The establishment of the Jamaica Plain Historical Society in 1987 provided our area with a means of sometimes getting local questions about our past conveniently answered. An inquiry this summer focused attention on the several streets in Jamaica Plain that are named after saints: John, Joseph, Mark, Peter, and Rose.

The streets, named for Jesus’ disciples Peter and John, got their names from the fact that they once marked the locations of Episcopal churches in Jamaica Plain: St. Peter Church has disbanded, while St. John’s Church moved to Sumner Hill.

Parishioners leave Saint Thomas Aquinas Church after Sunday mass during World War II. The church was built in 1873 at the corner of South and Saint Joseph Streets and was designed by architect Patrick J. Keeley. The sign on the front lawn lists parishioners serving in the armed forces during the war. Photograph from the Jamaica Plain Historical Society archives.

The remaining three streets (Joseph, Mark, and Rose) are all off South Street in an area known before the Civil War as “Irish Village.” Here the Roman Catholic diocese of Boston established its first church in Jamaica Plain and named it for the great medieval teacher of the Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas. The three streets were laid out in the 1880’s with the Irish still there. Not surprisingly these sainted street names have an increasingly Catholic touch.

Mark was certainly biblical as the author of the Second Gospel and a student of St. Peter. Joseph of Christmastide fame was a saint only in the Catholic Church to some l9th century Christians.

That certainly was the case for St. Rose, whose identity forced the Jamaica Plain Historical Society’s inquiry into sainted-named streets. As will be seen, whoever chose the name (probably an early pastor at St. Thomas Aquinas) chose very wisely with a prophetic eye to today’s Jamaica Plain.

Not only is Rose a woman, but she is also the first American-born person given sainthood by the Catholic Church and she is the patron saint of Latin America and the former American Commonwealth of the Philippines. Unlike our other saints who have given their names to Jamaica Plain streets, St. Rose of Lima is a relatively modern woman who is well known in the documentary record. She is not some stained-glass attitude or the imagination of some artist.

This female saint of the New World, born on April 20, 1586, began life as Isabel de Flores. She was the daughter of a pioneering conquistador, who had come from Puerto Rico to Peru to try his luck in a further outpost of Spain’s empire in the Americas.

She acquired the nickname of Rose as the result of her fine complexion, which an Indian nurse remarked on during her comfortable upbringing. During her teens she adapted her name to that of the Virgin to become Rose de Santa Maria.

Like the famous Spanish bishop, Bartoleme de las Casas, Rose was horrified at Spanish greed and cruelty to America’s native peoples. Early on she had assumed a religious stance and desired to enter the Catholic Church despite the wishes of her parents, who foresaw a comfortable life for her as the wife of a rich conquistador. After the family fortunes took a dip when a mining venture failed, they all knew poverty and Rose pitched in gladly.

Fortune smiled on the Flores later, but the lessons learned persuaded them to allow their daughter at age 20 to join the Dominican Order. Her vow of virginity fulfilled, she took the mystical Italian saint of the 14th century, Catherine of Siena, as her model. Thus Rose lived as a hermit in a small building in the family garden, which also did service for the poor and elderly of Lima, both Spanish and native.

So Rose became the first social worker in Peru, if not in the New World. Given the widespread sin and corruption in her world, she also developed a keen mystical side in prayer and penance, which included the toning down of her fine complexion with pepper and lime, and the wearing of a symbolic small silver circlet of thorns.

These physical and psychological activities quickly brought her to the attention of the Spanish Inquisition, which worked on religious aberrations in Old Spain as well as New Spain. A medical/religious commission validated Rose’s deeds as “supernatural impulses of grace.” Her fame was capped by her death on August 24, 1617, at age 31; on the very day on which she had prophesied that she would die.

A vast funeral was held in Lima, where she was buried in the churchyard of St. Dominic’s Cathedral-later to be moved into a crypt under the main altar.

Of her it is said that her mode of life and her ascetic practices are suitable only for those whom God calls to them.

Rose’s gender, fame and location soon placed her on the ladder to sainthood. Pope Clement X, only a half century after her death, beatified her in 1668. Canonization followed three years later by the same Pope with full documentation of her works and ways. Her feast day occurs at summer’s end on October 30. Basically a woman of New Spain, she was proclaimed patron of the domains of South America and the West Indies. She is also the special patroness of Peru, along with the Philippine Islands.

Her extraordinary life has lent itself to three novels: Capes’ “Flower of the New World” (1899), Mynd’s “Rose of America” (1947), and Keyes’ “The Rose and the Lily” (1971.) On the 300th anniversary of her canonization Peru issued a multicolored commemorative postage stamp in her honor for its special patron, the first native-born saint of the Americas.

Sources: New Catholic Encyclopedia; Butler, “Lives of the Saints.”

Reprinted with permission from the Jamaica Plain Gazette. Copyright, Gazette Publications, Inc.

The National Register of Historic Places is the nation's official list of cultural resources worthy of preservation. Authorized under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Register is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect our historic and archeological resources. Properties listed in the Register include districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects that are significant in American history, architecture, archeology, engineering, and culture. The National Park Service, part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, administers the National Register. The text below is excerpted from the registration form submitted to the National Park Service in 1987. Brian Pfeiffer, Architectural Conservation Trust; Carol Kennedy, Boston Landmarks Commission; and Nancy Friedberg, National Register Director, prepared the form. The nomination form is dated April 1985; revised June 1986.

The Sumner Hill Historic District is located in the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood of Boston, approximately seven miles southwest of the city center, in an area roughly bounded by Seaverns Avenue, Centre Street, South Street, Carolina Avenue, and the Southwest Corridor. The district, which encompasses 365 acres, contains 63 buildings and 18 structures, of which 28 buildings are designated as non-contributing due primarily to severe alteration, temporary nature, or recent age rather than intrusion. In the following description, the district's architectural development is described chronologically by style with selected buildings offered as outstanding and/or characteristic examples of particular styles.

The Sumner Hill Historic District is a well-preserved, wood frame, residential area developed throughout the latter half of the 19th century. In addition to domestic dwellings, the district features several distinguished stone and brick public buildings, including two churches and one school. Commercial intrusion isminimal, and is confined to one structure, a garage, located at the foot of Harris Avenue. Although several of the larger single-family houses and the vacant Jamaica Plain High School have been, or are in the process of being, converted to multi-family use, the district retains its single-family residential character.

The Sumner Hill Historic District occupies a portion of the hilly spine of Jamaica Plain that runs roughly north/south between Centre Street and the Stony Brook Valley (Southwest Corridor). Most of the district is steeply contoured and the upland area of the district, the product of the subdivision of several large 18th century estates, is characterized by picturesquely curving streets; generous, well-landscaped lots with puddingstone retaining walls; and large, architecturally distinguished homes. Many tall, handsome maple and beech trees are scattered throughout the area, and copious plantings and shrubbery add to the 19th century suburban atmosphere of Sumner Hill. No public open areas exist in the district with the exception of a few undeveloped house lots; however, the heavy plantings, deep setbacks, and meandering streets of the neighborhood create a park-like feeling that distinguishes the district from its surroundings.

The Sumner Hill Historic District consists of an outstanding variety of large single-family residences that were built between 1850 and 1900. The structures encompass a multitude of architectural styles including Italianate, Second Empire, Victorian Gothic, Stick, Queen Anne, Shingle, and Colonial Revival. Many of the structures were built by well-known Boston architects in the most fashionable styles of the day, and all structures exhibit a high level of workmanship and quality of materials. Most of the houses in the district use a wide assortment of materials in complex and inventive ways and are irregularly massed, contributing to the architectural vitality and depth of the district.

The Sumner Hill Historic District retains a distinctly different atmosphere from the areas immediately surrounding. Its clear residential character and narrow streets separate Sumner Hill visually from the commercial activity of Centre Street on the west. Historically, the Boston and Providence railroad bed (Southwest Corridor), constructed in 1834, has created an effective barrier from manufacturing activities of the Stony Brook valley on the east.

To the north and south, the difference in architectural quality, density, scale, and period of development separate Sumner Hill from other residential areas. The Sumner Hill area has maintained its architectural quality and has suffered very few losses or major alterations to its residential structures.

Alterations that have occurred have primarily involved the application of synthetic siding, the enclosure of porches, and small side and rear additions. Almost all of the houses in the district are well-maintained and several buildings on Sumner Hill are being restored or renovated. Except for the development of the Southwest Corridor, no known alterations have occurred that may have disturbed archaeological features in the district.

The earliest Italianate-style houses in the district were constructed on land subdivided in the 1850's from the David Greenough estate. The first house built on the newly created Elm, Alveston, and Roanoke Streets was the imposing General William Sumner House (10 Roanoke Avenue), 1852. The house, which dominates the crest of the hill, is distinctive architecturally for its transitional nature, combining a Greek Revival-style pedimented entry, Doric columns and corner boards with paired cornice brackets, hip roof, and long narrow windows typical of the Italianate-style. The nearby Gilbert House of 1854 (83 Elm Street, built two years later, fully embraces the Italianate-style and exhibits its characteristic cornice brackets, two story bay windows, hood mouldings, and paired round arched windows. The Italianate-style remained popular on Sumner Hill for the next 30 years, and numerous examples may be found throughout the district, including a well preserved group of ca. 1855 L- and T-plan houses on Harris Avenue (7, 9, 11, 15 Harris Avenue.)

Sumner Hill has several exceptional Second Empire houses, the most elaborate of which were built during the 1860s along the newly extended portion of Alveston Street between Roanoke and Greenough Avenues. The four houses at 20, 23, 28, and 31 Alveston Street are similar in plan and exhibit classic Second Empire details such as quoins, scalloped slate shingles, round-arched dormers, bellcast, convex and concave mansard roofs, and elaborate window mouldings. 23 Alveston Street, the most lavish of the four, also has incised Neo-Grec horal motifs and a two-story octagonal bay. Elegant Second Empire details also appear on more humble houses in the district such as the trio of slate-roofed mansard cottages at 84,88,90 Seaverns Avenue, ca. 1865. Brick mansard Second Empire rowhouses were very popular in more urban sections of Boston, but were an anomaly among the detached houses of Sumner Hill. 22-26 Greenough Avenue, ca. 1875, is one of only four such groups built in the District.

Development in the 1870s of Everett, Bishop, and Newbern Streets on the eastern edge of Sumner Hill produced several outstanding homes, four of which were the work of John D. Webster, a local builder and architect. Webster's distinctive homes, built sometime during the early 1870s, are eclectic and spirited combinations of Italianate, Second Empire, and Stick-style motif (9,13,15 Bishop Street.) The elegant house at 73 Elm Street, ca. 1875, with its jerkinhead roofs, stick work gable aprons, clapboards overlaid with vertical boards, polychromatic slate work, and asymmetrical massing, has been attributed to Webster, and represents the most elaborate Stick-style house on Sumner Hill. A "purer" example of the style also appears at 109 Segwick Street, 1872.

The Queen Anne-style is particularly well represented on Sumner Hill, and the area hosts some of the most architecturally sophisticated examples of the style. Large, well-detailed houses constructed in the mid-1880s, exhibiting complex plans, asymmetrical fenestration, elaborate porches, contrasting surface textures, and multiple chimneys, stand at 6, 8, 22 Everett Street, 11 Revere Street, and 11 Roanoke Avenue. 10 Revere Street, an exceptional example of the style designed by the well-known Boston firm of Ware and Van Brunt, is also responsible for Memorial Hall and the Episcopal Divinity School at Harvard University. This handsome house has an unusual roofline, vertical and horizontal boarding, turned porch posts, and a lively mix of shingles and clapboards. Other good examples of the style are located at 9 and 14 Newbern Street.

On the west side of the hill, the picturesque cul-de-sacs of Storey Place and Greenough Park provide intimate settings for a remarkable assemblage of Shingle-style houses, several of which were designed by William Ralph Emerson. These houses, particularly 9 Greenough Avenue, ca. 1880; 21 Greenough Avenue, ca. 1884; and 5 Greenough Park, 1893, exhibit a continuity of roof and wall and a continuously shingled exterior which expresses the structural frame beneath. Eyebrow dormers (21 Greenough Ave.) and swelling surfaces (15 Greenough Avenue) are characteristic elements of the style.

The Colonial Revival-style that began to appear in the 1890s was used throughout Sumner Hill as a design source for the last wave of construction in the district. John A. Andrew Street exhibits several simple, hipped roof homes typical of early suburban Colonial Revival houses (14, 24, 25 John A. Andrew Street). Much more sophisticated architecturally is 7 Greenough Avenue, 1893, designed by Clarence Blackall, well-known Boston theater architect, and George F. Newton. The house features an irregular combination of classical elements such as paired Corinthian columns, bowed entablature, and oval windows in an overscaled, asymmetrically massed plan. Located at the foot of Greenough Avenue, it provides an impressive introduction to Sumner Hill's collection of homes.

In addition to its many fine residential properties, the district contains several public buildings of outstanding architectural quality. These include two Gothic Revival churches, the Jamaica Plain Methodist Church (40 Elm Street), 1870, and St. John's Episcopal Church (Elm Street at Roanoke Avenue, 1882.) The Methodist church, which is perched on the slope of Sumner Hill, is a small, English, country-style, Gothic Revival building. Constructed out of native puddingstone, the steepleless church has pointed arch windows, a steeply pitched roof, and an octagonal apse.

St. John's Church, located further up Sumner Hill, is a more elaborate structure set well back from the street on the crest of the hill overlooking the Stony Brook valley. Designed by Harris M. Stephenson, an early proponent of the Colonial Revival-style, the church is constructed of Roxbury puddingstone with brownstone trim. It is composed of a square corner tower with pyramidal roof offset from a long nave, and has a late 1880s parish house addition. The church is in an excellent state of preservation except for poor spot repointing, and retains its typical Gothic Revival batten doors, tall pointed-arch windows, and polychromatic roof slates.

In 1834, the Boston and Providence railroad was established along the western edge of the Stony Brook valley, making the water power of Stony Brook more accessable, and industry developed rapidly in the 1840s and 1850s. The railroad also transformed the population of Jamaica Plain. Access to fast, efficient rail transportation meant that the populace was no longer limited to farmers and wealthy summer residents, and for the first time people could live outside of Boston and commute to work. In response to demands for suburban housing, many of the large estates In Jamaica Plain began subdividing the property for residential development.

In 1851, the western section of Roxbury, which included present-day Jamaica Plain, separated from Roxbury and was incorporated as the separate town of West Roxbury. Separate town status lasted only until 1873 when the citizens voted to annex themselves to the City of Boston. Shortly thereafter, in the 1880s and 1890s, a second wave of residential development occurred, with the establishment of streetcar lines that reinforced Jamaica Plain's link with the city proper. By the beginning of the twentieth century, residential development began to level off, and Jamaica Plain today retains much of its nineteenth century housing stock and remains a largely residential community.

The area encompassing the Sumner Hill Historic District, like the rest of Jamaica Plain, underwent two distinct phases of development. The first period began in 1850, when the heirs of David S. Greenough began subdivision of his "mansion house estate" whose boundaries encompassed most of the land in the district west of Elm Street, and lasted until the Depression of 1873. Development during this phase was largely a result of the increase in population brought on by the arrival of the Boston and Providence railroad. Estate land was sold in large chunks to resident speculators who built homes for themselves and further subdivided their lots.

A network of streets developed on Sumner Hill, reflecting its residential growth. In the 1840s, the only roads were Starr Street (Everett Street) and "Greenough's Street," but by 1850, Roanoke, Alveston, and Elm Streets were laid out on the crest of the hill. From the very beginning, the Sumner Hill National Register District was characterized by large-scale homes on generous lots, and succeeded in attracting upper middle-class merchants, businessmen, and professionals from both Jamaica Plain and Boston. The tone was established by the first house built in the district, the William Sumner House at 10 Roanoke Avenue in 1850. William Sumner (1780-1861) was a noted lawyer, legislator, and real estate developer whose extensive holdings included land in Jamaica Plain, East Boston, and Chelsea. Both the Sumner Tunnel in Boston and Sumner Hill were named in honor of General Sumner.

By 1858, extensions of Harris Avenue to Roanoke Avenue and Alveston Street to Greenough Avenue added new room for development. The three Italianate-style houses at 9, 11, 15 Harris Avenue, were built for Charles Brewer, a local merchant, on speculation and were typical of the type of subdevelopment that occurred in the district. The extended portion of Alveston Street was surveyed for house lots as early as 1859 and it is likely that parcels changed hands several times before construction occurred in the mid-1860s. At that time the street's large, well-preserved Second Empire houses were bought by a variety of professional people including insurance agents John Bumstead (20 A1veston Street) and Benjamin Putnam (28 Alveston Street); a retired Civil War colonel, F. B. Beaumont (23 Alveston Street) and a local grocer, David Keezer (31 Alveston Street.)

During the 1870s, commercial development adjacent to the Jamaica Plain depot at Woolsey Square (no longer extant) was paralleled by residential construction activity along Elm, Bishop, and Newbern Streets. In 1871, local architect John D. Webster purchased a five-parcel tract from George F. Woodman (83 Elm Street) and began constructing the distinctive Italianate/Stick-style houses that appear at 9,13,15 Bishop Street. To serve the spiritual needs of this developing section of Sumner Hill, the Jamaica Plain Methodist Church (40 Elm Street). 1870, was built at the intersection of Elm and Newbern Streets.

The Depression of 1873 slowed growth on Sumner Hill throughout the 1870s, and very few homes were built during this period. The notable exceptions are the four groups of brick mansard rowhouses (22-26 Greenough Street, 60-64 Elm Street, 26-30 Everett Street and 28-30 John A. Andrew Street, which were all built in the late 1870s. These atypical, multi-family units probably represent an attempt by speculators during this depressed period to maximize their investment by increasing the number of units per lot.

During the 1880s, Sumner Hill underwent a second wave of residential development. Boston's expanding population was rapidly outgrowing the confines of the narrow Shawmut peninsula, and nearby suburbs like Jamaica Plain became popular for residential expansion. The electrification of horse-drawn streetcars enabled trolley companies to expand their service, putting neighborhoods as far as ten miles from the city center within reach of the commuter. Sumner Hill's desirable location adjacent to the trolley lines on Centre Street helped maintain its popularity with upper middle class manufacturers and professionals, and fashionable new Shingle and Queen Anne-style homes were added to the district.

One of the earliest areas to be subdivided during this second phase was lower Greenough Street and Storey Lane. Several outstanding Shingle-style houses were built here in the early 1880s for corporate executives (2 Storey Place), Boston store owners (15 Greenough Street), and manufacturers (18 Greenough Street). At the same time, large, elegant Queen Anne houses were filling in the lots along Everett and Newbern Streets (6, 8, 22 Everett Street) and 11, 12, 14 Newbern Street, for a similar type of resident. Symbolizing the growth of the district, a second church, St. John's Episcopal Church (Roanoke Avenue and Elm Street), was built in 1882, on land donated by William Sumner. During the 1890s, available building sites on Sumner Hill became scarcer and development slowed.

Some of the last houses constructed on Sumner Hill were the Sturtevant-Foss House, (11 Revere Street), 1890; 7 Greenough Avenue, 1893; and the three houses built on tiny Greenough Park (3, 4, 5 Greenough Park), ca. 1893.

During the mid-twentieth century, the district experienced minor and reversible alterations as some of the larger, single-family houses such as 9 and 11 Revere Street were converted to apartment houses, nursing homes, and some lodging houses; many of the district's smaller houses have remained in use as single-family residences or have been modified as owner-occupied two-and three-family houses. In general, the physical changes made to buildings during this period were the enclosure of originally open porches, the installation of synthetic sidings, and the removal of some wooden ornamental details; however, the extent of these changes has been far less than in surrounding neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain which experienced extensive property abandonment. Within approximately the last five years, the physical decline of the district has been reversed by the rehabilitation and restoration of several prominently situated buildings.

Typical of this trend are the Victorian Gothic-style house at 73 Elm Street, which has remained an owner-occupied house throughout its history, and the Sturtevant-Foss House at 11 Revere Street, which has recently been restored as part of its conversion from a nursing home to residential condominiums. Similarly, the now vacant Jamaica Plain High School is scheduled to undergo exterior restoration as part of its conversion to residential apartments. Smaller-scale renovations throughout the district have tended to strengthen the area's late-nineteenth century character; a trend that seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Sources
Boston Landmarks Commission. Jamaica Plain Project Completion Report, Part I.

Boston Landmarks Commission. Building Information Forms, Jamaica Plain Survey, 1983

Gilmore, Andrea M. "Sumner Hill", Alliance Letter, Volume 5, Number 5; June 1984

____________. Leading Businessmen of the Back Bay, South End, Boston Highlands, Jamaica Plain and Dorchester. Mercantile Publishing Co., Boston, 1888.

____________. "Data Pertaining to Streets in the Sumner Hill Historic District". Sumner Hill Association Historical Data, no date (manuscript Jamaica Plain Branch, Library).

Tucci, Douglas Shand. Built in Boston, Harvard University Press, Cambridge; 1978.

Warner, Sam Bass Jr.. Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900, Harvard University Press, Cambridge; 1962.

Zaitzevsky, Cynthia. "Victorian Jamaica Plain", Victorian Boston Today, New England Chapter, Victorian Society of America, 1975.

Boston, Brookline, Roxbury City Directories 1840-1915.

City of Boston, Building Permits.

Maps
Walling, Henry Francis. Map of the County of Norfolk, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. (New York: Smith & Bumstead, 1858 and 1866)

Atlases
Hopkins, Griffith Morgan. Atlas of the County of Suffolk, Massachusetts. (Philadelphia: G. M. Hopkins & Co., 1874)

Bromley, George Washington. Atlas of the City of Boston, West Roxbury, Massachusetts Volume 5. (Philadelphia: George W. Bromley & Co., 1884)

Bromley, George Washington. Atlas of the City of Boston, Boston Proper and Roxbury, Massachusetts. (Philadelphia: George W. Bromley & Co., 1890)

Bromley, George Washington. Atlas of City of Boston, Volume 6, West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Philadelphia: George W. Bromley & Co., 1896)

Bromley, George Washington. Atlas of the City of Boston, West Roxbury, Massachusetts. (Philadelphia: George W. Bromley & Co., 1914)


All photographs Copyright © 2003 by Charlie Rosenberg.

By W.H. Marx

A glance at Hale’s 1832 Town of Roxbury map shows the Stony Brook (incorrectly spelled Stoney) meandering through the middle of the town, which then stretched from the Charles River in Dedham through Jamaica Plain to Back Bay, after rising in swampy areas at the town’s southern border below Canterbury Street and finally emptying into the Muddy River at the Fens.  The present Stony Brook Reservation farther west was not the stream’s source.  Stony Brook is difficult to visualize today because it and its tributaries, the Sawmill (now Bussey) and Goldsmith (now Willow) Brooks in the Arboretum, are almost all hidden from view.

Before its “improvement” Stony Brook attracted many businesses to its banks and was the channel for the entrance of the Industrial Age and its workers into Jamaica Plain.  One business of the area, the Haffenreffer Brewery, brewed its beer from Stony Brook’s crystal clear aquifer.  Yet the brook had tremendous power to do bad as well as good, for it acted as a drain for much of the town and habitually caused massive floods in an area undergoing rapid urbanization.

Thus in 1869 the Town of West Roxbury undertook “the improvement of the brook,” which was cleaned out and deepened; but the real burden lay on Boston (which had annexed Roxbury in 1868) “to deepen the brook within her limits to get the necessary grades.”  Interest grew in the project to make a straighter and deeper channel for Stony for even better drainage.

By 1871 this course was fixed and land claims settled for $15,165 with a complaint that “Boston will not do the works for many years to come unless the Town will contribute to the expense.”  The Town Report for 1872/3 featured a foldout presenting a profile of Stony’s proposed new grade from the Boston line to the Hyde Park line (3.5 miles).  The last Town Report a year later noted $43,027 spent on the entire project from 1868 to 1874.

Boston thus inherited the problem and gave it to its park-and-water czar, Frederick Law Olmsted, who began work in the city in 1878.  His final solution came in the 1890’s when Stony was enclosed in a culvert 11 feet in diameter as a part of his concept to make the Fens a holding basin for the Charles River.

Stony Brook is now noted by the new Orange Line station location and name.  In addition, its mouth is prominently marked by the Stony Brook Gatehouse of Roxbury puddingstone on the Fenway facing the classical Forsythe Dental Infirmary for Children.  A duplicate stands beside it, built in 1905 when the outlet was enlarged to a double channel.  Today there’s more to Stony Brook than just a name, and Olmsted surely would be pleased with the new Southwest Corridor Park on top of his creation. 

Originally published in the Boston Daily Globe, October 1, 1913

A big change in the women’s shoe retail trade of Boston takes place Oct 1 – the agency of the famous Queen Quality Shoes will be controlled by C. F. Hovey & Co., 33 Summer St.

This concern took up the Queen Quality Agency, which necessitated the enlargement of the shoe department, only after making an exhaustive study of the Thomas G. Plant Company factory at Jamaica Plain.

The investigators found at the same time – a fact little known to Bostonians – that the city harbors in the plant of the Thomas G. Plant Company, the largest exclusively women’s shoe factory in the world, employing 5200 people, with a value of its business approximately $8,000,000 yearly and with an output of better than 3,000,000 pairs yearly.

It was the privilege of the Globe representative to go through the big factory a few days ago with a party guided by Vice President F.R. Maxwell, the Sales Manager of the company, and the trip proved a revelation to one unaccustomed to the perfection of a manufacturing system such as that at the Jamaica Plain plant. The tour of inspection began at the roof.

The roof of the factory is one huge roof garden and playground, one-half for the use of the women. From this roof can be obtained a magnificent view of Boston and the surrounding territory, and it overlooks the beautiful park alongside the factory, which is used for a recreation ground for the employees.

On the top or sixth floor, where the north light – the clearest light possible - gleamed through the skylights, were groups of men who have been handling leather for the company for 15 or 20 years. Close by the skins were measured by a wonderful machine which in a second gives the exact surface measure of any skin, no matter how irregular its shape.

Vici kid was going through. It was learned that every women, who buys a pair of Vici kid shoes "gets somebody’s goat," literally, for it takes an entire skin of one animal to make a pair of shoes. As there are 13,000 shoes on an average put out by the factory each day, it will be seen that somewhere an immense number of animals are being slaughtered for the Queen Quality wearers.

In the cutting and stitching rooms were hundreds of women and men to cut and assemble the different parts of the shoes. Endless belts did the errands that would require hundreds of boys. There was everywhere an insistent obligation of cleanliness. There was everywhere the very latest idea in improved machinery. One machine for shaping the shoes was just being tried out for the first time.

Piece-by-piece the shoes took form and went forward to completion until, on the first floor, they were seen going into big paper board cartons, which now take the place of the heavy wooden boxes on all small orders, thereby saving the customer express and freight charges.

In the engine room, the big dynamos whirred away supplying the big plant with man-saving power.

Particularly interesting were the style rooms where the latest guesses as to what people will want next season were being worked out. It was interesting to note the boom in fancy shoes that has come since the short skirts came into vogue. Madame, who formerly got along with cheap, out-of-repair footwear, now demands the best, the books of the style-maker show.

To leave the story of the world’s biggest women’s shoe factory without mention of one of its greatest features would be wrong - the feature of cooperation between the company and its employees.

"When we built this factory," said Mr. Ratcliffe, President of the company, "we had in mind ideal conditions under which labor could be made more pleasant and effective, and as we planned, so we built."

