2014, https://lostnewengland.com/2014/08/ebenezer-hancock-house-boston/

Strahan, Derek, "John Hancock House, Boston," Lost New England, October 23, 2017, https://lostnewengland.com/2017/10/john-hancock-house-boston/

"The John Hancock House, Boston, Mass., Historic New England, 2008, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/103657

"Tiny Story: Ebenezer Hancock House," Boston Preservation Alliance, February 6, 2025, https://www.bostonpreservation.org/news-item/tiny-story-ebenezer-hancock-house

A West End wonder

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:46:52 +0000

Photo by Alexander Tang.

Boston's West End is notorious for being bulldozed into a memory in the 1950s and 1960s, displacing an entire immigrant community with the big-box high-rises of Charles River Park. However, a low-rise gem hides behind a near-jungle on Cambridge Street as a paradigm of how pure geometry can define, shape and organize a quiet study space.

The West End Branch of the Boston Public Library, built in 1968 from an unusual hexagonal design by Eugene Kennedy of Maginnis, Walsh & Kennedy, also presented the hexagon as a considerable exterior space saver and interior space economizer, allowing the placement of books along its perimeters so that they left an open-concept central space for many different kinds of library activities at once, all within a small footprint.

Now, with proposals in the offing to replace the West End Branch Library and top it with 119 units of housing, I had to revisit it before it went the way of the West End.

Its footprint yields acreage for not only parking, but also a peace garden to introduce the entrance with a calming intimation of the peace and quiet one expects in a library.

The garden, the path from the street, the ceiling-high window walls, and the open porch all present us with a very friendly gesture of welcome to the library, giving us an external indication of the generous sitting space and reading light we're in for when we pass the book-sale carts in the vestibule and enter the main room.

Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Rachel Moon.

Sure enough, the room is one open, bright, fluid atmosphere with light (natural and fluorescent) extending to all, in-the-round displays of over 20,000 books of all subjects extending space to all, a myriad of seating options. and a deluge of activities open to all. These include exercise and tai chi classes, movie discussions, story hours, technology instruction, and origami, LEGO and construction clubs.

Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Rachel Moon.

Kennedy wisely designed the interior as a hexagon within a hexagon. This created a smaller hexagonal central space with a slightly dropped ceiling installed with circular "moon" lights. Picking up on a mode of lighting in Alvar Aalto's Baker House dormitory at MIT, this scheme shed extra light on the office-reference desk below. The open shelves pick up on the hexagon theme to create mini-hexagon study spaces.

Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Alexander Tang.

This open-access concept was mirrored in the librarians' accessibility when school paper assignments brought me to the West End Branch Library, a short walk from my Beacon Hill home. For a biology report on hibernation of bears and social studies papers on U.S. westward expansion and Sudbury's colonial settlement, the librarians helpfully supplied me with the books I needed to get an A each time.

Old West Church (1806) as West End Branch Library, c.1920.

Interestingly enough, the modernism of the West End Branch originated in the classicism of the Old West Church, when it was a library from 1896 until the "urban renewal" of the West End forced its closure in 1960. Designed by Asher Benjamin in a Federal style with pilasters, panels and a cupola-crowned clock tower, it was built in 1806 for a Congregational fellowship to replace a church damaged by British forces in 1775. Rev. Charles Lowell, who commissioned the new church, was a major abolitionist who desegregated seating in the church, sheltered renegade slaves in the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, and provided Sunday school for people of all economic backgrounds. In 1887, the congregation dissolved, and Andrew Wheelwright purchased the church to preserve it and turned it over to the city for library use, for which its column-supported open space (below) served it very well – as sort of a model for the columned hexagonal central space of its successor.

Old West Church, West End Branch Library interior, c.1930.

Jewish Book Weeks and immigrant literacy services were offered at the library for West Enders, courtesy of Fanny Goldstein, its head librarian from 1919 to 1957 and Massachusetts' first Jewish librarian. Shortly before the building's reconversion to a church – this time with a Methodist congregation – John F. Kennedy cast his ballot there on the eve of his historic presidential election in 1960.

The one-story height and generous setback of the West End Branch Library's new home made it a polite neighbor for Cambridge Street's extant historic West End structures, the First Harrison Gray Otis House (1796, Charles Bulfinch) and Old West Church, by virtue of its lowly deference to its elders. By contrast, the library-housing tower proposals for the site look rather corporate and would add to the skyscraperization of the West End by dwarfing its landmark next-door neighbors and making them look even more like "holdouts" from urban renewal. So I'm not too thrilled about it, aside from its provision of much-needed affordable housing in our housing crisis.

I would preserve the West End Branch Library as a modernist landmark, for its use of innovative geometrics to create a model of the free-to-all inclusiveness that befits a public library design.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"151 Cambridge Street (West End Library)," City of Boston, https://www.boston.gov/buildinghousing/151-cambridge-street-west-end-library

"About the West End Branch," Boston Public Library, https://www.bpl.org/about-west-end/

"Boston Public Library: West End Branch interior," Flickr, uploaded December 3, 2010, https://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/5229424305/in/photostream/

Brinker, Andrew, "Housing at the Library? It may be coming to your neighborhood," The Boston Globe, updated April 6, 2023, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/04/06/business/housing-library-it-may-be-coming-your-boston-neighborhood/

Chen, Queenie (author), Bob Potenza (editor), "The Old West Church," The West End Museum, https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/west-boston/the-old-west-church/

Loth, Renée, "Eight high-profile teams compete to design West End library, complete with affordable housing," The Boston Globe, updated December 8, 2023, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/12/08/arts/eight-high-profile-teams-compete-design-west-end-library-complete-with-affordable-housing/

Roche, Daniel Jonas, "Books over Beantown: MASS Design Group, Mikyoung Kim, Shigero Ban Architects, and others throw their names in the hat to design a new library in Boston's West End," The Architect's Newspaper, August 21, 2023, https://www.archpaper.com/2023/08/mass-design-group-mikyoung-kim-shigeru-ban-architects-others-throw-names-hat-design-new-library-bostons-west-end/

Roche, Daniel Jonas, "A Propensity for Density: MASS Design Group and The Architectural Team to design combined housing and library project in Boston's West End," The Architect's Newspaper, January 28, 2025, https://www.archpaper.com/2025/01/mass-design-group-the-architectural-team-housing-library-boston-west-end/

Smart, Janelle (author), Jaydie Halperin (editor), "The West End Branch of the Boston Public Library," The West End Museum, https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/immigrant-neighborhood/the-west-end-branch-of-the-boston-public-library/

Welker, Grant, "Boston has a new place to put housing: Above its libraries," Boston Business Journal, May 19, 2026, https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2026/05/19/boston-now-putting-housing-above-its-libraries.html?cx_testId=62&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

Co-op vs. condo

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:46:56 +0000

This stately 17-story residence (actually 16-story, not counting the missing 13th floor that would have spooked the superstitious away from buying it) on Park Avenue in New York was built in 1925-26 from a Classical/Georgian Revival design by Henry C. Pelton, before he co-designed NYC's landmark Riverside Church with Allen & Collens in 1930.

This was my second New York home, where I lived for seven years, from age 3 to age 10, when my family moved to Boston. Here we had it all:

A green-canopied entry to a mirror-paneled lobby.

A uniformed doorman (Vito) who summoned taxis with the shrill of a whistle.

A superintendent (Mr. Johnson) and a maintenance man (Gus) who took care of everything.

Two elevators, one with an elevator man, until its push-button replacement made him go the way of the milkman.

A side-alley service entrance where gourmet groceries from Fraser-Morris were dropped off to the well-to-do.

Birthday and Halloween parties and musical recitals with great neighbors.

Short walks to school and shopping, movies around the corner, Central Park two blocks away.

This was a co-op.

This equally stately 5-story residence on Beacon Hill in Boston was built in 1911 from a Classical/Federal Revival design by Richard Arnold Fiske as floor-through French flats replacing an 1837 Mt. Vernon Street townhouse and a Pinckney Street rowhouse in the rear. The townhouse had marked the site of the c.1804 home of Jonathan Mason, one of the Mount Vernon Proprietors who had developed Beacon Hill (who also included Charles Bulfinch, architect of the gold-domed Massachusetts State House two blocks away, and the West Front of the U.S. Capitol).

This was my first Boston home, where I lived for two years, from age 10 to age 12 going on 13, when my family relocated to a rent-controlled apartment a block away due to major setbacks in my father's architecture career. Here we had a lot, if not all:

A gated front walk for me to play Catch, Dodgeball, and Red Light/Green Light with the neighbors' kids (one was my first crush).

A well-manicured front garden.

A vintage Otis caged elevator.

A courtyard patio that my father paved with bricks.

Two bedrooms for me.

A loyal, cooperative homeowners' association.

Frontage on what Henry James, who resided at No. 102, called "the most proper street in Boston."

Short walks to school and shopping, the Boston Common two blocks away, the Esplanade at the end of the street.

This was a condominium.

So what's the difference between the two? And which is the better choice for you?

In brief: A co-op involves collective shareholder ownership of the whole building. A condo involves individual ownership of a unit within a collectively maintained residential community and its shared areas and amenities.

Each is a homeowners association (HOA) in which you share amenities with neighbors, and all are collectively responsible for upkeep of common areas, structural elements and exteriors, the payment of monthly fees to do so, and the minimization of conflicts that can impede the civil living with others under a common umbrella roof that characterizes both HOAs.

So, given each option's pros and cons, which is the better choice for you depends on what assets you're most comfortable with, what liabilities you can best put up with, the degree of autonomy you want over your unit, your long-term home ownership and investment goals, and a host of other considerations. Here's the scoop on each option:

Co-op

In a co-op you're not really a homeowner, but a shareholder who buys a share of stock in the corporate entity that owns the building. This grants you the right to occupy your unit according to the terms of a proprietary lease that accompanies the stock certificate you receive upon moving in.

So you don't actually own your unit as physical property, and you may have to get corporation approval to renovate it, depending on the co-op bylaws.

But that's nicely balanced with other privileges that are unique to a co-op and not always found in a condominium. These include:

A more streamlined way to pay monthly expenses: one lump-sum fee typically covers insurances, maintenance, salaries for hired staff (doorman, superintendent, etc.), property taxes, and sometimes the whole building's underlying mortgage.
Potential election to the board that handles the co-op's operations and maintenance expenses, pays insurances and staff wages, and tries to keep the peace in the community.
Having a say in how the organization is run and maintained, and who can join the co-op.

Which means you actually have a say in who your neighbors-to-be will be, in the framework of fair housing laws. You can cast a 'no' vote for an applicant with a substance abuse issue; a couple engaged in domestic violence; a candidate with an alimony, child support obligation, new car loan or other financial encumbrance; or whoever you have a gut feeling would default on the mortgage and/or monthly fee, spurn the cooperative attitude that defines a co-op, or make an Animal House out of the premises. Depending on what the co-op bylaws state about new occupant approval, anywhere from a majority of nay votes to a single dissenter can blackball undesirables from becoming your new neighbors.

Which could work against you, the applicant, even if your lender has green-lighted your mortgage. A co-op board's screening process for new members can be stringent. You may have to cough up multiple income tax returns, bank/asset statements, credit histories, previous homeownership and/or rental payment records, and other proof of your ability to handle monthly co-op expenses. The board may also look at your loan to determine your loan-to-value ratio (LTV), or the percentage of the co-op share's price the unit buyer may finance. Many co-op boards call for an LTV of under 75%; some may even demand up-front payment of the whole unit price, to ensure that you don't default and are free and clear to make the co-op fee every month. You may even have to have an individual interview with each resident to make sure everyone is comfortable having you aboard.

The board approval process could also stymie your sale of your co-op unit if you decide to move, since each new buyer of a share in the corporate entity must be rubber-stamped by the board. Which is one reason many homebuyers prefer the semi-autonomy of a unit in a...

Condominium

In a condominium you're still accountable to the HOA. But this time you're a homeowner, owning title to your unit plus a share of the common areas and amenities—grounds, lobby, gym, lounge, etc. Your ownership is limited to your unit's interior if the condo is a multifamily building, or your entire "house" if the condo is an aggregate of townhouses or freestanding homes. The monthly condo fee is set by the HOA board based on the amounts and costs of common services, e.g., maintenance of grounds, exteriors, gyms, decks and elevators; master insurance on the complex; water and sewer connections; and security, including concierge and doorman. A condo fee is usually lower than a co-op fee, because it doesn't include property taxes, which are individually levied on each unit.

The condo's HOA meets periodically to discuss such issues as expenses, maintenance, bringing a pet into a unit, or any problems anyone has with anyone else. The standard HOA has a board elected by the HOA members; it may include a president, VP, treasurer or comptroller, secretary for recording meeting minutes, etc.

However, admission to a condo is contingent upon a lender's approval of the homebuyer's loan rather than HOA board approval, so the co-op privilege of picking your neighbors is less common in a condo. Moreover, condo unit owners may sublet their units, which gives you even less say over who you're about to abut.

For the most control of who your condo neighbors will be, it's best to meet with members of the HOA of the condo you're considering before making an offer on a unit there. Important questions to ask them include:

• How do you get along?

• How do you resolve conflicts?

• What kinds of conflicts tend to occur?

• How are decisions made on condo fee fund use?

• What is the makeup of the board?

• How often does it meet?

• How are members elected?

• What unit alterations are subject to board approval?

• Are pets allowed? What kinds, and how many?

• Are unit subleasing and guest parking allowed?

As with a co-op, you should also ask to review as many kinds of HOA documents as you can: board meeting minutes, HOA policies and bylaws, HOA rules and regulations, financial statements including invoices and tax audits, insurance policies, and anything else readily available to HOA members.

This review will help you see how issues are discussed, conflicts resolved, funds appropriated, money managed, services rendered and billed, etc., to decide whether a particular HOA is for you. (A section of a standard purchase-and-sale agreement [P&S] gives you the right to do this before going forward with a unit's purchase, and to terminate the P&S if you don't like any HOA policies.)

So which is the better choice for you?

Since I was just a kid when I lived in the aforementioned co-op and condo, I couldn't possibly say which was the better choice for my parents (ultimately neither, owing to my dad's career demise), though both had strong neighbor communities—particularly the condominium, where the neighborhood extended beyond the building to other residences on close-knit Beacon Hill, presenting great opportunities for Halloween trick-or-treating, Christmas caroling, babysitting for the neighbors, garden tours, and other activities.

But what's best for you, the present homebuyer, depends on your long-term homeownership, investment and social goals.

For one, keep in mind that interactions with co-op neighbors will probably be more frequent than those with condo neighbors, because the collective responsibility for a co-op's common services and the accountability toward the building-owning corporation demands more continual attention from everyone.

In a condo, however, it's common to have monthly HOA meetings with your neighbors, say hi to them in the hall during the week, and retreat into the shell of your own unit. So co-ops are not for extreme privacy lovers. But in a co-op you're more likely to get along with your neighbors, since each was pre-approved by the others. And if you plan to stay for a long time, a co-op is a good way to make long-term friends and connections, which the more come-and-go nature of condos tends to impede.

Regarding investment, as I mentioned, in a co-op you do not possess physical property but purchase shares of the stock through which the housing cooperative owns the building. This may limit your unit's equity.

Leasing co-ops, in which the corporate entity leases but does not own the property, give you no equity.

Limited equity co-ops, in which the board controls the price at which you may buy or sell shares in the co-op, give you just that—limited equity for the limits imposed on your unit's purchase or sale price.

Market-rate co-ops enable you to buy or sell shares according to their market rates.

So the appreciation of a co-op unit's value depends on that of its purchased shares of stock in the corporate entity, as well as the housing cooperative's degree of control over their prices. This may not assure you a lucrative sale of your unit if you relocate. (The value of shares could even drop.)

A condo unit, however, is more likely to appreciate in value according to real estate markets rather than stock markets. Besides, the unit can be subleased for rental income while waiting for its market value to rise enough to consider a sale – not an option in a co-op, because of its corporate and financial structure.

Yet a co-op can stabilize real estate value during recessions or economic downturns by the powers of their boards to reject applicants not financially stable enough to maintain a co-op's fiscal solidity over time.

This could help a co-op building evade bank foreclosure, allowing its economically viable residents to remain there in good and bad times.

So a co-op may be a better investment in a long-term community and stable housing stock, whereas a condo may be a better real estate investment. Either way, you get community and convenience in addition to the comforts of home. It's up to you!

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Co-ops vs. Condos. What's the difference?" The Gold Team at eXp Realty, https://www.thegoldteamny.com/co-ops-vs-condos-whats-the-difference/

Gassett, Bill. "What is a Condominium Homeowners Association (HOA)?" Maximum Exposure Real Estate, January 14, 2014, https://www.maxrealestateexposure.com/condominium-home-owners-association-hoa/#:~:text=A%20condominium%20HOA%20differs%20from%20a%20regular%20homeowners,for%20instance%2C%20shares%20the%20roof%20of%20that%20unit.

Gottlieb, Steven. "Condo, Townhouse or Co-op: Which is Right for You?" U.S. News and World Report, December 11, 2019, https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/condo-townhouse-or-co-op-which-is-right-for-you

HOA Manager. "Do Your HOA Board Members Know Which Documents are Open for Review?" Hignell HOA Management, January 24, 2015, https://blog.hignellhoa.com/do-your-hoa-board-members-know-which-documents-are-open-for-review

Mburugu, Charles. "Condo vs. Co-op: Which is the Better Real Estate Investment?" Mashvisor, April 24, 2020, https://www.mashvisor.com/blog/condo-vs-co-op-which-better-investment/

Novoryta, B.J. The Yellow Brick Road to Buying a Home. Sedalia, Colo.: Castle Pines Realty, 2019.

Palumbo, Richard, LLC. "Understanding the Difference Between Condos, Co-ops and HOAs in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut." Palumbo Law, August 19, 2020, https://richardpalumbo.com/2020/08/19/understanding-the-difference-between-condos-co-ops-and-hoas-in-rhode-island-massachusetts-and-connecticut/

Sager, Jeanne. "Co-op vs. Condo: What's the Difference Between These Types of Homes?" Realtor.com, November 6, 2017, https://www.realtor.com/advice/buy/condo-vs-co-op/

'Harry Potter' closet rehabs

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:35:56 +0000

From the Harry Potter Studio Tour London. Photo courtesy of Amber Primdahl, She's Catching Flights.

That "cupboard under the stairs" Harry Potter was miserably forced to hole up in by his abusive aunt, uncle and cousin until receiving his life-changing letter of acceptance to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry can also be a source of misery or wizardry for homeowners, depending on whether they see it as a goldmine for rehab or a gaping hole for nothing.

Since a stair must hog hall space to provide needed upstairs access, it may vex homeowners with the way the cavern it leaves underneath usurps living space. Or if storage, kitchen, bathroom, sleeping, laundry or whatever space is at a premium, the homeowner may not remember the buried treasure under the treads, awaiting wizardly wisdom for a rework to fulfill a crucial spatial need.

I was thinking about that while looking at a townhouse I was writing about for the now-defunct Boston Homes magazine, and the real estate agent pointed out the "Harry Potter closet" under the main stair. I opened its mysterious arched door to see a bulletin board, nearly flush with the under-stair wall. All very well, but denying the potential for creative use of the space beyond.

Of course, a bedroom like Harry's wouldn't be suitable for that space, because of the poor ventilation, light and leg-room he was given (which clearly didn't concern his extended family). But if the door and part of the wall were taken away, the space could become a comfortable sleeping nook for a child or guest, or perhaps a temporary landing spot for the homeowner if, say, the primary bedroom is being renovated or is recovering from flood or fire damage.

Who could sleep in this cranny would naturally depend on the length of space the stair allots for it. Higher risers and shorter treads would yield space enough for a small-to-mid-sized child, because it would make the space more vertical. But lower risers and longer treads would put more horizontality into it, suiting it for taller people.

And it needn't be limited to the bed. This example includes bookshelves and lights, making the space a cozy reading-in-bed retreat.

Photo courtesy of r/CozyPlaces on Reddit.com.

Here's another example of under-stair sleeping/library space, making even more of those tight quarters by sliding storage drawers underneath, possibly for bedding or slippers. It's cozier than the previous example – as little of the wall as possible was removed (probably just the door) for the greater enclosure that grants the hideaway safety we often need for a good night's sleep, but with the entry staying open so we're not Harry Pottered into claustrophobic suffocation.

Photos courtesy of HomeDecorHub.

But if your overflow of books calls for just a library under the stairs, bookshelves are among the easiest to wedge under that wedge of space, because the underbellies of the stairs could act like bookends in themselves, determining where to put the divisions between the shelves. And, depending on the width of the stairs, the library could also become a cozy reading corner (right).

Courtesy of Bria Hammel Interiors, Pinterest.

Photo courtesy of Lee Taylor, Pinterest.

And if your stairs are really wide, their under-space would be deep enough for a library with a built-in couch or upholstered bench for relaxing on while you're reading (left), with books there to grab above you. This is especially an advantage if your home has a curving bridal staircase (right). Its majestic circular sweep will lend sinuous elegance to your understair library/lounge, which may mean it could accommodate even more books and objets d'art, because no perpendicular walls will meet at the corner and possibly obstruct each other's contents.

Photo courtesy of Marina Sofety, Home Decorating Ideas

Since the COVID-19 era of working remotely from home mandated more office space there, what better place to put it than under the stairs? That way, it's remote from living, dining, entertaining and sleeping activities so work and study won't frustrate them, or vice versa, and their use-designated rooms won't disintegrate into multipurpose malfunction and family fracas. With a designer's imagination, an efficient office can be configured within the stair's underbelly. Tighter shelf spaces at the acute angles can accommodate small office-supply or index-card containers. The broader floor area the stair leaves as it descends to the floor can fit the desk, computer, file cabinets and bulletin board. Bookshelves can be stacked by the higher wall the stair creates as it rises to the upper level.

Of course, this arrangement has its drawbacks: absent a door for light and air's sake, privacy for fuller work concentration and less distraction is also in absentia here. So the best understair office is a "quickie" one for brisker tasks: bill-paying, bookkeeping, looking up info online, emails, etc.

Photo courtesy of TalkDecor

Photo courtesy of Home Designing

If your understair space can be connected to house plumbing (which is easier if it's near the kitchen or a bathroom), it could house a washer and dryer (left), with space to spare for detergent, fabric softener, and maybe a sorting counter.

Or you could wedge in a powder room (right) for guests or any family member needing a quick rest stop before going out, especially if the first floor has no bathroom. Given the privacy a bathroom requires, putting one here would be a good excuse to preserve an understair door, especially if it has historical significance to the house. Or, for better air circulation in the powder room, you could cut away the wall so it just frames the space, and install a new door to fit into the frame.

Photo courtesy of bathrooms.com

It pays to be careful where you put each fixture in a space like this. Since people usually sit down to use the commode, that would best be placed on the side with the lowest headroom. Since all of us stand up to use the sink, that should go under the highest headroom. And, given the darkness and airtightness of this usually windowless space, good lighting and a powerful vent should be installed. (And be sure to leave room for at least one small cabinet for cleaning supplies and deodorant spray.) Again, make sure each fixture, lighting and vent location can be safely linked to your plumbing and electrical networks before deciding to install a powder room in there.

A kitchenette could conceivably be squeezed under the stairs, but that would depend on how broadly they sweep across the space as they go up, and how much headroom they leave for essential elements such as a small fridge or wine cooler, a counter with enough headroom for you to stand up while washing and enough length for a small oven and/or cooktop, and enough shelf/cabinet space for essential tableware. This would be especially handy if the kitchen is on the garden level or upstairs and you need to prepare something fast for guests without troubling them to make them walk up or down stairs, particularly if any of them is mobility-impaired. But, again, be sure a bathroom is near enough so the kitchenette can be plumbed for appliances and sink.

Photo courtesy of Outlook9 Shaw for Under Stairs Wine Cellars

But if all that plumbing isn't feasible for that little space and you still want it to fulfill a kitchenesque function that there isn't room for in your kitchen, your fine selection of libations could go there. Of course, you would have to decide what kinds of spirits would best fit there. If you want to store red wines, you could simply install wine-bottle cubbies and use the space as is, since red wines must be kept at room temperature.

But if you want to store white wines, champagnes and/or imported beers, you would need refrigeration. So you would have to reconfigure the space for a wine cooler—either a standard-sized Sub-Zero or a deluxe wine-cellar cooler custom-designed to fit into more of the space. The latter would need a controllable thermostat so you can serve your drinks to your guests (or yourself, for an end-of-the-day nightcap by the TV, Super Bowl Sunday, or a pop of the cork to celebrate a milestone with your loved ones) at just their desired temperature. For that, a significant electricity source will have to be installed there, so make sure it can be done.

Not enough wines to fill it all out? Put a wet bar or dry bar in the rest of the space (right), so you can select, serve and swill in one swoop. Make sure to cubby the wine bottles in the lower part of the triangle and build in the bar and shelves in the upper part, to allow space for glassware, shakers, mixes and other bartenders' supplies.

Photos courtesy of AllDayChic

Photo courtesy of Pinterest

But if general storage is more wanting than wine storage—especially when toys, books, magazines, sports equipment, games, puzzles, coffee mugs, clothes, sweats, sneakers, shoes, skates, etc., etc., pile up beyond capacity—that understair cavity is practically made to order for that, since most underutilized, overlooked or wasted spaces tend to become storage receptacles anyway, Understair storage can take too many forms to go into here. But the storage drawers, cabinets, closets or cubbies should always be designed to use as much of that awkward triangular space as possible.

The pull-out side-loading drawers in the upper left image are a splendid example, with the triangular leftovers functioning as shelves for all those little things that tend to get lost in closets or dresser-drawers. The drawers in the center seem to step up with the stairs, and the residual triangles are nicely paneled as attractive ornaments. The French-doored closets on the right lend domestic elegance to the stair while housing a lot of "storables."

The shelves in the immediate left image attractively showcase all sorts of things, presenting them as household treasures, and leaving space for whatever is behind the left-hand door.

Yet there's another household treasure that could really use a space like this—especially in colder months—and could adapt to it best of all: your canine companion. The slant in the stairs suggests a doghouse, and one of these examples of indoor doghouses follows the slant as part of its "roof," which your dog may recognize as home if you have an outdoor doghouse. Besides, it's roomier than most doghouses, with space for supper and water dishes, a little play, a lot of sleep, and, first and foremost, total protection against the elements, while still feeling like home.

You can also make a young child feel more at home by carving out a playhouse under your stairs. Here are but six examples of how playful you can make your playhouse, giving children the illusion of coming home to their dream house, and a place to play with their friends in secrecy and autonomy. They can be illuminated, painted and decorated inside to make them more home-like. When your child outgrows the space, a dog could take it over, for a greater sense of dignity than just living "in the doghouse."

Photo courtesy of Odd Stuff Magazine.

But if your budget is limited—money-wise or space-wise—your Harry Potter closet can simply be a space to make or take a phone call in private, like the phone booths of yore. The door could be retained for the sake of confidential conversations, and very minimal furniture and lighting is necessary: a small chair, perhaps a tiny table, and a flashlight if necessary.

That, by the way, was how my college fraternity used its understair space. Being under a very short flight of stairs that introduced the main flight on a right angle with it, it was too cramped for much use. So they installed a permanent phone in there, back when analog landline wall phones with extendable twisted cords were still in vogue (remember the one in your parents' kitchen?).

"After." Courtesy of Red Door Home.

"Before." Courtesy of Red Door Home.

Yet they attempted to put the space to its most practical (and costly) use of all: a second egress from the basement to comply with fire codes. They sawed out the floor, only to replank it after the frat president never heard from the builder and announced, "The stair is in limbo and may not be built at all." There were likely no funds for it—perhaps because they were later blown on a frivolous gable extension for an upstairs party lounge or studio suite. (Besides, the frat was in arrears with the college and was eventually shut down.)

Which goes to show how a phone closet remains one of the most economical ways to reuse a Harry Potter closet (next to a kids' game of Hide-and-Seek, a teens' game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, or a private place for anyone of any age to have a little cry if they need to).

Yet, as this image and the one way above show, a homeowner whose stair happens to run along the inside of one of the house's outer walls has an opportunity to bring light into this dark corner by adding a window. The "phone booth" benefits from an oculus, and this reading/fainting couch benefits even more from a quarter-circle window handsomely designed to just fit under the stairs and make a showpiece out of that space, as an energy-saving measure in daytime and a dash of elegance in a typically ignored corner.

Photo courtesy of Beautiful Bedrooms, London, UK

If that space is big enough—especially if privileged to be under a windowed mezzanine landing like this—a window could even turn it into a full bedroom or playroom, giving Harry Potter his much-needed light, ventilation and play space, not to mention a more direct escape to Hogwarts School.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Clark, Krista, InspiredDesignOfHouse.com, Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/69594756730474921/

"Closet space: Not so much," Meanwhile, at the Manse, January 27, 2013, https://atthemanse.wordpress.com/tag/harry-potter-closet/

"50 Creative Ways To Incorporate Book Storage In & Around Stairs," Home Designing, https://www.home-designing.com/under-stairs-shelf-ideas-for-book-storage

HomeDecorHub.com (defunct).

"Original Under Stairs Storage Space Ideas," AllDayChic, 2020, https://alldaychic.com/original-under-stairs-storage-design-ideas/

Sofety, Marina, "Under the Stairs Office Look, Home Decorating Ideas, https://homedecoratingmyideas.blogspot.com/2016/08/under-stairs-office-look-would-darker.html?spref=pi

TalkDecor.com (defunct).