There is a library, part of the Recreation Department, where employees are given unrestricted use of some 2,000 books. There are rest rooms for those who are ill, with a skilled physician and nurses in attendance. There is a dance hall with a piano and mechanical piano player, and this hall is open two nights a week besides all through the working day, to be used by girls who have a few minutes of leisure on their hands. There is a billiard room for the men with several bowling alleys attached, and a barbershop. There is a lunchroom which sometimes feeds 1,000 at a meal, and there are dining rooms for private parties and for the Officers of the company besides. The best of wholesome food is sold at cost prices.

"Summing up all you have seen and heard, gentlemen," said Vice President Maxwell, "you may understand why it is that we distribute eight million dollars’ worth of shoes entirely through retail trade.

"The merchandise produced under the conditions which you have seen cannot help but be good as it is possible to make it at the prices asked. The personnel of the firm as well as the whole body of employees enter into their manufacture, because they are all interested and happy in their work."

The Jamaica Plain Historical Society is extremely grateful to Peter O’Brien for his assistance in transcribing this article.

The Shoe Factory’s Demise
Jamaica Plain’s Most Unforgettable Fire
By Walter H. Marx

"Instantly the raging fire rolls to the rooftop with its wind; the flames overcome all; the blazing tide roars heavenward." Vergil, Aeneid 11. 758.9

To a modern observer the corner of Bickford and Centre Streets opposite the Bromley-Heath Housing Development is a vast overgrown wasteland covered with countless fragments of red brick in all sizes. The side on Centre Street is in the process of becoming JP Plaza. Nearby a chimneystack stands atop a chamber once connected to something else. That something was the five-storied brick and white stone-trimmed Thomas G. Plant Shoe Factory, Jamaica Plain’s largest manufactory.



Then running along Bickford Street to its former corner at Minden, to the heart of "Little Germany," the plant covered a good third of the city block of Centre, Walden, Minden, and Bickford Streets with the open area given over to a picnic area for employees and some cooling apparatus.

Built late in the 19th century for Thomas Gustave Plant, a Maine lad and inventor in the shoe industry, the factory at its height employed 4,000 workers from the surrounding German-Irish neighborhood. Quality and efficiency were trademarks of the factory. Workers wore color-coded uniforms. Ramps and elevators enabled boys wearing roller skates to get quickly throughout the complex. Plant paid a higher wage than the going rate and provided a library, gymnasium, and swimming pool.

Plant’s concern for his workers in an age of vast labor exploitation was no mere chance. Born in Bath in 1859, he left his home state and school at the age of 13 to support himself making shoes in Boston. He had known the bottom of the ladder, but with his perceptive and inventive mind he devised and patented items for making shoes. He was finally able to buy a business and to expand in the suburban Boston area with headquarters in JP. When a strike hit before World War I, Plant sold out to United Shoe Co., which ran it into the 1950’s.

The factory is certainly the reason that our area grew to be known as "Shoemaker Plain" to prior generations - yet another corruption of the name of the Massachusetts Indian Sachem who gave his name to our area. When the shoemaking ceased in the 1950’s, the vast enterprise was broken up into quarters of small businesses, art studios, and apartments. But on the rainy Sunday night of February 1, 1976, persons unknown decided that all this should end.

Managing to turn off the sprinkler system and start fires at various points nearly simultaneously, the arsonist(s) provided an historic fire. For the first time in the city’s history all but one of Boston’s engine companies were at a single fire with additional apparatus called in from surrounding communities, while 23 Metropolitan Boston municipalities manned Boston’s firehouses. The first alarm was sounded at 9:28 p.m. By the time the first engines arrived, all the plant, with its flammable wood interior was aflame.

The burning of the city of Troy so vividly portrayed in Homer’s Iliad and in Book II of Vergil’s Aeneid, could not have been more graphic. Of the fires this chronicler has ever seen this was by far the tops. By chance he had looked out of a window several blocks west of Plant’s to view a sky pulsating with an orange-and-red glow. A quick walk in its direction confirmed the initial guess that it was Plant’s. All was afire, and noise was added as the 80-foot brick walls constantly crashed down into the street.

Pictures taken on the scene could hardly do justice to the immense force of the fire in one area, which under other weather conditions could have been a disaster. Miraculously, there were no serious injuries, the fire being confined to the factory, but all personal possessions were lost in the raging conflagration. Throughout the wet night of February 1 scores of firemen fought a firestorm that waged total war with its place of origin. By dawn it was finally out; little was left for the wrecking crane. Plant’s looked like a remnant of the Great Boston Fire of 1872.

Many former employees journeyed back to the place where they had once worked to pay for school, help start a family, or support their siblings. The fire went to five alarms with $1,000,000 damage. Fire Commissioner George Paul echoed most spectators: "I’ve never seen such a volume of fire in one building. Never have I seen bright orange flames (the hottest type) burn for so long a time. Tongues of flame up to 200 feet high shot up many times during the night."


Sources: Jamaica Plain Citizen Feb. 4, 1976; Boston Fire Department records; Boston Globe February 2 and 4, 1976. Reprinted with permission from the August 9, 1991 Jamaica Plain Gazette. Copyright © Gazette Publications, Inc.

This article originally appeared in the Boston Daily Globe on June 23, 1918

When the Thomas G. Plant Company, the shoe manufacturing concern in Jamaica Plain, announced a few months ago that it was prepared to employ women who had small children and would give the little ones just as good —-even better—-care than they would receive at home while the mother was at work, some folks were skeptical.  The idea of a shoe manufacturing company starting a nursery and kindergarten for the children of its employees was a new one.

But the plan has worked, — probably better than even the most optimistic official of the company had hoped.  The three-story house adjoining the factory on Bickford St., opposite the Lucretia Crocker school, already is threatened with being outgrown, and the company is prepared to throw open to the kiddies and their caretakers the roomy house next door.

Some time ago a small temporary nursery was established in the factory building itself, to provide for the children of employees.  But with the war, the scarcity of male labor and the increasing number of women entering the field; the need for larger quarters became pressing.

In the new home every accommodation is made for the care and training of children from 3 months to five years of age.  On the third floor are airy sleeping rooms where the babies slumber peacefully in tiny white cribs.  Downstairs is the big kindergarten room for the older children, where educational play is the program.  On the ground level are the dining and reception rooms and the big kitchen where dainty, nourishing food is prepared.

And then the yard!  Out there, in the sunshine, is the big sandbox, where the youthful architects were hard at work.  And around this busy space is the big play space for the little mothers with their dolls and the brave soldier boys in paper caps.  

Manager Charles M. Lawrence of the company has a personal interest in the welfare of these little ones, and frequently drops in to call on them.  Dr. Lewis, the company’s staff physician, not only visits the kindergarten regularly twice a day, but is always within instant call.

Miss Euphemia Christie, formerly a kindergarten teacher in the Boston Public schools and the Perkins Institution for the Blind, is constantly with her little charges.  Miss Mary O’Leary is in charge of the nursery.

Many of the mothers of these bright children are the wives of men now fighting in France.  Others are widowed.  

The mothers come to the house just before 8 o’clock each morning and leave their children.  Following supervised play in the morning, the larger children have lunch at 11:30.  The smaller tots and the babies always have plenty of milk.  Then in the afternoon comes the interesting and instructive play in the kindergarten.  

The children seem to be delighted with their life.  The mothers like it too and new children are constantly being received.  Today, of the Plant Company’s 5000 employees, 2500 are women, and the number is growing rapidly.

This work for the children is only one of the services which the Thomas G. Plant Company gives to its employees.  The factory features include separate rest and recreation rooms for men and women, equipped with pianos and games; reading rooms, with a free lending library of 3000 volumes; a restaurant and dining rooms, with service at less than cost; a hall for club dances and parties; women vocational experts to assist women workers; a hospital supervised by Dr. Lewis, the staff physician, who is in the factory during working hours, and who is assisted by Miss Armstrong, a professional visiting nurse; a private park of several acres, adjoining the factory, with a greenhouse growing flowers for employees, sold at cost; a roof promenade for the noon hour; separate locker for every worker; a refrigerating plant providing chilled drinking water throughout the establishment; a heating and ventilating system that changes the air completely every three minutes; bright, clean factory interior; bowling alleys, billiard and pool rooms; a barber shop and facilities for getting cigars, soft drinks and candy.

A corps of investigators is constantly employed to look up absentees – especially among the younger people, whose parents in many instances do not know when the youngsters stay away from their work.  For the boys and girls a private continuation school is maintained.

By Pete Stidman
Jamaica Plain Gazette
   
HYDE-SQUARE “If ever there was an essence of a bar owner,” said Carl Goldman, a retired schoolteacher and devoted Triple D’s patron, “an essence of a solid neighborhood bartender, a publican, it’s that man right there.” He pointed to Joe Devlin, who poured a draft behind the bar. “There’s a man who knows how to pour a Guinness. Look at how he does it,” said Goldman.

Devlin has poured drafts for his customers at the corner of S. Huntington Avenue and Moraine Street for 27 years. Dick Watson, the other bartender on duty, has worked with him since the beginning. The rest of the staff has an average tenure of about 15 years.  

But at 73, Devlin is ready to retire. “If I was in my 50’s I wouldn’t go anywhere,” said Devlin. “I’m at the end of the road here. I can see what’s coming.”  He plans to head for Florida with his wife and soak up some sun among a group of lifelong friends who have also set up shop there.  

The sale of the bar to Lyndon Fuller and Relena Erskine has yet to be completed as the JP couple scrambles to raise funds for the $1.4 Million asking price plus enough to renovate, but Devlin said he will sell to someone else if the deal falls through. Rumors abound that if the couple does buy, the transformation of the bar will not be as dramatic as they had previously proposed. Instead of a completely new interior, they may just be fixing it up along the lines of what already exists.

“It’s been since June,” said Devlin. “I’m just on that edge of wanting to be done with it. I get that check in my hand, and I’m out of here.” There’s no doubt the man has earned the pay-out for what he has done for people in the neighborhood, supporting several baseball, softball, football, and basketball teams, paying for the funerals of those who could not afford it, serving free Thanksgiving dinner every year and donating the money from St. Patrick’s day dinners to the Jimmy Fund. He also deserves it for how hard he has worked to support his own family over the years.

Devlin was the eldest of five brothers and two sisters growing up on Chestnut Avenue in Jamaica Plain. After his father was laid off from his job in the Charlestown shipyards, Devlin dropped out of 9th grade and went to work in a lumberyard to help support the family.  “I wasn’t a grade-getter in school, so I went to work,” he said.

After fighting in the Korean War in the early 50’s, he came back to Boston and landed a job as a prison guard in Walpole. As a trainee at Camp Edwards he had improved boxing skills he had worked on as a kid. In Boston again, he ran to work in the mornings to get his calisthenics in and trained the evenings.  

“Between professional fighting and prison work, I really learned how to deal with people,” said Devlin.  “If you don’t like me, I punch you out,” he joked. But most of his patrons place him closer to a saint than a lover of violence.  His former professional life came in handy at the bar only once, he said, and, “Once we got outside it was over pretty quick. I can usually sense stuff and make sure it’s over before it starts.”

Nevertheless, if it weren’t for Devlin’s controlled violent streak the bar might never have fallen into his hands. Devlin’s record was 12 wins, no losses with eight knock outs in 1958 when he matched up with Welterweight Armand Savoie in front of 6,000 people at the old Mechanic’s Hall formerly on Huntington Avenue in Boston. Savoie was a three-time Canadian champ who had taken a shot at the world lightweight title in ‘53.  The fight was brutal. Devlin knocked Savoie down in the first round, but the more experienced fighter stood back up and eventually knocked down Devlin in the fifth. The two hung on for 10 rounds, and Devlin won by decision.

Devlin’s nose was broken in two places, convincing him to stay out of the ring for a while, but he had received $1,000 for his efforts.  Later that month, a co-worker at the prison invited him over to his Marshfield home to see his flock of racing pigeons.  While his friend demonstrated the speed with which his birds could carry their little messages abroad, his wife Helen snuck off with the woman of the house to view a home for sale down the street.

“When she got back her eyes were as big as dinner plates, and I knew I was in for it,” said Devlin. He put $500 down on a 1.7 acre property with a house big enough for his six kids. He got a second job as a bartender to afford his $78 mortgage and food for his growing army of young ones, eventually totaling nine.

That house increased in value, and in 1977 Devlin got a new mortgage and bought Buddy Hanrahan’s bar in JP with his brother Eddie, who has since passed away, and co-worker Tom DeCourcey who invested without taking an active role in the business.

The current décor came into being in the early 80’s. Originally, the layout was smaller, stretching only from the north side of the present rectangular bar to the far wall. That part of the building has been a drinking establishment for around 70 years. It carried a series of monikers still floating on old school JP memories: Buddy Hanrahan’s, The Moran Café and the South Huntington Tavern. Before it was a bar, during the prohibition era, it was a small market.

According to the crew who still works the taps, Triple D’s was the place to be in the 80s, and three bartenders could hardly keep up with the thirst of the crowds on a weekend night.  These days, during the week there are only enough people to fill up the bar stools and occupy a few random tables. One bartender says the bar is “coming out of a quiet period.” At Saturday night Gary-oke one can see why he implies that the bar is on an upswing.

On a recent Saturday evening a Johnny Cash song was butchered. Later on, Dolly Parton’s 9-to-5 got the whole crowd singing. Before the night was over, tables and bar-tops were once again dance floors.

It’s Gary-oke, and it’s one way this old school bar has set foot into the hearts of JP’s more recently arrived residents. “There’s a difference between Karaoke and Gary-oke,” said Gary Gifford, the night’s KJ. “I push the envelope in my sense of lewd behavior.”

Gifford, who isn’t what you’d call a slim or athletic individual, gave two lap dances (fully clothed) to two extremely red-faced college-age women during the night while singing happy birthday Marilyn Monroe/JFK style. He was once noted as the rudest KJ in Boston by a short-lived local magazine, which brought in more fans than ever before.

Gifford originally came on to fill-in two years ago while the bar searched for a more permanent KJ. “When I first started there were 12 people in the bar and three singers,” said Gifford. During that two weeks JP’s queer women had begun to discover the place, and there was friction between the old Triple D’s crowd and the new bunch.  

“They called and asked me if I would stay and I said: Are you frigging kidding me? That place is going to burst into flames!” said Gifford. “Two weeks later they started accepting each other and the show started taking hold. Now you can’t see a more diverse crowd at any other karaoke night.”

Media attention focused on the Triple D’s sale has brought in even more people from across the city in the past few weeks. Even though other bar owners have been talking to Gifford, he hasn’t truly considered moving the show.  

“I don’t want to go away with this,” said Gifford. “I don’t know if we could really pack it up and take it anywhere else, there’s something about this place.”

Karaoke regular Kate Peppard sits at the barstool closest to the front door and catches up with fellow crooners. Occasionally she asks the bartender a question about another regular or the wellbeing of one of the Devlin family, but he’s too busy for small talk.

“It’s like the old days,” he said as he ran around pouring drinks and whipping off bottle caps, “I’ll lose ten pounds tonight.” Peppard has come in enough to know the whole crowd, old and new.  

“I’m not into going to shows or dance bars,” she said, “I just want to sit and talk to people.” She met her husband at the bar two years ago and they both occupy stools at least once a week.

“We’re so marketed to in this age group that we can tell the real thing when we see it,” she said. “You know how they have kit Irish bars? In a few years they’ll have kit bars like this, but it won’t be the same.” She and her husband have been looking around at other spots to prepare for the disappearance of Triple D’s.
 
“We like the Stag,” she said. “The people are nice there and there are pool tables.”Paul Devlin, Joe’s son who works weekend nights, thinks he understands why some people have become so loyal to Triple D’s. “People want to have something that feels like it’s theirs,” he said, “when everything else doesn’t feel like that.”

“It was a great run,” said his dad Joe Devlin. “Everything clicked. All my kids went through college. We had a time-share in Orlando for them to visit when they wanted to.  I thank god for this happening to me.”

Reprinted with permission from the October 21, 2005 Jamaica Plain Gazette. Copyright © Gazette Publications, Inc. 

By Mark Bulger

Ward’s Pond sits on the border of Jamaica Plain and Brookline, just north of Jamaica Pond and within Olmsted Park, one of the long links in Boston’s Emerald Necklace of parks. None of the surviving local histories or memoirs of Jamaica Plain we rely on mentions Ward’s Pond or its namesake. Perhaps the fame of Jamaica Pond overshadowed its much smaller neighbor, but as is so often the case in local history, once we start digging we unearth fascinating new stories.

Ward’s Pond sits near the head of the Muddy River, so called, although the river was never more than a stream. It is now within a park along the Brookline Boston border, but for over 250 years was in private hands. The first map to show the name Ward’s Pond was published in 1859. The same map shows no Wards living near the pond, but two Wards are shown along Muddy River to the north. J.O. Ward is shown just south of today’s Riverway on the Brookline side, and H.S. Ward is to the east at the corner of what we now call Huntington and South Huntington avenues. An 1852 map shows a J. Ward living along Muddy River in the same area as well. With these initials to go by, we can begin to connect this Ward family to the pond that memorializes their name.

Map published by Walling in1859

Map published by Sidney Smith in1852
John Ward the first was born in 1626 in London and emigrated to this country. His son and grandson, Edward and Samuel the first, were born in Newton. John the second, son of Samuel, was born in 1748 in Natick, and in 1771 married Roxbury girl Martha Shed. In 1788, John – now a blacksmith – bought 44 acres of land along Muddy river from his brother-in-law James Shed. The deed gives us little to locate the precise boundaries of the lot, but it was bounded by the town line, and by land of Peleg Heath, which puts it somewhere between Muddy River and the Heath street/South Huntington avenue area. The deed also specifies that the sale is exclusive of the old mill, which may have been the old colonial grist mill that still, at that time, drew off Jamaica Pond water near Ward’s Pond to drive its wheel. 

Through 1805, John Ward would continue to buy land in the area from the Shed family. There are no mentions of a pond, but property boundaries on the Road to Worcester and the Road from Watertown tell us that he was buying land on the road where today’s Huntington avenue and Brookline’s Boylston street meet – we would also call it Route 9. This was the very edge of Roxbury, and directly adjacent to the old Brookline settlement of Punch Bowl, now known as Brookline Village. We can imagine that land near the village of Punch Bowl and along the busy road from Boston to the west would have made a good location for a blacksmith shop. In 1804 and 1805, John again enters the records, taking payment from the Boston Aqueduct Corporation for allowing them to lay pipe over his land. This would be the route that Jamaica Pond water would follow on its way to satisfy a thirsty Boston.

Samuel WardJohn and Martha Ward had eight children, Of those, only two daughters and one son are recorded as having survived to adulthood. Samuel, who would inherit the property, was born in September of 1772. Unlike his father, Samuel became a farmer. Samuel appears in an 1818 newspaper article reporting on a Brighton cattle show. In a plowing match on a fine October day, a yoke of oxen owned by Samuel Ward of Roxbury was awarded second prize. The story notes that farmer Ward’s team pulled the famous plow made by Jeffe Warren of Dedham. Roxbury farmers were leaders in the agricultural improvement movement of the time, so it should be no surprise that a Roxbury man was using the latest in plow technology. We also find Samuel Ward’s farming prowess cited in a history of Boston published in 1881. It states there that “The farm of Samuel Ward now belonging to the Brookline Land Company, was famous fifty years ago for its Roxbury Russet apples, often producing a thousand barrels a year; and also for cherries, of which he sent to market forty to fifty bushels daily in the season, and occasionally he dispatched a four-ox team to Providence with seventy-five bushels.”

Samuel Ward had married Joanna Bird in 1799. Joanna bore 14(!) children, few of whom are recorded to have survived to adulthood. Already mentioned are Henry Shed (H.S.) Ward and James Otis (J.O.) Ward, whose initialed names appear on the 1859 map discussed above. Henry actually died in New Hampshire at 37 in 1844. His share of the old estate would pass to his brother James, who survived him by 11 years.

James Otis WardThe life of James O. Ward takes us away from Jamaica Plain, but is worth remembering. As told by Dean S. Bird, a descendent on both the Ward and Bird side of the family, James Ward traveled to New York to sell the produce of his father’s farm. Remaining in New York, he became a successful businessman. After first running his own chandlery business, supplying ship owners and seaman with all their various needs, he then purchased his own ships and became a trader between New York and the West Indies. His son, James Edward Ward, founded the Ward Line, one of the largest  steamship lines of its era.

When James O. Ward died in February of 1855, flags in New York harbor flew at half mast.  In March of 1860, the executor of his estate sold 80 acres of land along Muddy River for $83,000 to the Brookline Land Company. The property plan shown here was drawn in 1845, and shows the Ward Farm at the time. Most of the estate at that time was in Brookline, but the name Ward’s Pond is recorded for the first time, and the pond itself sits inside the town of Roxbury. To the north, the farm extends to today’s  Riverway at Brookline Village.

So now we know: the Wards lived on the old Roxbury/Brookline border, more Roxbury than Jamaica Plain residents. They did once own the land surrounding the eponymous pond, and left their name to one of Jamaica Plain’s small jewels on Boston’s Emerald Necklace.

Special thanks go out to Dean S. Bird for his many contributions to this article: family genealogy, stories, and portraits. The portrait of Samuel Ward shown here has been passed down through the Ward and Bird families, and is owned today by Dean.


Sources:

Massachusetts Spy, October 28, 1818. Brighton Cattle Show article.
 
The Memorial History of Boston; including Suffolk County, Massachusetts 1630-1880. Vol. 4. Samuel Ward farming citation.

Suffolk County Registry of Deeds:

162:16 – 1/8/1788. James Shed, 44 acres to John Ward.

Norfolk County Registry of Deeds:

22:61 – 7/27/1804; 22:196 – 1/7/1805. John Ward, rights to lay pipe to Boston Aqueduct Corporation.

285:1 – 3/1/1860.  Estate of James O. Ward, 80 acres to John Wetherbee Jr., broker, for Brookline Land Company. 

Written by and provided courtesty of Richard Heath.

The Woodbourne section of Jamaica Plain is bounded by Walk Hill Street, Wachusett Street, Forest Hills Cemetery Crematory and Catherine Street. Historically, it is divided into four sections: the Andrew J. Peters/Richard Olney land between Walk Hill Street and Eldridge Road, which was about 16 acres; the 30-acre Minot estate which at its greatest extent ran from the corner of Southbourne Road and Hyde Park Avenue to St. Michael’s Cemetery, and from Walk Hill Street to Catherine Street and Florian Street; the Boston North End Mission, a 4.6-acre tract along Southbourne Road and bisected by Goodway Road; and a portion of the Organ and Meyer land, roughly 5 acres on both sides of Catherine Street.

Largely subdivided in three phases between 1890 and 1933, Woodbourne was the last of the philanthropic housing experiments which began after the Civil War. Woodbourne also represents the transition in housing ownership for the middle classes — that is housing listed at $3000 to $5,000 — which characterized the first quarter of the 20^th century. This transition was from the two- or three-family house or the apartment building which dominated middle-class housing construction in the last quarter of the 19^th century to the single-family house on its own lot of land. Within the borders of Woodbourne are the housing styles which would become so familiar in the post-war years of suburban America. More than anything else, Woodbourne was a deliberate attempt to attract the middle-class family into owning its own home in the city.

II.

One of the most important aspects of the social history of the 20^th century is how the middle classes lived, worked, played and shaped the way America is governed. The 19^th century is a study of the wealthy: who their ancestors were, how they got their wealth, how they lived, and of their business and philanthropic circles, because the wealthy shaped the contours of American social and civic life in the first century of the American republic. The history of Woodbourne begins as two estates of the wealthy. Indeed, the very name of the district is taken from the estate of one of the most illustrious families in Boston.

On November 18, 1845, William Minot bought a large parcel of land for $2,800 “beginning at a cedar tree on the westerly side of Bourne Street … adjacent to the land of Ebenezer Weld” (Norfolk County Registry of Deeds, Book 160, p. 109). Minot and his two sons William Jr. and George would add to this property over the next twenty years. Most of the land was originally owned by Weld. Ebenezer Weld (July 4, 1775-1859) was a prosperous Roxbury farmer and a direct descendent of Captain Joseph Weld, one of the founders of Roxbury, of which Jamaica Plain was an integral part. William Minot was a direct descendent of George Minot who emigrated with the first English settlers to Dorchester on May 30, 1630. These two first families were joined by marriage in 1798, when Hannah Minot was wed to William Gordon Weld.

William Minot bought the property for a summer home and he was soon joined by his children, William Jr., George, Mary and Julia. All four Minot children lived on the estate all year, while their father spent only the summer there. For over forty years the land was the happy home of the extended Minot family.

William Minot was the seventh generation from George Minot, the founder, born on November 20, 1592 in Saffron Waldon, Essex, England. He left Saffron Waldon with his family on March 20, 1630 and dropped anchor at the foot of Savin Hill, on Dorchester Bay, on May 30. He became a freeman (that is, a member of the church) on April 1, 1634 and in 1636 was a signer of the Church Covenant, thereby establishing Puritanism in Dorchester. He served as a ruling elder of the town until his death on December 24, 1671. He was buried at Dorchester North Burial Ground (at Upham’s Corner) and for long years after was remembered by the good people of Dorchester as “Shining Minot.”

As a founder of the town, George Minot received a land grant which he extended to cover both sides of the Neponset Estuary including most of present day Squantum (then part of Dorchester). He built a wooden house about 1640 on what is today Chickataubut Street above the Neponset River. This house was passed down to the eldest son of each generation, and William Minot of Woodbourne owned it at his death in 1873. The house burned in November 1874, but the land remained in the family until the early years of this century.

Stephen Minot (1711-1787) was a leading merchant of Boston and is the first recorded Minot to establish what would become a significant presence in the business, financial and legal circles of Boston for the next two centuries. Stephen was born a British subject and died an American citizen in a house on Devonshire Street at the corner of Spring Lane (where the Minot Building is today, at 111 Devonshire Street). Stephen was also a founder of King’s Chapel, the seat of Anglicanism in Boston, the dreaded Church Of England, the power from which George Minot had fled to the New World. At the time of his death, he was a member of Old South Meeting House at the corner of Milk Street not far from his home.

The Minots of Woodbourne are descended from Stephen’s youngest son George Richards Minot. Scholar, historian, lawyer and judge, George Richards Minot moved among the highest political circles of his day in Massachusetts during and after the Revolutionary War. (It was his niece, Hannah, daughter of his oldest brother Jonas Clark, who married William Gordon Weld.) Born in the house on Spring Lane in 1758, a British subject like his father, he studied law and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1782. Shortly thereafter, he established a law office at 39 Court Street (then called Prison Row because the Court House — opposite Minot’s law office — dominated the street). He hung his sign on an apple tree. Five generations of Minots had their law office at that address (Staples Office Supply occupies the site today).

He established himself as a public speaker in 1777 when he gave a funeral oration for his law tutor John Wadsworth. G. R. Minot’s most famous address was “An Eulogy on George Washington Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston,” on January 9, 1800. On March 5, 1782, as Orator of Boston, he gave a speech on the Boston Massacre.

In 1780, George Richards Minot was appointed the first clerk of the newly-established House of Representatives shortly after the adoption of the Massachusetts Constitution. Eight years later, he served as Secretary of the convention presided over by John Hancock, which ratified the Federal Constitution. (The vote was a close one: 187 in favor, 168 opposed.) He moved on to become Judge of Probate and Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas before being appointed Judge of the Municipal Court of Boston in 1800.

George R. Minot was also one of the earliest historians of Massachusetts. In 1788, he published an account of Shay’s Rebellion, A History of the Insurrections in Massachusetts in the Year 1786. On January 24, 1791, he was one of the 10 incorporators who met (allegedly in his law office) to establish the venerable Massachusetts Historical Society.