"10 Wonderful Phone Booth Designs for Your Home," Odd Stuff Magazine, https://oddstuffmagazine.com/phone-booth-designs.html

The Bathroom Showroom at City Plumbing, https://bathrooms.com/

"Twin bed under the basement stairs. My reading hide out," r/CozyPlaces, Reddit, 2017, https://www.reddit.com/r/CozyPlaces/comments/8guzed/twin_bed_under_the_basement_stairs_my_reading/

"Under Stairs Wine Cellars," Outlook9 (private site), https://www.pinterest.com/Outlook9/_saved/

"Warner Bros. Harry Potter Studio Tour London Photo Essay," She's Catching Flights, https://shescatchingflights.com/harry-potter-studio-tour-london/

"Welcome to Beautiful Bedrooms, the Home of Bespoke Bedrooms, Built In Bedroom Furniture & Fitted Wardrobes," Beautiful Bedrooms, https://beautifulbedrooms.co.uk/

"What You Didn't See," Red Door Home, January 25, 2010, https://reddoorhome.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-you-didnt-see.html

A Chipotle off the old block

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:53:14 +0000

William D. Ticknor, February 21, 1857, Maturin Murray Ballou's Pictorial

Whenever a historic landmark is rebranded as a familiar restaurant, café or retailer, it loses a lot of its historical identity and drowns in the sea of chains that are making everywhere look like everywhere else. Such has been the struggle of Boston's Old Corner Bookstore virtually since its most lionized tenant, Ticknor & Fields, moved out in 1864 and its last bookstore left in 1903.

Now it is known primarily as the ever-familiar Chipotle Mexican Grill, where anyone can slip inside for a grab-and-go taco or Mission burrito and motor without ever knowing that this building was once a choice haunt of the likes of Alcott, Dickens, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Tennyson, Thoreau, and other literary figures, many of whom met here at the Saturday Club to schmooze about the latest in letters before taking their monthly repasts at the Parker House Hotel down the street. Many Chipotle customers don't even get a sense of when the building was built – 1718 – unless they bother to stop and read the green plaque on the wall, which is so upstaged by Chipotle's in-your-face signs it often escapes notice.

Commuters are likely more captivated by the mouthwatering colors, eating and mingling they could find inside any old Chipotle than the intricate brickwork, brownstone quoins and slate gambrel roof that are more telling about the old building's one-of-a-kind history.

Which I'll share with you now, so you'll really know what you're going into the next time you get a craving for a quesadilla.

It was built in 1718 by Thomas Crease as his residence and apothecary shop on the site of Anne Hutchinson's home, which had burned down in the Great Boston Fire of October 2, 1711, after she was banished from Massachusetts in 1637 for anti-Puritan heresy. The first bookstore to occupy the house, in 1828, was Carter & Hendee. Ticknor & Fields had set up shop in there by 1844, at which time it became a major mecca for Boston's literati, having sparked "positive literary and intellectual magnetism" since the bookstore's occupancy, according to writer David Emblidge.

More than a store, it became a haven "to gather and exchange greetings and ideas," according to The Boston Daily Globe. In Sitting Room No. 2, writers exchanged lively anecdotes and views, which could be nuggets of inspiration for their literary pursuits – a far cry from Chipotle's upstairs "sitting room," where the modus operandi is eat-and-split.

"Charles Dickens Reading to his Family" by C.I. Doughty.

Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and others could be seen in literary parley in Sitting Room No. 2. Ticknor & Fields even published Dickens' works for the first time in America. James Thomas Fields coordinated Dickens' historic 1867 visit to Boston, during which he gave the first public reading of A Christmas Carol in the U.S. at Tremont Temple, acting out his legendary story of miserliness, spiritual renewal and redemption with voices, gestures and expressions of Ebenezer Scrooge, Jacob Marley's ghost, the Three Spirits, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, and other memorable characters. Many local literary figures were present for the reading, including Emerson, Longfellow and Lowell, and it was received with resounding plaudits, helping to fuel the story's everlasting popularity and holiday appeal.

Other British authors Ticknor & Fields published works of included Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as such New England authors as Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau.

Eminent literary works published by Ticknor & Fields in their first editions included: The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne's historical novel set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century, in 1850; Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe's anti-slavery novel, in 1852; Thoreau's Walden, in 1854; The Courtship of Miles Standish, Longfellow's narrative poem concerning the Mayflower Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, in 1858; and Little Women, Alcott's coming-of-age novel about the maturation of four sisters, published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869.

Walden featured on its title page a vignette of the square cabin in the woods Thoreau had built on woodland owned by Emerson near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, and had stayed in from July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847, during the transcendentalist social experiment in simple living and self-reliance in natural surroundings he conducted and later chronicled in his book.

The Atlantic Monthly was founded in a back room at Ticknor & Fields in 1857 as a major literary, cultural and political periodical that included commentary on the abolition of slavery and other hot-button issues of the day.

Under the founding editorship of James Russell Lowell, the magazine premiered such seminal works as Paul Revere's Ride, Longfellow's poetic Civil War message to Northerners to rally for the nation's founding ideals of freedom through the example of a Revolutionary patriot (and a perennial standard for classroom reading and rote memorization), in 1861; and Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe's rallying cry for the Union to crusade for human freedom in the Civil War, running right on the front page in 1862.

The periodical is still published today as The Atlantic.

Following William Davis Ticknor's death in 1864, Ticknor & Fields had outgrown its home and relocated to Tremont Street, opening the building up to a succession of five new booksellers, beginning with E.P. Dutton in November 1864 and ending with its namesake, the Old Corner Bookstore, in 1902.

Interior of Old Corner Bookstore, 1891.

Though Old Corner occupied it for only one year, its name stuck and made it "still the favorite haunt of the author and the reader," as The Washington Post put it, despite presently being the favorite haunt of the jalapeño junkie. "But Ticknor & Fields' successors moved the store away from Old Corner in 1903 and the toboggan-slide from fame began," reported The Herald News in 1960.

And they weren't kidding. As you can see from the shifting of signage in the chronology of images below, the Old Corner Bookstore post-Ticknor attracted a stream of other commercial tenants, furthering its devolution from an erudite intellectual salon to a generic shopper's world, all the while retaining its basic colonial form as a plea for salvation:

This final photo, taken in 1960, shows the Old Corner Bookstore at its nadir as a combination billboard building and beanery, totally obscured from its literary glory. Thus sparked the rallying cry for its preservation, which Mayor John F. Collins made possible by encouraging the formation of the Old Corner Committee, chaired by historian Walter Muir Whitehill, author of Boston: A Topographical History. The committee raised the full $275,000 needed to buy the building and the adjacent Cunningham House from developer Samuel P. Coffman, who had planned to replace it with a motel, and Whitehill co-founded Historic Boston Inc. to own and operate the restored Old Corner Bookstore.

In 1964, its new tenant was The Boston Globe, and its restoration returned it to a conjectural image of its appearance spanning 1718-1828, with sash windows of wobbly glass replicating 18th-century handmade glazing in a forced, fake way akin to Colonial Williamsburg. The abutting Andrew Cunningham House, first built in 1728, was restored in time for the Bicentennial of 1976.

Old Corner Bookstore, 2009. Photo by Céline Harrand.

What I've always liked best about the Old Corner Bookstore is its corner anchorage of an historic block, not being a "holdout" amid newer abutters that raise the question of what occupied their sites before. The left-hand "wing" block was developed in 1828 by Timothy Harrington Carter of Carter & Hendee, Old Corner's first bookstore.

The Globe Corner Bookstore, 1988. Photo by Russell Kord.

What I've always liked least, of course, is its failure to maintain a proper tenant that fully honors its history and heritage. It was on the right track when The Globe Corner Bookstore (left), a retailer of travel literature and New England-related books, occupied it from 1982 until 1997, when it was squeezed out by overhead costs and competition with the big-box Borders Books and Barnes & Noble chains down Washington Street. After a brief fling as The Boston Globe Store souvenir shop and Internet café, followed by an Ultra Diamonds jewelry-chain tenancy in 2005 (above), the Old Corner Bookstore regrettably became another Chipotle Mexican Grill in 2011, which emblazoned it with its commonplace brand signs that mar the history it's supposed to bespeak to Freedom Trailers. Which means the Old Corner Bookstore is back to its old self as a bastion of commercial tenant switcheroos, this time as a Chipotle off the old block.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Boston Landmarks Commission, "Old Corner Bookstore and Cunningham House Study Report," City of Boston, last updated May 13, 2025, https://www.boston.gov/news/old-corner-bookstore-and-cunningham-house-study-report

"History of the Old Corner Bookstore & Cunningham House," Historic Boston Incorporated, https://historicboston.org/about/history-of-the-old-corner-bookstore-cunningham-house/

"Old Corner Bookstore, Boston National Historical Park," National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/places/old-corner-bookstore.htm

"Old Corner Bookstore," Boston Women's Heritage Trail, https://www.bwht.org/explore/old-corner-bookstore/

"Old Corner Bookstore Building," Celebrate Boston, 2020, https://www.celebrateboston.com/sites/old-corner-bookstore.htm

"Old Corner Bookstore," r/OldPhotosInRealLife, Reddit, 2023, https://www.reddit.com/r/OldPhotosInRealLife/comments/19bbpjp/old_corner_bookstore_through_the_years_boston/

"Old Corner Bookstore," The Freedom Trail, https://www.thefreedomtrail.org/trail-sites/old-corner-bookstore

"Old Corner Bookstore," Wikipedia, last edited on 2 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Corner_Bookstore

"Views of the Old Corner Bookstore," Historic Boston Incorporated, October 23, 2018, https://historicboston.org/views-of-the-old-corner-bookstore/

Bowdoin Beata – Part IV

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:16:18 +0000

Bowdoin College, c.1907.

Hubbard Hall and Walker Art Building, Bowdoin College, c.1910.

The turn of the 20th century saw Bowdoin College welcoming new, untested architectural styles to its campus, in an attempt to transition itself away from its image of a small college with a chapel, tucked away in a corner of a small college town, to the appearance of a prominent academic institution with appropriately ceremonial buildings to publicly display that status. Memorial Hall's grandiloquent Gothic presence was a good start (see my last post), but now it was time for more architectural symbols of scholastic and artistic excellence in the arts and sciences to round out the Bowdoin Quadrangle.

Searles' solemnity

The Mary Frances Searles Science Building (1894) had a bad rap on campus. Legend had it that the descendants of its namesake were out to build "the ugliest building possible" because they'd been cut out of her late husband's will when his money was left to build it. Though I wasn't much for its purplish paint job – wondering what that covered up – it was one of those buildings I found myself stopping and staring at.

Which is a litmus test for great architecture: the extent to which it makes you stop and stare, and for how long. (No wonder I kept ignoring the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.) And why was the Searles Building worth a special look? Because it had the majestic presence of an old English or Danish castle, of the kind Hamlet would home in, owing in part to the predilections of its architect, Henry Vaughan, a Brit by birth and Edward Francis Searles' favorite architect (they built the famed Methuen Memorial Music Hall in Massachusetts together) for Elizabethan and Jacobean (known as "Jacobethan" in combo) stylistic elements in his designs.

East Boston High School (1926, John M. Gray Company). Photo by Antony.22.

The Searles Building also recalled those Gothic and Jacobethan schools and colleges in New York I fondly remembered – Erasmus Hall High School, Flushing High School, City College of New York, many others – as well as the welcoming octagonal twin turret-towers flanking the entrance of East Boston High School. In short, Searles' style said two things: scholarship and showmanship.

Mary Frances Searles Science Building (1894). Photo by Dirk Ingo Franke.

Which were part of the building's intent: to unify the Biology, Chemistry and Physics Departments under one roof that promoted their academic reputation through a regal design of high Dutch gables, octagonal crenellated turrets, domed lance-like towers flanking the entrance, oriel bay windows, Amherst sandstone trim and finials, and a crowning classical cupola, all reflecting the repute of the likes of Oxford and Cambridge.

The Maine Street elevation of the Searles building takes the form of a pair of identical gabled rear ells enclosing a courtyard on three sides. Vaughan designed it just so to allow the laboratory-lecture halls in the ells as much daylight as possible, picking up on the natural illumination architecture for scientific classrooms and labs established by Seth Adams Hall in 1861 (see my previous post). This courtyard also came in handy for the Searles Building's 1999 renovation and expansion by Cambridge Seven Associates, who filled it in with a 2,000-square-foot granite/glass atrium, a sequence of ramps interconnecting all floors, interdisciplinary communal rooms, and cutting-edge computer/audiovisual high-tech, to bring the Searles Building into the 21st century.

Searles was yet another demonstration of Bowdoin's foresight in the architectural planning of all its buildings, making them just as useful with every passing age, up to and including our IT/AI age.

Sadly, I have no Searles memories to share, never having passed through its doors. I never studied science at Bowdoin, no thanks to its lack of course distribution requirements, which would have given us a well-rounded curriculum by which we would have discovered new interests that opened doors to fulfilling careers.

Thankfully, distribution requirements were restored at Bowdoin, thanks (real thanks) to Prof. Barbara Kaster, who once declared in class, "You folks are being shortchanged by having no distribution requirements!" and set out with her initiative to bring them back, thus benefiting Bowdoiners from Gens X, Y and Z.

Walker's wonders

The Walker Art Building (1897) accomplished for Bowdoin's art collection and curriculum what the Searles Building did for its scientific studies, this time as a classical temple that completed the Bowdoin Quadrangle's eastern parameter with a monumental miniature of some of America's great art museums, from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to the one just down the road in Portland.

To be continued...

Sources:

"About," Bowdoin College Museum of Art, https://www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum/about/index.html

Anderson, Patricia McGraw, The Architecture of Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1988, https://digitalcollections.bowdoin.edu/view/946/the-architecture-of-bowdoin-college

Bauman, John F., "Bowdoin College Museum of Art," Society of Architectural Historians Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/ME-01-005-0084-02

Bauman, John F., "Bowdoin College Quadrangle," Society of Architectural Historians Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/ME-01-005-0084

Bauman, John F., "Hubbard Hall," Maine, Society of Architectural Historians Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, https://sah-archipedia.org/node/14522

Blanding, Michael, "The Strange Tale of Searles Hall," Bowdoin Magazine, June 17, 2020, https://www.bowdoin.edu/news/2020/06/the-strange-tale-of-searles-hall.html

Bowdoin College Museum of Art, "Art Museum: The Walker Art Building as Seen through the Photography of Leon B. Strout," Bowdoin, July 28, 2026, https://www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum/news/2026/leon-strout.html

"Bowdoin College Museum of Art," Wikipedia, last edited on 30 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowdoin_College_Museum_of_Art

Bowdoin News, "A new chapter: Enter the Hubbard Hall reading room," Bowdoin, January 31, 2024, https://www.bowdoin.edu/news/2024/01/hubbard-hall-reading-room.html

Briggs, Janet, "What's in a Name: Hubbard Hall," The Bowdoin Orient, February 21, 2025, https://bowdoinorient.com/2025/02/21/whats-in-a-name-hubbard-hall/

"Campus and Buildings," Bowdoin, https://www.bowdoin.edu/about/campus-location/facilities/campus-and-buildings.html

Nasruddin, Aleena, "What's in a Name: Searles Hall," The Bowdoin Orient, October 17, 2025, https://bowdoinorient.com/2025/10/17/whats-in-a-name-searles-hall/

"Searles Science Building," CambridgeSeven, https://www.cambridgeseven.com/project/searles-science-building/

Bowdoin Beata – Part III

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 23:54:16 +0000

In 1802, Massachusetts Hall laid the architectural cornerstone for the buildout of Bowdoin College, establishing the red brick construction and Federal/Classical design patterns that would define the development of the campus into the mid-20th century. In 1855, the Chapel was consecrated, giving Bowdoin its definining icon, music sanctuary, time-reminding school bells, budding art gallery and library, and design direction into the turn of the century.

Now I'd like to explore the college buildings the Chapel established a hankering for in the Victorian era, and the Gothic, Neoclassical and Jacobean styles they assumed as a rich variety of newer, grander architectural forms changed the campus character, fulfilling new functions for the broadening diversity of academic interests of the next generations of students.

Adams' abundance

Seth Adams Hall (1861) was built for Bowdoin's Medical School of Maine, the state's first medical college, for which the high ceilings, vast floor areas, and tall windows brought light, space, and vapor-dispersing atmosphere to the school's laboratories, dissections, and medical/surgical instruction.

Seth Adams Hall (1861), Bowdoin College, c.1890.

These features, coupled with the compatibility of its vertical red-brick Italianate Gothic style to Bowdoin's red-brick dorms and the rise of the Chapel, made it made-to-order for some of the college's bigger classes, such as my 52-strong Sociology 1 my freshman year, where I'd feel lost in a sea of students unless I sat way up front, which I always did (though I rarely spoke).

Today Seth Adams Hall houses the Sociology and Anthropology Departments, and was one of the first campus buildings to receive a down-to-the-studs green renovation following the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) guidelines. Kudos to the architectural prestidigitation of Harriman of Maine, Seth Adams Hall has a healthier indoor environment than it did in its heyday, bike racks encourage a pollution-free commute to class, low-flow plumbing with user sensors and innovative wastewater technology reduces water usage by as much as 50%, and energy-efficient lighting and HVAC systems make the indoor environment even healthier. Seth Adams Hall was already a milestone of sustainability with its unusually tall windows letting in more natural sunlight, and it has now gone all the way in its initial design goals.

Memorial's memories

Memorial Hall (1882), no doubt inspired by the Chapel's Gothic soar, granite structure and space-use versatility, underwent a major transformation from a somber war memorial into a dynamic magnet for student and faculty attraction from all nooks, crannies and corners of the campus to a smorgasbord of sparkling spectacles inside. Samuel D. Backus and William Gibbons Preston designed it as a Gothic granite memorial to Bowdoin's 359 Civil War veterans, most notably Brig. Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Class of 1852, who commanded the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry at Gettysburg (holding Little Round Top) and accepted the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for gallantry, and later served as President of Bowdoin College.

Memorial Hall was renovated in 1955 by McKim, Mead & White into the 600-seat Pickard Theatre, opening it up to stage stellar productions by Bowdoin's Masque & Gown theater troupe and the Brunswick Summer Playhouse; vibrant dance performances under the founding choreographic hand of June Adler Vail; the Kenneth V. Santagata Memorial Lecture Series, bringing international speakers of fame and renown to communicate daring, unorthodox perspectives in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to open-minded students; the Bowdoin Film Society's annual Oscar-caliber presentation of the student films generated in Prof. Barbara Kaster's "Flicks" class, and so much more.

Memorable Memorial moments for me were many. I kicked off my first two Bowdoin years by attending Brunswick Summer Playhouse performances of the classic Stephen Schwartz musicals Godspell and Pippin, leaving the theater with a reduced appreciation of the former and a heightened regard of the latter.

I found Godspell too silly, childish and clichéd for my maturing tastes, and I found myself enjoying Pippin more, because it was better staged than the direct-from-Broadway production I'd seen in Boston and disliked intensely, mainly because my father never once applauded throughout it and, after the final curtain call, declared it "a complete dud." Of course, now that I was leaving home and going away to college, I was developing a clean slate and a fresh formation of my own viewpoints, with passionate influence from two female students who persuaded me to appreciate Pippin's philosophical message about finding one's own meaning, identity, and peace of mind, accepting and appreciating the ordinary, and not chasing rainbows in the distance to "find my corner of the sky," as the lead character sang. Good counsel.

Other Pickard perks for me included attending an electrifying Masque & Gown performance of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies, an existentialist retake on Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripedes' myth of Electra and Orestes' quest to avenge the death of their father Agamemnon, King of Argos, by killing their mother Clytemnestra and her husband Aegisthus. (The bearded, portly Zeus actor was despotically godly and very commanding on stage, though I heard he forgot his lines in one performance. So much for godly.) I also remember a production of Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, a duet of plays exploring interpersonal misunderstanding and miscommunication through marked, and sometimes deliberate, differences in language and expression. Masque & Gown musical productions I saw at Pickard were The Pajama Game, with an expert rendition of "Steam Heat" by future writer Sue Abbattista, and Once Upon a Mattress, where the Sir Harry actor gave me an idea of how I ought to have played the part in my Park School production of it: like a comical stuffed shirt, not the serious stiff nerd I had been.

Tom Stoppard (1937-2025), c.1985.

A Santagata lecture on "The Event and the Text" brought British playwright Tom Stoppard all the way from England to discuss his philosophical insights into society's linguistic, metaphysical and existential foundations. (Along with The Flies, I had studied a work by Stoppard in Prof. Victor L. Cahn's "The Theatre of the Absurd" course my freshman year. The play was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a meditation on determinism and the playing of predetermined roles vs. free will and the freedom to choose one's own path, using two minor characters from Hamlet – Hamlet's university classmates, whom he orders executed in his place as his "whipping boys" – and their actual scenes from Shakespeare's play. Cahn, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Stoppard, later published as Beyond Absurdity, remains my favorite Bowdoin professor.)

But my Pickard peak-experience was accepting the Bowdoin Film Society Award for Best Dramatic Film for my "Flicks" creation, a black-and-white Super-8 short about a shy student who has a crush on a girl who hangs out with more social, clowning students – an autobiographical replay of an actual fraternity experience. (The people I based my film on came – in fact, were invited – to a party scene I was shooting. All of them showed up in the film, they found out my ulterior motive in making it, and one of them threatened legal action.)

But I digress...

Wish Theatre (2000), Memorial Hall (1882). Photo: brsidders, Wikimedia Commons.

Memorial Hall's second major makeover was its extension into Wish Theatre in 2000. It is a flexible, open-concept 150-seat experimental performance space, made possible by a substantial gift from Barry N. Wish '63 and Oblio Wish, for Bowdoin's expanding Theatre Arts Major.

And what progress from my Bowdoin years, when its theatrical offerings were limited – very limited – to Masque & Gown; their sole director, Ray Rutan '51; his few courses on "the fundamentals" of acting, directing, and playwriting; and the Bowdoin Orient's acerbic theater critic, Marc Silverstein, who trashed virtually every one of Rutan's productions with the vitriol of John Simon of New York magazine and Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe, making Ray look like an incompetent amateur. Poor guy.

Wish is a captivating compromise between the modernism there was no turning back from and the historicism Bowdoin is rooted in. It presents a dance of a peaked tower with a skybridge to the old building, a hip-roofed pavilion with Italianate brackets and lace-collar trim, and a cupola-crowned kiosk, all in step with Memorial Hall's Gothic arches and Mansard roof as a theatrical extravaganza that tempts us inside to experience theater, dance, lectures and flicks as we wish they could be.

Seth Adams Hall and Memorial Hall are further examples of Bowdoin buildings planned with foresight, so they could be structurally and spatially adaptable to future social and academic requirements, just as Massachusetts Hall's hipped roof and deep footprint and the Chapel's roomy wings were (see my previous post for details).

To be continued...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Bauman, John F., "Bowdoin College Quadrangle," Society of Architectural Historians Archipedia, 2007, https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/ME-01-005-0084

"Bowdoin College: Seth Adams Hall: A major renovation reinvigorates a campus treasure," Harriman, https://www.harriman.com/projects/bowdoin-college-seth-adams-hall/

"Campus and Buildings," Bowdoin, https://www.bowdoin.edu/about/campus-location/facilities/campus-and-buildings.html

"Facilities Management: Adams Hall, Bowdoin, https://www.bowdoin.edu/facilities/campus-construction/completed-projects/adams-hall.html

Staten, Emily, "The glass 'spine' of Adams Hall," The Bowdoin Orient, November 2, 2018, https://bowdoinorient.com/2018/11/02/the-glass-spine-of-adams-hall/

"Sustainability: Adams Hall Renovation," Bowdoin, https://www.bowdoin.edu/sustainability/climate-action-2042/green-buildings/adams.html

"Theater and Dance: Facilities," Bowdoin, https://www.bowdoin.edu/theater-dance/resources-and-opportunities/facilities/index.html

"Theater and Dance: Memorial Hall," Bowdoin, https://www.bowdoin.edu/theater-dance/resources-and-opportunities/facilities/memorial-hall.html

"Venues: Pickard Theater," PortTix, https://porttix.com/venues/pickard-theater/

Bowdoin Beata – Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:45:20 +0000

Photo courtesy of the Maine Historical Society.

When bright skies were o'er us,

And life lay before us,

'Neath Bowdoin's pines we gathered far and near.

So filling our glasses,

And greeting all classes,

We drink a health to alma mater dear.

So it's clink, clink, drink, drink, drink!

Smash the glass to splinters when you're done.

O Bowdoin Beata,

Our dear alma mater,

There is no fairer mother 'neath the sun.

(Words by Henry H. Pierce, Class of 1896; revised by Anthony Antolini '63, Director of Bowdoin Chorus Emeritus)

Photo by Michelle Stapleton.
My dear alma mater's song captured the polarity of the Bowdoin College experience: the high academic standards of its curriculum vs. the high living that came with the territory of its formerly fraternal social life, in the form of alcohol, drugs, horseplay, and heaven knows what else.

In my previous Bowdoin Beata post I explored the latter situation, and how the fraternity houses moved on from it when they became the College Houses, which revealed their fine architecture as a framework for the intellectual, social and cultural communities I wish had been available to me when I was there.

But now I'd like to focus on my favorite academic buildings at Bowdoin, those that have formed and shaped the college's scholastic identity as I remember it.

Massachusetts' modesty

Massachusetts Hall (1802), Bowdoin's oldest, was built soon after the college was chartered by the Massachusetts State Legislature (remember, Maine was part of Massachusetts then) in 1794, from a Federal design by Aaron & Samuel Melcher III. And it says "Massachusetts" all over, recalling contemporary works of Charles Bulfinch in Boston and Samuel McIntyre in Salem.

This style speaks through its symmetrical façade and chimneys, narrow center entrance with fanlight transom and cornice, hipped roof, simple interior paneling, and the mahogany-railed staircase that curves up to professors' offices and the top-level floor-through classroom. All these elements present the hall in a unified form to the Bowdoin Quad.

Massachusetts Hall, Bowdoin College, in 1884. Photo by Amos O. Reed.

This modest unity of minimal detail and maximal cohesion was also an outgrowth of the financial constraints affecting Bowdoin's development, including rising real estate values. So it was decided to start the campus small, hence Massachusetts Hall's modest, diminished, lowly stature, well atoned for by architectural foresight and planning.

As a result, its small size didn't stop it from supplying multiple faculty offices, including the English and Philosophy departments (until the latter relocated to the Edward Pols House on 5 Bath Road), the Faculty Room, the McKeen Study, and a sizable floor-through top-floor classroom (which barely fit me and the overflow of 30 students in Prof. Geoghegan's Religion 32), which the Hall's high hipped roof and square footprint – almost as deep as it was wide – made possible.

Residential row

Bowdoin College c.1823. Artwork by John G. Brown.

Massachusetts Hall, in a way, spurned the development of the four brick dormitories that were to shape the beginnings of the Bowdoin Quadrangle, by virtue of establishing brick as the building material, rehiring the Hall's architect to design the first dorm, and lining them up along the new campus's western parameter so they would fully border the Quad by the time the last one, Hyde Hall, was built.

Winthrop Hall (1822, Samuel Melcher III), c.1925.

Winthrop Hall (1822) was Samuel Melcher III's follow-up building, and the first of four brick dormitories that formed the western parameter of the Bowdoin Quadrangle, setting it up for future campus development with a "Harvard Yard" appeal. Establishing the standard for Bowdoin's dormitory superblocks followed through the 1950s, Winthrop repeats Massachusetts Hall's narrow center entrance with fanlight transom, but breaks from it with tripartite central windows – portending the 20th-century modernism of "Chicago" windows – and, of course, an added story and a larger footprint for the growing student population.

Note how, by lining up regimentally along the Quad's western parameter, the "street wall" of Winthrop Hall and the subsequent dorms inspired a path along the Quad, confirming its intimate rectangular form.

Maine Hall (1837), designed by Anthony Coombs Raymond, follows Winthrop's standard with nearly identical brick façades and tripartite windows. The arched entrances are a bit wider and more deeply recessed into the façades, perhaps to allow freer inward and outward passage to more students at once, and to grant them pre-entry and pre-exit shelter from the elements.

Maine Hall repeated the pattern of stylistic uniformity in dormitory design that Harvard Yard established when Bulfinch's Stoughton Hall (1805) was built as a near-replication of Hollis Hall (1762). This turned Bowdoin into sort of a "little Harvard," which was of great appeal to me when I was visiting Bowdoin for my application interview (since my dad wished I would go to Harvard).

Appleton Hall (1843) was designed by Samuel Melcher & Sons, who followed in their father's footsteps with the dormitory template set by Winthrop Hall, but with variations according to the shift to the Greek Revival: A squared center entrance with higher stoop, flat lintel and broad keystone underscores the tripartite windows, giving the entry a sense of verticality.

Hyde Hall (1917), designed by Allen & Collens (best known for New York's Riverside Church and Union Theological Seminary), is one of three dorms that stretch the Winthrop Hall prototype of 1822 way into the 20th century, the others being McKim, Mead & White's Moore Hall (1941, my freshman dorm) and Coleman Hall (1958). The visible changes in the elevations, heights, chimney placements, entrances, stair-hall windows and cosmetics from one dorm to another as the years progressed showcase a pattern of architectonic adjustment according to the changing needs of new generations of students, the growth of the college and its student body, and the advancement of structural engineering and material manufacturing throughout those years.