His magnum opus is the elegantly-written two-volume Continuation of the History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from the year 1748 to 1765. The title referred to Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from the first settlement thereof in 1628 until the year 1750 (published in 1767). (Hutchinson, a contemporary of Stephen Minot, was the last American-born Royal Governor of Massachusetts Bay.) Volume I of Minot’s History was dedicated to President John Adams on January 1, 1798. It was Minot’s intention to write a history of the Commonwealth through the beginning of the War of Independence in 1775, but Volume II was published posthumously in its incomplete condition in June of 1803. George Richards Minot died of tuberculosis at the age of 44 on January 3, 1802.

At his death, his close friend John Quincy Adams said that George Richards Minot’s “deportment bore the marks of graceful simplicity, dignified modesty and unassuming urbanity… [and] his voice was the echo of a warm and generous heart.” He opened Volume I of his Continuation of the History of Massachusetts with words in which a further glimpse of the character of the man might be seen: “A sense of the obligation encumbered on everyone, to devote his leisure time and means on information to some object of general utility has excited this attempt to continue the history of Massachusetts Bay.”

The man who bought the tract on Bourne Street was the only son of George Richards Minot. William Minot was born in the house on Spring Lane on September 17, 1783. William was of that generation which saw the change from residential to business and commerce in those ancient streets around today’s financial district. The property was leased to Safford and Law Blacksmiths by 1830. After his marriage in 1809, he lived on Charles Street. Then in 1817, he bought land on Beacon Street opposite the Boston Common for $3000 on which he built a fashionable townhouse. In 1824, it was damaged by a fire which gutted six adjacent buildings. Minot’s was the least damaged and he quickly rebuilt. It is a building of elegant detail of brick with a distinctive white wood porch capped with wrought iron in the High Regency style of 18^th-century London. It has been suggested that the architect was Peter Banner, who designed Park Street Church in 1809. One reason for this suggestion is that both buildings are distinguished by tall thin wooden columns supporting an entablature across the face of, and in contrast with, the red-brick facade. Unlike his two sons, William Minot never lived year-round at Woodbourne, only the summer months. His home was at 61 Beacon Street for 60 years, and he died there on June 2, 1873 at the age of 90. He died with an estate worth $364,000. By contrast, his grandfather Stephen died bankrupt.

After graduating from Harvard, he was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1805. He married in 1809 and he and his wife had five children, all born at the Charles Street house. Four would live at Woodbourne: George Richards Minot II (October 29, 1813 to February 18, 1883); William Minot Jr. (April 7, 1817 to February 26, 1894); Julia Minot (January 23, 1823 to March 22, 1875 ); and Mary Minot (November 1, 1811 to February 18, 1882). The fifth child, Francis Minot, was born in 1821. He graduated from Harvard Medical School (then on Mason Street near the Common) in 1844 and set up his own practice at 144 Charles Street. He joined the staff of Massachusetts General Hospital as a surgeon in 1859 and practiced there until his death at his home in Milton in 1899. He had a townhouse at 65 Marlborough Street.

William Minot managed trusts and wills for over 60 years from his office at 39 Court Street. In 1804, he took up the management of the fund established by Benjamin Franklin. Minot’s ability as a portfolio manager is demonstrated by the fact that the Franklin Fund earnings grew from $4000 in 1804 to $125,000 in 1868. (On November 10, 1885, The Board of Boston Park Commissioners voted to name the new park just getting under construction in West Roxbury, “Franklin Park.” The City at the time anticipated that the income from the Fund at its centennial in 1891 — when the will specified it could first be used — would be devoted to pay off the debt incurred for the purchase of the park lands. In the end, neither the Parks Department nor Franklin Park ever received any money from the Fund in 1891 nor when the Fund was closed out in 1991.)

In 1846 William Minot was listed in the self-described directory of “Boston aristocracy,” Our First Men of Wealth, Fashion and Gentility, as being worth $100,000. (His kinsman, William F. Weld, commission merchant at Central Wharf, was listed as being worth $100,000.) When William Minot bought the land for his summer house in 1845, Bourne Street had been a public way for at least 25 years. It connected Walk Hill Street — a very old 17^th-century public road — with Canterbury Street and Canterbury Village. Walk Hill Street began at the Toll Gate. The neighborhood took the name from the privately-owned Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike which was incorporated in 1803 and connected Boston to Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Called the Dedham Turnpike in Roxbury, the toll road went from Dudley Square to Dedham Courthouse along present-day Washington Street. The toll gate where carts and wagons were weighed and the fee charged according to that weight was at the intersection of South and Washington Streets. It was the first gate outside of Dudley Square. On March 31, 1824, the Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike Corporation took out a mortgage for land in Dedham and 16 acres in Roxbury (Norfolk: Book 72, p. 37). The more melodic “Forest Hills” was applied to the district after Forest Hills Cemetery opened in 1848. It was the opening of the Boston & Providence Railroad on June 11, 1834 with a station at Toll Gate which opened up the farmland of western Roxbury for country houses. The railroad also put the toll road out of business. The turnpike became a public way in June, 1857. It was renamed Washington Street from Dudley Street to the Dedham line on June 16, 1874.

In a letter dated December 23, 1844, William Minot Jr. wrote: “We went out to Jamaica Pond and had a royal skate. The whole pond was smooth as looking glass. [A] beautiful sunset reflected from the ice. Skated 2 to 3 hours. One more argument in favor of Jamaica Plain as our future home.”

William Minot and his son George built their houses in 1846; William had his built in 1847. The homes were no doubt designed and built by housewrights. The same man who had an elegant townhouse built for him would more than likely want the same craftsmanship for a country retreat; in 1873, the country house and land was appraised at $10,000. One imagines the houses as simple but well built by men skilled in use of wood, duplicating the proportions of a farm house. Perhaps they consulted one of the house pattern books of the day, such as J. C. Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (1833) or maybe even Andrew Jackson Downing’s new book on the landscaping of country houses (1841). The houses probably had steep gables and dormer windows, stone chimneys, a kitchen wing at the back leading out to vegetable gardens and, of course, a verandah facing southwest and the Blue Hills. The houses were connected by a common avenue, which turned off Bourne Street where the intersection of Northbourne Street is today, and were set on a ridge which is present-day Bournedale Road. William’s house was approximately where number 41 Bournedale is, George’s house about on the site of number 27, and number 9 Bournedale was the home of the two sisters. Each house had a view of the Blue Hills to the south with a meadow sweeping down to Stony Brook at the edge of the property.

On June 5, 1855, William Minot Jr. sold 4 ½ acres of land on the east side of Bourne Street to Charles Eliot Guild for a summer house. This was a triangular-shaped parcel originally part of Ebenezer Weld’s farm. Guild paid $4,800 for the parcel which — judging by its price — may have had a building on it (Norfolk: Book 236, p. 308). Guild did have a house on the lot. It was the home for some years of Massachusetts Governor Curtis Guild. The drive to the house was located at the corner of Bourne and Northbourne and the house itself was situated approximately on the site of number 43 Eastland. The house stood until about 1920. After Charles Guild died, the land was bought back by Minot on July 11, 1889 (Suffolk: Book 1887, p. 529) and rented out.

In a privately-printed collection of letters of William Minot Jr. published in October, 1895, his son William III described Woodbourne (where he was born) as “the scene of a long, happy uneventful period in [his father’s] life.” There were three households with children, servants and many guests, 50 to 60 people at a time, all coming together in “perfect peace. Serenity, mutual love and confidence reigned at Woodbourne.” The landscape was dominated by a large grove of pines on the north side of the house. The southern and western exposures faced open land which William Minot Jr. landscaped himself with flower gardens, trees and shrubs: “Father’s natural love of nature and instinctive good taste made our place in its prime one of the earliest and most beautiful creations of landscape art in the neighborhood of Boston.”

In one of his first letters dated from Woodbourne, on June 20, 1850, William Minot Jr. described his estate: “Our roses are just out. Our honeysuckles too. The new mown hay, almost half a ton, lies spread on the garden lot. The pears are shaping themselves. Strawberries ripening. Raspberries well formed. The laurels are opening new leaves. All is green, growing, gracious.”

After he returned from a summer’s trip to Europe in 1858, where among other places he visited the ancestral seat at Saffron Waldon in Essex, England, William Jr. wrote, “England and Switzerland are full of beautiful scenery, but the avenue through our pine trees had a charm surpassing anything I saw in Europe.”

The name “Woodbourne” was chosen by Julia Minot, the invalid daughter of William Sr., from the home of Guy Mannering in the Waverly Novel of the same name published by Sir Walter Scott in January, 1829. The novel’s name was a good pun on the woods of Bourne Street, but the description which Scott wrote of the estate in the Cheviot Hills of Southern Scotland obviously reminded Julia Minot of her own home: “Woodbourne was a large comfortable mansion snugly situated beneath a hill covered with wood, which shrouded the house upon the north and east; the front looked upon a little lawn bordered by a grove of tall trees; beyond were some arable fields, extending down to the river, which was seen from the windows of the house. [Mannnering] resolved to place himself at the footing of a country gentlemen of easy fortune” (Guy Mannering, Vol. I, Chapter XIX, 1895 edition).

The Minot estate was substantially enlarged on July 16, 1850 when William Minot and his two sons William Jr. and George Richards paid $3,120 for a large parcel on the east side of Bourne Street from Walk Hill to present-day Catherine Street, approximately up to the line of today’s St. Michael’s Cemetery (Norfolk: Book 195, page 274). This was originally Ebenezer Weld’s land. In 1864, William Minot Jr., who lived all year at Woodbourne in his father’s house, acquired a parcel of land which included three houses on Bourne Street where number 114 and number 124 Bourne are today at the corner of Eastland Street (Norfolk: Book 322, p. 125). This would be the southeastern limit of the Minot property. The western extent was a parcel “on a lane from Bourne Street and Stony Brook” which George Richards Minot bought from Ebenezer Weld on May 1, 1856 (Norfolk: Book 245, p. 41). This large parcel is today covered by houses bounded by Wachusett and Florian Streets and Southbourne Road.

42 Bourne St. Built in 1933.

George Richards Minot, William Minot’s first-born son, built his summer home in 1846 on a lot 100 feet from his father’s. After attending the boarding school kept by his kinsman Stephen Minot Weld at Centre and South Street in Jamaica Plain, George became a merchant like his 18^th-century ancestor Stephen Minot. George entered the mercantile firm of Chandler and Howard on Commercial Wharf as an apprentice at the age of 16 in 1829. He served on East-Indian trading ships for about ten years before he opened his own Indian trading company, Minot and Hooper of Marblehead, in 1839. The ships he owned worked the ports of India, China and Boston until trading dropped off during the financial panic of 1857. Minot and Hooper then removed to Milk Street opposite Old South Church and became a selling agent for Southern cotton mills. The firm later moved to a building on Kingston Street where it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1872. Minot was in Europe at the time, but he quickly rebuilt the company which was taken over by his son George Richards III.

George Richards II married in 1841 and for a time lived on Pinckney Street opposite Louisbourg Square. His summers were spent at Woodbourne after his house was completed, but after 1849, he and his family lived there year round. George’s house had vegetable gardens and a barn for horses, cows and pigs. The horses and cows grazed in the fields below the house and drank from Stony Brook. His house had a “beautiful view of the Blue Hills,” as James Jackson Minot wrote in his invaluable genealogy of his family in 1936. George’s brother William — with whom he was close — described him as a caring man who “took care of the poor people who lived in Canterbury Village [and] saw that they had work and food.”

George suffered from angina and on December 4, 1883 he had a heart attack and died at Woodbourne. He was struck while supervising the construction of a townhouse at 245 Marlborough Street which the architectural firm of Cabot and Chandler had designed for him. His wife and children moved from Woodbourne to the Marlborough Street house in April, 1884.

His brother William wrote the obituary of George Richards Minot II in the Boston Advertiser of December 6, 1883: “[He was] the ideal of a Boston merchant… [a man of] commercial honor… unwearied in his efforts to make everybody about him happy.”

No one loved Woodbourne more than William Minot Jr. A seemingly introspective man, he found great comfort and happiness with his family about him in his gardens and fruit trees at Woodbourne. It was the one place where his father and brothers and sisters and their families and friends could be together. He was born on Charles Street in 1817 but was raised in his father’s house at 61 Beacon Street. As a boy he played in the brackish marshes of the tidal basin, where the Public Garden is today, and the Charles River. While shooting on the Charles, he shot off his thumb, and he wore a sheath over his hand all his life.

After graduating from Harvard in 1836, he entered the family law firm. On November 28, 1842, he married Katharine Maria Sedgwick (1820-1880). She was named for her aunt (1789-1867), who in her day was a well-read novelist and the contemporary of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant. After their marriage, they lived at 61 Beacon Street before removing to Woodbourne in 1847. William Jr. so loved the estate, that he named his first child Alice Woodbourne, who was born in the house on the ridge on July 10, 1847. Little Alice was a close favorite of her Great-Aunt Catharine and in 1851 — at the suggestion of her brother-law William — she wrote her autobiography in the form of a series of letters to “my dear little Alice.”

William Minot Jr. was an avid gardener and spent much of his time planting and improving the grounds of Woodbourne. In this he was much like his contemporary, the great American historian Francis Parkman, who lived at Chestnut Street, two blocks over from the Minot house on Beacon Street. Parkman summered from 1852 until his death in 1893 on an estate overlooking Jamaica Pond surrounded by trees, shrubs and flower beds which he propagated and planted himself. “With nature he was not only intimate,” wrote William Jr’s son William III in 1895, “but was one with her spirit.”

But the spirit of death visited Woodbourne. His father William Minot Sr. died in 1873 and in 1875 his sister Julia died in her house at Woodbourne. His other sister died in 1882. His wife Katharine died in 1880 and in 1883 both his brother George and his beloved little Alice died, leaving the houses and grounds of Woodbourne full of only ghosts. The loneliness became too much for him to bear, and so in the early part of 1884, William Minot Jr. moved into a townhouse at 22 Marlborough Street, one-half block from the Public Garden. Until his death in 1894 at the age of 77, he took up yachting, perhaps in memory of his seaman- and shipowner-brother George. Thereafter Woodbourne was never the permanent home of the Minot family. The estate reverted back to a summer home, and perhaps one or two houses were rented, until it was sold in 1911 and the houses pulled down.

The Minots of memory are not far from Woodbourne. Three years after William Minot purchased the first of the parcels that became his family’s estate, Forest Hills Cemetery was consecrated in June, 1848. On July 24, 1858, Minot bought a terraced lot at Forest Hills, from which could be seen the outline of his estate on Walk Hill Street. An underground tomb was constructed for the remains of William, his sons and daughters, their wives and children, all those who lived and loved at Woodbourne. On November 9, 1858, he sold the Minot family tomb #22 at the Old Granary Burial Ground for $100. Soon after, William had the remains of his father George, his grandfather Stephen and their wives removed to the tomb at Forest Hills. In all, 25 family members are buried there, the last of whom died in 1985. In keeping with the fashion of the rural cemetery, of which Forest Hills is a fine example, the names are carved on huge slate slabs set flush to the ground.

III.

The second estate belonged to Richard Olney on Walk Hill Street, which extended down to Hyde Park Avenue. A leading authority on railroad law, Olney served in the second administration of President Grover Cleveland, first as Attorney General from 1893 to 1895 and then from 1895 to 1897 as Secretary of State. In the phrase of his biographer, Gerald Eggert (1974), Olney was an outlander: neither Boston-born nor nurtured at Harvard as the writers of obituaries were careful to note (particularly the Boston Evening Transcript). Pugnacious and brusque, with a famous bad temper, Olney certainly cared nothing for that opinion as he amassed a fortune as a corporation lawyer and advisor to the wealthy.

Like his neighbor William Minot, Olney’s life straddled epochs in American history: Minot was born at the dawn of the American republic and lived through the test which demonstrated that the republic could survive fratricidal war intact. Olney was born in the Age of Jackson, the birth of nationalism, and lived to see America occupy the world stage in the Age of Woodrow Wilson. Also like Minot, Olney’s roots went deep into the founding of Massachusetts Bay, although even then as an outlander. His forefather Thomas arrived in Salem from England in 1635 and became allied with Roger Williams. Together, they were banished to Rhode Island in 1637 for refusing to adhere to the views of the Puritan oligarchy of Massachusetts Bay. The courageous Thomas Olney became one of the 13 proprietors of Rhode Island, a founder with Williams of Providence, and went on to establish the Baptist church in America.

In 1819, the Olney family removed to the mill town of Oxford, Massachusetts to join members of his mother’s side of the Olney family, the Sigourneys, descendants of French Huguenots. André Sijourné was driven out of France for political reasons and obtained a land grant of 2,500 acres in 1687 in what became known as Oxford, the center of Huguenot culture in the Commonwealth. “It was from his Huguenot blood,” wrote a colleague in 1919, “that Mr. Olney came to have a precision of thought and speech not altogether Anglo-Saxon.”

It was there in Oxford that Richard Olney was born on September 15, 1835. His father was a successful and wealthy cotton manufacturer. After attending Brown University in Providence, graduating in 1856, he took his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1858. He worked in the law office of Judge Benjamin F. Thomas in Boston from 1859 until the Judge’s death in 1878. Olney specialized in wills and trusts, again like his neighbor Minot. Indeed, all his life Olney’s office was at 23 Court Street, a few steps away from the Minot building at number 39 Court. On March 6, 1861, Olney married Agnes, the daughter of Judge Thomas.

Ever the outlander, Olney was a life-long states’ rights Democrat who believed that the South had a right to secede from the union peacefully. This is understandable since Olney’s family fortune depended on a free flow of plantation cotton to run their mill in Oxford. He backed up this belief by hiring a substitute to fight in the Civil War, which erupted soon after his marriage.

On April 18, 1864, Olney paid $5,300 for 10 acres of land with a house and stable on Walk Hill Street, abutting the land of William and George Minot (Norfolk: Book 322, p. 126). Olney was no doubt a friend of the Minots — he practiced law on Court Street near William Sr. and both shared in the work of managing trust funds for the wealthy. The move to Forest Hills was more than likely influenced by this professional and personal friendship. Olney took out a $4,500 mortgage with the cotton broker George Richards Minot, with whom his family no doubt did business. Five years later, on September 15, 1869, Olney joined in partnership with Andrew J. Peters, and paid $16,805 to the Roxbury Grammar School for 18.67 acres of land extending from Olney’s property across Hyde Park Avenue to the line of the Boston and Providence Railroad (Norfolk: Book 384, p. 194). Peters was a prosperous merchant and landowner who lived on an estate on South Street on the edge of Toll Gate. His land extended to the Turnpike. Most of that property today includes Asticou Road, some of Martinwood, and American Legion Post No. 76. His son Andrew J. Peters, born on the estate on April 3, 1872, served as Mayor of Boston from 1918 until 1921. He had the misfortune of presiding over the infamous Boston Police strike of 1919.

Between Peters and Olney, they owned the land that encompasses all of Patten, Rodman, Eldridge and Wachusett Streets from the Parkman School to number 235 Wachusett, and on both sides of Hyde Park Avenue from Walk Hill to Ashmore Street. This was a wise investment: the City had recently completed the extension of Hyde Park Avenue from Cummins Highway (then called Ashland Street) to Walk Hill.

The Roxbury Grammar School — or Roxbury Latin School — is one of the oldest schools in America, founded on August 31, 1645. Joseph Weld, Ebenezer’s ancestor, was one of seven governors of the school. Other Governors included Thomas Dudley, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Reverend John Eliot. One of the incomes to maintain the school was from the distribution by the Town of Roxbury of the “Great Lots,” land situated between Franklin Park and Beech Street. Roxbury Grammar School was given a portion of the Great Lots about 1650, the income of which went to support the school. For example, about 17 acres were leased out in 1670, and in January, 1687, 35 acres “of woodland lying at Walk Hill” was leased to farm for 500 years. Olney and Peters bought one of those parcels at the time when Roxbury Latin School was on Kearsarge Avenue above Dudley Square, and it needed funds for expansion.

Olney’s house still stands, although somewhat altered, at 56 Patten Street. It had one of the first tennis courts in Boston on which the neighboring families of Charles Guild, George R. Minot and William Minot would meet and play.

On January 10, 1873, the Town of West Roxbury (for Jamaica Plain had separated from Roxbury in 1851) took a portion of the Olney/Peters land for the widening and dredging of Stony Brook (Norfolk: Book 434, p. 311).

Richard Olney became wealthy and famous in his day as one of Boston’s leading authorities on railroad law when, at the age of 40, he reorganized and saved from financial failure the Eastern Railroad Company which served northern New England. Thereafter, he devoted his career to the regulation and consolidation of railroads, the lifeblood of the American economy. He joined the Board of Directors of the Boston & Maine Railroad in 1884 and served as its general counsel for 30 years. By 1893, Olney’s clients included the business and financial elite of Boston as well as some of the nation’s major railroads. When Grover Cleveland was assembling his cabinet for his second administration, he was anxious to include a New Englander. Olney’ s professional connections within Cleveland’s advisors recommended him and he was appointed Attorney General of the United States in 1893. In 1894, he negotiated the end of the strike by workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company which had crippled rail commerce in Chicago and the Mid West. Olney’s intervention resulted in a loss by the union. On the other hand, in that same year, he protested the discharging of all men employed by the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad unless they resigned from the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen. The order was lifted after Olney stepped in and the men returned to their jobs with their union cards. Also as Attorney General, he successfully argued the unconstitutionality of the 1894 Income Tax Law before the Supreme Court, a law he would see enacted under President Wilson.

By then, Richard Olney was far away from Walk Hill Street. On February 8, 1882, he sold both his house and property and his portion of the adjoining parcel to his business partner Andrew J. Peters for $27,100. He moved his family first to 175 Marlborough Street and then in 1884 into a newly-built townhouse designed by Samuel D. Kelly. This townhouse — between Exeter and Fairfield Streets — was next door to the house of George Richards Minot at number 245 Marlborough Street. In 1890, he commissioned Charles McKim of McKim, Meade and White to design a townhouse for $40,000 at 415 Commonwealth Avenue overlooking the recently-completed Back Bay Fens at Charlesgate East. Olney lived there for the rest of his life.

On October 28, 1890, Richard Olney’s daughter Agnes married George Richards Minot III in a ceremony held at the Olney summer house in Falmouth. George Richards Minot carried on his father’s business at Minot and Hooper. Their only son Francis was born on November 8, 1891 at a large rented house in Milton. Soon after, George and Agnes bought many acres of land on Brush Hill Road near Great Blue Hill and built on it a comfortable, roomy house. In January, 1894, George, Agnes, and young Francis were moving into Olney’s townhouse for the winter when George caught the influenza from exposure to the cold. He died of pneumonia on January 26 at age 45.

Richard Olney retired from government at the conclusion of the term of President Cleveland in March, 1897 and returned to his law practice. In 1904, he was appointed a trustee of the Benjamin Franklin Fund, which William Minot Sr. had managed for over 60 years. The trustees voted to found a trade school with some of the income of the fund so that working men could gain more skills and advance into managerial and supervisory positions. The Franklin Union was erected on Berkeley and Appleton Streets in 1908. Olney established the school as a corporation and served as its first president until he died.

Olney never lost interest in international affairs. President Wilson offered him the post of Ambassador to Great Britain in 1913, but he declined. Olney supported Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy toward an increasingly-belligerent Germany, and he died on April 8, 1917, two days after Wilson asked Congress to declare war.

Richard Olney was summed up well by a member of the Massachusetts Bar in a post-war eulogy in 1919: “The great outstanding characteristic of the man was power.”

IV.

Florence Street was laid out in 1848 between Bourne Street and the Boston & Providence Railroad. The street presumably was built as a connection to the Mt. Hope Station, located where the Blakemore Street Bridge is today (its site is a paved vacant lot). The new street built two years after William Minot completed his summer home neatly separated the Minot property from the land of George H. Williams and Charles F. Curtis. Williams and Curtis purchased this lot as part of a 16-acre parcel from Otis Brewer on July 13, 1871 for $25,000. The land included a house and outbuildings and was bordered on the southwest by Stony Brook (actually the property line ran down the center of the stream. Norfolk: Book 410, p. 112). This land was originally owned by Thomas Weld. At his death, he left it to Elizabeth M.C. Bradstreet on August 9, 1821 (Norfolk: Book 60, p. 257). Elizabeth Bradstreet was a widow and more than likely Weld’s daughter. The land would provide her with an income. (William Minot Jr. would do the same at his death for his two unmarried daughters, when part of Woodbourne was given to them.)

On May 21, 1873 a new owner bought a large parcel on Florence and Bourne Streets, also as a country home. This was the Boston North End Mission, which took out a mortgage for $12,500 with Williams and Curtis for the land and the house on it (Norfolk: Book 440, p. 164). The Boston North End Mission was established in June, 1865 as the Hanover Street Home Mission Society to serve the poor of the immigrant North End. The Mission was founded by the Hanover Street Methodist Church and although most of its resident missionaries were from the Baptist and Methodist sects of Boston, it became non-sectarian. Its purpose was as a temporary refuge for “fallen women” (as the Directors phrased them in their Annual Reports), providing them with a room to stay, education and training, until full-time employment could be found. In 1871 it bought and renovated a former dance hall at 201 North Street — which it had been leasing since 1867 — as a school and shelter not far from the Paul Revere House. (A huge air ventilation shaft of the Callahan Tunnel sits on the site today.)

At first the legislature refused to incorporate the Mission because there were so many single women as officers. The Mission was finally incorporated in 1870 as the Boston North End Mission. Eben Tourjé, the founder and Director of the Conservatory of Music, was one of the Mission founders. He became Superintendent of the Sunday School in 1867 and served a term as Board President.

There was an industrial school in the building which taught the young women and girls how to sew to make their own clothes and to learn the seamstress trade. The Mission held seven religious services a week in which they made every effort to attract the sailors off the ships docked at the nearby wharves. Temperance meetings were held every Saturday. The Mission Board was particularly proud of its Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners held at 201 North Street. This changed about 1875 to Thanksgiving food baskets. Bags of vegetables, meat or poultry, fruit, sugar and tea — all donated by individuals or businesses — were given out in proportion to the size of the family.

The North End — like East Boston — was the great entry port for immigrants to Boston from Europe and they packed into rickety old wooden buildings — many of which were 17^th- and 18^th- century homes broken up into tiny apartments. Today’s cramped, narrow streets of the North End give a good idea of how the community looked when the North End Mission was there. The North End of the 1870s was overwhelmingly Irish Catholic, although German Jews trickled in and the great migration of Italians was just getting started. In this light it is interesting to note that the Mission served primarily Protestants (“with delegates from the Hebrews,” as the 1876 Annual Report of the Mission wrote). Most of the women to whom the Mission was primarily devoted were more than likely farm girls from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and the rural parts of Massachusetts, who were attracted to Boston to work for better wages in factories. When they lost their jobs, such as during the severe recession of 1873, they wandered the streets. Some others were no doubt prostitutes and barmaids; after all, this was a seaport.

The trustees of the Mission purchased the land at Woodbourne for the same reasons as the Minots: it was in the country surrounded by open land and shade trees, a complete change from the crowded city near the Mt. Hope Railroad Station. The Curtis-Willams estate was acquired as a summer home for children as well as a year-round home for some of the women in order to remove them (as several Annual Reports stated) from “the temptations of their former lives.” The Trustees called it the Mt. Hope Home. This may have been the name of the estate which occupied the site, because a substantial brick house had been built near the corner of Bourne and Florence Street, probably before the Civil War. Its entrance drive came off Bourne Street at the corner of Florence where number 85 Bourne is today. The property had a large pond at its far corner where Florian and Goodway Streets are today (it had been filled in by 1914, probably after the cholera epidemic which swept through the region in 1909).