Hyde Hall picked up its predecessors' brick facing, center entrance, central tripartite windows and punched rhythm of fenestration, but elongated its front door and one of its tripartite windows, to express and shed light on the upward mobility of the stairwell, which the lowering of one window and the elongation of another clearly expresses as a separate entity from the living quarters. Hyde's basement windows signify the increasing use of basements for practical purposes, such as more advanced plumbing, laundry, gas and electrical facilities. Moore and Coleman moved their entrances from the ends to the sides, allowing for four entries for busy student traffic, with taller stairwell windows above them for more ease of finding one's way to one's room after pulling an all-nighter, getting drunk, or partying the night away (below).

Moore Hall (1941, McKim, Mead & White).

Coleman Hall (1958, McKim, Mead & White).

Chapel's chimes

Bowdoin College Chapel (1855, Richard Upjohn). Photo by Andrew Mass.

Photo by William Morgan.

The Chapel (1855), which completes the western border of the Bowdoin Quadrangle as a cynosure of the campus, is the college's principal landmark, the one that immediately defines its scholastic identity, in many ways: with its twin towers visible from afar, chiming their Westminster Chime on the quarter-hour to remind students, faculty and staff of their obligations and deadlines; with its axial symmetry on its footpath, which served as a compass for future campus development; with its colorful interior and resonant acoustics and organs, serving as Bowdoin's central venue for concerts, recitals, Chapel Talks and lectures; and with the myriad of other ways it has served the college and its community over the years, kudos to its versatile wings.

"Brunswick College Chapel, Brunswick, Me.", rendering by Richard Upjohn, 1845.

Designed by Richard Upjohn, famous for Trinity Church in New York (1846) and the First Parish Church in Brunswick (1846), the Chapel demonstrates, in stature, structure and use, how everlasting the Gothic Revival can be (even with the phase-out of compulsory religious services at Bowdoin in the 1960s), kudos to the same architectural foresight that went into Massachusetts Hall.

With this foresight, the Chapel was planned for mixed uses from the beginning: a central hall for worship and music, a library, and an art gallery. The German Romanesque random-ashlar Brunswick granite shell was given a tripartite scheme that included library and gallery wings.

The Chapel interior is a wonderworld of stained glass, hammerbeam roof rafters, black walnut woodwork, colorful fresoes, two organs (front and rear), and resonant acoustics. This has made it a blessed space for Chamber Choir concerts – I fondly remember singing solos in a Mozart mass and a "new song contest," and the song with my solo was the winner: "Susie Asado," James Sellars' adaptation of a poem by Gertrude Stein. Other fond Chapel memories were Sunday afternoon Chapel Talks, which enabled students and faculty to soapbox their views on a myriad of issues and arguments of mixed merit. An unconvincing one was "The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Fact or Fiction?", in which a Bowdoin Christian Fellowship member used semantics and bombast rather than logic, evidence and deduction to argue for Jesus' ascension:

"This brilliant scholar says that there is overwhelming evidence that the Resurrection really occurred... The results [of his research] stunned him." The student also described the process of death by asphyxiation on the cross and the secure guarding of tombs back then. That was reasonable logic to show the impossibilities of survival of crucifixion and of grave robbery (more logical reasons for the disappearance of Jesus' body), but not to show that the story of Jesus was true. Yes, faith triumphed over reason.

And, oh, the way the sunlight penetrated the stained-glass windows and spotlighted the frescoes, bringing out their rich colors and delicate artistry! Upjohn likely calculated the window placements for the right impacts of light at certain positions of the sun – still more foresight.

He also must have calculated the siting of the sharp-pointed bell towers according to when and how the sun would hit them at various solar positions of the diurnal arc. Which made the towers a handy "sundial" for Bowdoiners: bright towers meant rise and shine (and get to class), and red-orange towers meant bedtime was nigh (unless you were pulling an all-nighter).

The east end of the Chapel's south wing, Banister Hall, originally housed a two-level art gallery, displaying sculptures on its lower floor and paintings upstairs. This was the extent of the college's "art museum" – in rather cramped quarters – until the fine artworks found brighter, roomier breathing space and elbow-room in the Walker Art Building across the Quad in 1894. Banister Hall then housed the Department of Music (which was handy for Chapel concerts and recitals next door) and the Department of Psychology, until they too found new homes, in the Harvey Dow Gibson Hall of Music in 1954 and eventually Kanbar Hall in 2004, respectively.

Today Banister Hall houses the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common Good, a community service and civic engagement center, and the THRIVE program, supporting first-generation and limited-income students in transitioning into and on from the college experience, and to give them a sense of belonging. (THRIVE was made possible by a major grant from Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings '83.) Very worthy new uses for the spiritual community center the Chapel was built to be!

The library in the opposite wing, despite its beautiful arch, column, bracket and drip moldings and dark walnut woodwork, had but limited capacity for Bowdoin's ever-growing book collection, as the overflowing shelves show here. The completion of Hubbard Hall in 1903 was the answer to the library's prayers.

But in time even Hubbard Hall (center) burst at the seams with books, as the evolution of knowledge dictated, until the functional but drab Hawthorne-Longfellow Library (bottom left), designed by Steinman, Cain & White, assumed the book-burden in 1965, with a much-needed expansion in 1984 and major renovations in 2000 and 2004 by Annum Architects.

(Looking more like an office park than a college library, this is my least favorite building at Bowdoin, so it won't be featured here.)

Other occupants of the wings are the Office for Inclusion and Diversity, the Banister 106 classroom and media presentation room, and a Muslim Prayer Space. The Chapel's wide array of uses attests to the endurance of its granite edifice through the ages, still ringing its bells and boasting its towers from far and wide to declare, "This is Bowdoin."

Class of 1875 Memorial Gateway on axis with Chapel in 1907.

The Chapel's axial path gave rise to future campus growth on that axis. The Class of 1875 Memorial Gateway (1902, McKim, Mead & White) mirrored the duality of the Chapel's towers with twin fluted columns and Grecian urns in the "City Beautiful" classical style. Their axial symmetry with their progenitor framed and reinforced the Chapel's central sanctity to Bowdoin

until the Visual Arts Center (1975, Edward Larrabee Barnes) blocked their view of the Chapel with a new, ominous gateway to the Quad, forcing passage through a dark tunnel to enter the campus – a barbarian byproduct of the modern age that was invading the academic peace of historicism that once blessed Bowdoin.

To be continued...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Campus and Buildings," Bowdoin, https://www.bowdoin.edu/about/campus-location/facilities/campus-and-buildings.html

Cross, John, "Whispering Pines: One Hearth, Many Lives," Bowdoin, October 3, 2017, https://www.bowdoin.edu/news/2017/10/whispering-pines-one-hearth-many-lives.html

"Identity and Culture: Sacred Spaces," Bowdoin, https://www.bowdoin.edu/identity-culture/spiritual-life/sacred-spaces/index.html

"King Chapel, Bowdoin College, ca. 1920," contributed by Maine Historical Society, Maine Memory Network, https://www.mainememory.net/record/17687/image/17687

"Massachusetts Hall, Bowdoin College," Wikipedia, last edited on 5 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Hall,_Bowdoin_College

"Music: The Chapel," Bowdoin, https://www.bowdoin.edu/music/resources-and-opportunities/facilities/the-chapel.html

Pastor, Rin, "What's in a Name: Massachusetts Hall," The Bowdoin Orient, April 4, 2025, https://bowdoinorient.com/2025/04/04/whats-in-a-name-massachusetts-hall/

Pierce, Henry H., and Anthony Antolini, "Bowdoin Beata," https://alumni.bowdoin.edu/gateway/document.doc?id=133

"The History, Art, and Architecture of the Bowdoin College Chapel," George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, 2011, https://library.bowdoin.edu/arch/archives/a-1-13ChapelBrochure2010-web.pdf

Webber, G.B., "Chapel, Interior, Banister Hall," Bowdoin College Library Archives Image Gallery, 1889, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.2177773

Bowdoin Beata — Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:55:26 +0000

"Bowdoin Beata" is a song of Bowdoin College, my "dear alma mater," as that old hymn heralds. Beata, from the Latin beatus (blessed), defines Bowdoin architecturally, if not always socially.

Bowdoin College Homecoming, October 2025.

I recently dreamed that I visited the Bowdoin campus in Brunswick, Maine, at a Homecoming event and made the rounds of the old fraternity houses that had been converted to student housing and other uses. In the dream each house sported an emblem or seal (not Greek letters) expressing their individual identities and pride of place. This decorative touch replaced each dwelling's Animal House reputation with a celebration of its new and proper role on campus: to house students as social activity centers and havens of academia. Which prompted me to reflect on the campus architecture to which I had paid little heed when I was there, being too caught up in the shenanigans of the frat scene to appreciate the beauty of the campus that had lain before me all those four years.

MacMillan's majesty

MacMillan House, formerly Theta Delta Chi (TD), was the first house I visited in the dream – which was possibly a recollection of my two sole ventures into its fraternity when I was in college. The first was during the annual Rush Week, when incoming freshmen and others flocked to the beer (and sometimes pot) parties the frats threw to lure, bid and recruit new members. TD's president told me, "Everyone here plays some kinda sport," "We have the highest grade-point average on campus," and "We bid people based mostly on personality." Since I was no jock, and certainly didn't have his personality, I decided then and there that TD was not for me.

This was confirmed when I entered a campus-wide party there a couple of years later. The smell of beer and the loud, confused brouhaha of jibber-jabber predominated the ambiance. "What's your name?" I asked someone. "None a'yuh business!" was the response. Good-bye forever. So you can imagine my dismay when, on my senior year's Drop Night, from the porch of my frat I saw new members "dropping at" (joining) TD in droves (driven by a promo photo of TDers guzzling beer and whooping it up), while my frat got only two new members.

But now that it's no longer TD, I'll talk about what matters most about it: its architecture. Built in 1942 as a private fraternity house for Theta Delta Chi, it was renamed for famed Arctic explorer Donald B. MacMillan '98, when Bowdoin renamed each of its former frat houses after a distinguished alumnus or faculty advisor of that frat.

The house actually replaced an earlier one that had been built in 1904 as Theta Delta Chi's first chapter house on campus, designed by William R. Miller with a wraparound covered porch, steep gables, clustered windows, and picturesque pop-out bay windows, turrets, chimneys and other details. The brochure calling for its replacement called its brown Shingle Style "wrong" with "an absence of any collegiate feeling in its design."

So it was replaced with a stately, traditionalist Georgian Revival design by Felix Arnold Burton '07, in keeping with the "early American" palette that characterized Bowdoin's architecture, according to that brochure. MacMillan House is confidently and coherently massed, as if it really means "business" in housing students. The left-side sunporch, right-side brick extensions, and pediment-crowned center-entrance projection give the house a tempting lure of luxury – which might well have lured some of those new TDers on Drop Night, who knows?

Helmreich's House of the Seven Gables

Helmreich House, formerly Alpha Rho Upsilon (ARU), my fraternity, was renamed after the late Ernst Christian Helmreich, Reed Professor of History and Political Science Emeritus at Bowdoin, the club's original faculty advisor. (His sons were members.) I was tempted to join ARU based on the immediate friendly greeting at the door a female member in a cowgirl hat and neckerchief gave me right when I entered, which didn't occur at any other frat on campus. I was also attracted to the premise on which the frat was founded in 1946, "All Races United" (A.R.U.), so that Jewish and African-American students, and later women, could have a community to belong to.

It also had a reputation as an "anti-fraternity," having been originally founded in 1937 as the Thorndike Club, a dining club for non-frat "indies," under Ernst Helmreich's leadership as its faculty advisor.

That "cowgirl," along with another member, bid me to join ARU the next day. Convinced I had found the right place, I "dropped" there on Drop Night without hesitation, and I picked that girl as my ARU "Big Sister."

ARU was far from anti-frat, as I painfully discovered in my four years there while constantly trying to "make it work." And there were warning signs all along that joining it was my big mistake. Examples: My "Big Sister" immediately left school to get married, just as I was getting to know her. I came in last place in a "Mr. ARU" talent contest I was eager to participate in. My best friend at ARU suddenly transferred to the University of Chicago as soon as he got word that his ARU girlfriend was pregnant. By a margin of one vote, I was elected Orientation Chairman to plan activities for the new frosh members (including their "Hell Night" initiation rites), which put me far behind in my studies. I had two other unrequited crushes there. By my senior year the house was divided into cliques, none of which I comfortably fit into. And so on. So I renounced ARU when I graduated, and it was the first of Bowdoin's remaining frats to close down in 1990, being in extreme arrears with the college.

But from the beginning I was intrigued by the house's architecture and history. It was built c.1900 by George Taylor Files, Professor of German, and his wife Edith Davis Files, who later established the George Taylor Files Professorship of Modern Languages at Bowdoin. The house is an unusual hybrid of Shingle Style and Georgian Revival.

Those two styles were originally thought to be incompatible, the former having been a rebellion against the latter, as you'll see later. But they work in agreeable balance here: the former supplies the rustic shingles, gambrel and picturesque massing of the Shingle Style, while the latter graces it with a Georgian Palladian window within the gable, classical balustrades and Ionic-columned front porch, some clapboard siding, and enough semi-symmetry to keep it in line with Bowdoin's "early American" vernacular.

The side sunroom – ARU's dining/party hall, all-nighter study hall, art exhibit gallery, and milieu of its "Shot-a-Minute" tradition (no comment) – was added before 1952. Since then ARU sprouted several other additions that compromised its symmetry even more.

These included a mid-1980s extension of its side gambrel over the sunroom. An ARU president said it "looks great," but it served little useful purpose except to create an oversized studio apartment for a lucky member (or two, if it was a couple), and to add to the arrears that shut ARU down, initiating the phase-out of all Bowdoin fraternities.

This evolution of Helmreich House truly transformed it into a "House of the Seven Gables" that at least now has the capacity to provide lots of generous spaces for student housing and campus activities.

Burnett's bounty

Burnett House, formerly Phi Delta Psi, was one of Bowdoin's earliest fraternities to close and be converted to student housing. Built in 1858, it was named for two of its owners, Charles Theodore Burnett, Professor of Psychology, and his wife, Sue Winchell Burnett, a cellist who became the namesake of Bowdoin's Sue Winchell Burnett Prize in Music. Eighteen years after Prof. Burnett's passing in 1946, Phi Delta Psi, having newly split from Alpha Tau Omega, occupied his house, but for only six years, at which time it became Burnett House. I fondly remember its large rooms, oversized windows and high ceilings, which made its front living area a pristine location for shooting a party scene in the film I made for Prof. Barbara Kaster's "Flicks" class.

On October 6, 1858, the Brunswick Telegraph reported that the new house's dimensions were "well proportioned, and when the building is completed, the grounds graded, the improvement will add much to the attractiveness of that part of the town." And it does, exemplifying the Italianate style, with matched boards, quoined corners, and projecting lintels, cornice, and porch roof.

Burnett's abundance of rear space and lawn area is another bonus. Later "ell" additions to the house greatly expanded its capacity for student housing – always at a premium on college and university campuses – while concealing themselves from Maine Street to preserve the house's Italianate identity on the street.

Howell's honors

Howell House, formerly Alpha Delta Phi (AD), was built in 1924 as the lodge of Bowdoin's first fraternity. It was renamed for Roger Howell Jr. '58, Professor of History and President of the College. One of the few Americans to teach British history at Oxford University, where he had been a Rhodes Scholar, Howell saw Bowdoin through major social and academic transitions during his presidency: admittance of women for the first time, founding of African-American studies programs and the 12-college exchange program, elimination of SAT admission requirements (Bowdoin was the first college to do so), and erection of Bowdoin's Visual Arts Center, among other milestones.

Alpha Delta Phi members in 1997.

Yet the academic distinction of Roger Howell and the house's architecture was de-emphasized at AD's Rush Week parties. Their main theme was alcohol – as it was at every frat – but with a bit more imagination this time, for better or for worse. AD's libations included "Bad Wines" and "Jim Jones Punch," a tasteless reference to that cult leader in Jonestown, Guyana, who in 1978 forced his "disciples" to drink cyanide-laced Flavor Aid all together, killing 912 of them, followed by himself with a gun to his head, in the largest mass murder-suicide in history, the Jonestown Massacre. Reducing it to a joke like that – especially at a place as erudite as Bowdoin – was in as bad taste as the Bad Wines, which may have turned me off from wanting to drop at AD.

But now that it has been rightfully rechristened in honor of its most honorable member, Howell House stands as a shrine to scholarship, kudos to architect Felix Arnold Burton's study of 18th-century buildings for his Georgian Revival design of this one.

Historical features he adorned his creation with include a façade-length brick stringcourse expressing the division of floors, the center entrance's scrolled broken pediment with pineapple, Gothic-arched dormer windows on a balustraded hipped roof, grouped outer-wall chimneys, and a multi-columned side porch.

This exemplar of elegant classical balance, where all the parts work together to form a pleasing whole, has finally received its academic due and rightful recognition. Howell House now presents itself as a dignified place for students to live and study, rather than to drink, joke and toke.

Quinby's quirk

Quinby House, formerly Psi Upsilon (Psi U), seemed made to order for the off-the-wall, funky, kinky, free-spirited types it attracted to its frat membership, who ran the gamut from hippy to punky to artsy to electric to bling. (They included the late New York artist Nina Jordan.) Psi U's erratic, dramatic explosion of gables, bay windows, porches, terraces and ells seemed to leave it dancing in the street, shouting "Party time!" to tempted frosh. The cool, hip in-crowd it housed also made it cliquish, as I sensed when no one there would talk to me during my Rush Week visit there. It was also too grimy, beer-rancid and graffiti-plastered for my palate.

But now that it has taken a new lease on life as the namesake of George "Pat" Hunnewell Quinby '23, Professor of English and Director of Dramatics at Bowdoin (its theater connection is very fitting for its artsy image), I'm told that a diverse, eclectic smorgasbord of personalities live there, putting on a panoply of intellectual, artistic, social and political events for the college community, as all College House dwellers make a pact with the college to do when they set up their residency there – hence the reputation of the College Houses as "the living rooms of Bowdoin." What a relief that they aren't just about beer, pot and parties anymore. I could have used such a sociocultural awakening when I was at Bowdoin.

Which Quinby House is entirely fit for. Built in 1903 from a Shingle Style design by John Calvin Stevens, it is as unbalanced as its fellow College Houses are balanced, as defined by its off-kilter front gable and the thrust of its side and rear gables and porches in varying lengths and directions...

...its rear protrusions taking the unusual form of a "K," inspired by Kappa, the Greek letter of the local Psi Upsilon chapter the house was built for. A green-painted Shingle Style skin wraps the entire composition, unifying its disparate parts and angles, nooks and crannies into a satisfying whole that provides the spatial ingredients necessary for a broad diversity of student personalities, campus activities, and study shelters.

Reed's repose

Reed House, formerly Chi Psi, is everything Quinby House isn't: Georgian, classical, collegiate, conservative, traditional, stately, symmetrical, restful. Which fit the conservative character of its fraternity – at least the one allied with the national headquarters. When I was at Bowdoin, Chi Psi split over the issue of admitting women as members, to the point where its co-ed faction declared itself a local frat – Alpha Chi Psi – and stayed in the house, banishing the all-male national allegiance (which included College Republicans) to a four-bed cluster in Bowdoin's Coles Tower.

Eventually the national HQ forced Alpha Chi Psi out of the house, and the national affiliate chapter renounced its recognition by Bowdoin in August 1982 in defiance of the college policy of women's equal participation in all frats. Its conversion to college housing certainly resolved that culture war.

Come to think of it, there was a similar split at TD, but in a different way: the unrecognized female members formed a sorority, Delta Theta Delta. Once women were admitted to Bowdoin in 1970, the debate over whether all fraternities should admit women as full members was a hot topic for years. The Bowdoin Orient campus weekly insisted, "Sexism has no place at Bowdoin," but some students believed fraternities should have an individual choice whether to remain a men's club. That was a price everyone who joined a frat paid: getting mired in its sometimes-nasty politics and social conflicts, which could easily be avoided by remaining an "indy," as I realized too late.

But that's in the past – though the past can't be ignored. Built in 1932 from a Georgian Revival design by H. Herbert Wheeler, Reed House is one of Bowdoin's most visually uniform College Houses, wrapped in a detail-challenged brick facade culminating in chimneys crowning its gambrel at each end.

Deviations from the uniformity, highlighting the house's essential components, include a pedimented center entrance, a diversity of window toppings (segmental brick arches on the first floor, straight brick lintels on the second, triangular pediments on the dormers), fan window-hoods on the sides under the chimneys, and modillioned cornices under the roof and on the entry pediment. Reed House is especially dignified by its setback from the street, providing it generous lawn and yard acreage for outdoor activities and giving it a sense of rural repose – which is most welcome come exam time.

Ladd's liberalism

Ladd House, formerly Zeta Psi (Zete), has undergone a radical transformation that is a blunt counterpoint to its conservative architecture and social history. When I was at Bowdoin, Zete (pronounced ZAYT, by the way) was one of the final holdouts in the college's all-male fraternity circle, its female affiliates being "token" members restricted from full participation. Which was a shame, because Zete had an earlier reputation as an all-inclusive co-ed frat, until its national HQ cracked down and forced out the females. (No wonder at least two of its full members defected to ARU. Another went in the opposite direction, for reasons hazy to me.)

But now Ladd House is a center of programs of a social movement under fire from the Trump administration: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). A 2023 renovation transitioned Ladd House from a sophomore residence and party venue to the headquarters of DEI-related campus support and advocacy programs: the Center for Multicultural Life (CML), for students of color; THRIVE, for first-generation, low-income and similar student populations; Sexuality, Women and Gender Center (SWAG), for female and LGBTQ+ students; the Rachel Lord Center of Religious and Spiritual Life, facilitating interfaith dialogue, spiritual practice, and student religious groups, with such resources as a Kosher and halai kitchen; and the Student Accessibility Office, coordinating accommodations and resources for students with disabilities. All of these programs are under the common umbrella of a multifaceted enclave of gathering spaces of diverse sizes and configurations for lectures, receptions, study groups, Bible studies, prayer groups and other social functions supporting all facets of student identities and fostering mutual understanding within diversity.

Quite a change for a house that has worn the look of collegiate conservatism since its construction in 1929 from a design by John P. Thomas, who laced it up with familiar Georgian Revival stone trappings: stringcourses defining story separations, keystoned window lintels, a roofline molding, a center-entrance pavilion with a Tuscan-columned portico, a broken scroll pediment and urn on the second-floor window, and a swag-adorned pediment crowning the composition.

This lodge replaced a more imaginative Shingle Style house from 1903 that would have been more appropriate for Ladd House's new function, for its diversity of gambrels, dormers, bay windows, porches and chimneys popping out hither and yon, yielding rooms, nooks and crannies of many sizes and dimensions.

Recalling the playful spirit of Psi U, this house was described in September 1903 by the Portland Evening Express as "of a shinglesque pattern, now rambling, quaint, and picturesque. The shingles are stained bronze green and the trimmings are white."

Bereft of its progressive design as it may be, Ladd House – named for Samuel A. Ladd Jr. '29, the first president of Zeta Psi's Lambda Chapter at Bowdoin, later the college's director of career counseling and placement – serves its new purpose well, kudos in part to the ells that pop out the back, offsetting the symmetry on the back and sides but supplying added space for the diversity of lecture, study and prayer rooms contained in the house's collegiate shell.

Burton-Little's bonanza

Burton-Little House, formerly Delta Kappa Epsilon (Deke), is on record as the first Bowdoin building designed and built specifically for a fraternity. It boasts a country-club appearance that seemed appropriate for the "preppy" reputation of its members. Deke was the first frat house I visited during my freshman-year Rush Week, and its preppy image, combined with the general friendliness of the members and the classical finesse of the architecture, immediately captivated me, so much so that I decided on the spot that I wanted to join, until ARU came along.

The Deke-ARU rivalry was always apparent. Throughout Rush Week we held house meetings in which we perused Bowdoin's booklet of pictures, names and hometowns of the latest crop of frosh to see whom we had talked to at our parties and whom we might want to bid to join ARU, and one student was rejected from consideration because she was "kind of Deke-ish," in one member's words. Another member complained whenever a freshman class seemed "rich, preppy" – implying, of course, that they'd be better off at Deke. But anyway...

Burton-Little House is Bowdoin's admissions office, and is entirely suited for the job by its collegiate presentability, making student wannabes feel special (or timid?) when they step onto the balustraded terrace and pass through the columned, pedimented portico into the detail-rich parlor.

Built in 1901 from a Colonial Revival design by Chapman & Frazer, the Delta Kappa Epsilon House was lauded pre-construction by the Bowdoin Orient: "The old colonial type of building with its simple lines seems to fit into the surroundings admirably. The grand old portal will give dignity to the front, but will not materially interfere with the interior rooms." In fact, the "grand old portal" seamlessly complemented the interior, where a bridal staircase introduced by columns with scrolled capitals, square corner pilasters, boxed ceiling beams, a classic fireplace, keystoned arches, a Palladian-windowed sitting room, an upholstered window seat, and woodwork of black walnut and California redwood are among the first-floor details Ouellet Construction of Brunswick carefully preserved in the 2000-2001 house-to-office renovation.

Burton-Little House was named for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harold Hitz Burton '09 and College Historian George T. Little, Class of 1877. Yet one wonders – in light of the reputation of Bowdoin's Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum (above) – if Deke should have been renamed Peary House, for its most eminent alumnus, Commander Robert E. Peary, who is credited with discovering the North Pole in April 1909 (left), as MacMillan House was named after TD's own Arctic explorer member.

In fact, on reaching his destination (according to legend; today there is widespread doubt that he reached the actual Pole), Peary paid tribute to his fraternity, as well as his country, as he reported in his 1910 book The North Pole:
We planted five flags at the top of the world. The first one was a silk American flag which Mrs. Peary gave me fifteen years ago...

A broad diagonal section of this ensign would now mark the farthest goal of earth – the place where I and my dusky companions stood.

It was also considered appropriate to raise the colors of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, in which I was initiated a member while an undergraduate student of Bowdoin College, the "World's Ensign of Liberty and Peace," with its red, white, and blue in a field of white, the Navy League flag, and the Red Cross flag.

Baxter's bravura

Baxter House, formerly Sigma Nu, was another early frat-to-flat conversion by the college. Built shortly after Delta Kappa Epsilon in 1901 from a design by the same architects, it essentially grew out of Deke. Its namesake, Hartley Cone Baxter, Class of 1878, likely chose Chapman & Frazer and their contractors, Smith & Rumery of Portland, to repeat their success with Deke by designing and building similar quarters for him, having been a member of Deke. In May 1901, the Brunswick Telegraph described "the fine new residence which H.C. Baxter is building on College Street" as "an exact duplicate in exterior and interior to the Delta Kappa Epsilon Chapter house."

However, Baxter deviated from Deke's design by embellishing his residence's center entrance with a round portico crowned and railed by classical balustrades, White House-style, and placing a Juliet balcony with scrolled brackets and a balustrade under the window over the entrance. Other "personal touches" included a chamfered left-hand bay window in lieu of Deke's squared bay, and dormers with triangular pediments instead of Deke's broken half-moon ones. He virtually replicated Deke's side porch and hipped roof.

After Baxter died in 1939 and his wife, Mary Lincoln Baxter, passed away in 1950, their house was acquired by the Sigma Nu fraternity after they moved out of what became Alpha Rho Upsilon. When Sigma Nu disbanded in 1970, their lodge was rechristened Baxter House as a student residence, for which its grandeur and breadth suited it perfectly.

I hope this little tour of Bowdoin College's former fraternity houses has given you an idea of how they never reached their full architectural potential until fraternities were abolished at Bowdoin (thank heavens) and they became the College Houses, a handsome panoply of variations on styles ranging from collegiate to colonial to creative. Their architectural distinction got lost in the frenzy of fraternity hijinks, be it beer-pong, pot parties, bong-water tosses, campus-wides, or just blowing off steam to blow off studies. Now they are bastions of social, intellectual and artistic campus activities, as their designs fit them for.

In Part II, I'll be reminiscing on my favorite academic buildings at Bowdoin. Stay tuned...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Campus and Buildings," Bowdoin, https://www.bowdoin.edu/about/campus-location/facilities/campus-and-buildings.html

Peary, Robert Edwin, "We Reach the Pole," selection from The North Pole, in University Library, Vol. VII, John Huston Finley, ed., Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1936.

"Projects: Burton-Little House," Ouellet Construction, 2001, https://ocmaine.com/project/bowdoin-college-burton-little-house/

"Residential Life: The Houses," Bowdoin, https://www.bowdoin.edu/residential-life/college-houses/the-houses.html

"Robert Peary," Wikipedia, last edited on 12 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Peary

"Robert Peary, American Explorer, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Edwin-Peary

Remember the Refectory?

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 22:29:28 +0000

Franklin Park Refectory (1896, Hartwell & Richardson), c.1906. Photo by Thomas Warren Sears.

Franklin Park Refectory (1896, Hartwell & Richardson), c.1907.

As we celebrate the American Revolution Semiquincentennial and the golden anniversary of the American Revolution Bicentennial, I am observing a not-so-golden anniversary. Fifty years ago the Franklin Park Refectory, a Boston landmark that would be very useful today were it still with us, was laid waste and torn down.

Franklin Park Refectory (1896, Hartwell & Richardson), c.1907.