In 1874, 86 women lived in the comfortable home on the estate, about 36 every six months. The Mission emphasized daily church services and scriptural readings. Attached to the house, the Mission set up a laundry in which the women and girls took in washing and ironing from surrounding families. A horse and wagon picked up and delivered. The laundry brought in some income to the Home — $1,035 in 1875. It cost $4,765 to operate the Home that year. The seamstress school also continued.

In the days before government and state subsidies and grants, charitable institutions lived by the donations of individuals and companies. The Annual Reports of the North End Mission from 1876 to 1883 list several pages a year of people and businesses who gave money in $5 and $10 increments, and sometimes higher amounts, as well as clothing, food, bedding and furniture. Women volunteered to work and teach at The Mt. Hope Home and at 201 North Street. But all this could not sustain keeping the Home open all year and in 1877, the trustees closed the Home for women and kept it open only as a summer camp for children.

The camp was very important to the trustees and the benefactors of the North End Mission. The 1876 Annual Report described that “the pale little faces seen in such numbers in the neighborhood of the Mission — often peering in at its doors — have long appealed to the sympathies of those who labor there. Friends of the Mission conceived the plan of opening a summer home, to give the children of the poor a glimpse of God’s beautiful world, a respite from noise and strife, and a few weeks of pure air, good food and tender treatment. A large and well ventilated building on the Mount Hope Home estate, with a cottage attached, was fitted up for them, with 59 roughly made bedsteads in two large chambers.” The Mt. Hope Home was like all summer camps for kids: the days were filled with story telling, games, singing and romping in the fields. As many as 104 children a season — from infants to the age of 14 — spent the summers there in two-week stays, “enjoying pure country air, fresh milk, a tidy home and out door play. [A] great change from the miserable life in the pestilential air of North End tenement houses” (1875 Annual Report). Yet some died there too; one was buried at a donated lot in Forest Hills Cemetery and a little Jewish boy succumbed to whooping cough.

In 1902, the Mission moved out of the North End and bought a 16-room townhouse at 31 Worcester Square in the South End. According to the Boston Herald of June 5,1902, “the new location is more home like and not so institutional … it is in a refined neighborhood with a good view of the little park.” The Herald went on to say that the Mission was targeting its work towards younger girls, of which there were 13 then living at Worcester Square. In 1902, the Mt. Hope Home had 40 children staying there; they were orphans, children from broken marriages or children “who belong to worthy parents who, when tided over a financial struggle, will claim their little ones.”

It does not seem that the Minots altogether enjoyed having the Mt. Hope North End Mission as neighbors. In eight years of Annual Reports, no Minot is listed as contributing cash, food, bedsheets or even a diaper. Perhaps they hired one or two of the women as domestic servants or cooks or had their laundry done at the Home. In 1906, when the Minot heirs first set down to sell off their estate as house lots, they put as a restriction that “no public or private institution, such as hospitals, sanitoriums or for any religious, educational or charitable purpose” could be built (Suffolk County Deeds: Book 3139, p. 404).

V.

The Woodbourne district began to be subdivided into house lots from farmland and country seats on May 22, 1888, when about 10 acres of land were purchased by Frederick Organ from Charles F. Curtis (Suffolk: Book 1822, p. 406). This was part of Thomas Weld’s land which he bequeathed to Elizabeth Bradstreet in 1821. Catherine Street — then called Spruce Street — had already been built through the property in 1874. It was renamed Catherine Street on December 28, 1893. Organ entered into a business partnership with Andrew J. Meyer in 1889. Their property extended from the Mt. Hope Home almost to Halliday Street. Where Organ Park Street dead ends today is the extent of the Organ and Meyer subdivision. The deed to the land was subject to the following conditions: “For a period of 20 years from January 1, 1888, no building placed or erected shall be for the manufacture or sale of liquor or for carrying on any business offensive to good morals or injurious to health. Buildings shall be worth at least $1500 with a ten foot set back” (Suffolk Deeds, Book 1822, p. 406).

Building permits for most of the houses on Catherine Street cannot be located. There are 25 homes on the street; 11 were built by 1890, including number 25, number 26 and number 58. Number 64, also built by 1890, is now a vacant lot at the corner of Florian Street. The house opposite, number 63, high above Florian Street, also dates from 1890. The lots numbered 58, 60 and 64 backed up to Stony Brook. In 1898 and 1899, the City of Boston partially relocated and widened the brook through the Organ and Meyer property. The City of Boston put the brook in a culvert in 1934. Number 40 was issued a building permit on May 7, 1895. Number 6 Meyer Street is a triple decker completed in 1894.

The street was largely built up by 1896, when 17 homes had been completed. These included the distinctive twin houses at numbers 10 and 12, with Norman-style corner towers and bracketed porches, built by 1896. The two-family corner house with the built-in store front at the corner of Bourne Street was also built by 1896. Its neighbor, number 15 Catherine Street, was built by 1890. These homes no doubt profited from their close proximity to Mt. Hope Railroad Station. Some of the children of the new families probably began their education at the Canterbury Primary School on the corner of Bourne and Canterbury Street, where St. Michael’s Cemetery Chapel is today. Later houses on Catherine Street changed the nature of the community to multi-family dwellings. J. Silensky of Deering Road in Mattapan built the large six-family house at number 34 in 1916. In 1928, a two-family building was built at number 25-27. As far as architectural styles go, Catherine Street is the most eclectic in the Woodbourne District.

PART TWO

In August of 1895, work began on the elevation of the Boston & Providence line of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. A huge granite wall 4.5 miles long from Cumberland Street in the South End to Forest Hills was completed at the end of 1897, which eliminated all grade crossings. At Forest hills, a huge five-arch granite viaduct designed by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, completed in 1898, carried the Arborway under the new four-track railbed to Franklin Park. At the intersection of Walk Hill Street and Washington Street, where the old Toll Gate House stood, the last bridge was built of plate girders just beyond the new brick Forest Hills Station.

All of this was destroyed between 1981 and 1984 for the Southwest Corridor, which depressed the Orange Line and Amtrak rails and placed a park on the covered decks. Yet just as the Southwest Corridor transformed the topography of Forest Hills, the stone walls of the improved railroad changed the character of Forest Hills. At the turn of the century, Forest Hills would evolve quickly from country seats of the wealthy to thickly settled streets of multi-family houses for the working and middle classes .

At Woodbourne, however, a different character would emerge. On August 26, 1896, the City of Boston took an acre of land from Andrew J. Peters for the construction of the Francis Parkman School. Charles B. Perkins designed the building which was built in stages between 1899 and 1904. Across Wachusett Street at the same time, the Forest Hills Methodist Church Society ‘s new building was going up on land donated by Peters in 1897. Forest Hills Methodist began in October, 1893 in a rented hall in Forest Hills. James G. Hutchinson designed the church in a half-timbered wood-and-stucco style of an English country church (with a “Shakespearean gable,” as the Boston Herald reported on April 24, 1899). The building permit was issued on June 10, 1899. At the corner of Wachusett and Patten Streets, Hutchinson designed a 75-foot high tower. It was a landmark for many years and Hutchinson would make his mark on Woodbourne on later buildings. The church was dedicated on October 27, 1901. The Herald trumpeted in its next day edition that “Forest Hills has a new house of worship.” The paper printed photographs of the new church showing its handsome tower and an interior view of the sanctuary. In 1925, an addition was added on Wachusett Street. On March 10, 1977, the Shawmut Chapter of the Knights of Columbus bought the church, which was in some disrepair. Shortly thereafter, blue aluminum siding buried the Shakespearean gable and everything else. In that way it is still a landmark building.

The Boston Herald announced the transformation of the character of this section of Forest Hills in its Real Estate section on July 14, 1901: “Title taken to land on Patten, Walk Hill, Rodman, Eldridge and Hyde Park Avenue.” The trustees of the estate of Andrew J. Peters realized a profit from his investment in land thirty years earlier when they sold 16 acres to Hosford and Williams Real Estate Dealers, 337 Tremont Building. “A group of high grade building lots belonging to the late Andrew J. Peters and formerly known as the Richard Olney estate adjoins the estate of the late William Minot Esq. … This property is in one of the best sections of Jamaica Plain, a district that is growing rapidly” (Herald, May 8, 1904). The developers advertised the property as being but 3 minutes from Forest Hills Station, “where over 200 trains a day are available,” as well as the street cars. By 1904, Patten, Rodman and Eldridge Streets had been built and Wachusett Street extended to Eldridge. House lots ranged in price from $600 and up.

Outside of the Catherine Street houses, the earliest house in the Woodbourne district is number 71 Walk Hill Street, built for Charles DeRoches. The building permit was issued on October 20, 1896. The handsome house with corner tower and projecting wall dormer windows was designed by a Mr. P. Corson. On December 31, 1896, a building permit was approved to build the two-family wooden house at number 17-19 Walk Hill Street for J. A.Tobin. George Zunner was the architect. In 1898, Tobin erected the brick apartment block number 9 to 13 next to it. W. J. Peters was the architect. Construction of houses on the lots sold by Hosford and Williams began in 1899 with number 55 Patten Street, a one-family house designed by James Murray. Murray also designed number 47 Patten Street in 1899 which, like number 55 Patten and 71 Walk Hill, were built by H. F. McNeal. On July 22, 1902, number 66 Patten Street was built. Alan Fraser was the architect and it cost $4,500 to build.

Houses were not built as quickly as the excitement of the press suggested they would. Construction happened in spurts and in various architectural styles, mainly of two-family dwellings. Of the 21 houses on Patten Street between Wachusett and Bourne, only ten were built by 1914. Number 65 and 67 Patten at the corner of Rodman was built as late as 1928, 26 years after its neighbor, number 63, was completed. And the houses between Rodman and Bourne, numbers 81 and 85 Patten Street, were not built until 1964. Number 65 Patten was designed by Albin F. Brodin of Roslindale, one of the most prolific architects in the Woodbourne district (of the 254 houses surveyed for this history, 23 are by Brodin). The oldest building in the district is number 56, a large house in half-timber style set back from the street, which — as has been said — was Richard Olney’s house. It was enlarged and altered in 1921. Harold Peters owned it in 1914. That Richard Olney owned the house was still a point of pride as late as 1968 when the history of the neighborhood was written in a souvenir program from the 60^th Reunion of St. Andrews Church. Harold Peters also built number 60 Patten Street next door. It was designed by Alexander Boyle (of Murdock and Boyle) and was completed on December 12, 1916 at a cost of $3,500. (Peters and Boyle also collaborated on number 169 Wachusett Street, also in 1916.) Another interesting building is the large two-family brick house with the dignified gallery at number 43 Patten Street, built in 1922 by HoratioYoung of Brighton. The other two brick buildings in the district are numbers 32 and 40 Eldridge Street. The building permits cannot be found. Number 32 was built by 1914, and number 40 by 1924.



63 Bourne St. is a Colonial Revival saltbox style and was built in 1922. One of a cluster of four houses built on its own lot at the same time when the Woodbourne development resumed after WWI.

Walk Hill Street and Wachusett Street extension to Eldridge are more uniform in style and proportion than Patten, but even on those two streets, development took 20 years. The earliest house on Wachusett Street in the district is number 161 built in 1903; at the opposite end, number 210 was built in 1926. Number 71 Walk Hill Street was built, as we have seen, in 1896; number 51 was completed 36 years later on March 5, 1932. Numbers 51 and 55 Walk Hill Street were constructed 33 years apart.

Not every building was built as a home. On May 10, 1907, number 87 Walk Hill Street was completed for Mary C. Davis as a showroom for cemetery monuments and headstones. It was replaced as a dwelling house in 1925. Arthur Weinbaum of Weinbaum & Wexler was the architect.

Bourne Street began to be redeveloped in 1909 when Hiram Ludovic built number 9 Bourne Street. Samuel J. Rantin was the architect (Rantin also designed the 1907 Davis Monument showroom behind it.) One of the handsomest houses in the district is the corner building at number 15 Bourne Street, with its double-Dutch Colonial-style gambrel roof with the elbows connected by molding. Each roof faced a street. Robert J. McDonnell of Roxbury was the architect and it was completed in 1912. As an illustration of how house lots took decades to be built on in the top half of the district, the small white cottage at number 12 Bourne Street was not completed until 1931, over 20 years after its neighbor number 9 was built. Albin Brodin was the architect.

In 1909, the same year that number 9 Bourne was built, the City of Boston built a brick-and-steel fire station at the corner of Walk Hill and Wenham Streets. It was designed by Moller and Smith and completed in May, 1910. It was converted to apartments in 1962.

II.

The heart of the Woodbourne District is the roughly oval-shaped area conforming to the flow of Northbourne, Wachusett, Florian and Southbourne Roads. This was the first phase of Forest Hills Cottages, a subdivision unlike any before it in Jamaica Plain because it was not built for profit so much as it was built as a statement of social reform, in many ways an experiment. What follows owes much to the original thought and research first of Richard Candee and Greer Hardwick, who began to study Woodbourne in the early 1980s, and most recently the work of Peter Rowe and Alexander Von Hoffman.

The Minot family began to sell off their summer estate on August 28, 1899, when the Massachusetts Cremation Society paid $5,900 for 2 ¾ acres of land along Walk Hill Street (Suffolk: Book 2602, p. 420). This is now part of Forest Hills Cemetery. In 1906, the various Minot heirs and guardians planned to subdivide their property. This decision was no doubt encouraged by the determination of the Boston Elevated Company to extend the Washington Street Elevated from Dudley Square — where it terminated in 1901 — to Forest Hills. Ground was broken on March 16, 1908. Service from Forest Hills direct to the Washington Street tunnel and the downtown business and financial district opened on November 22, 1909. The elevated followed the route of the Metropolitan Railroad horsecars which began in 1853 from the corner of Bromfield and Tremont Street to Egleston Square along the line of the old Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike. It was extended to Forest Hills in 1864. Electric cars replaced horses on September 2, 1890.

The Minot family at first considered selling the property off in lots like Hosford and Williams, but reconsidered and sold the remainder of the estate — 30 acres — to Harriet A. Connors of Ashland on January 11, 1911. Later that year, the Boston Dwelling House Trust was formed and on December 18, 1911 acquired the Minot estate for about $100,000. (On May 16, 1911, William A. Gaston began construction of a new office building at 111 Devonshire Street. Designed by Parker, Thomas and Rice, it was called the Minot Building in memory of its location on the site of the 17^th-century Minot family home.)

Forest Hills had been a transportation center since 1803 when it was called Toll Gate on the Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike. In 1909, it was the center of electric surface cars, the elevated rapid transit trains and the intercity steam railroad. The Boston Dwelling House Company hoped to attract as home buyers the motormen, mechanics and superintendents of the Boston Elevated operating out of the Arborway car barns.

In contrast to Hosford and Williams, the trustees of Boston Dwelling House had an ideology: they would build quality housing for the working man. The Hosford and Williams subdivision of the Olney-Peters property was descended from the last of three significant patterns of housing for workers which grew up in the middle of the 19^th century: the boarding house for the factory girls working, for example, in the Olney family’s cotton mill in Oxford; the company-owned and -built tenements such as those around the brewery on Amory Street; and the speculative building on large tracts around the outskirts of the factory districts of cities.

In the late 1870s, speculative developers adapted the new, popular style of the triple decker: apartment houses of three family flats one on top of the other. Literally acres of triple deckers were built across fields of square grids, particularly in Dorchester. This is well-illustrated by the grid of streets coming off Washington Street at the edge of the car barns. Triple deckers line Brookley and Rossmore Roads, Williams and Forest Hills Streets, stopped by Franklin Park. [This writer lived for 18 years in a triple decker built in 1927 on Forest Hills Street. The owner was a retired electrician for the Boston Elevated; exactly the sort of working man who the Boston Dwelling House trustees wanted to attract. He rented in a triple decker for nearly 30 years.] On the edge of Woodbourne, the triple deckers began being built along Hyde Park Avenue from Walk Hill Street to Eldridge Road at the same time as the first houses of the Boston Dwelling House Company were underway.

But these neighborhoods were congested, and many triple deckers were not well built. Poverty, blight and congestion were becoming of increasing concern to a new breed of men and women in the last years of the 19^th century, that century of unprecedented urban growth. Working-class apartment dwellers were seen by reform planners at the turn of the century as rootless and not involved or invested in the community. Home ownership was the key to build civic pride and stability in a time of enormous growth and great technological change. Home ownership was also seen as the way to warm up the melting pot — to hasten the assimilation of the immigrants from Eastern Europe into the American way. At the turn of the century, some progressive industrialists and architects began to work on the concept of integrating housing with aesthetics and landscape design in industrial communities, taking Andrew Jackson Downing’s theory of landscaping private homes to more egalitarian — and hence more American — directions. But mill and factory owners and other barons of commerce still wanted to keep their profits high, and they were not inclined to increase wages, so the dream of home ownership was beyond the reach of the workers in the factories which lined the Stony Brook Valley of Roxbury and Jamaica Plain.

The development proposed by Boston Dwelling House would be based on the Garden City concepts developing in Britain and the United States by social reformers. The Garden City centered on the suburban plan of houses integrated into the landscape with emphasis on the natural features of the site. The site would be outside the central business and industrial sections of the city but connected to it by rail. The Garden City would be profitable, but could keep costs down by the collective purchase of a large site and design and construction of houses based on a master plan of shared spaces. The village atmosphere (to use a term of Candee and Hardwick) not only reduced costs, it kept closely to the ideology of the Garden City. “[It ] was deemed important to civic and moral health because it would evoke a complex of middle class values — home ownership, saving, civic pride and citizenship… Reformers believed their projects would nurture traditional American values and strengthen the democratic system” (Candee and Hardwick).

Forest Hills Cottages is also close to the ideals of philanthropic housing pioneered by the British in the 1870s. Rowe and Von Hoffman make this connection: private philanthropy directed by men of wealth and influence would provide good and affordable housing where the private sector was timid to invest.

Forty years before the Woodbourne experiment, the Boston Cooperative Building Company attempted a very similar project to build a suburban neighborhood of single family houses affordable to the workingman. Indeed, the two housing initiatives overlapped in the person of settlement-house reformer Robert A. Woods: he joined the board of Boston Cooperative in 1896; in 1911 he became a trustee of the Boston Dwelling House Company. Called “the first significant model housing company in the United States” by scholar David Culver, the Boston Cooperative Building Company was chartered in May of 1871 to provide houses for working people at moderate cost.

Boston Cooperative grew out of the tenement reform movement which gained increasing energy after the Civil War when a massive increase in immigration caused great overcrowding in rundown multi-family buildings in central Boston’s waterfront and factory districts. The Cooperative was formed by the distinguished physician Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, a pioneer in public health in Massachusetts. Out of his efforts came the first Board of Health in the Commonwealth in 1869, which he chaired for ten years.

In the years between the Civil War and as late as the 1890s, poor housing was considered specifically a public health matter. Bowditch had become interested in housing as early as the 1840s when large numbers of impoverished Irish immigrants first began to strain Boston’s limited housing stock. His thinking was greatly influenced by English housing reformers. Shortly after assuming the chair of the State Board of Health, Bowditch spent six months in London where he met with housing reformers, toured slums and visited model tenements. Chief among reformers was the wealthy financier, Sir Sidney Waterlow. In 1863 using his own wealth, Waterlow created the Industrial Dwelling Company to provide housing for London’s poor. Bowditch met Waterlow, toured his model apartment buildings and talked with the tenants. Bowditch came away a believer that Waterlow’s system could be duplicated in Boston to solve the city’s housing problems. The only way to provide better housing for the working poor was to provide alternatives to the real estate market which controlled the supply of, and the rentals and prices for, housing. Bowditch convened a number of wealthy friends who together raised a capital of $200,000 to form the Boston Cooperative Building Company. Each investor would be limited to a return of only 7 percent (about half of what tenement investors were getting).

The Board was an impressive one: Martin Brimmer was President, a seat he held for 24 years until his death in 1896. Board members were Bowditch; the Hyde Park industrialist Henry C. Grew; Robert Treat Paine Jr., himself a housing philanthropist; Mary E. Parkman, sister of the great historian Francis Parkman; the architect George W. Pope; and future governor Roger Wolcott.

From the start, Boston Cooperative believed exactly as the Boston Dwelling House Company did in 1911 that capital and philanthropy could be combined to create comfortable housing for the workingman. And also like Boston Dwelling House, Boston Cooperative Building Company made clear that it was not a charity but a real-estate business (Seventh Annual Report of BCBC for the year 1878). At its first meeting in June of 1871, the trustees decided it would not build tenements; rather it would begin by building row houses with separate apartments on each floor. In 1872, it built 23 brick small row houses on a three-quarter acre parcel in a factory district on East Canton Street near the corner of Harrison Avenue. Harrison Avenue was lined with coal docks on Fort Point Channel, which a century ago extended as far as Massachusetts Avenue. A lumber yard operated behind the row-house blocks. (Today, the channel has been filled in and the coal docks, lumber yard and all the row houses are gone too.)

Overcrowding of the central city, where unregulated building of tenement blocks created unhealthy living conditions (especially in the North End, but also in present-day Chinatown and Bay Village) was the primary focus of housing reformers. One way to ease downtown congestion, they correctly reasoned, was to build outside the downtown city limits in the newly-annexed communities of Dorchester and Roxbury. This relieved urban congestion and fit right in with the deep-rooted American belief in the purity of the country life. (Housing reformers were as concerned about morals as much as they were about disease; all tenants were carefully screened for the model tenements which were built and each included outside managers — mainly women — who made regular “friendly visits” to check up on alleged bad habits while they collected the rent.)

Suburban housing for the workingman remained a popular notion among reform housing advocates despite the fact that it was unrealistic. Workingmen were not commuters (Culver). They lived near to where they worked because transportation costs were high, and reformers could not get the railroad Boards of Directors to provide workingman’s fares.

Boston Cooperative Housing trustees were fervent disciples of suburban living for workingmen. In 1872, as the East Canton Street row houses were being rented, the BCBC trustees formed a Standing Committee on Country Houses which included two women (no doubt to advise on moralistic issues as well as the needs of the housewife), Abby May and Helen F Kendall, the architect George Pope, Henry Grew and J. Gardener White.

The properties they investigated were judged on five requirements:
• Near a railway
• Near schools and churches
• Good water supply
• Fairly level land to avoid the costs of heavy grading of rocks which would increase the costs of building (also a concern of Boston Dwelling House Company)
• Reasonable land costs per square foot.

On March 12,1874, the Boston Cooperative Building Company bought a ten-acre lot for $31,750 from the estate of Samuel Blake Pierce on Harvard Street in the then recently-annexed town of Dorchester. The flat parcel was two blocks from the Harvard Station of the Hartford and Erie (today the Midlands Branch) Railroad and equally close by was a public school.

In the summer of 1874, two streets were laid out and 13 houses built, no doubt designed by George W. Pope (who, it can be assumed, also designed the East Canton row houses). The streets were named Sidney Place and Waterlow Street after the English housing reformer. Waterlow Street curves from one point on Harvard Street to another. The BCBC trustees sold the Harvard Street lots for market value. (Waterlow Street still exists; Sidney Place is today Elmont Street which runs perpendicular from Waterlow to Vassar Street; a third road named Clinton Street was laid out in 1897 after BCBC had sold off the remaining lots.) In total, 16 houses were built by 1876. They were roomy, gable-fronted wooden houses with 2 to 4 bedrooms, a kitchen and a cellar. The average price was $2,650. The homebuyer had to deposit a downpayment of $200 and paid $25 monthly. Not until the full purchase price was paid would the homebuyer receive the deed to the house and lot. Yet despite the best efforts of the Boston Cooperative Building Company, the homes were beyond the wage level of the workingman or laborer; as happened at Woodbourne, the very class of people for whom the housing was built could not afford them.

The timing also could not have been worse: like building a tree house in a hurricane, the Sidney Place and Waterlow Street houses were constructed during the worst depression America had then suffered; it began in 1873 and lasted throughout the decade. Many men who paid the downpayment could not keep up on the rest of the debt and BCBC ended up being landlord mainly to renters. The Sidney-Waterlow model housing was a financial as well as a reform failure. There were not enough workers, writes Culver, who could afford enough suburban housing to make it successful. Boston Cooperative ended up selling houselots on the open market exactly as Boston Dwelling House Company did at Woodbourne after 1922. By 1896, all the land had been sold and BCBC closed its books on the first philanthropic single-family housing development in Boston.

Yet by 1902, as Cousineau notes, over 30 years and two major economic depressions, Boston Cooperative Building Company had built or rehabilitated 311 family housing units in 78 houses ranging from single family to small tenement — a proud record. Only Waterlow and Elmont Street survive today, although it is difficult to determine exactly which houses were built by the Cooperative.

Despite this failure, housing reformers were convinced that private enterprise was the best hope for the housing problem. At no time, writes Culver, did the trustees of the Boston Cooperative Housing even hint in their annual reports that perhaps the free enterprise system was not adequate to the task. That realization was still sixty years in the future. Boston Cooperative trustee Robert Treat Paine Jr. remained convinced that private capital and philanthropy could solve the housing problem and he still believed in suburban relocation of workingmen.

By 1885, he had built 45 small brick row houses for workingmen on Sussex Street in Lower Roxbury. In 1887, at the opposite end of Jamaica Plain from Woodbourne, Paine organized the Workingman’s Building Association, a division of his Workingman’s Cooperative Bank. In 1888, he bought up a large tract below Center Street in the shadows of the Plant Shoe factory and the large breweries on Heath Street, and the Workingman’s Building Association erected 116 model single-family homes between 1889 and 1891 on the picturesquely named Sunnyside and Roundhill Streets. They were modest Queen-Anne style houses designed by George Pope. A bit more attractive in embellishments than Waterlow Street, all were sold as soon as they were completed. The location was ideal: within walking distance of several large factories, and the construction also took place during a period of robust economic growth. Yet despite Paine’s best efforts, the housing remained too expensive for the laboring class. The higher-paid skilled workman and middle manager bought the model homes. The workers moved their families into the miles of wooden triple deckers which dotted the hills around the factories; this was ironic because Sunnyside was a direct alternative to the triple decker and the tenement block, another major objective of housing reformers.

The suburban model housing of Sunnyside and Sidney-Waterlow represented the ideal form of philanthropic workingmen’s’ housing which the Boston Dwelling House Company would seek to emulate. The precedent of Sidney-Waterlow model housing was the parent of the Woodbourne garden suburb.

Like the Boston Cooperative Building Company, the Boston Dwelling House Company was organized by men and women of wealth, position and influence. As they made clear in their investment prospectus, they were involved “to point the way to home ownership for persons of limited income not in the spirit of charity, but in the spirit of good citizenship.” Seventeen officers and trustees were listed on the investment pamphlet distributed in 1912. The company’s president was Henry Howard, a leader of the Boston Chamber of Commerce and vice president of a Massachusetts Chemical Company. The social reformer Robert A. Woods, renowned for his work on the problems and solutions of the tenement district poor (which were the concern of the North End Mission) was a trustee, together with His Eminence William Cardinal O’Connell, the Archbishop of Boston. Edward A. Filene, the owner of one of Boston’s largest department stores, was a leader in the progressive movement in Boston to reform and improve many aspects of its society, but particularly overcrowded and substandard housing. The great Cardinal was a “militant defender of Catholic interests,” but he could not be described as a social “do gooder.” Filene convinced Cardinal O’Connell that many a good Catholic lived in run-down housing owned by careless landlords, and in 1910, Cardinal O’Connell briefly joined the Boston Dwelling House movement (Rowe and Von Hoffman).