The best way to celebrate the history and heritage of our nation is to preserve, recycle and reuse its historic architecture as an educational tool for future generations and a tribute to the artisans who built distinguished social facilities to help foster a more civilly democratic society.

Franklin Park Refectory, courtesy of digitalcommonwealth.org.

So I thought I'd recall an architectural treasure — once of high social significance and utility to visitors to Franklin Park, its zoo and its golf course, kudos to its palatial presence in a location by the entries to those popular attractions – that fell victim to shifting socioeconomic demographics, benign neglect, and the wrecking ball.

Blueprints for the Franklin Park Refectory.

Frederick Law Olmsted conceived Refectory Hill as part of his 1886 General Plan for Franklin Park as a rural retreat offering a wide variety of amenities for people of all social classes within wilderness, rolling hills and paths, overlooks, a pond, and recreational fields. He envisioned the Refectory as an eating place where "refreshments [would] be served principally out of doors under a large pergola or vine clad trellis, upon a terrace formed in the manner of the Playstead Overlook. Horse Sheds on the east side. Extended sylvan prospects from the terrace." Designed in an Italian Renaissance Revival style by Hartwell & Richardson, the Refectory was dedicated with festive excitement on July 4, 1896 – timely with America's 220th anniversary – as an open, airy, breezy pavilion with a pergola, an arcade, corner towers with classical arches and balustrade balconies, private dining rooms, a second-story loggia, and a rooftop garden, bordered by a terrace and a classical balustrade overlooking a mountainous stone foundation. All those areas for eating, drinking and lounging offered heavenly bucolic vistas extending beyond the Arnold Arboretum to the Blue Hills, as an idyllic setting for the public to benefit from the restorative powers of food, libation and nature.

Franklin Park Refectory, c.1917.

Its hilltop grandeur, presenting it as a social mecca to a shrine of refreshment and renewal, was expressed by Sylvester Baxter in his Boston Park Guide: "While all the other park buildings are simple and picturesque in character, the Refectory is marked by an elegance of style in keeping with its site and purpose."

Franklin Park Refectory, renovated as a Boston Public Library branch.

By 1906, the Refectory proved a strain to maintain as a restaurant and café. So it became a branch of the Boston Public Library, for which its open-air first floor was closed off with an arcade of glass doors with arched transoms, making it an out-of-the-way place to read and study surrounded by the tranquility of nature.

Franklin Park Refectory as a Boston Public Library branch, side view.

Upon its closure as a library in the late 1920s, a Catholic charity sought its conversion to a day home for children with tuberculosis, that would enable them to take advantage of the healing powers of the fresh air and natural environs the building presented in abundance.

But neighbors objected to this proposal, afraid that it would turn the old building into something like a hospital (which, of course, didn't foreshadow the 1950s usurpation of Franklin Park's Heathfield by Lemuel Shattuck State Hospital, which remains there today).

It was reopened as an eatery by the Burke family in 1928. For 44 years it was the go-to concession stand for golfers, zoo crowds and kite-flyers, where Weitz Toasted Frankfurters were a specialty and Schlitz beers, Cracker Jacks, Mallomars, out-of-the-oven pizzas, ice cream, and more were served by dapper young men in white uniforms and aprons.

This variety of victuals extended the Refectory into a jovial social center where political powwows, gala get-togethers and children's birthday parties took place by the dozen, family dinners were enjoyed on umbrella-shaded terrace tables with breathtaking country views, and toboggans were rented out for winter coasts down Schoolmaster Hill.

Seniors have shared their happy memories of the Refectory on Facebook, including Tharreni Jessie Morton:

Yes, I think this is maybe the building I have been thinking of off and on that we used to go to – it had a little lunch counter where you could get maybe a hotdog and a drink... and [an] old stereopticon picture machine, things that you looked at little scenes from – old Victorian stuff – and it was still pretty much just as it had been in the past – and this was in my teen years in [the] early-mid-sixties.

Franklin Park Refectory after closing, mid-1970s.

The rapidly changing social demographics, urban renewal, and mounting fear of crime that led to the "white flight" from Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and other neighborhoods abutting Franklin Park forced the closing of the refectory in 1972, which plunged this noble classical temple into decay and long-term neglect. A blog visitor shared his memory of this in 2008:

I remember pulling open the large metal door on the abandoned, boarded-up Refectory back in 1974 as a 10 year old to look inside. It was cavernous. And all I could think was, "Wow, somebody should fix this place up!" That experience sparked a love for abandoned old buildings with potential that has stayed with me ever since.

Photo by Georgfotoart.

My father's scrutiny of the near-shambles Refectory sparked the same for me – especially when, in April 1976, he was notified that it was being razed, no thanks to a decree from then Commissioner of Parks and Recreation Anthony Forgione that it had to be torn down "right away." My father dashed out to the site, where he was interviewed by a major news outlet about the demolition, and an eighth-grade classmate told me she had seen my father on television.

He even reported to us that one of the wrecking crew had told him, "It's a shame that they should tear something like this down," and that about 12 mature trees were cut down in the process – as if the city had a parking lot for the golf course and the zoo in mind for the site. My father salvaged an ornate plaster bracket from the rubble, which he displayed in our garden and let the elements erode over time, as sort of a memorial to the ruination of the Refectory.

Fast-forward fifty years: What's Refectory Hill like today? Sure enough, it's another fulfillment of the prophecy Joni Mitchell made in her song, "Big Yellow Taxi":

Don't it always
seem to go

That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?

They paved paradise,

Put up a parking lot.

Trillium beer garden, Fenway (opened March 2013). Photo by Alex Zokan.

Which is a shame, considering today's popularity of beer gardens such as the Trillium in the Fenway. Today there would certainly be a market for a restored Franklin Park Refectory as a beer garden attracting the crowds that flock to the Franklin Park Zoo, the William Devine Golf Course, the annual Kite Festival, and White Stadium once it's rebuilt.

Just as Frederick Law Olmsted had predicted when he first envisioned the Franklin Park Refectory.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Big Yellow Taxi" (lyrics), Genius, https://genius.com/Joni-mitchell-big-yellow-taxi-lyrics

Boston Landmarks Commission, Franklin Park: Boston Landmarks Commission Study Report, March 4, 1980, https://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/franklin%20park%20study%20report%20no%2042_tcm3-28511.pdf

"Franklin Park," Jamaica Plain Historical Society, https://www.jphs.org/photogallery/franklin-park#gsc.tab=0

"Franklin Park: the Refectory, a building that served at various times as a restaurant and a branch of the Boston Public Library," Smithsonian Gardens, https://gardens.si.edu/collections/explore/ead_component/sova-aag-srs-ref4754

Osinski, Stan, "Boston Public Library Branch in Franklin Park," Boston Mass, Vintage, Facebook, July 6, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/1201814968754031/

Polimer, Joe, "Franklin Park Refectory as Boston Library," Boston Mass, Vintage, Facebook, October 5, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/996255315976665/

"Refectory, Franklin Park, Roxbury, Mass.," Historic New England, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/195346

"Refectory Hill," olmstedbooks, April 10, 2008, https://olmstedbooks.blogspot.com/2008/03/refectory-hill.html

Sammarco, Anthony, "Dorchester's Lost Library on Blue Hill Avenue," OFD (Originally From Dorcheste), Facebook, August 17, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheOFD/posts/10154425552196241/

"Time Traveling thru Franklin Park," Historic Franklin Park, February 16, 2012, https://historicfranklinpark.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/time-traveling-thru-franklin-park/

"Tiny Story: White Stadium," Boston Preservation Alliance, March 28, 2024, https://www.bostonpreservation.org/news-item/tiny-story-white-stadium

You must remember this...

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:18:17 +0000

Coulton Building (c.1912). Courtesy of Henry Osteen, Boston Mass. Vintage, Facebook.

...but I don't blame you if you don't – especially given the in-your-face eyeful that replaced it (more on that later). The Coulton Building once stood at a prominent corner of Boylston and Berkeley streets in Boston's Back Bay, and was one of the city's many overlooked and underappreciated architectural gems that nobody has remembered since they were gone.

Except for three people who are not with us today (speaking of gone): architectural historian Donlyn Lyndon, the fictional private eye Spenser of the late Robert B. Parker's crime novels and the TV series Spenser: For Hire, and my father, architect and historian Leslie Larson.

YMCA (1882, Sturgis & Brigham), A Stranger's Guide to Boston and its Suburbs (1883).

The Coulton Building was itself a replacement for quite an eyeful: a majestic YMCA, built in 1882 from a design by Sturgis & Brigham. This High Victorian Gothic red brick hybrid of Queen Anne, Ruskinian Gothic and Dutch Gable styles anchored its corner with a generous helping of friendly elegance inviting people of all ages and backgrounds to come in and get fit, who were no doubt attracted by its terra cotta ornament, arched windows, and cylindrical corner turret...

YMCA (1882, Sturgis & Brigham), courtesy of Henry Osteen, Facebook.

...not to mention its smorgasbord of community offerings. In addition to the most advanced athletic facilities, it offered lodging, a library, and lecture halls. Sadly, this bastion of Back Bay grandeur was destroyed by fire in 1910, forcing the YMCA to relocate to its present larger facility on Huntington Avenue. But this building's destruction paved the way for one of the neighborhood's most creative, ahead-of-its-time structures.

Photo by Moulton-Erickson Photograph Co., courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

The completion of the Coulton Building around 1912 certainly brought fresh character to this prominent Back Bay intersection, helping to transition Boylston Street and most of its cross streets from a largely residential and cultural district, like the one extending to Commonwealth Avenue and the Charles River, to one of Boston's main commercial boulevards. It was Boston's new downtown, essentially.

Coulton Building (c.1912). Photo courtesy of Heidi Adams on Facebook.

And what a difference the new building made! Gone were the YMCA's Jacobethan windows and stepped gables in favor of innovative bay windows that stretched the Back Bay's iconic chamfered bays to new dimensions of light and space, while quadrupling the corner turret, to allow all levels to take advantage of the plethora of corner light and vistas that were foreshadowing the modern office building.

Coulton Building, courtesy of MIT Digital Collections.

In The City Observed: Boston, Donlyn Lyndon wrote that the Coulton Building "may be my favorite building in Boston, an astonishing combination of straightforward building construction and sheer willful iconoclasm... As you look at the building you look directly into the offices, with various forms of chairs, bicycles, plants and drapery juxtaposed against the architectural patterning." This was a good opportunity for the building's tenants to use their bay picture windows to showcase their businesses more prominently on the street, drawing upon an aesthetic pioneered by Chicago School of Architecture office buildings such as Burnham & Root's Reliance Building (1890-1895), Holabird & Roche's Monadnock Building (1891-1893) and Chicago Savings Bank Building (1904-1905), and Adler & Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange (1894, demolished 1972). This was a harbinger of modernism's dissolution of the barrier between inside and outside through the membranes of window walls.

The Coulton was also perfectly timed with the construction of the Back Bay subway extension (today's MBTA Green Line) from 1913-1914, which brought a flurry of commuters to and from Boston's new downtown, hence to the light and luxury of its new Chicago-windowed offices and back home to Boston's streetcar suburbs.

The Coulton's bay windows may also have been inspired by its Beaux-Arts neighbor across the street, the Berkeley (1905, Codman & Despradelle), which has similar windows in its tall arched openings. The Berkeley was likely the location of Spenser's office, as Parker's novel Early Autumn suggests:

I moved down Boylston Street to the corner of Berkeley, second floor. I was half a block from Brooks Brothers and right over a bank... To the right across Boylston I could see Bonwit Teller. To the left Police Headquarters. In Bonwit's windows there were mannequins wearing tight leather clothes and chains. Police headquarters leaned more to Dacron. In the window bay of the advertising agency across the street a young black-haired woman in high-waisted gray trousers leaned over a drawing board. Her back was toward the window. "My compliments to your tailor," I said out loud. My voice sounded odd in the empty room. The black-haired woman went away and I sat at my desk...

Bonwit Teller (now Restoration Hardware), courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

Spenser was likely ogling her through a revealing bay window of the Coulton right across from his office as he kept his eagle-eyes on the city from his panoramic perch, waiting for new clients and giving the streets the once-over for auguries of criminal activity. He also had a handsome view of Bonwit Teller (right) catercorner to him, possibly another model for the Coulton's shop-window approach to architecture. (Now the RH Boston Gallery, this building was built in 1863-1864 from a French Academic / Neoclassical design by William Gibbons Preston as the Museum of Natural History, the precursor to Boston's Museum of Science.)

Woodbury Building (1898-99), 443-445 Boylston St.

In fact, the Coulton was the fourth cornerstone in a four-corner historical merry-go-round that distinguished the Boylston-Berkeley crossroads as a four-way gateway to different parts of the city. Catercorner to it was the Woodbury Building, built in 1898-99 by Woodbury & Leighton, builders of the Boston Public Library. The Woodbury is notable for its razor-thin footprint and its pressed-metal bay windows, another possible inspiration for the Coulton for their light- and space-giving qualities.

For the Coulton's historically inspired and futuristically foresighted design, my father lobbied to have it preserved. But the nine-member Boston Landmarks Commission's rejection of its landmark designation by a tie vote, with one abstention due to a conflict of interest, sealed its fate. So in 1989 it gave way for 222 Berkeley, a haphazardly massed phantasmagoria of historical allusions cooked up by Robert A.M. Stern as a bedfellow of 500 Boylston, Philip Johnson's Italianate extravaganza next door. Now 222 Berkeley commands (and demands) our undivided attention with virtually every Bostonian stylistic trick in the pattern-book: a grand arched entrance ceremonially flanked by Ionic column pairs, a brass mini-dome referencing the State House, bay windows and a corner oriel clearly taking cues from the building's predecessor, a Grecian temple front for its main entrance, a crown of festoons, and brick, brick, brick. This historical hodgepodge takes all our notice away from the three historic corners it competes with, doing grave injustice to the artful restraint, careful composition, and artistic coherence of historic Back Bay architecture in the name of the grotesque showmanship of the postmodern era. Which both the Coulton Building and the YMCA were careful to avoid by focusing on balanced composition, structural practicality, and fenestral finesse, now both long forgotten as time goes by.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"222 Berkeley Street," RAMSA, https://www.ramsa.com/expertise/project/222-berkeley-street

Adams, Heidi, "Back Bay Through Time," Facebook, April 17, 2023, https://www.facebook.com/groups/2181272735433124/posts/3790624697831245/

Boston Landmarks Commission, Status of Petitions to the Boston Landmarks Commission for Designation of Landmarks and Districts, as of June 2016, https://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/PETSTATS_June2016_tcm3-53570.pdf

"Chicago Building," Wikipedia, last edited on 2 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Building

"Chicago Stock Exchange," Wikipedia, last edited on 21 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Stock_Exchange

Dolcimascolo, Elizabeth, and Clio Admin., "Boston Society of Natural History Restoration Hardware," Clio: Your Guide to History, February 25, 2026, accessed October 12, 2026, https://theclio.com/entry/86331

Lyndon, Donlyn, The City Observed: Boston, a Guide to the Architecture of the Hub, New York: Vintage Books, 1982, https://libraries.mit.edu/150books/2011/05/08/1982/

"Monadnock Building," Wikipedia, last edited on 6 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadnock_Building

Morgan, Keith N., "Berkeley Building," Society of Architectural Historians Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsly, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012–, https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MA-01-BB25

Osinski, Stan, "Historic YMCA site on Boylston and Berkeley streets in Boston," Boston Mass, Vintage, Facebook, August 12, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/955277290074468/

Osteen, Henry, "Historic YMCA Building in Boston, MA," Boston Mass, Vintage, Facebook, January 2, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/1060769886191874/

Parker, Robert B., Early Autumn, New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1981, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Autumn_(Parker_novel)

"Reliance Building," Wikipedia, last edited on 8 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliance_Building

Rocheleau, Matt, "All of Boston’s historic landmarks, and the ones that failed to make the cut," The Boston Globe, March 17, 2017, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/17/all-boston-historic-landmarks-and-ones-that-failed-make-cut/BExHEExQIzWaGDTOAL9l5O/story.html

Smith, Dana, "Historic YMCA Building in Boston Destroyed by Fire," Boston Mass, Vintage, Facebook, May 27, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/1169450918657103/?ref=fb_answers

Stark, James Henry, A Stranger's Illustrated Guide to Boston and its Suburbs, Boston: Photo-electrotype Co., 1883, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008651253

Vanderwarker, Peter, "Berkeley Street," Museum Without Walls, https://v1.culturenow.org/entry&permalink=14064&seo=Berkeley-Street_Peter-Vanderwarker_Boston-MA

The desecration of St. Paul's

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 21:51:36 +0000

Archival image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

As a choirboy at Boston's Cathedral Church of St. Paul in the 1970s, I was always vexed and perplexed by the uncarved, uneven stone blocks in the church's crowning pediment as I faced the façade on my way to weekly rehearsals and Sunday morning services. Compromising the Greek Revival grace and refinement of the old stone temple front – which was built of light Quincy granite hauled from the Quincy quarries on America's first railroad and Ionic columns of brown sandstone quarried from Acquia Creek in Stafford County, Virginia – the pediment seemed to hunger for something to fill that gap, to climax the cathedral with a sublime signature that sanctified its patron saint in an artistic and proper Bostonian way.

In fact, the church's original 1819 Greek Revival design by Alexander Parris (of Quincy Market fame) and Solomon Willard (of Bunker Hill Monument fame) had called for a detailed bas-relief of St. Paul preaching before King Agrippa II to be carved into the crowning pediment.

St. Paul Before Agrippa and Bernice by David Martin (1639-1721).

It would have resembled the pediment bas-relief above, on St. Paul's Cathedral in London, had it been executed, and would have likely been modeled on various artistic interpretations of Paul's homily to Agrippa, Bernice and Roman governor Festus on his Christian conversion and the realization of Old Testament prophecies of Jesus Christ's suffering, death and resurrection, as recorded in Acts 26 in the New Testament. This carving would have been just the artistic finishing touch of Bostonian academic erudition this fine work of architecture called for. Alas, a shortage of funds made it not to be.

Photo by Beyond My Ken, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Well, the pediment was finally filled after two centuries. Only this nautilus whimsy backed in shocking blue isn't what I had in mind. True, this sculpture – "A Ship of Pearl" by Donald Lipski – was intended as a universal metaphor for spiritual evolution based on Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem The Chambered Nautilus, promoting the Cathedral as a "House of Prayer for All People" (Isaiah 56:7) rather than an Episcopalian coterie.

St. Paul's Cathedral at night. Photo by Father Tim.

But the neon of the nautilus clashes violently with the historic architecture and cheapens its public effect, especially at night (right), much in the vein of that image of mass communication (and miscommunication) in Simon & Garfunkel's song: "And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made, and the sign flashed out its warning..." And it is a warning about what we're in for when we enter.

Former interior, Cathedral Church of St. Paul. Photo by Daderot.

No, not this. This was the cathedral before its makeover. In proper Episcopalian form, rows of wooden pews faced the half-domed choir chancel (renovated by Ralph Adams Cram in 1912), physically reinforcing the sanctity of its ministers and bishops over its parishioners, and providing the choir and organist with a good acoustical channel to the congregation.

St. Paul's Cathedral before its renovation. Photo courtesy of Pinterest.

And what a coherent composition it made! The mahogany rails of the original pews (though their doors had been removed and their floors raised before I joined the choir) lent a touch of old-time New England, and blended smoothly with the chancel's carved reredos, choir benches and wainscoting that were part of Cram's sensitive remodel.

Look at it now: Original pews ripped out, replaced with freely placed chairs. Floor tackily redone with a zany labyrinth design in line with the funk of the nautilus. Altar relocated to the center. Skylights punched into the old coffers. Original windows replaced with those thermal-paned tack-ons with fake muntins, now half closed off.

Understandably, the church wanted a more flexible, accessible meetinghouse-styled sanctuary with more democratically arranged seating in circles (for which the labyrinth provides a handy floor plan) that enabled the minister to communicate equally to all parishioners of all races, colors, genders and abilities, and "to better house a full range of ministries," as the renovation's designers, Context Architecture, put it. But this took away the Greek Revival / Classical Revival coherence of Parris's and Cram's historical visions, reducing the interior to a generic parish hall furbelowed with the frippery of historical chintz.

Photo courtesy of the Organ Historical Society.

Even the magnificent Aeolian-Skinner loft organ that my choir director, Thomas Murray, loved to play – and I still remember the rumbles, swells and echoes of its diapasons in his stellar performance of Eugène Gigout's Grand Choeur Dialogué – was dismantled, put in storage, and listed for sale through the Organ Clearing House, to make way for...

...a handicapped-acessible elevator. Which is also understandable, given the demands of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and many churches' efforts to accommodate people of varying physical capacities. But history was lost in the process, and the church no longer exhibits its historical evolution of fine craftsmanship through the ages.

The chancel, too, broke the molds of history to extend outward into the nave to be closer to the worshippers, bidding farewell to the minister/congregation dichotomy of New England Anglican and Episcopal churches from King's Chapel to Old North to St. Paul's. The checkerboard floor looks as tacked on as the labyrinthine seating plot.

Photo courtesy of the Organ Historical Society.

Now St. Paul's interior yields a very different effect for me from when I paraded with my fellow choirboys up the central aisle to the choir chancel, and back toward the narthex at the end of the service, while singing "God of Our Fathers" to the organ's brassy fanfare, "Onward, Christian Soldiers," and other majestic hymns every Sunday morning, and hearing the organ's soft bell-chimes solemnly close the service before Mr. Murray's postlude performance of Charles-Marie Widor's Toccata rip-roared away.

At night, St. Paul's Cathedral seems to blend more with the neon shop signs and late-night office lights than with the rest of Boston's historic architecture, on account of the neon nautilus glitz of what filled its pediment – which, indeed, comes across more like advertising than artistic homage to a saint. This is a vulgar desecration of New England's first Greek Revival church, in the name of no-more-kings social progress. I love the causes, but not the context.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Boston, Massachusetts 1907 -> 2017," r/OldPhotosInRealLife, Reddit, 2023, https://www.reddit.com/r/OldPhotosInRealLife/comments/18zztth/cathedral_church_of_st_paul_boston_massachusetts/

"Cathedral Church of St. Paul (Boston)," Wikipedia, last edited on 3 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Church_of_St._Paul_(Boston)

"Cathedral Church of St. Paul," Context Architecture, 2015, https://www.contextarc.com/cathedral-church-of-st-paul

"History," The Cathedral Church of St. Paul, https://stpaulboston.org/history

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, The Chambered Nautilus, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44379/the-chambered-nautilus

Martin, David, "Paul Before Agrippa and Bernice," Pitts Theology Libary, Emory University, https://dia.pitts.aws.emory.edu/image_details.cfm?ID=113153

Morgan, Keith N., "St. Paul's Cathedral," Society of Architectural Historians Archipedia, https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MA-01-BD3

Osteen, Henry, "St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral Church in Boston," Boston Mass, Vintage, Facebook, February 17, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/836330418635823/

"The Cathedral Church of St. Paul," Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, 2026, https://www.diomass.org/about-us/cathedral-church-st-paul

There goes the neighborhood

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:42:43 +0000

BEFORE

AFTER

How dramatically a change of scenery can alter the character of its foreground.

Such was the fate of this Georgian Revival building in Watertown, Mass., built in the 1940s for masonry contractor T. Stuart & Son. It was handily backgrounded by stone and brick yards and handsomely growing ivy collegiate-style, until it all gave way to high-end residential development that totally changes the building's visual context, most notably by giving it the high-end luxury condos and apartments it had happily lived without for a century, keeping the town affordable, until now.

There goes the neighborhood!

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Kokoros, Teddy, "You Know You're From Watertown, MA If......", Facebook, June 30, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/groups/WatertownStrong/posts/8739398082753858/

"T. Stuart & Son Company," New Hampshire Company Directory, https://www.nhcompanyregistry.com/companies/t-stuart-son-company/

Power and pallor in presidential libraries and museums — Part IV

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:30:27 +0000

This is a continuation of a series of posts assessing the architecture of U.S. Presidents' libraries and museums. Part I covers those of John Adams to Rutherford Hayes; Part II, William McKinley to Herbert Hoover; Part III, Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy. This is Part IV.

Joyless Johnson

Too bad Kennedy's VP and successor didn't get an architectural/archival tribute as creatively cutting-edge as that of his prez. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft and R. Max Brooks of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, even lacks the high-tech innovation of Bunshaft's Lever House in New York (1952).

Photo by Beyond My Ken, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Lever's marked contrast of vertical and horizontal elements (right) does resurface slightly in LBJ's libes (above), albeit haphazardly. Here it tries to be both at once, which cancels out both its latitudinal and longitudinal forces to render it static and nondescript, as if Bunshaft didn't know what to make of Johnson's presidency. And no wonder: Johnson's beneficent Medicare, Medicaid, Great Society and Civil Rights initiatives were badly balanced by his Vietnam War escalation, breaching his promise never to "send our boys to fight Asian wars" and disgracing him into declining a second term. Lever's well-balanced upward and outward thrusts articulate future technological and corporate growth and expansion with lofty optimism, while the library goes nowhere, leaden with the gloom that ended LBJ's irresolute presidency...

Photo by Wally Gobetz, courtesy of Flickr.com

...as well as JFK's joyfully optimistic one, with the assassin's bullet that shot Johnson into power — and how. In On the Rise, Paul Goldberger wrote that the 1971 LBJ Library "suggested a pompous presidency; it may or may not have been so, but the mausoleum-like architecture makes it hard to believe that Mr. Johnson was anything but an emperor."

Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Archives

The awkward placement of the horizontal element on top of the building does suggest an imperial crown — or the swelled head that made LBJ ruthlessly ambitious, rising from Senate Majority Leader to Vice President to President to Vietnam Warrior. This makes the building top- heavy, not lithely levitating like Lever House or the JFK Library.

More like an airport control tower awaiting Lyndy's landing on Air Force One. The paved plaza certainly has a runway routineness, which is not helped by the bureaucratic impersonality of the University of Texas at Austin's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs running beside it.

Offsetting the austerity of the campus are colorful perennials, shady trees, lush greenspace, and especially the single-jet fountain, which hauntingly evokes the aura of the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame at JFK's Arlington National Cemetery gravesite when lit up at night.

Photo by Zereshk, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The library's Great Hall feels imperial indeed — soaring and reaching in all directions, coffered for an echoic effect, carved with a gargantuan presidential seal, and constructed with a ceremonial staircase rising regally toward a window-wall revealing the four-level presidential archive stacks.

Trying to expand as much as possible within the confines of its concrete shell, the hall conveys Johnson's great power- grab and mountain-climb up the political ladder — as well as his ultimate demise.

For its barren walls, empty coffers and underutilized space sour with the vapidity of vanity, the all-for-nothing aura of a president's fall from greatness, and his failure to carry Kennedy's vision to full fruition.

Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library and Museum.

Nor are the archives particularly appealing. Resembling cell-block rows instead of library stacks, they contradict the space's openness with a jail's barred enclosure, making one wonder why they are displayed just so. To invite us to learn more about an underappreci- ated man? To suggest a punishment due him for overextension of power?

Photo by Wally Gobetz, courtesy of Flickr.com

LBJ's four-door Lincoln limousine does lend credence to Goldberger's speculation of a pompous presidency (though Johnson didn't order it until after leaving office). It also casts him as a "limousine liberal," a term coined soon after Lyndon left office in 1969 when Democratic New York mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino described his Republican opponent, John Lindsay, as such. (Lindsay won, then switched parties.)

Photo by Found5dollar, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library and Museum.

Of course, no presidential museum is complete without a precise, down-to-the-details replica of the Oval Office as it looked when that museum's namesake occupied it – this one complete with his presidential desk, three-TV console enabling him to keep track of CBS, NBC and ABC broadcasts simultaneously, period phones and teletype machines, personal books and mementos, and a portrait of FDR that LBJ looked to for inspiration. At least this space's classical style and presidential-suite luxury are a temporary relief from the white-bread blandness of the building itself.

Photo by Ajay Suresh, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Yes, as we leave the LBJ library and museum, we can't help noticing its plainness on the plain it stands on. Its uniform cream-travertine skin, relieved from total blah by cornices of modillions formed by the coffered ceiling structure, doesn't exactly make us want to go back there, and seems to memorialize Lyndon Johnson as an imperial but nondescript president who was too full of contradictions, missteps, and deviations from his Great Society idealism for us to get a proper historical reading on him – hence the lack of architectural reading we get on his library/museum.

To be continued...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Good for Texas Tour: Presidential Libraries Edition: Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum," Comptroller.Texas.Gov, 2024, https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/economic-data/library/2024/lbj.php

LBJ Presidential Library, https://www.lbjlibrary.org/exhibitions/permanent?utm_source=google&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign={campaignname}&utm_term=lbj%20library%20exhibits&utm_content=785908143995&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23308854142&gbraid=0AAAAADo2uDeSxbKLvCAfBgSL4GKBA6qN0&gclid=CjwKCAjwirLWBhBBEiwAlItbErDJPueyPS_QKwYwwKARdjOvCm41SrbwVBeaV1g77y6oGdKSUZd54BoCRa8QAvD_BwE

Livingston, Jenna, "Visiting the LBJ Presidential Library & Museum, Visit Austin, Septenber 13, 2025, https://www.austintexas.org/austin-insider-blog/blog/post/lbj-library/

"Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum," Wikipedia, last edited on 31 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_Baines_Johnson_Library_and_Museum