The most active trustee of Boston Dwelling House was its vice president, Robert Winsor Jr., one of the Directors of the Boston Elevated Company. He was the one who suggested in 1911 that a model residential suburb be built near the Forest Hills car barns for conductors and motormen. Winsor studied the garden cities of England and was particularly impressed with Forest Hills Gardens, then under construction in the borough of Queens, New York City. Underwritten by the Russell Sage Foundation, Forest Hills in Queens was the next-higher level of philanthropic housing as built by men like Paine. It had the same goals as Boston Dwelling House: it was intended to be affordable for the middle class working man.

The Olmsted Brothers were the landscape architects and Grosvenor Atterbury the architect. In 1869, the Olmsted firm, headed by Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux, had designed one of the first railroad suburbs in America on the prairie outside Chicago called Riverside. F. L. Olmsted died in 1903, and since then the firm had been headed by his son Fred Jr. and step-son John Charles. The brothers were retained by Boston Dwelling House early in 1911. So as to keep their project distinct from the Sage Foundation’s, they called their subdivision “Woodbourne”. The Olmsted firm presented its first plan to the Dwelling House Company in April, 1911. It borrowed a lot from Riverside, Illinois, particularly with thickly planted curvilinear streets coming off a straight axis. A wide triangular space in the middle of the site was proposed at which present-day Bournedale, Northbourne, Bourne and a fourth street would meet at a rotary. Two important Boston architectural firms were selected by Olmsted to work on the project: Parker, Thomas & Rice and Kilham & Hopkins. Grosvenor Atterbury was also asked to prepare plans.

On January 9, 1912, Olmsted Brothers submitted a second report to Board President Henry Howard elaborating on their plans for subdividing the Minot estate:

“The surface of the property west of Bourne Street is extremely irregular and much grading will be required for small lots and inexpensive houses. A large amount of filling will be required in the low areas… A large part of the ridge should be removed to make access easy to the central part of the property. The greatest value for the property can be obtained by removing the ridge.” The Olmsted firm provided an alternate plan in which the ridge was kept in place. But this had serious objections: “A number of houselots would have small street frontages and steep surfaces sloping north in which the sun will not penetrate as much in the winter months. [This seems to be referring to Northbourne Road—ed.] Secondly, “the ridge is covered with large trees, a few in very good condition.” However, foundation excavation would cut and damage the roots and cause rapid decline of the conifers. They cannot be preserved if the area is to be closely built up. Destruction of the big pines will be necessary. [To bring out] the best possible frontages and land values requires the removal of large trees.”

The report went on to state that 13 contractors had been asked to bid on the project and their estimates ranged from $150,000 to $160,000 for house-lot preparation, streets and drainage.

The public was invited to invest in the project in an advertisement in the December 20, 1911 Boston Herald. Contractors had submitted bids for road work and site preparation by January 1912. On February 12, 1912, Howard wrote to the Boston Dwelling House trustees to report that the “cost of carrying out the Olmsted plans appeared so great that an alternative layout was required.” He went on to say that Robert Anderson Pope, of New York City, “had been commissioned to make a new plan which is enclosed herewith.”

The Pope report, dated February 1, 1912, stated that the “principle feature of the design is the utilization of the knoll. It makes possible 18 ample sites. Grouping of houses will make possible a very picturesque result and save many important pines. An existing old road [most likely the approach drive to the Minot houses—ed.] can readily be made use of for serving the houses on the north side of the knoll.” [This probably refers to Bournedale Road—ed.]

Pope proposed to build 127 single and double houses for 163 families on 17 acres for a total cost of $39,293.38 He stated that a house lot measuring 3,900 square feet could be sold for $1000. That cost would include parks, playgrounds and service roads. When Howard engaged Pope to redesign the project, Frederick Law and John Charles Olmsted were furious at what they felt was breach of contract and withdrew all their plans (Candee and Hardwick).

The shape of the Woodbourne garden suburb today is the design of Robert Anderson Pope. Three new streets were planned and graded out: Northbourne Road, Westbourne Road and Westbourne Terrace. Westbourne Road was the extension of Wachusett Street which, to avoid Stony Brook, did not connect up to Wyvern, but instead curved around an oval to meet Florence (now Florian) Street. A road was built from Hyde Park Avenue to meet Florence Street. The new road was joined with the stretch of Florence Street coming off Bourne Street and renamed Southbourne. Northbourne followed the curve of the steepest slope of the ridge on which the Minots built their summer houses and connected Bourne with Hyde Park Avenue. The highest part of the development was Westbourne Terrace — later renamed Bournedale Road. It followed approximately the line of the original approach drives to the Minot houses on the crest of the ridge. At the highest point, Pope had planned two small, diamond-shaped parks in the center of the road around which homes would be built. In the second phase of construction after 1922, this street pattern was wisely rebuilt. The small parks are still suggested by the setbacks of number 26, 30, 32 and 34 Bournedale Road.


Number 14 and 24 Bourndale. Colonial Revival saltbox style. Built 1922 and 1923.

Pope planned Woodbourne with three distinct housing patterns built over about 17 acres. The first was two groups of brick houses set in a common park on the southern slope of the wooded ridge of the Minot houses. These groups had twelve houses each facing out across a wide common on Southbourne Road. Each group had one six-family attached block set far back on the lot, two double houses and two single-family houses on each side. The were tied together by a common service driveway and each had a common playground space. A smaller court at the eastern end of Southbourne near Bourne Street consisted of one two family attached house flanked by two single family houses all built of wood and stucco.

The second housing pattern was a cluster of ten two-story cottages of wood and stucco built around common land in an oval created by Wachusett and Florian Streets. They all faced inward towards the center of the oval, not out at the busy street. This was one way to compensate for the compactness of the lot. These houses were meant for the lower-income home owner; they cost $3,500 to build.

The third pattern was a block of six apartment houses built along Hyde Park Avenue between the two entrance drives of Northbourne and Southbourne Roads. These were built as a wall to block out Hyde Park Avenue’s traffic and street-car noises from the cottages within the development. They were very distinctly-designed buildings suggested by Henry Howard as an alternative to the triple decker which was beginning its march down Hyde Park Avenue from Walk Hill Street. Actually, they were just four triple deckers placed back-to-back with one common entrance. Built of wood and light-colored stucco, they had broad piazzas facing Hyde Park Avenue and a common courtyard on the interior. The apartment blocks were built in a sweeping bow front at the corners of Northbourne and Southbourne Roads. Although only made of wood, they were very distinguished buildings and the finest block of buildings on the Avenue until West Street. Their commanding size and light color caused the neighborhood to be called “White City.” By the time they were completed, the bank of triple deckers which dominates the west side of Hyde Park Avenue was well underway: six were completed by 1914 and sixteen by 1924, between Walk Hill Street and Eldridge Road. Allowed to deteriorate by their owner, the White City apartments were razed in 1977 and replaced by the present block of low-scale dark-wood-and-brick apartments named Woodbourne, which hug their lots so tentatively as to be almost invisible.

The architect for three of the four housing clusters was the firm of Kilham and Hopkins, formed in 1901. Most of their work was in the design of public schools and urban apartment blocks, as well as Colonial-Revival homes for Boston’s upper-middle class (Candee and Hardwick). The principles of the firm were Walter H. Kilham of Beverly (1868-1948 ) and James Cleveland Hopkins (1873-1938), who grew up in Jamaica Plain. Both men graduated from MIT. Hopkins, as Candee and Hardwick point out, “spent part of each year in England and this influenced his taste for half timbered, arts and crafts houses.” He was the most informed on English garden city developments (Candee and Hardwick).

In the April, 1913 issue of The Brickbuilder, Kilham and Hopkins explains the ideology which underpins Woodbourne and the design for “two groups of houses built for the Boston Dwelling House Company.” [I am grateful to Greer Hardwick for sending me a copy of this article in 1983.]

“Boston has suffered from thoughtless and ill ordered expansion of its cheaper residential districts, [which] has been particularly painful, for instead of housing its people in individually owned cottages, its suburbs have been built up with miles on miles of wooden three story apartment houses… generally of the flimsiest construction. To combat this unhealthy state of affairs and to provide as an example for investors, the most far seeing and public spirited men and women of Boston organized a strong corporation known as the Boston Dwelling House Company and acquired 30 acres near Forest Hills. The property was largely covered with splendid growth of old pines and other ornamental trees, as many as possible of which have been preserved.”

The prize of Woodbourne are the two groups of brick houses on Southbourne Road. In keeping with the ideals of the garden suburb, each house has its own garden plot and a common playground for children and each group was carefully integrated into the landscape. “The greatest care has been taken to preserve the wonderful old trees that occupied the ground before the buildings were started. Most of these trees have been preserved and give the whole community the age and dignity which is only obtained after years of patient waiting.” [William Minot Jr. would have been pleased.] In addition, the common areas were planted with shrubs and trees, and vines were grown against the brick walls of each house.

The large oval of smaller wooden cottages were designed by Kilham and Hopkins in half-timbered, stucco style in imitation of the English Arts and Crafts house which James Hopkins so much admired. The lots were quite modest, even for 1911: only about 800 square feet. Like the Southbourne groups, each house features a prominent double-hip slate roof and shares a common pedestrian walk to each doorway.

The Florian ( Florence) Street cluster illustrates the design philosophy of Robert Anderson Pope, in which he explained that tribal property was an advancement over individual property. Pope was also a believer in self sufficiency and he recommended that garden space be provided so that each family could have fresh vegetables (Rowe and Von Hoffman). The Florian Street clusters were deliberately designed for the lower-middle-class home owner, so the communal space also reduced the costs for utility lines and pipes.

Kilham and Hopkins designed the apartment houses on Hyde Park Avenue which they described as a “new type of low cost apartment house which have met and conquered the triple decker on its own ground.” The Boston Sunday Herald of March 17, 1912 devoted a whole page to these apartment buildings, including line drawings of the front and rear elevations.

The group of small cottages at the east end of Southbourne were designed for newly-weds just beginning a family by the architectural firm of Allen and Collens. Francis R. Allen, the senior partner, joined with Charles Collens in 1903 to form a design team which for 30 years gained a national reputation as architects of Gothic style churches and institutional buildings. Among their greatest accomplishments was Riverside Church in upper Manhattan which was built in 1930. They designed the Newton City Hall in 1932.

The small cottages appear to be a speculative venture of Charles. He is listed as the owner of each of the 4 properties on the building permuted dated June 21, 1912. They were completed on January 31, 1913. Each shares a common lawn and the center two-family house is set back from the street nestled in trees.

In 1911, the Dwelling House Company opened its site office at 308 Hyde Park Avenue near the corner of Southbourne Road. Unlike the Hosford and Williams development, Boston Dwelling House bought, built and marketed their project. Work began on the two brick groups on Southbourne Road on November 11, 1911 when the building permits were issued for number 40, 42, 38, 36 and 30. The A. Varnerin Company was the contractor and the buildings were completed on October 5, 1912. In the early weeks of 1912, Varnerin’s crews began construction of the Hyde Park Avenue apartment buildings. On June 24, 1912, building permits were issued for the Florian Street homes. J. N. Fish and Company were the contractors and they completed the houses on April 11, 1913.

The Boston Herald reported on July 3, 1912, that by September of that year, 72 apartments and 24 homes would be completed. “Each group of houses,” the Herald wrote,”overlooks a view of the surrounding country in the distance. Especially is this true of the groups on the high knoll where long vistas may be seen from beneath tall pine trees. The outlook will invariably be over parks or playgrounds or towards clusters of trees with which this site abounds.”

By the end of 1914, 38 homes had been built and 72 apartments in six buildings completed. This included a clubhouse for the Woodbourne Club designed by Allen and Collens at 84 Bourne Street. This was built on a half acre of land at the corner of Bourne, Southbourne and what would become Eastland Street by the Boston Dwelling House Company as an amenity for the owners of their houses, and the club was part of the promotion the company used to sell houses. The clubhouse is noted for its huge rubblestone fireplace. Construction costs for each single-family building ranged from $4,800 to $5,400. All had been bought and rented. The publicity was very favorable; the Herald trumpeted Woodbourne regularly: “Engaged and newly married couples should visit” (April 18, 1913). “Visit Woodbourne on the 4th of July, the most attractive harmonious and artistic community of homes around Boston (July 3, 1913). “48 Southbourne Road sold to Mrs. L. M. Clark. Furnished throughout by Jordan Marsh Company (Sunday Herald, July 6, 1913).

III.

World War I intervened and then a recession. It was not until 1920-1921, that the Boston Dwelling House Company (BDH Co.) began to develop the rest of its property at Woodbourne. Now, though, the ideologically-driven, reform-minded company was replaced by a simple real estate venture. “The compulsion for idealism was gone,” wrote Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday (1931), “realism was in the ascendant.” Although BDH Co. didn’t loose money in the first phase and all the homes were purchased, it didn’t earn as much as the Directors hoped either. More importantly, the lower-middle classes — the motormen and conductors of the Boston Elevated — couldn’t afford the houses. The high quality of workmanship in the brick houses with fireplaces, built-in book-shelves and sunporches, were too expensive for the very group for whom they were built in the first place. So the motormen, carpenters, mailmen and skilled brewery workers took apartments on Walk Hill Street, the low numbers of Wachusett Street, as well as Weld Hill and Tower Streets. As Rowe and Von Hoffman point out, 70% of the residents of Woodbourne were middle-level managers, salesmen, teachers, dentists and doctors. Some domestic servants of the families on Southbourne Road lived in the apartments on Hyde Park Avenue.


Wachusett Street, Cottage.

The objective for profit which the trustees of BDH Co. stated from the start, ironically, foiled their honest attempt to make home ownership affordable to an emerging middle class. As Rowe and Von Hoffman write, this fact demonstrated that the private sector could not provide good, affordable housing for the lower-middle-class and working-class families — much less home ownership. The Depression would make this fact a stark reality and out of this came the United States Housing Act of 1937, which stated that for the first time in American history it was the policy of the United States to remedy unsafe and unsanitary housing.

The second phase of the development of Woodbourne lasted from 1922 until 1933. On August 1, 1922, Boston Dwelling House completed a measured plan for house lots on the land they owned on Bournedale and Northbourne Roads. Twenty-one houses were plotted for the north side of Bournedale and the south side (with its steep slope) of Northbourne. The north side — where the Seaver School would soon be built — was laid out with eight house lots. On July 23, 1923, a subdivision plan of all the land between Bourne Street and St. Michael’s Cemetery was prepared showing 96 house lots on streets named Eastland, Woodbourne and Waybourne Roads. Unlike the first romantic era, these houses were set on their own lots parallel to the street. Like the Hosford and Williams subdivision, these house lots averaged 5000 square feet and were sold to individuals, contractors or speculators, although, between 1922 and 1925, Boston Dwelling House itself planned, built and marketed homes.

The second phase does not have any pattern to it; gone are the cluster courts and common parkland. The concept of tribal land which so impressed Robert Anderson Pope was at odds with the single-most-important pillar of American culture, the individual. Americans preferred there own houses on their own lots. Yet all the houses have a comfortable, familiar feel to them. All are based on the lines of the New England wooden house of the 17^th and 18^th century. The Colonial Revival style first bloomed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago when visitors saw the Massachusetts State Building, a reproduction of John Hancock’s 18^th-century Beacon Hill mansion (a close copy of which can be seen at number 23 Eliot Street, Jamaica Plain). Housing reform advocates proffered the Colonial style because it was egalitarian, solid and respectable (Candee and Hardwick). The architects for the wealthy built their mansions in the Roaring Twenties, borrowing from England and Italy or France. The middle classes felt more comfortable in a decidedly American form of architecture. The use of Colonial Revival styles throughout most of phase two of Woodbourne, especially along Bourne Street as far as Goodway Road and all of Bournedale, make this section very different from the Hosford and Williams development of Patten and Walk Hill Streets. This unified streetscape of architectural style and proportion begins to fray past Goodway Road as multiple family houses were built. Number 90, 92 and 94 Bourne Street are interesting variations on the Colonial Style. Number 92, built in 1926, has a gambrel roof with the end wall set perpendicular to the street. Number 90 and 94 were built in 1925 by BDH Co. They were each designed by James G. Hutchinson who incorporated a hip roof and a shed roof to the street facade. Each shed roof has a different twist to it; number 90 has long narrow clerestory windows and number 94 has an asymmetrical pedimented entrance.

Boston Dwelling House built and marketed the first houses in 1922 beginning where they left off in 1914 at the east end of Southbourne Road. These were the closest to a cluster pattern that would be seen in the second phase, a set of houses all designed in the same style on Bourne Street between Southbourne and Bourndale Roads. Numbers 59 and 63 were begun in April, 1922 and were designed by James G. Hutchinson, the architect of Forest Hills Methodist Church in 1899 and number 65 Walk Hill Street in 1902. Hutchinson designed 16 houses in Woodbourne for both Hosford and Williams and Boston Dwelling House. Numbers 55 and 49 followed in July, 1922, designed by Woodbury and Stuart, also in the same style. Before joining with George Stuart in 1918, Daniel Woodbury was in private practice starting in 1893. In 1907, he designed number 80 Patten Street.


Brick cluster housing set on commonly owned parkland. Number 56, 58, 60-70, Southbourne Rd. Built 1912.

The style that Hutchinson and Woodbury and Stuart used was a derivation of the saltbox or catslide roof common in 17^th-century New England farmhouses, where one roof slope is longer than the other. In the original, the entrance is set in the center of the shorter slope. In the Bourne Street group, the front has been turned to the end wall and the entrance placed asymmetrically at the shortest slope. There are ten houses built in the Woodbourne Saltbox style, four in a row on Bournedale, number 10 Southbourne and number 49 Bourndale. The latter are each set at an angle on a corner lot. Number 10 Southbourne was begun in July, 1922 by Boston Dwellling House next to one of the 1912 corner apartment buildings. It was designed by Woodbury and Stuart and cost $7000 to build. (By contrast, the cottage nearby at number 288 Wachusett Street designed by Kilham and Hopkins in 1912, cost half that to build.) Directly opposite, the house set high above the street at number 18 Southbourne was also begun in April, 1922 but not by the Dwelling House Company. The lot was acquired by Hartwell Sibley who hired Woodbury and Stuart to design it in a modified Federal style with a Greek Revival entrance.

Bournedale Road the most architecturally uniform street in the second phase. It occupies the highest elevation in the district; all three Minot houses were built facing south at its crest. Every house but three were built in the four-year period 1922-1926. Number 41, built on the site of William Minot Sr.’s summer house, was designed by James G. Hutchinson for Clarence Trimble. The building permit was issued on Sept. 17, 1926. All the houses are built in Colonial Revival styles — three with gambrel roofs and four in Woodbourne saltbox style. Number 9 is different. It is an L-shaped house built close to the street on a long narrow lot. It has a sloping, bungalow-style roof facing southwesterly.

Number 5 Bournedale was first for about seven years the site of the construction yard for the Dwelling House Company, beginning in 1924. In May, 1937, a permit was issued for a single-family house designed by Joseph Selwyn using the 17^th-century house style of a projected second story called a jetty, or the garrison style. Also in 1937, number 11 Southbourne was built from designs of Harold Duffie.

The earliest houses on Bourne Street are two multi-family houses which date from before 1890 at numbers 149 and 145, probably built by Organ and Meyer about 1888 or 1889.s Thirty-one houses were built on BDH Co land along Bourne Street between 1923 and 1933. In 1924, Pierrre O. Plant designed and built a cottage at number 11 Bourne Street, this was the last house on the former Olney property on Bourne Street. In May and October, 1923, construction began on number 35 and 32 Bourne Street by BDH Co. These were both designed by Mulhall and Holmes in wood and stucco. They are both the same house, except that number 32 is set sideways on the highest lot on the street. It is distinguished by a wooden gallery built around a central brick chimney which is its street face. Number 6 Bourndale, also built in 1923 at the corner of Wachusett, is a duplicate of those two houses.

Building houses or selling house lots for the single-family home owner was, like the golden first phase of Woodbourne, the dominant theme of the second phase. But this phase was marked by profit over ideology. The hated triple-decker was kept out (although two did sneak in on the periphery of the property), but the two-family house was introduced, yet designed in a way that made it appear like a single-family building with one main door. The first was at number 16-18 Bourne Street, designed by James G. Hutchinson for the Dwelling House Company. Fred R. Wells was the contractor. Wells built many houses in the second phase for BDH Co, including 25 Bourne which Hutchinson designed in 1925. (Numbers 26, 32 and 35 Bourne were all built by Wells Company in 1923.) The largest house on Bourne Street is on the opposite corner from numbers 16-18, that is number 21 at the corner of Patten. Albin Brodin designed this two family for Nellie V. Cronin in 1929. Nellie lived at 101 Wachusett Street and she was issued the building permit on May 6, 1929.

Other two-family houses on Bourne Street are number 98s-100 (1927), 102-104 (1926), and 106-108 (1926) all developed by Stanley Reid. Hutchinson designed numbers 98-100; Weinbaum and Wexler were the architects for the other two. (Weinbaum and Wexler designed the Mattapan Hebrew School on Morton and Norfolk Streets in 1930.) Three undisguised two-family houses — one apartment built on top of the other, with top and bottom porches facing the street — are opposite, numbers 87, 91 and 95 Bourne Street. These were each designed by Weinbaum and Wexler and they were built in 1927.

The other two-family house on Dwelling House Company land is number 309 Wachusett, built in 1927 opposite number 302, one of the cottages designed by Kilham and Hopkins. The original Pope design of 1912, which The Brickbuilder reproduced in its April, 1913 issue, shows a series of four duplex houses set in large common areas, on the outside curve of Wachusett, from Florian and Southbourne streets. Only number 309 was built, suggesting again that it was profit over design and ideology which motivated the second phase of the Dwelling House Company.

The first bungalow style house in the district is number 175 Wachusett Street completed on June 18, 1907. It was designed by C. L. Wetmore. It has twin oversized pedimented shed dormers on a sloping roof. The next house in this style didn’t get completed 17 years later. This is number 259 Wachusett Street, a classic bungalow-style house which Dorr, Harlow and Kimball designed for the Dwelling House Company. The building permit was issued on April 23, 1924. This style, however attractive, did not fit in with the Colonial-Revival pattern of the community and only one other bungalow-style house was built, at 20 Bourne Street. The house was completed on March 26, 1932. Walter Campbell was the architect.

In 1932 and 1933, in the very last days of the Boston Dwelling House Company experiment, Albin Brodin designed three houses for Olva Auclair, 50 Northbourne Road (permit issued on November 29, 1932) and 42 and 46 Bourne Street (permits dated Sept. 8, 1933 and November 1, 1933). These were each designed with steeply-pitched roofs in what can be called Forest Hills Gothic. Number 50 Northbourne is the finest example of the style of which Brodin only designed these three in Woodbourne. Number 50 takes advantage of its slight elevation in the road with full-blown Gothic roof lines on front and south side elevations.

 

 
Two views of 50 Northbourne, Tudor Revival style, built in 1932.

 

IV.

In 1924, three neighborhood landmarks were completed. The first was a school, the Edwin P. Seaver School at 35 Eldridge Street. The City of Boston bought several parcels of land totaling a little over 2.5 acres from Boston Dwelling House and another private owner between Eldridge and Northbourne. The City leveled the lot by cutting into the slope along Northbourne below which it built a concrete retaining wall. Blackall, Clapp and Whittemore were the designers. In 1930, John F. Cullen either remodeled or completely redesigned the school in the Georgian Revival style on site today. The main building was completed in October, 1930; the two wings were added a year later. The school was named for Edwin P. Seaver (1835-1917) who was appointed headmaster of English High School in 1874 before serving as Superintendent of the Boston Public Schools for 24 years — 1880 until 1904.

Due to declining enrollment, in 1981 the Seaver was closed and declared surplus property. The Finch/Abbey Group, developers, converted it into 18 condominiums in 1983. When it opened in 1984, the average unit sold for $50,000. (Finch/Abbey developed 5 schools for which they paid a total of $310,000, or an average of $62,000 a school.)

The other public investment was the Parkman Playground on Wachusett Street. On September 4, 1924, the Boston Parks Department paid $12,000 for 2 acres of land at the crest of the street. Once owned by Forest Hills Cemetery, the City bought the land from the Franciscan Monastery of St. Clare (Suffolk: Book 4612, p. 443). Preliminary work began that fall to grade the land into a level playing field. By the end of 1925, one baseball field, a skating pond, shelter and flagpole were built at a cost of $13,012. Skating began in December of 1926.

The third landmark was St. Andrew the Apostle Church. It was dedicated with a Low Mass on May 11, 1924, Mother’s Day, by His Eminence William Cardinal O’Connell, one of the former Directors of the Boston Dwelling House Company.

The Catholic Church has had a presence in the community since the Minot family built their summer houses. The first Catholic Church in Roxbury was St. Joseph’s Church dedicated on December 6, 1846. The parish included all of Roxbury, Dorchester, Brookline, Hyde Park, Dedham and Norwood. Reverend Patrick O’Bierne was the founder of the parish and he served it for the next 40 years. On May 9, 1849, Rev. O’Bierne bought a triangular parcel of land formerly owned by the Weld family just outside Toll Gate for the parish cemetery. The land cost $4,400 (including a $2,615 mortgage. Norfolk: Book 186, p. 310.). The cemetery was built on what was then known as Walk Hill Street, which became Hyde Park Avenue in 1869. The first internment was in 1854. The last internment was on June 15, 1897. It became the property of the Archdiocese in 1872, shortly before St. Thomas Church was dedicated on August 17, 1873. St. Thomas Parish included the Forest Hills district. In 1911, the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad proposed to take the cemetery for right-of-way expansion. At the request of the corporation, the Archdiocese investigated the history of the tiny cemetery. At that time it was in decrepit condition, with no parish claiming any responsibility for it. The Archdiocese found there were 300 headstones, of which only about 200 were legible. Apparently because the next-of-kin could not be located to authorize rebuttal of the graves, the railroad dropped its plan to take Toll Gate Cemetery.

St. Andrew’s Church was created out of the parish of St. Thomas on August 11, 1918 where the new parish line was established:

east by Forest Hills Cemetery and Walk Hill Street;
south by Neponset Avenue and Mt. Hope Cemetery;
west by the railroad tracks, South St., Whipple Avenue and the Arboretum;
north by Morton Street.

On March 31, 1916, The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston bought a 1 ¼-acre parcel at the corner of Walk Hill and Wachusett known as Clark’s Dairy Farm, from the heirs of Nicholas Summers. (Suffolk: Book 3946, p. 252). Nicholas and Sarah Summers bought the land from Joseph M. [Minot?] Weld on June 15, 1847. Joseph Minot owned all the land east of Toll Gate up to the edge of Forest Hills Cemetery, including present-day Tower and Walk Hill Streets. Until money could be raised for the new church, mass was held at Minton Hall in Forest Hills Square by the first pastor, Rev. William J. Casey. The first rectory was at 27A Asticou Road and later 76 Hyde Park Avenue. Father Casey proposed three names for the new church to Cardinal O’Connell: St. Henry, St. Catherine and St. Andrew (in that order; letter dated Sept. 4, 1918, Archdiocese Archives). The architect of St. Andrew the Apostle Church (named so as not to confuse it with St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Egleston Square), was Richard Shaw,and his plans and cost estimates were submitted to the Archdiocese Building Commission in January, 1921. Final approval came on August 4, 1921 with an estimated cost of $65,000 for a stone church designed in the English Gothic style with a corner tower. It was decided at the same time that rather than build a new rectory, the old Summers house, built by Nicholas Summers about 1873, would be moved to a different location on the same site. Vandals had stripped the house of plumbing, doors, shelves and railings, and the windows were broken, but it was far cheaper to move the house than build a new one. The building permit to set the house on a new rubble-stone foundation was issued on Sept. 20, 1921. Once that was accomplished the new church could get underway, because its foundation is located where the house stood. A strike of stone cutters in Sept., 1922 delayed the finishing of the altar as well as the cornerstone ceremony (which apparently never happened).

The architect of St. Andrews Church was also the original architect for the West Roxbury Courthouse. Richard Shaw presented the keys to the new courthouse to Mayor James M. Curley in June, 1923 (Herald, June 3, 1923). The courthouse is in Georgian Revival style in tan Roman brick. At St. Andrews he used the English Gothic style with a broad flat front with low relief decoration facing Walk Hill Street. Shaw used small, evenly-cut, multi-colored granite which created a mosaic on the building facades. Its most unique feature was the tower set into the corner of the sanctuary and the chapel. The St. Mary’s Chapel was completed in the base of the tower in 1928 together with the interior of the church. The church suffered from poor stone workmanship from its earliest days and this contributed to the weakening of the tower and spire. They were removed in the summer of 1978 (building permit issued June 22, 1978).

A second lot of land was acquired opposite the church for a community building. This was erected as an undistinguished prefabricated structure of one story by Brooks, Skinner and Co., which was responsible for many garages added to houses in Woodbourne. The community building was completed on May 7, 1924 and used as a Sunday School. It was enlarged in 1931.

The Archives of the Archdiocese has a set of letters and other documents about St. Andrew’s Church. In one folder is the Parish Reunion Book of April 26, 1954 in which there is a beautiful portrait of Woodbourne at the time the church was first established: “It was an area graced with forest and hills and stately homesteads… Older folks among us may recall the gracious dwelling in the Bourne woods east of Bourne Street and Northbourne Road as that of Curtis Guild, former governor of Massachusetts, and on the summit of the opposite hill where Northbourne Road is now the estates of the Minot families and nearby the sanitarium of Dr. Stedman. Our organist, Mrs. Michael T. Gainey, lives in the oldest house in the parish, a house which is over 100 years old, having been the home of Richard Olney, once Secretary of State under President Cleveland… some of our older parishioners remember the parties held on the grounds. There are those who … remember wading in Stony Brook, which was a clear sparkling stream meandering through the section. There are those who speak of the fountain in Forest Hills Square when there was no elevated and the Toll Gate Inn Building was originally the stage coach and railroad station and there was as board walk along Hyde Park Avenue.”

A school was contemplated by the second parish priest, Rev. Patrick Durcan, in 1937. When the small filling station built in 1923 at the corner of Hyde Park Avenue and Walk Hill Street became available, Monsignor Phelan, the Archdiocese Chancellor wrote to Rev. Durcan to ask if it could be acquired by St. Andrew’s. In his reply of August 9, 1937, Father Durcan wrote, “It is too far from the church [and] is useless to us as church property. The only interest we might have is that these lots not be bought by Jews” (Letters, St. Andrews Church, Archdiocese Archives). The good father soon rested easy. The Shell Oil Company bought the parcel and erected a larger gas station and repair garage in 1940 (permit June 10, 1940). The gas station became Doughboy Donuts about 1980, and is now Dunkin Donuts.

On October 27, 1937, Father Durcan submitted plans for the new school designed by Richard Shaw and estimated to cost $80,000. Construction was delayed until funds were in hand. The building permit for a 12-room school was issued on August 13, 1941. The site chosen was on Wachusett Street against the church. Some Roxbury conglomerate ledge had to be blasted for the foundation, which no doubt weakened the tower a little more. St. Andrew’s School officially opened on September 10, 1942 with 43 children. Richard Shaw also planned and executed the frescoes behind the altar of the church in 1937-1938, which Father Durcan paid for himself.

St. Andrew’s rectory was the first of three homes moved from another location into the district. The second was number 235 Wachusett Street. This was a triple-decker built before 1914 at number 135 Hyde park Avenue. It was moved to make way for the Boston Elevated Carbarns. It was set on a new foundation on April 15, 1922, right at the property line of the Boston Dwelling House Company. The only other triple-decker in the district is number 211 Wachusett Street, built in 1923. Henry Bradley was the architect. The tree house lots which separate the two houses have never been built on in Roxbury history. The third house is number 121 Walk Hill Street. This was moved from number 205 Walk Hill Street to make way for the expansion of St. Michael’s Cemetery. The house was built about 1873, and was set on its new foundation on February 25, 1939.

The Boston North End Mission Home property was purchased by John S. Goodway on August 8, 1923 for $22, 500 (Suffolk: Book 4494, p. 629). After building a road through the site which he named for himself, Goodway built 26 houses between 1923 and 1928, about 5 a year, of mostly one-family houses in the Colonial Revival style. Mr. Goodway kept the old North End Mission Home building and about an acre of land for himself. Eight houses are two-family houses, five of which are on Goodway Road. The earliest house is number 99 Florian, built in 1923. It is a wood and stucco house which matched the opposite cottages built a decade earlier. A duplicate of number 39 Southbourne, it was designed by Frederick M. Russell and built by Guisseppe Madonia of East Boston (Russell and Madonia would collaborate on several Goodway houses, such as number 43 Southbourne built in 1923). In 1924, Russell designed and Madonia built number 33 Southbourne Road in the Colonial Revival saltbox style.


Smaller cluster housing set on common parkland. 78 Southbourne Rd. Built in 1914.

Number 35 Southbourne Road was built in 1924 by Goodway, presumably for the Boston North End Mission. The house was designed by Russell as a Boarding House for Infants. Goodway is listed as owner and architect on the permit.

Number 39 and number 85 Southbourne Road are the earliest houses in the district designed and built by Neal de Young, another architect who worked on several Goodway houses. Number 85 Southbourne, it will be remembered, was built at the original entrance to the North End Mission.

Boston Dwelling House built the first two-family home in the district in 1925; Goodway built the next 8, but only one of his architects made an effort to disguise it as a single-family house.

Number 3-5 Goodway (Albin Brodin, architect, 1927, single entrance)

Number 7- 9 ” (Neal de Young, 1926)

Number 11 ” (Frank Casey, 1927)

Number 15 ” (Frank Casey, 1927)

Number 17 ” (Neal de Young, 1926).

Numbers 87, 91 and 95 Bourne Street were each designed by Weinbaum and Wexler in 1927 for Matthew Mc Issac on land he bought from Goodway. They were completed between Jan. and May, 1928.

The North End Mission Home was known for many years as the Goodway Mansion. The house and land were sold by the estate of Mrs. Elizabeth Goodway to John F. Gately on July 12, 1963 (Suffolk: Book 7760, p. 444). Local legend has it that the old house burned. Gately built five single-family houses and one duplex on the lot in 1964. Number 30 and 34 Goodway Road were completed on September 3, 1964. Each cost $8000 to construct.

VI.

The Boston Dwelling House Company changed its marketing strategy after 1929 when it sold large blocks of land to two developer contractors. The first was Martin J. Herbert. The second was James C. Martin who would complete the development of Woodbourne.

Martin J. Herbert, like John Goodway, developed a street and named it after himself by buying up two parcels of land between Eldridge and Northbourne. He began by building the first six houses on Eastland Street between 1931 and 1933, numbers 5, 8, 9, 12, and 16 all designed by Albin Brodin. Number 15 Eastland was completed on August 16, 1934; number 9 and number 16 Eastland were completed on Jan., 1933.

Martin Herbert built 5 homes on Herbertson Road all in 1930. The first house on the road is the corner two-family at number 19-21 Eldridge Street, completed in 1928. Harold Duffie was the architect for Denis O’ Connell, the owner. Herbert completed the block using three architects, William Campbell, Martin Boyle and a third identified on the building permits only as Mr. Devine. The largest house is number 12, designed by Campbell with its overlapping gambrel roof. Numbers 1, 11 and 21 were each two-family houses. Number 11, which was listed as Herbert’s address, was designed by Mr. Devine and completed on July 26, 1930, a few months after number 7. Martin Boyle designed number 7.

Herbert is the first developer in the Boston Dwelling House Company property to plan his homes for the automobile age with built-in garages. The earliest documented houses in the district designed with built-in garages are numbers 22 and 26 Eldridge Road. Number 26 was designed by Max Kalman and completed on September 29, 1928. It is a two-family house set on a high robust foundation of red granite and brick. Many houses in Woodbourne had garages built at or shortly after construction of the main house in the second phase after 1922, but it was done almost as an afterthought and none has any detail to match the house. Only in Herbert’s small subdivision were the house and the garage planned and built as a unit. Numbers 9, 11, 12 and 15 each have garages below the first floor, as does number 50 Norhbourne. All take advantage of the slope of the land by having the garage below the grade of the street.

An interesting change in use occurred in 1938, when John S. Goodway took a garage built in 1930 by Alexander Mc Donald at number one Meyer Street, directly below number 17 Goodway, and hired Albin Brodin to convert it into a three room house. The new house was completed on December 31, 1938.

Topography played a significant part in the development of Northbourne Road. The northerly slope of Northbourne is steep and some of the houses — particularly numbers 43 and 47 — are nestled into the hill like ski lodges. All of the ten house built on Northbourne have garages. Some of the garages are built into the slope of the hill below the house. The ten houses were built between 1929 and 1941 by different developers and architects. Each house, however, was designed with a garage built into the structure. Herbertson and Northbourne Roads were the first streets in Woodbourne to acknowledge the fact of the automobile as part of middle class housing.

Northbourne is also the first street to see the rise of that most famous of post-war domestic houses, the Cape Cod. Part of the Colonial Revival style, the Cape Cod style was very adaptable to location and budget. Almost all the houses on Northbourne are a derivation of the Cape Cod house. Numbers 55 and 29 are the two oldest houses, each built in 1929. Neal de Young was the architect and H. C. Cogell (of 124 Bourne Street) was the developer of both houses. Albin Bodin designed number 64 in 1931 to fit on the small lot left over from the acquisition for school property. Number 47 is the most interesting on the street because of the way it is perched on the hillside — built right into it actually — with its garage below it at the street level. This is a Cape Cod style house designed by George Couttes for Josephine Rockwood who lived at 18 Goodway Street. The house was completed on February 18, 1935. Number 43, also built by Josephine Rockwood, is set on a high stone foundation with the garage built under the first floor. This house, together with number 51, was designed and built by James C. Martin, a developer/ architect/ contractor who would complete what the Boston Dwelling House Company began in 1911. Number 43 was built in 1937, number 51 in 1938.

VII.

The Great Depression all but stopped most home buying and construction. In 1934, the City of Boston took 77 house lots from the Boston Dwelling House Company for back taxes. (See attachments to Certificate of Title # 5085, Feb. 21, 1913. Suffolk Registry Book 21, p. 85). Almost all of these lots were on Eastland, Wayburn and Woodbourne Road with a few others scattered on Walk Hill Street. Most of these lots would be built on in the next fifteen years by the architect/contractor James C. Martin. On June 22, 1934, Martin bought the Woodbourne Clubhouse and its half acre lot containing the tennis courts. He took out a mortgage for $3,600 on the property. He altered the clubhouse into a single-family house and added a garage in the basement below the grade of the street. The building permit was issued on April 25, 1935. Martin’s first project was a house he designed and built next door at number 76 Bourne Street; the permit was issued on June 14, 1935. It has a very steep, narrow gable with an asymmetrical chimney. The house is on the edge of an incline and Martin used this slope to create a driveway to an understory garage. The house was sold on April 22, 1936. Martin then built number 66 Bourne Street which was completed on October 19, 1936. It was purchased on January 20,1937 with a $5,300 mortgage.

Martin built on whatever scrap of land he could buy up. In 1937, he bought a part of the common green of Robert Anderson Pope’s plan for the Southbourne Road cluster houses, a wedge of land between number 18 and number 30. Martin had the property lines altered and turned the common service drive built in 1912 to the brick row houses into a driveway to a small house he designed, numbered 24 Southbourne Road. There are unverified stories that other houses were planned for the common greens along Southbourne Road, but these were apparently resisted by abuttors.

At the same time, Martin began to buy up house lots in bulk: 19 lots were purchased on August 9, 1937, mostly on Woodbourne and upper Eastland Street and two lots on Walk Hill Street (numbers 115 and 119). Thirteen more lots were bought on the same streets on Jan. 3, 1942. Some of those lots he built on sooner than others, depending upon a willing buyer. He completed number 30 Eastland in June 30, 1938. He acquired the lot of 110 Bourne Street in 1937, but did not complete the house until Sept. 6, 1942. The lots for numbers 115 and 119 Walk Hill Street, purchased in 1937, were also not built on until 1942. Number 8 Eastland was not completed until 1947. Martin designed and built all of them.

The remainder of the Boston Dwelling House Company subdivision of the Woodbourne estate of the Minot family was not fully completed until 1964, a full half-century after the noble experiment was begun. By then Woodbourne was just a typical post-war subdivision unremarkable from all the rest going up on vacant tracts in West Roxbury, Roslindale and Mattapan for men and women in the war industries, and then for returning servicemen and their new families. New ranch and Cape Cod houses were a far cry from the triple-decker flat on Weld Hill Street, and in the post-war economy, the working man could afford to buy his own house. Only the curving streets laid out by the visionary Robert Anderson Pope remained of the original plan for Woodbourne. Increased automobile use caused the City to widen Southbourne Road in 1943, which resulted in the narrow sidwalks along the north side of the street. Wachusett Street was rebuilt to City standards in 1938 from Eldridge to Southbourne. The intersection of Bournedale, Northbourne and Bourne has been repeatedly widened at the expense of property owners so that it resembles the central square proposed for the intersection by the Olmsted firm.

What is the meaning of Woodbourne today? Woodbourne was a 20^th-century transition development in three ways. First, a transition in domestic housing styles from the eclecticism of the late 19^th-century, seen so clearly on Patten Street to the truly New England-style house developed after 1922: The Colonial Revival housing style had deep roots set in the 17^th and 18^th century of the region. The houses of Woodbourne built after 1922 evoked a familiar feeling to the community, especially the Cape Cod houses on Woodbourne, Waybourne and lower Eastland Streets.

Second, the transition in housing styles that adapted to the automobile: Upper Wachusett Street is a street built before the automobile; so is Southbourne Road. The cluster group of housing built in Woodbourne Saltbox style on Bourne Street made no concession to the automobile, even though land was available. Northbourne and Eastland were built in styles which acknowledged and planned for the automobile.

Third, the transition in the design of private spaces: Woodbourne was originally designed as cluster housing set amidst green commons. The second phase of development discarded that plan, but it can be argued that Woodbourne itself, especially south of Eldridge Street, is one huge cluster housing. It is not a sprawling subdivision. It has boundaries and entrances. Its boundaries are Walk Hill Street and the tree line of Forest Hills cemetery on the north, St. Michael’s Cemetery on the east and Hyde Park Avenue on the west side. Walk Hill Street is the approach drive and Bourne Street is the gate on the north. Northbourne and Southbourne Roads are the entrances off Hyde Park Avenue, as Robert Anderson Pope planned them to be.

The one failure was the apartment house complex on Hyde Park Avenue, carefully designed by Kilham and Hopkins as a new form of the triple decker by the Boston Dwellinghouse philanthropists. BDH Co managed the apartment complex until 1924, when it changed into a real estate venture and sold the buildings. Thereafter the apartments had an unhappy life. They changed owners several times, were constantly in arrears for non payment of water and coal bills, and were finally taken by the City of Boston in 1951. A new private company refinanced the apartments in 1954 with a ten-year, $162,000 mortgage. A new owner took possession in 1971, but the City of Boston foreclosed on the buildings for non-payment of taxes in 1976. By then, the buildings were in such disrepair, that the City condemned them all, boarded them up and razed them 1978. In that year a new form of philanthropist took possession of the land, the Greater Boston Community Development Corporation. Acting through its subsidiary, Woodbourne Community Housing Corporation, it took title to the property on September 25, 1978. On September 21, 1978 it secured a mortgage and security agreement with the Department of Housing and Urban Development for $2. 9 million for a complex of high- and low-rise apartments for senior citizens. The building permit was issued on September 19, 1978 for a 4-story, 67-unit apartment block along the length of Hyde Park Avenue from Northbourne to Southbourne Roads; on July 11,1978 permits were issued for two, 2-story buildings of 4 apartments each on the corner lots of Southbourne and Northbourne Roads and Hyde Park Avenue. Chia-Ming Sze was the architect. Now twenty years old, the elderly housing complex is well managed and the buildings are in good condition. As architecture, they are homely. The main building is a huge, plain brick box that acts as a wall shielding Hyde Park Avenue from the tidy neighborhood behind it. Good housing and good architecture did not succeed in this new philanthropic venture.

Woodbourne was the last of a long and distinguished line of philanthropic housing which grew out of the tenement house reform movement of the 1850’s in Boston. It was an experiment of a vision to provide affordable housing for the workingman, but like its predecessors it failed because the business/philanthropist investors could not comprehend that wages never kept up with prices. The promise of Woodbourne was illusive to the workingman on the Boston Elevated or on the shop floor of Sturtevant Blower Works.

But Woodbourne was unique in three ways. It was part of the nationwide Progressive Era for a more ordered and just society. It was the most ambitious of its Boston predecessors because it was part of a pioneering effort of a large group of Boston business leaders to transform the way Boston was governed, planned and developed, known as “Boston 1915,” largely the vision of Edward Filene, the driving force behind the Boston Dwelling House Company. Although it lasted only from 1909 to 1913, “Boston 1915” ushered Boston into the 20^th century and planted the seeds of the strong-mayor form of government and the city planning agency. (See Appendix I for a study of “Boston 1915” and its relationship to Woodbourne.)

Woodbourne was unique in that its architecture and landscaping were given extraordinary thought; both were an integral part of providing affordable model homes. It was the type of planned community which Boston 1915 wanted to see become part of the 20^th-century city. Like all other housing reformers beginning with the Model Lodging House Association incorporated in 1853, Boston Dwelling House Company believed that good housing made good citizens; homeownership also made good Americans, especially the foreign born who could not be assimilated fast enough for the leaders of Boston 1915. But whereas the other reform-housing ventures depended on careful screening of tenants and homeowners and a system of (mainly) women managers, who kept a sharp eye on household morals while collecting the rent or mortgage payment, Boston Dwellinghouse Company believed that a well-designed home set around beautiful parkland and carefully landscaped grounds would be the great civilizing force. Indeed, it is the architecture and the landscaping which makes Woodbourne so special even today. Few people know about or visit the Sunnyside and Roundhill houses, much less Waterlow Street.

Finally Woodbourne is unique because it was the last experiment in private philanthropic housing in Boston. Thereafter housing which was affordable to the workingman and the impoverished would be built by government.

In the words of Eugenie Birch and Deborah Gardner, “Between the Civil War and World War One, business philanthropists undoubtedly fostered substantial improvements in low cost housing through new financial arrangements, architectural forms and management systems, all of which prepared the way for the 20^th century housing movement. … [As a result of] the failure to convince a critical mass of investors to erect the immense number of decent dwellings needed by the burgeoning urban population, the 20^th century housing movement would become wholly a creature of government.”

Fifteen years after the Boston Dwellinghouse Company shifted from philanthropic housing to a simple real estate venture in 1922, the Wagner-Steagall Public Housing Act of 1937 was signed by President Franklin Roosevelt. Decent affordable housing was now the policy of the United States Government.

There were four steps towards making that public policy; Walter H. Kilham, principle architect of the Woodbourne philanthropic housing project, would play a major role in the first two steps:

• The Massachusetts Homestead Commission of 1915.
• Emergency Government Housing for defense workers of 1918.
• The Federal Home Loan Bank Act of 1932.
• The Emergency Public Works Program Housing Division of 1933.

The Massachusetts Homestead Act of 1915 was the first public housing program in the United States. Housing reformers had originally looked to government to regulate the worst aspects of private sector housing. The earliest regulatory law was the 1868 Tenement House Act. This set height limitations and minimum dimensions for house-lot size, yards and interior courts.

The introduction of building classes was established in 1892. This legislation created categories of buildings according to their degree of fireproofing. Each class carried its own set of regulations. First Class — fireproofing throughout, steel, concrete or masonry with plaster walls and ceilings. Second Class — wood frame with exterior and party walls of masonry. Third class — wood construction.

The most symbolic power of direct government action which would extend far into the 20^th century was slum clearance. In 1897, the Board of Health of the City of Boston was authorized to take and demolish — with due compensation — unfit tenement buildings. “Slum clearance was a significant step away from the 19^th-century aversion to violating property rights,” states Culver. By the 1890s, there was no longer any serious debate over government’s right to control housing conditions; the question was “how far has the state the right to interfere?”

Yet as Christine Cousineau points out in Tenement House Reform in Boston, government regulations and slum clearance did not create better housing for the low-income wage earner. The lack of housing alternatives was a strong impediment to a more forceful slum clearance program, and the Board of Health was reluctant to destroy poor peoples’ homes. Not only that, but housing reform through regulation increased the cost of new housing by as much as 15 percent. In response to mounting criticism of the decrease of low-cost housing, some building codes were dropped in 1906 and 1907. One chief critic of regulations was none other than Robert Treat Paine Jr.

The long-standing impulse of housing reformers to build workingmen’s homes in the suburbs was joined at the beginning of the 20^th century by the nascent city planning movement which advocated for public policies that would relieve the overcrowding of central cities. Ebenezer Howard, one of the prime movers of the garden city movement and a major influence on the planning of Woodbourne, wrote an influential tract in 1902 called Cities of Tomorrow. In it he called for planned communities of small houses and gardens built around the core city. This is exactly what was planned and first built at Woodbourne.

The main problem remained — as it did at Waterlow Street — that the gap between workers’ wages and the downpayment and monthly mortgage was insurmountable for the average workingman to afford to buy in these suburban garden villages. In 1908 a group of reformers began to push for the first time for direct government construction of housing. The Housing Committee of Boston 1915 and the Boston Chamber of Commerce were unanimous in pressing for legislation for the planned decentralization of the metropolitan area. The result was the Massachusetts Homestead Commission of 1911. In 1912, it reported out a bill which authorized the Commonwealth to purchase, lay out and build suburban houses for workingmen (MGL Chap. 595/Act of 1913). In 1915, the Homestead Amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution passed both houses of the legislature and was ratified overwhelmingly in a public referendum: “The General Court shall have the power to authorize cities and towns to take land and to hold and improve, subdivide and build upon and sell, for purposes of relieving congestion of population and providing homes for citizens.” In the words of scholar Christine Cousineau, this was America’s first public housing program.

The Homestead Commission began its first housing project in Lowell, Massachusetts, in October of 1917. Kilham and Hopkins were the architects. The plan was to build 50 houses on 7 acres for mill workers. Twelve houses were built in the first year and all were promptly sold. Walter H. Kilham described the Commission’s mandate in the March, 1918 Journal of the American Institute of Architects, and outlined the standards used in designing the houses. Elevations and floor plans of the four building types proposed were published. “In the Homestead Commission’s project,” he concluded, “there is no trace of paternalism or charity. The object of the Commission [has been] to show that good houses can be supplied and supplied within reach of the wage earner. The Commission has hoped that when the results of the experiment were seen, private capital would be reassured and would enter the field of low cost housing development.”

World War I halted further construction, however, and the remaining land was turned into Victory Gardens. Pressure from the real estate and construction businesses worked against the Commission from the start, and these antagonists increased their opposition when construction halted. Their lobbying succeeded: the Legislature refused to appropriate funds the next year and in 1919 the Homestead Commission was buried within the new Department of Public Works. The housing and planning sections of the Commission did not survive the reorganization.

“With Calvin Coolidge as Governor,” concludes Cousineau, “State involvement in housing ended early and thoroughly. The very idea of public initiative was submerged in the postwar economic climate of a return to laissez faire private enterprise.”

It was also in that same climate that the philanthropic housing impulse of the Boston Dwellinghouse Company surrendered to private enterprise at Woodbourne.

EMERGENCY GOVERNMENT HOUSING FOR DEFENSE WORKERS: THE UNITED STATES HOUSING CORPORATION, 1918-1919.
Overcrowding of the central city was the main force behind the establishment of the first public housing legislation in the nation. The First World War was the main force behind the first public housing program built entirely by the federal government.

With the entry of the United States in the war against Germany in 1917, munitions plants, steel mills and shipyards across the country greatly increased production, which required the hiring of tens of thousands of new skilled and unskilled workers. Thousands of these workers required housing which the private real estate market could not provide.

Over the summer of 1917, the housing shortage became a concern to the federal government because the inadequate supply of housing was making it difficult for defense plants to find and keep workers. Consequently, the production of warships, heavy equipment and munitions were in danger of falling below the demands of the battlefield. Housing became a war emergency, and Congress created two entities early in 1918 to meet the need for housing of defense workers: the Emergency Fleet Corporation (United States Shipping Board) was established in March,1918 with an appropriation of $95 million, and the United States Housing Corporation (Department of Labor) was established in June of 1918 with an appropriation of $60 million. This was increased to $100 million in July.

Twenty-one corporation towns from Maine to Vancouver were built by the Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC). The first and largest was Yorkship Village at Camden, New Jersey. Over 2000 houses were built on 225 acres for the New York Shipbuilding Company. The first 900 were completed by June of 1918. In April of 1918, Kilham and Hopkins — the architects of Woodbourne — were appointed to design and plan a community for the Atlantic Shipbuilding Corporation in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Named Atlantic Heights, 300 houses were built over 30 acres by October, 1918 (the architects completed the house plans in three weeks). The September 1918 issue of The Journal of the AIA featured a description of this development.

Forty-four townships across the country were built by the United States Housing Corporation. The first one was at Bridgeport, Connecticut where 5 separate developments were designed by R. Clipston Sturgis of Boston, beginning in May of 1918 (described in Architectural Record, February, 1919).

At Quincy, Mass., three developments were built to serve the massive Fore River Shipbuilding Company, then a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel Corporation. James E. Mclaughlin designed a total of 256 mostly wooden houses on three widely-separated tracts. (A lengthy description with plans was published in the Architectural Record of March, 1919.)

Overnight, in the words of C. Stanley Taylor in American Architect (December, 1918), “the greatest single owner of workingmen’s houses in America was the United States government.” This was housing on a massive scale never before seen in the United States, and it was carefully watched by housing reformers and architects alike.

Lawrence Veiller, Secretary of the National Housing Association and one of the country’s foremost authorities on tenement house reform, wrote in the April,1918 issue of Architectural Record that “one of the many unexpected by products of the war has been the inauguration of the policy of building workingmen’s dwellings by the federal government. … It has seemed to many that building of houses for workingmen by the federal government was an undue interference with the rights of the individual, and those of a conservative mind have feared greatly the inauguration of such a policy. … But war changes everything. The exigencies of war have forced the federal government to take up the building of houses…”

(The congressional debate which established the US Housing Corporation and the Emergency Fleet Corporation did turn hysterical at times. Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico declared that public housing was an “insidious concerted effort to overthrow the entire government of the United States.” Fall became Secretary of the Interior under President Warren Harding. He was the first sitting cabinet officer in American history to go to prison.)

Most importantly, the federal government recognized that the shortage of housing across the country was a national problem. In June of 1919, the United States Housing Corporation published — in response to hostile Congressional inquiries on its activities — a detailed two-volume Report on its work. In the Introduction of Volume II , the Report stated:

“The shortage of housing which the United States Housing Corporation was created to meet as a wartime emergency was not a new thing. … The war simply aggravated a widespread, chronic trouble of peacetime which the country must now face. … Capital for some years has been more and more inclined to seek other channels of investment other than housing. The individual home builder and large operator alike have been finding it progressively more difficult to obtain mortgage loans on favorable terms…”

The Report listed three major reasons for the inadequate supply of housing:

1. “Modern houses cost much more than houses did formerly. Very recently, all our expensive sanitary, modern plumbing, water supply and heating have come to be considered essentials to an ordinary house.”
2. The rising cost of lumber.
3. The rising cost of wages in the building trades.

“When the enormous war manufacturing expansion began and the great additional supply of labor had to be concentrated in the various towns where United States contracts were placed, the housing difficulties were at once brought to a head.”

On March 17, 1918, the US Housing Corporation approved the “Standards for Permanent Industrial Housing” drawn up by a 25-person committee, chaired by Lawrence Veiller, of architects, landscape architects and town planners. Walter H. Kilham was a member of the committee. These standards were published in full in the April, 1918 issue of Architectural Record, edited and with commentary by Veiller. These standards were based on two main principles:

1. The houses must be reasonably attractive and provide the essentials of light, air, warmth and convenience of living.

2. The houses must be built substantially and well.

The standards provided for nine different types of building:

Type 1. Single-family house
Type 2. Two-family house
Type 3. Single-family house with rooms for lodgers
Type 4. Lodging house for men
Type 5. Hotel for men.
Type 6. Lodging house for women
Type 7. Hotel for women
Type 8. Tenement house
Type 9. Boarding house.

Each house type had its own specific standard, but all nine types had to conform to 18 general provisions, relating to such details such as closets, cooking areas, furniture space, lighting, building materials, plumbing, rear entrances, windows and gardens. Many of these standards now legitimized within a federal housing policy were objectives long advocated by housing reformers since before the Civil War:

1. First and foremost, “tenement houses are considered undesirable and will be accepted only in cities where single and two family houses cannot be economically built because of the high cost of land.”
2. Requirements for light and cross ventilation.
3. A minimum of 20 feet between buildings.
4. Requirements for adequate back yard space: a minimum of 50 feet between buildings in the back with at least a 20 foot yard for each house.
5. Absolute prohibition of living spaces in cellars.

Veiller wrote that the Housing Corporation would have “a potent influence upon the housing of the workingman in this country for many years to come. The Housing Standards would have a wider significance beyond the war,” he wrote, “marking the standards which should be attained in the construction of workingmen’s dwellings.”

One standard would have a significant impact on all future housing and that was the organization of interior spaces for specific purposes. Bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms were designed specifically for those uses, a feature unknown in worker’s housing before 1918.

The first public housing developments in Massachusetts were three separate tracts built by the United States Housing Corporation at Quincy to serve skilled and unskilled workers employed at the massive Fore River Shipyard. A 12-acre tract of 21 temporary barracks was also built for single men hired as laborers; these were torn down after the war. The three tracts of single- and double-family houses not only still stand, but are thriving middle class neighborhoods that have been completely integrated into the weave of the housing built up around them after the end of World War One.

The largest is the Baker Yacht Basin tract of 22 acres on which 218 detached, 2-flat houses were built and 18 duplex houses for a total of 218 families. It was planned for unskilled men with families and the density here is greater than at the other two smaller developments. Baker Yacht Basin faces the bay and the houses are laid out in a grid. One street of houses overlooks a pretty bayside park. A second small park is on the Washington Street side of the development directly opposite the shipyard.

The Arnold Street development by contrast is built on 18 acres and the lot sizes are much bigger. Some of the houses are built of brick and the others constructed of wood. The streets are curved to conform with the topography. Arnold Street resembles the Woodbourne subdivision in the curving streets, large lots and the use of Colonial Revival housing styles.

Both developments are united in the use of the Colonial Revival style, but in particular at Arnold Street; here the gambrel roof, salt box and Cape Cod styles are used with more accuracy.

In the words of architectural historian William B. Rhoads, Lawrence Veiller “believed in the value of national architecture,” and he considered Colonial architecture distinctly American.” He was pleased when architects did not attempt to transplant English or French styles to American residential communities. Given that Veiller played a significant part in writing the Standards for Housing, it is not surprising that the Colonial Revival style was made federal policy too. The Architectural Review of January, 1919. noted that “the simplicity of line and variety in the styles of roofs and porches have been the keynote of the designs…modeled very appropriately after those fascinating relics of the Old Colony which one sees in the villages of Norfolk county. …Every effort will be made to make these houses as sound and as enduring as their venerable prototypes.”

The architect of the Quincy houses, James McLaughlin, used the shed roof of the 17^th-century farmhouse as a device to carry the stairs to the second floor apartment in some of the houses he designed for the Baker Basin tract. The gambrel roof and the Cape Cod were carefully reproduced at Arnold Street.

The abrupt end of hostilities in late 1919 found many US Housing Corporation developments — like parts of the Quincy developments – incomplete, but they were finished and promptly sold at auction after the armistice was signed.

A walk around the Baker Yacht Basin and Arnold Street developments today — nearly 80 years after they were built — proves the accuracy of these lines, probably written by Walter H. Kilham. In an article on Atlantic Heights in Portsmouth, NH , published in the September, 1918 Journal of the American Institute of Architects, he wrote, “if there are doubters of the value of good houses they might inquire what will become of all the government built houses. …These houses are the only tangible permanent assets left from all the twenty billions expended in the War for Liberty. It is worth while to remember that no private capital would have had the courage to take the situation in hand with such foresight and forethought as the government has shown.” This was written by the same architect who designed the philanthropic housing development called Woodbourne only six years earlier.

THE FEDERAL HOME LOAN BANK ACT OF 1932
It took another emergency, the catastrophe of the Great Depression to force government again to take direct action in providing housing.

The recovery of the American economy in 1921 from the recession following the abrupt conclusion of World War I resulted in an explosion of domestic housing construction across the nation. Indeed, between 1922 and 1930, 87 houses were built at Woodbourne, an average of ten a year. In that period too, as has been discussed, Woodbourne reverted back to the usual house-building method of the small contractor, local architect and individual mortgage lender. The ending of the philanthropic housing experiment also ended the planned streetscapes of unified cluster housing that characterized both the Boston Dwellinghouse and The United States Housing Corporation developments. With the return of prosperity, the era of city planning in the construction of domestic housing came to an end.

Presiding over this prosperity and the lush housing market was Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. In 1921, he established a Division of Housing and Building within his agency to promote home construction and home ownership. It is ironic then, that as President, Hoover was faced with the double collapse of the housing market and the hopes of home ownership. After October, 1929, the question was not whether the federal government would become involved with housing but how (Gail Radford).

For Herbert Hoover, government’s response was to strengthen the private real estate and financial markets by supplying the capital necessary to provide mortgages to buyers and loans to builders. This recognized the problem faced by every philanthropic housing reform program since the Civil War: the lack of capital necessary to build housing and the savings needed by the buyer for the downpayment. Robert Treat Paine was a rare visionary when he advocated in 1881 for the creation of pools of capital available to the workingman. The Workingmen’s Loan Association was formed by Paine in 1887 to support his Workingmen’s Building Association.

In 1930, private philanthropy was exhausted, financial institutions were not lending and builders were not building; moreover, massive unemployment caused epidemic mortgage foreclosures and fewer and fewer home buyers. President Hoover’s first response to this situation was a job stimulation program to get more capital into the system so that mortgages could be paid and houses bought. He had long favored public works projects, and as President, he asked for and received Congressional authorization for two huge public works programs in the fall of 1930. (The second appropriation was for $150 million voted on in December of 1930.) These funds would put men back to work building roads, dams, harbors and public buildings. (The American Legion Highway, on the eastern edge of Woodbourne, was one of the earliest public works projects funded through the Hoover administration.)

The President’s second response was to encourage cooperation among the various actors in the business community. He believed in self regulation and from his days as Commerce Secretary convened numerous conferences to bring people together on issues for common action. He used that same method to combat the Depression. On October 4, 1931 the President convened a conference of economic leaders to urge upon them that they pool their resources and create a $500 million fund to halt the foreclosure of mortgages by life insurance companies. But private business was not anxious to use its own resources to resolve a national crisis and the response was poor.

Hoover tried again. On December 8, 1931 he invited 4000 people tp the President’s Conference on Home Building and Homeownership. In his opening remarks, the President urged the delegates to put their personal financial problems aside, and focus instead on the importance of preserving the private enterprise system of housing.

Secretary of the Interior Roy Lyman Wilber put it more bluntly afterwards: if private capital didn’t respond by building large-scale residential housing developments, “housing by public authority is inevitable.”

Hoover proposed something very new: a government lending agency that would supervise a system of banks and mortgage lenders. On July 22,1932, Congress passed by a narrow margin the Federal Home Loan Act which was designed to stimulate new construction as well as to reduce foreclosures. In the words of scholar Gail Radford, “It was the first permanent piece of federal housing legislation.” It was also something more: a Republican maneuver to stave off direct government construction of housing.

To shore up the weakening financial institutions, Hoover proposed, and Congress authorized, a gigantic lending machine called the Reconstruction Finance Agency (RFC) that put government revenues into banks and insurance companies. The RFC was authorized to borrow $2 billion and it quickly loaned out $1 billion to banks and insurance companies as well as farm support loans. In July of 1932, the Relief and Construction Act further empowered the RFC to provide loans to state and municipal governments for low rent housing and slum clearance.

The Republican leadership of the Hoover administration refused to consider any proposal to combat the Depression which would compete with or replace the free market system, especially in housing. But the Relief and Construction Act provision for slum clearance did just that: it created the first modern public housing development in the United States, Knickerbocker Village in Lower Manhattan, southwest of the Brooklyn Bridge. Knickerbocker was the first and only project financed by the RFC during the Hoover administration. The project was the first to combine slum clearance with the construction of housing specifically for low-income residents. It was completed in 1934. In density it was huge — 1,600 units on just 3 acres — but it remains a solid middle-class community to this day.

The Federal Loan Home Act — which is still in effect today — seems to have had an impact on Woodbourne. Between 1931 and 1933 ten new houses were built on scattered lots including 12, 42 and 46 Bourne Street, 50 Northbourne, and 12 Herbertson, as well as a clump of 5 houses built in 1933 on Eastland Street around the corner from number 12 Bourne Street.

The 1932 Home Loan Act was strengthened by Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 12, 1933 when he signed into law the Home Owners Refinancing Act, which created a federal corporation to underwrite home mortgages and advance cash for repairs. The first loan authorization was $2 billion. It not only saved homes, it was also a brilliant political move because it created solid middle-class support for the New Deal at the start of that amazing revolution in government intervention.

THE EMERGENCY PUBLIC WORKS HOUSING DIVISION OF 1933
The private housing market did not respond to the loan programs of the Hoover administration, and Franklin D. Roosevelt was confronted with galloping mortgage foreclosures, massive homelessness, as well as staggering unemployment, when he was sworn into office in March of 1933.

With the Roosevelt administration came the last step of government involvement in providing housing for the working man and the low-income family in the United States — housing built and managed by government authority.

In June of 1933, President Roosevelt signed into law the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Title II of the Act authorized a comprehensive program of public works including “construction and reconstruction of low cost housing and slum clearance.” Congress appropriated $3.3 billion for the NIRA. In July, Roosevelt appointed Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to direct Title II, named the Public Works Administration (PWA). Almost immediately, Ickes announced the creation of the Housing Division within the PWA. In its often tumultuous 4-year life, the Housing Division financed or directly built 58 housing developments across the nation. In the first year, the Housing Division financed housing developments with low-interest loans to limited dividend corporations. These corporations were very much like the Boston Dwellinghouse Company and the Boston Cooperative Building Company. One project tentatively approved in the late summer of 1933 was to the Neptune Gardens Corporation. Neptune Gardens was proposed as 700 units of housing on 44 acres of mudflats in East Boston, adjacent to Wood Island Park between Prescott Street and Neptune Road, including present-day Frankfort Street. As reported in the September ,1933 issue of Architectural Record, the development would be a mix of 2-story row houses, 2-family houses and 3-story apartments. The total cost was estimated to be $4 million, of which the Housing Division would advance a loan of $3.5 million. The developers selected as architects the firms of Blackall, Clapp and Whittemore; Clark, Sturgis Associates; and George Nelson Meserve. Although the Architectural Record printed a schematic plan of this ambitious housing development, it was never built. Today the site is entirely taken up by the North Entrance Complex of Logan Airport.

Too many limited-dividend developers failed and Ickes abandoned the program in February of 1934; thereafter the federal government would finance and build housing. During this highly-visible 3-year period, the Housing Division built 51 projects across the country and Puerto Rico. Only two were in Massachusetts: Old Harbor Village in South Boston and New Towne Court in East Cambridge.

Old Harbor Village — today called the Mary Ellen McCormack Development — was a $6.6 million housing program built on 26 acres of vacant land between Dorchester Avenue and Columbus Park. The land — some of it unfilled marshland — was acquired between September and October of 1935. It was a combination of 3-story apartment blocks and 2-story row houses and contained slightly over 1000 housing units.

New Towne Court was built on main Street near the Boston and Maine freight tracks just west of Kendall Square in a thickly settled factory district. New Towne Court was in contrast with Old Harbor in three ways: the land was acquired through land condemnation and slum clearance; it was much smaller with 300 units, and much denser — a cluster of 3-story apartment blocks around open courtyards.

These government constructed housing developments were unlike the emergency war housing of 1918 in three dramatic ways. The first was they were built in direct response to an internal national emergency to house the homeless, the low-income family, and the workingman. Second, they were built to provide jobs for architects and contractors. Third, and the most lasting to this day, they were the first housing which used the European design of domestic architecture that had enormous influence on younger architects in the 1920s. This style became the mold for every public housing development built afterwards. The style was marked by a complete lack of ornament; functional-shaped brick or cast-stone apartment boxes of 2 or 3 stories set in parallel rows; and the destruction of the city street with the boxes laid out in T-shape, L-shape or X-shape superblocks, surrounded by common spaces for playgrounds, drying lines and grassy squares. They were the tribal grounds of Robert Anderson Pope’s plan for Woodbourne magnified 100 times.

Old Harbor Village — unlike New Towne Court — has traffic roads through the development but, like those in Woodbourne, these are narrow and curving public ways. Also like Woodbourne, Old Harbor has many common green spaces and playgrounds around the superblocks. The 3-story apartment houses face east towards Carson Beach. These blocks are clustered in the center. The better-looking row houses are on the outer edge; one row backs up to the brick wall which separates the development from the Old Colony Railroad (now the Red Line). Old Harbor Village today is a pleasant, shady residential community.

New Towne Court has no interior public streets but wide-paved courtyards — perhaps once grass lawns — relieved by grassy squares between the superblocks of brick boxes. A team of 5 architects designed New Towne, including Charles R. Greco and Isidor Richmond. A team of 17 architects designed Old Harbor, including one woman architect, Eleanor Manning O’Connor. New Towne Court in 1997 and 1998 had major renovation work done on the apartment blocks, not least of which was a revolt against 1920s European-housing design by the addition of ornamental cornices and buff-colored corner strips to relieve the monotony of the brick boxes.

The Boston Housing Authority was established on October 1, 1935 to take advantage of the housing loan programs of the WPA, but it lacked the legal power to build, own and operate low-rent housing. The United States Housing Act of 1937 established the United States Housing Authority (which is today known as HUD, Housing and Urban Development). Following its passage, the enabling legislation of the BHA was amended to conform to that Act; thereafter, local public authorities would design and build housing with federal grants.

The Housing Division of the WPA had no impact on construction starts in Woodbourne. A second piece of legislation did have a great influence on the third, and final, phase of the construction of Woodbourne: the National Housing Act of 1934. This Act created the federal Housing Administration which provided federal insurance for home rehabilitation loans and mortgages for newly-purchased homes. The insurance lowered the risk of the mortgage industry, which encouraged private capital to get back into the residential housing business. In 1934, new housing starts were up for the first time since 1926. At Woodbourne, James C. Martin took full advantage of the FHA program, first by buying and remodeling the old Woodbourne clubhouse into his own two-story residence in 1934. Over the next 20 years Martin would complete what the Boston Dwellinghouse Company began in 1911.

In 1934 the government was now in full control of providing housing for the workingman beyond the wildest dreams of the philanthropic housing reformers such as Bowditch, Paine and Filene. Yet, today, the private housing market cannot provide for those below the necessary income level. The August 27, 1998, South End News reported on the “struggle to find affordable homes.” At century’s end, home ownership still remains elusive for many Americans.

Richard Heath
January 26, 1997
Revised October 18, 1998

Appendix:
1874 Map of Woodbourne Area
Architect, builder, owner, and descriptive information for Woodbourne houses
Bibliography by Richard Heath
Boston Dwelling House Company Sketch
Olmsted Brothers Sketch

 

A STUDY OF THE PERIOD OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON IN WHICH WOODBOURNE WAS CONCEIVED AND BUILT AND WHY THE SUBDIVISION CHANGED SO DIFFERENTLY IN ARCHITECTURAL STYLE AFTER 1922.

The planning and construction of the first phase of Woodbourne took place during a period of time when Boston changed from a bustling, chaotic, industrial 19th century city and entered the 20th century. It was a period when the strong mayor form of government and professional city planners came into being which would do so much to shape Boston after the Second World War.  Seeds were sown between 1909 and 1913 by a pioneering - if paternalistic - effort of a large group of Boston business leaders to transform the way the modern City of Boston was governed, planned and developed.

Called the “Boston 1915 Movement,” it was largely the vision of Edward Filene, the moving force behind the Boston Dwelling House Company. Filene and four others formed an Executive Committee early in 1909 to address the needs of Boston in the new automobile age. These men were James Jackson Storrow, Louis D. Brandeis, Bernard Rothwell and George S. Smith. Filene, one of Boston’s most important retail merchants, was concerned with housing for the working classes. Storrow was an attorney who specialized in corporate law and managed investment trusts. He later went on to restructure and save the General Motors Corporation.  Brandeis was an attorney whom President Woodrow Wilson would nominate as the first Jew on the Supreme Court. Rothwell was President of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. Smith was a wholesale clothing merchant and President of the Boston Merchants Association.

High Mass Progressivism: The business-led Boston 1915 Movement perfectly promoted in this front-page editorial cartoon. Woodbourne was conceived out of Boston 1915 and was one of its most lasting achievements. Boston Sunday Herald, April 4, 1909. Click on the image to see a larger view of it.








Filene and his colleagues held a dinner for 230 of Boston’s business, industrial, financial , educational. religious and political leaders on March 30, 1909 at the  Boston City Club on Ashburton Place. The dinner was the unveiling of the Boston Plan; “a far reaching plan” wrote the Boston Herald the next day. “for making the Boston of 1915 the finest in the world.

Fifty years later, in 1960, Mayor John Collins and his recently appointed Director of the new Boston Redevelopment Authority would present another “New Boston Plan”. That Plan was created in a Boston in despair and near bankruptcy; its tax base eroded by industry migrating to regions with lower wage scales and a vanishing middle class taking Eisenhower’s expressways to the suburbs. The first “New Boston Plan” - on the other hand - was announced in a time and spirit of great optimism at the dawn of a new century. Indeed, it was a celebration of the end of the 19th century. The unplanned industrial and transportation growth and overcrowded, unregulated and unsanitary housing conditions were choking the little old Boston of the post-Civil War period. Unchecked and uncoordinated capitalism was threatening to weaken industrial and business growth. The business community intended, through the Boston 1915 Movement, to put its own house in order and create an efficient and planned 20th century Boston in its own image within five years.

“In the headquarters which will be opened tomorrow morning at 20 Beacon Street we will call to our aid experts and all the other help needed. [We will] bring to Boston, in addition to what we already have here, a knowledge of all the best things that have been done by any other city in the world and combine all these best things in a Boston Plan.”

Some of the points included; as reported in both the Boston Globe and Boston Herald the next day, were:

• by 1910: to have an expert accounting of the financial condition and resources of the city present and prospective, to understand clearly the waste in public resources and services, to have made a careful accounting of the human resources of the city to include the skill level of the workers and the executive abilities of industrial leaders, to create better working conditions, to extend existing industries and introduce new enterprises and to provide a comprehensive system of wage earner insurance and old age pensions.
• by 1912: to have more music in the parks.
• by 1915: to have a system of public education that actually prepares the boys and girls of Boston for their life work, to have well advanced the execution of an intelligent system of transportation for the whole state including electric, express, freight and passenger services, to increase the number of branches of the public library, and to have the best possible public health department.

Other speakers made additional recommendations for the new Boston of 1915. “We ought to move all our public schools to the borders of our city parks. There is no better way in which we can get our children the benefits of the country … good pure air and proper outdoor play.”

Another floor comment raised one of the most important issues of the Boston 1915 Movement, and one that led directly to the creation of Woodbourne; that of stricter building codes. “We need to compel builders to allow a decent amount of light and air in tenements.”

But it was the statement of Mr. George W. Codman that admitted the real meaning behind the Boston 1915 Movement. “Have we not misconceived the true nature of our corporate city life? We have tried to run the city as a political institution and have made a dismal failure at it. We think now that we want a business administration of our cities with businessmen in command.”

And that was exactly what was attempted in the 1909 mayoral election when James J. Storrow, executive committee member of Boston 1915, ran against John F. Fitzgerald, who was seeking his second term in office.

Before (and after) Boston 1915 there was the Good Government Association, and both were made up of the same people: The Associated Board of Trade, the Chamber of Commerce, the Merchants Association and the Boston Bar Association. The Good Government Association (GGA) was created in 1903 by Louis D. Brandeis and other business leaders. Its first president was Lawrence Minot, son of William Minot Jr. who lived at Woodbourne. (Lawrence Minot, as chief executor of his father’s estate, would sell the property to the Boston Dwelling House Company.) The GGA was formed mainly in response to the conviction of State Representative James Michael Curley for fraud in Federal court because he took a civil service exam impersonating a constituent in 1902. This was the final blow for business leaders who had watched in horror at the political rise of the Irish Democratic ward leaders and their art of patronage. Curley was anathema to the business leaders of the GGA; he represented all that was going wrong in elected city government. City affairs, in the eyes of these men, were being directed from Irish Democratic clubhouses in the North End and from Curley’s base in Ward 17 in Roxbury. City agencies were being filled with often incompetent political appointments. What was worse was the increased taxes levied on business property due to the soaring costs of municipal contracts - particularly in construction - because of graft and kickbacks. All this caused the GGA to form and seek ways to correct these problems before commerce and industry moved out of the city. In this context it is easy to understand why a municipal financial audit and a study of waste and mismanagement in City affairs were the first two points of the Boston 1915 agenda.

The election in 1905 of John F. Fitzgerald (grandfather of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy), political boss of the heavily Irish Catholic Democratic North End, created panic within the GGA. In 1906, they lobbied through the press for an investigation into corruption in the awards of city construction contracts, for which they held the Mayor personally responsible. Mayor Fitzgerald - hoping to avoid an investigation damaging to his reputation and political ambitions - called for an independent Finance Commission to review city expenditures. This was authorized by the Republican controlled State Legislature in July of 1907.  Yet, although the Mayor appointed the seven member Finance Commission (including the progressive former Mayor Nathan Matthews, who had always worked well with Irish political leaders), the negative press caused by the investigation into illegal contracts cost him reelection that year.

The Finance Commission (or FinCom) realized that reforms had failed in the past because the structure of government remained in the hands of ward leaders whose power rested with patronage and often graft. The FinCom also felt that the present form of ward-based city government was pushing property taxes too high because it depended upon increased city spending on municipal jobs and job generating capital projects in the wards. The FinCom felt that this was weakening the industrial and commercial base of the city. During the first six months of Boston 1915, the FinCom devised a new City Charter that would be brought before the voters in November 1909. With the strong backing of Boston 1915 Executive Committee member, Bernard Rothwell, acting in his capacity as President of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, the FinCom introduced a strong Mayor charter in order to dilute the locally based (and Irish controlled) city government. The Board of Aldermen and Common Council would be abolished and replaced by a nine-member City Council elected at large, citywide. The powers of mayor would be strengthened and the term of office extended to four years. (The new Charter, wrote James M. Curley in his 1957 memoirs, “was apparently designed to get rid of me.” Just the opposite was true, however, as Curley took full advantage of the increased powers of the mayor during his four terms in that office.)

Voters approved the new charter in November of 1909 by 52%. Ironically, although the businessmen reformers won control of a weakened City Council, they lost control of the Mayor’s office. In a hotly contested race, which can only be described as a class and ethnic contest, the wealthy Storrow lost to ward boss Fitzgerald in January 1910. More people voted than in any other election for mayor.  Fitzgerald would be the first Mayor of Boston to serve for four years.

John F. Fitzgerald saw his victory over James Storrow as a vindication of his good name. (Decades later, his daughter Rose would equate the 1910 campaign with the one that her son John waged against Richard Nixon for the Presidency.) In the words of Doris Kearns Goodwin, “the Mayor was more secure in his knowledge that he was indeed equal to the task of governing his city … a task, ironically, made easier in his second term as a consequence of the reform legislation he so vigorously opposed. By providing limits to the frenzied patronage seeking which undermined his first term, the new city Charter protected Fitzgerald from his own vulnerabilities …”

The second Fitzgerald administration worked in harmony with many of the goals of Boston 1915. His campaign slogan of 1905, “a Bigger, Better, Busier Boston ” fit in perfectly with the optimistic times of the second term. Business leaders would profit from a bigger and busier Boston, especially now that the ward boss system had been weakened by the 1909 charter reform law.

“Fitzgerald made it clear,” wrote Goodwin, “that he intended to be judged his second term by one standard alone, his ability to advocate and enact legislation that would make the life of the average citizen more worth living; measures that would improve the moral and physical welfare of the people of Boston …”  Words like  ‘moral’ and ‘physical welfare’ were taken right out of the language so often heard from the Boston 1915 Movement. The By-laws of Boston 1915 stated, for example, that it was organized “for the progress of Greater Boston; to promote by all lawful means the social, material, moral and intellectual welfare of Greater Boston.”

Within the first six months of his second term, Fitzgerald took an action that encouraged the Boston 1915 reformers: he called for a monthly conference of all City Departments so as to coordinate city services as well as to clarify the responsibilities of each department. In the fall of 1910, the Mayor appointed Louis Rourke, who had previously served as Chief Engineer on a section of the Panama Canal project, to the new and consolidated office of Board of Public Works. The new Board combined the Street, Water and Engineering Departments into one agency under one Commissioner. This was a “decided first step in municipal efficiency and economy,” cheered the magazine “New Boston.” It observed that: “harmony of action is absolutely essential if the public work of a city is to be properly prosecuted.”

The Mayor, however, vetoed a City Council ordinance passed in late 1910 that would consolidate the Departments of Parks, Public Baths and Music into one Parks and Recreation Department. This didn’t go far enough for the Mayor; he wanted to reorganize the entire system of recreation services for city residents. The Boston 1915 Movement had an apostle in John F. Fitzgerald. Like his predecessor, Hugh O’Brien, the first Irish Mayor of Boston, Fitzgerald could work with the business leaders of Boston.

Soon after the founding dinner, the Directorate of Boston 1915 was expanded to include two members who would become trustees of the Boston Dwelling House Company (BDHCo), the banker Frank Day and the housing social worker Robert A. Woods. Three other trustees of BDHCo were among those invited to the founding dinner of Boston 1915, John Wells Farley, Charles H. Jones and James L. Richards. Richards, Director of Boston Consolidated Gas Company, was one of the Filene Seven who initially organized the movement. In the spring of 1910, William A. Leahy was added to the Executive Committee as a representative of the Mayor.  

The Board of Directors numbered eighty men and women and included Robert Treat Paine, the dean of philanthropists in Boston who developed the housing for working men in Jamaica Plain’s factory district, (Paine died on August 11, 1910, so his participation in Woodbourne can only be speculated,) architect Ralph Adams Cram, and the daughter of the Irish patriot and editor of The Pilot, John Boyle O’Reilly.  Mary Boyle O’Reilly was involved with prison reform and served on the City Board of Children’s Institutions. Other Boston 1915 Board members were Phillip Cabot of The Improved Housing Association, Ellen Coolidge, of the Boston Social Union, Meyer Bloomfield also of the Boston Social Union as well as the Civic Service House, James H. Fahey, publisher of the Republican Boston Herald and a Director of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, and the Reverend John Hopkins Dennison of the Central Congregational Church on Newbury Street. The Catholic Charities was represented by its Director, the Right Reverend Joseph G. Anderson, the Auxiliary Bishop of Boston and Reverend Maurice J.O’ Connor.

The “single aim of the Boston 1915 Plan,” as stated in New Boston magazine, the official organ of the movement, was “to apply the principles of business organization to a federation of agencies, to focus this combined effort by setting definite goals for early achievement.”

It was the intention of the Directorate from the start to promote the aims of Boston 1915 through a widely advertised public program that would show what civic cooperation meant.  It was called the “1915 Boston Exposition: a graphic display of the living and working city … a display of Boston as a going concern.” The term ‘Exposition’ was deliberately chosen because it was inspired by the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair) held in Chicago from May through October 1893. Indeed, the entire agenda of Boston 1915 was under the enormous influence of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. It is difficult to imagine now, the magic that the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair cast over American cities for the first quarter of the 20th century.

The Chicago World’s Fair was built over 686 acres of lakeshore parkland to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the New World for Spain by Christopher Columbus. The fairgrounds were landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted and the exposition halls - some of which were huge - were designed by the greatest living architects and artists of the day. The fair achieved almost universal acclaim because in the midst of the disorganized industrial city which sprawled over miles of congested if not squalid housing, serpentine transportation networks, and inept if not corrupt political machines in city halls, was a planned metropolis of wide boulevards, parks and waterfronts; spacious and handsome buildings of uniform massing and proportion, and an efficient transportation system. It was called “the City Beautiful” and Boston’s Woodbourne section was a result of the concepts first introduced in Chicago to create a beautiful orderly city. The Chicago World’s Fair was the triumph of the city planner; indeed the fair would make that new term a recognized force in the development of the 20th century city. The fair was also the triumph of private investors and business leaders who largely financed and managed the Exposition. (The fair was directed from an elegant, domed Administration Building in the center of the complex). This fact was not lost on the reformers who saw the Chicago World’s Fair as a model for the future of American cities: a planned, rational, coordinated city, uniform in scale and design and directed from a central office; not by political machines but by business leaders. (The fact that the fair barely made $400,000 in profit from an investment of $28 million was not lost on planners.  As the Woodbourne Directors would learn, philanthropy does not make money.)

All the buildings at the Exposition were spray painted white which increased the sense of a unified whole over the vast campus of huge buildings, while giving it a celestial, futuristic glow which did not fail to impress fairgoers with a vision of the city of the future. The beauty and efficiency of the fair’s White City was in marked contrast to the dull brick and polychrome stone gothic buildings of contemporary cities and the barking disorder of urban life. (When the four Woodbourne community apartment buildings on Hyde Park Avenue were completed, their light color stucco walls caused the area to be called “White City” because they were the only buildings southwest of the Boston Elevated Terminal at Forest Hills. The name still lingers today, but it had far more meaning in 1914.)

The Boston 1915 Exposition opened to the public on November 2, 1909 at the old Museum of Fine Arts in Copley Square. This building was just the sort of fussy polychrome stone and brick pile of applied ornament to which the White City was in contrast. (It would be razed about a year later for the present Copley Plaza Hotel, completed in 1912).  The new Museum of Fine Arts opened that same month. This elegant temple of art built on clean, classic ‘City Beautiful’ lines was just the sort of future that the World’s Colombian Exposition promised. Built of light grey granite, it overlooked the tamed, landscaped swamp rechristened by F.L. Olmsted as the Back Bay Fens.

The Boston Herald called the Boston Exposition, “not as much a show as an awakening … hung on the wall where the Valasquez painting once hung is the ‘gist of it’,” - a banner outlining the platform of Boston 1915. “It is possible for the willing worker, on an average wage, to bring up his family amid healthful and comfortable surroundings. That they may become useful citizens … Boston 1915 is a ‘City Movement.’ It requires cooperation of all people and organizations for the improvement of Boston. It is a City Plan, which will put all plans into one general program. It is a City Exposition, showing year by year, the city’s progress in its factories, stores, public departments, homes and health.”

Over two hundred exhibits were broken down into three main themes: The Visible City, Educational, and Social and Economic. City planning, parks, streets and boulevards, and housing were among the exhibits in the Visible City area of the exposition. “One of the most interesting exhibits,” wrote the Boston Herald on November 2, 1909, “is the contrast, actual size, between a model tenement and an actual 3 bedroom tenement in Boston’s North End.” Also included were extensive models and plans for houses of workingmen in England and the United States. This exhibit would have a direct and immediate influence on the design and construction of the first phase of Woodbourne.  

Other models were the City of Boston “with every building and street correct” and a $75,000 exhibit of that holy land of the City Beautiful, Chicago.

There was also, as the Herald noted, “much in the exposition that was spectacle; the Curtiss aeroplane, models of the Wright Brothers aeroplane and wonderful scientific moving pictures, not to mention Italian marionettes. The 1893 World’s Fair had 14 acres of sideshows and spectacles too.”

A key exhibit for Edward Filene was “The Catholic Church and Institutions” in a portion of the hall devoted to organized religion in Boston. Filene recognized that the Catholic Church was on the verge of being a major political as well as social force in Boston because of the population growth of the Irish and, most recently, the Italian communities. The Irish Catholic was no longer a subordinate minority and if Boston 1915 was to succeed it needed the support and the participation of the new Archbishop of Boston, William Henry O’Connell.

On September 30, 1909, Filene wrote to Archbishop O’Connell regarding the enlargement of the Board of Directors of Boston 1915. He requested a meeting to discuss “the inception, development and purposes of the Boston 1915 Movement.” O’Connell agreed to meet with Filene on Sunday evening October 3, 1909. At that meeting, the Archbishop delegated Reverends O’Connor and Anderson to help organize the exposition exhibit on the Catholic Church and its schools. But O’Connell himself was conspicuously absent (as the press noted) from the special opening night attended by 4000 people on Saturday evening, October 30,1909.

William Henry O’Connell became Archbishop on August 30, 1907 at the death of Boston’s first Archbishop, John J. Williams.  It was an auspicious time for Boston Catholics, which O’Connell recognized and exploited completely. He was not the accomodationist like the gentleman Reverend Williams; he didn’t have to be. The Irish Catholic was in the majority now. O’Connell’s governing ideology was made perfectly clear on October 28,1908 at the celebration of the centennial of the founding of the Catholic Diocese of Boston. Standing at the pulpit in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, a building far bigger than City Hall and taller than the State House, O’Connell declared the new order in carefully chosen words. “The Puritan has passed; the Catholic remains. The child of the immigrant is called to fill the place that the Puritan has left.” To the sons of the Puritans of Boston 1915 the message should have been crystal clear, “The Catholic is here. You must deal with him on his terms.” Clearly inferred was the deeper message, “The Irish are here.” After a century of discrimination against Irish Catholics at the hands of Protestants, O’Connell would have very little to do in cooperating with them unless it was on his terms; on terms suitable to Catholics. He demonstrated this time and again as he ran the Archdiocese with a strong hand until his death in 1944.

The Jewish merchant, Edward Filene, himself no stranger to ethnic and religious discrimination, believed in the cooperative spirit of Boston 1915 and he was determined to reach out and include the Catholic Church. He was also pragmatic; Irish Catholics were now a majority political bloc and they listened to the Archbishop. The success of Boston 1915 depended on a broad base of public support.

On December 3, 1909, Filene wrote to Archbishop O’Connell that the Exposition highlighted the serious need for better housing. In this letter, Filene set the groundwork for Woodbourne. “Among such problems [facing the City].” he wrote, “that of housing seems to be the most serious and pressing. Promiscuous crowding under depressing conditions of those least well armed to resist evil creates a moral issue difficult to deal with. Getting together the religious institutions for us [that is the Boston 1915 Movement] would be desirable for dealing with the housing problem. I think it practically and reasonably possible that as much as $200,000 can be raised as a beginning for better housing. With that sum, new cooperative housing plans can be drawn up.”

The Archbishop replied promptly on December 5, 1909 that he would participate on his terms. “The plan you propose for the betterment of housing of the poorer people of Boston appeals to me very strongly. If I am to go into this movement personally it must be that I shall be at the head of it, for reasons you must understand.”

The record does not explain those reasons but it was clearly a test to see how far the business investors - willing to put up  $200,000 - were willing to go for the Archbishop’s prestige and participation. Apparently, they would not go that far; even to prove that the venture was in the spirit of reform and the public good.  But Filene kept trying. “The glory of the church,” he wrote Archbishop O’Connell on January 20,1910 “has always been in her curative and redemptive work . .  bad morals are caused by overcrowding in tenement districts. I am more than ever convinced that it lies in your power to inaugurate a work to remedy those conditions. It is here that the churches undertake, as a part of their religious work, the forming and carrying out of some plan by which the people of Boston will have better housing.”

When on November 1, 1911 the Boston Dwelling House Co. Directors signed the deed of trust to create moderate-income housing, Archbishop O’Connell’s name was among them. But in a letter to the BDHCo Trustees from his private secretary, dated January 5, 1912, he made it clear on what terms he would participate: “the Archbishop has lent his name to the Boston Dwelling House project … but will not be able to attend any business outside his regular routine duties.”

On November 15, 1913, the Archbishop resigned from the Board of Trustees stating to Board President Henry Howard “I have not been able to attend the meetings nor give the matter the consideration and time it deserves.” By then, as will be seen; the Boston 1915 Movement had ended.

With or without Archbishop O’Connell (who was elevated to Cardinal in 1911), Boston 1915 steamed ahead. In May 1910, the magazine “New Boston” first appeared. It was the self-described  “official organ of Boston 1915. A monthly record of progress in developing a greater and finer city.”

“New Boston” ran until the end of 1911. Each issue had articles on a wide variety of social issues, some of which are still relevant today. These topics written by experts in the field ranged from housing and transportation to a spirited campaign to “Save the Fourth” designed to ban dangerous fireworks. Articles such as the improvements to the Charles River basin, wholesome milk, the evils of billboards, the character of moving pictures, Boston’s garbage problem, public spirit and the tramp, schoolhouses as neighborhood centers, making wife desertion unpopular, Americanizing our immigrant children and “five essential ways the automobile has added to the wealth of the city ” show the very broad range of concerns the Boston 1915 Movement enveloped.

The Boston 1915 Directorate was divided into committees. One of the most important was the Housing Committee which first met on February 28, 1910. It was made up of Philip Cabot, E.T.Hartman, Meyer Bloomfield, Matthew Hale (City Councilor from 1910 to 1912), Charles Logue, J. Randolph Coolidge Jr., Richards Bradley, Warren Manning (a partner in the Olmsted firm), Henry G. Dunderdale, the architect William D. Austin (who designed the Jamaica Pond boathouse and bandstand in 1910) and the playground advocate and educator, Joseph Lee.

Their report, “The Boston House Problem,” was printed in the first issue of “New Boston” and focused on the conditions of dwellings in the North End, West End, Charlestown and South Boston.

The goal of the Housing Committee was to improve the overcrowding and sanitary conditions of the existing housing in these districts. No new Woodbourne-type subdivision was proposed for the North End. “Boston 1915,” the report recommended, “will organize a bureau whose duty it shall be to investigate housing complaints registered from any portion of the city.”   In 1911, Boston 1915 supported a bill introduced by Mayor Fitzgerald that proposed to revise the current housing codes to apply to wooden 3 family houses.  Boston 1915 proposed regulating what was understood by both business and government to be a private sector role. It was still the business of businessmen to provide housing.

Slum clearance would come 25 years later when the Federal government made housing a public priority in the face of the fact that the private sector could not provide it. The Boston Housing Authority was created in 1935 to provide, with Federal funds, housing for the wage earner.  

The January 1911 issue of “New Boston” ran a story written by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. that illustrated the design goals of housing beyond the central city districts that would be the model for Woodbourne. This was Forest Hills Gardens in the borough of Queens, New York, financed by the Russell Sage Foundation and planned and landscaped by the junior Olmsted. The story was appropriately titled “a suburban town built on business principles.” The tenement districts could only be ameliorated with improved and enforced building and sanitary codes together with better public health services. The objective of the Boston 1915 Housing Committee was that these overcrowded and unplanned residential districts should not spread out along the newly opened rapid transit lines linking the downtown core with the suburbs of Roxbury, Dorchester and Jamaica Plain. The planned suburban development would be built in those suburbs and Olmsted Junior’s article on Forest Hills Gardens was held up as the ideal for those projects.

The second Boston 1915 Exposition had housing as its main theme. It was held November 10 to 22, 1910 at Tremont Temple and the Boston Arena. More of a conference than an exposition, the event was called “The Civic Advance Campaign”. The highlight was a dramatic pageant at the recently opened Boston Arena on St Botolph Street titled “From Cave Life to City Life.” The intention of the program was to draw public attention to the problem of city building and it was designed to show the development of homemaking. It was held on Thursday through Saturday, November 10 through 12, and had sections reenacting cave dwellers, the Indian village, the Colonial town and the bustling 19th century city.  The Civic Advance Campaign opened with  “Mayor’s Night” at Tremont Temple with Mayor Fitzgerald as the keynote speaker. The November 1910 issue of “New Boston” exclaimed that the fundamental meaning behind Boston 1915 and its second Exposition “is to help create [a] state of mind. There is no reason why a municipality cannot be planned and made beautiful except through indifference and bad habits. [The city’s] affairs should be conducted economically and in strict business principles, properly planned, decently ordered and economically administered.”  To achieve this, “its citizens have to get into a [receptive] state of mind.”

The Tremont Temple conference outlined what would occupy the Boston 1915 Directorate in the coming year: it would write, influence and advocate a legislative agenda that would push forward, by force of law, the state of mind desired by the reformers.

Fifteen bills relative to police, education, housing codes, public health and city planning which the Directorate had approved for action were reviewed in the March 1911 issue of “New Boston.”

These comprised the 1911 Program for the Boston 1915 Directorate; some of which are still relevant 88 years later:

1. Establish a proper public authority to plan and provide for comprehensive development of the city.
2. Federate cities and towns into one Metropolitan District.
3. Organize larger uses of schoolhouses.
4. Create a civic center.
5. Establish more convenience stations and drinking fountains.
6. Provide better sidewalks (build 10 miles of paved sidewalk every year for 10 years.)

The most important Project of the 1911 Program for Boston 1915 was the first bill, House Number 1109, “To improve the conditions of the Metropolitan District.” The bill was “designed to provide Boston and the Metropolitan District with a city plan developed on sound moral, industrial and social lines.”  It would create a 3-member Commission which “would study and make planning recommendations for better homes, structural and sanitary safety of buildings, prevention of congestion and fire hazards and provide for reservations of land for public use.”

Boston 1915 put all of its great prestige and energy behind passage of the bill, which was largely the work of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber’s 1911 Report, “Real Boston: The Get Together Spirit Among Cities and Towns,” stated the case to the legislature, the public and the press of the Metropolitan District. It said that Boston was actually part of a city made up of 40 cities and towns stretching from Salem to Cohasset and westerly to Framingham. The Chamber and the Directorate of Boston 1915 introduced the “Real Boston” bill that would create the “Federation of Metropolitan Boston.” In the April 1911 “New Boston,” March G. Bennett, Chair of the Real Boston Committee wrote what a Federation could do for metropolitan Boston; he argued that a federation already existed in sewer, water supply and parks. In language predicting the rise, decades later, of the Mass. Turnpike Authority, MassPort and the MBTA, he stated that cooperative action would be valuable for transportation facilities, industrial education, factory development, dock facilities, industrial railways, direct highways and uniform building laws.  

The Chamber staffed the 10 person Real Boston Committee made up of men from Boston (the chair,) Brookline, Newton, Cambridge, Malden, Lexington and Somerville. This committee included Boston Dwelling House trustee Robert Woods and the influential journalist Sylvester Baxter. Baxter was a major champion of the Metropolitan Park Commission (today the MDC,) one of the first metropolitan governing agencies established in the Commonwealth. He was an ardent advocate of metropolitan planning and government.

The Directorate of Boston 1915 staked all their considerable influence and collective reputations on the passage of this legislation. The bill failed to pass out of committee in April 1911 and a different bill was refiled in May. It was strongly supported by Governor Eugene Foss who sent a message to the Legislature in April 1912 urging passage of the legislation. But it was defeated in the Metropolitan Affairs Committee later in the month. It was a mortal wound for the reformers. The heart and soul of Boston 1915 was that only through rational city planning could the 20th century city be realized.  The Chamber and its allies in Boston 1915 stated that a plan for the City of Boston Plan could not be made and implemented without full cooperation of the surrounding cities and towns. City planning on a large and comprehensive scale would harmonize the physical city and reduce conflicts of purposes and waste of resources. When this goal disintegrated with the defeat of the “Real Boston” bill, the reformers lost energy and Boston 1915 collapsed within a year. The business reformers failed to understand the dread of annexation in the hearts of the cities and towns on the borders of Boston. Try as they might, the Real Boston Committee and their legislative allies could not overcome the fear that if cooperation began today, annexation would follow tomorrow.

(Writing at the end of his term, Mayor Fitzgerald stated that the Boston 1915 Movement was “a more altruistic and ambitious scheme than ever was undertaken in any American city. Although it has ceased as a tangible movement, its stimulus should be included in a list of causes for Boston’s progress during this period of four years.”)

Mayor Fitzgerald was a strong believer in the legislation. His speech before the 1910 Civic Advance conference was about the need for municipal planning. When the bill failed to pass, he blamed the towns of Newton and Brookline for their shortsightedness. But then he knew only too well that the ethnic immigrant power that he represented was the primary reason the suburbs rejected the Federation of Metropolitan Boston in the first place: they wanted no part of Boston’s tribal politics. (In that same legislative session also came, in the words of the Boston Herald, “the annual attack on the Boston Charter by the Democratic machine.” Senator Martin Lomasney, ward boss of the West End, had proposed a bill providing for a City Council of 28 members.)

But Boston 1915 was victorious because it brought city planning to Boston. In 1911, the Commonwealth created the Homestead Commission to develop a long range, comprehensive housing program that included site planning and housing design, of which Woodbourne was an early example. The 1913 Report of the Commission contained language very similar to that of the Boston Dwelling House Company proposal two years earlier: all families deserved a wholesome home and only by conscious design, direction and supervision within a planned development could the working man have the housing he needed for his family.  The Commission recommended that each city and town over 10,00 people be required to have planning boards. After the defeat of the  “Real Boston” bill, Mayor Fitzgerald petitioned the General Court to authorize the City to establish the Boston Planning Board, which was approved on January 27,1914.

Discouraged by their legislative defeat and tired of all the parochial politics, the tattered remains of the Boston 1915 Directorate could take no pleasure in the establishment of the Boston Planning Board because in January of 1914 James M. Curley began his first term as Mayor of Boston.

Although a very popular Mayor at the end of 1913, with strong support from reformers, the business community and the ward leaders, Fitzgerald at first declined to run for reelection. He planned instead to campaign for the United States Senate against Henry Cabot Lodge in 1916.  

After Curley announced his candidacy for Mayor, both the ward leaders (for whom Curley never had any regard) and the reformers prevailed on Fitzgerald to run for a second term to keep Curley from winning. But Fitzgerald’s campaign was crushed and he resigned from the race in December 1914 amid allegations (gleefully exploited by Curley) of an affair with a cigarette girl and cabaret singer, Toodles Ryan.

Mayor John F. Fitzgerald built an administration of cooperation between the public and private sectors. Reformers could work in that municipal atmosphere. Curley, on the other hand, thrived on conflict and the war he waged over the next thirty years between Yankee and Irish, business and politics was not a place in which business leaders or reformers could flourish. Moreover the parks and beaches, schools and hospitals that Curley built during four terms as mayor and for which he is fondly remembered even to this day, were built on the ever increasing property taxes which had to be paid by business and property owners. (“The Republicans of our glorious Commonwealth,” wrote Curley in his 1957 memoirs, “should admit that improvements which advance the health, happiness and welfare of all people cost money. Is a low city debt and low tax rate the price we must pay for human suffering?”) But the happiness and welfare of James Michael Curley and his associates came first. These improvements were vastly over budgeted because of political corruption. Contractors who wanted lucrative city public works projects had to pay the Mayor first. Nothing symbolized this better than the construction of Mayor Curley’s grand mansion on the Jamaicaway during his first year in office. So scandalous was the open graft,  that in 1915 business leaders forced a recall election ( as authorized by the 1909 charter ) that Curley barely survived. But survive he did.   

Amidst all this turmoil, the business community simply retreated for forty years. They would not reemerge until the middle 1950’s during the more benign administration of Mayor John B. Hynes. But the optimism had vanished then; Boston was in dire fiscal straights and Hynes needed all the help he could get. (Running against Curley in 1949, Hynes’ campaign slogan was “The New Boston.”)

Politics and planning have always been linked but never mix well. This was especially true during the thirty years of Curley’s rule over Boston government. He was Mayor from 1914 to 1917; 1922 to 1925; 1930 to 1933; Governor from 1934 to 1936; and Mayor again from 1946 to 1949. These years of conflict within Boston’s political life dashed the spirit of optimistic reform that created and motivated the Boston 1915 Movement and gave birth to the Boston Dwelling House Company.  

The reform spirit that originally guided the efforts of BDHCo was gone when construction resumed on the second phase of Woodbourne coincidentally with the start of Curley’s second term as Mayor. (He replaced the choice of the business community, Andrew J. Peters, son of the owner of the Hosford and William’s subdivision adjacent to the Minot estate).

The second phase was dramatically different from the first two years of construction; not only in architectural styles, but also in ideology.  In the first phase the architecture fit the ideology. The architectural style of the second phase changed because the reform spirit was replaced by profit and nostalgia.  

The great optimism of the years before World War One, in which reformers, such as Boston 1915, sought to reshape American society along the lines of their own material and social values, was replaced by pessimism fed by the disillusion of the messy peace that concluded the War to End all Wars. Moreover, the change from war to peace was sudden and violent. The years 1919 through early 1921 were marked by labor troubles (the great steel and coal strikes and the walkout of Boston Policemen in 1919); the severe recession that struck in October of 1919 which left 5 million men jobless in 1920; and the emergence for the first time in American culture and politics of anti - communism in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of October, 1917.  (The American Communist Party was formed in 1919.)

With the return of Republican control of the White House in 1920 with Presidents Warren Harding; and after his death in office, Calvin Coolidge, federal policies were introduced which greatly increased prosperity.  The revolt of the 1920’s was that against the reform ethos of President Woodrow Wilson which was crushed beneath the wave of the new profit culture and the dawning of the consumer era ushered in by Harding and Coolidge. The will for collective action against society’s ills lessened with the prosperous Roaring Twenties. American business life looked very good indeed. There was nothing to reform. Moreover a new cult of individualism was growing too. The right of the individual to profit and enjoy himself replaced moral and ethical improvement, the ideology of the Boston Dwelling House Company.  Consequently, the tribal property of the 1912 Pope plan for Woodbourne was hopelessly out of date by 1920 and thus not duplicated in the second phase of its development.  In the words of H. L.  Mencken, “Doing good [was] in bad taste.”

Massachusetts was also swept up in 1920 with the historical nostalgia of the 300th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. The building styles of the 17th century were rediscovered by architects and the Colonial Revival style - the gambrel roof and especially the 17th century saltbox house - was in high vogue in the second phase of Woodbourne. Nostalgia replaced reform after 1922.  It also fit the nationalism of the day; America was big and strong after the War. Colonial Revival was a pure American style. Forget the fact that British colonists brought it over to New England in the first place; it did not look as ‘imported’ as the Kilham and Hopkins Arts and Crafts designs imported from England for the first phase of Woodbourne.  

But more than anything else, it was a different world for the investors of the Boston Dwelling House Company in 1920. Reform and business did not mix.  The business of Boston real estate was business; not housing reform.

Richard Heath
February 23, 1998

Appendix
Bibliography by Richard Heath

 

The material that follows is an excerpt of the National Register of Historic Places Registration Form prepared in April 1999 by Greer Hardwicke, Preservation Consultant, and Betsy Friedberg, Massachusetts Historical Commission. The Woodbourne area was subsequently added to the Register on June 4, 1999. A number of photographs, maps, and other material attached to the Form have been omitted.

Statement of Significance
The Woodbourne Historic District in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, Massachusetts is a residential development that contains early twentieth-century suburban architecture and planning. This section developed from nineteenth-century summer estates into a streetcar and model suburban enclave during its period of significance, 1898-1945. It contains examples of representative New England suburban architecture and design by local architects and builders, including Woodbury & Stuart, Frederick H. Gowing, Munhall & Holmes, and Murdock Boyle. It also contains an unusual garden city model housing development by the Boston Dwelling House Company designed by prominent Boston architects, Kalama & Hopkins and Charles Colleens and laid out by Robert Anderson Pope in 1911-1912. Woodbourne represents a universal pattern of development in history and style of suburban areas and represents a unique area of architect-designed model housing and garden-city landscape design.

The nominated district retains integrity of location, design, settings, materials, workmanship, feeling and association and fulfills criteria A and C of the National Register of Historic Places at the local and regional level.

Development
The 30-acre parcel of the National Register district consists of three historical parcels, each with their own history. Located within the Jamaica Plain area, Woodbourne was once part of the original 1630 Roxbury land grant. The Town of Roxbury was divided with the legal separation of West Roxbury (including Jamaica Plain, Roslindale and Forest Hills) in 1851, which was in turn annexed to Boston in 1874. The evolution and development of Woodbourne represent several important phases of late - nineteenth to twentieth-century housing developments in the United States, including examples reflecting civic and housing reform of the 1910s and the suburban development from World War I to post World War II. This area encompasses the variety of styles and development patterns common to the outer edges of urban Boston, which transformed agricultural and estate properties into moderate income, residential enclaves.

In 1845, this section of Jamaica Plain, a charming wooded area of rolling hills and the meandering Stony Brook, attracted many Bostonians. Bourne Street had been a public way for over 20 years; it connected Walk Hill Street, a century old public road, to Canterbury Street. Walk Hill began at the Toll Gate — the first gate from Roxbury on the private Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike (incorporated in 1803), which ran from Boston to Providence, Rhode Island. Named the Dedham Turnpike, this road went from present day Dudley Square to the Dedham Courthouse along Washington Street. The site where carts and wagons were weighed and charged was the Toll Gate at South and Washington Streets. This locus was renamed Forest Hills after the establishment of Forest Hills Cemetery in 1848. The impetus for development of the area was the opening of the Boston & Providence Railroad in June 1834 with a station at Toll Gate, now the Forest Hills Station. The turnpike fell on hard times and became a public road in 1857. Florence Street was also laid out in 1848 to go between Bourne Street and the Boston & Providence Railroad station. In 1874, this was renamed Washington Street. By 1874 Walk Hill Street, Hyde Park Avenue and Florence Street (part of now Florian and Southbourne Streets) had been put in.

Part of the top or north section of Woodbourne bounded by Walk Hill belonged to the Andrew J. Peters family. The Peters family was a local Jamaica Plain family that had many politicians and legislators. Peters, a Jamaica Plain native, was a wealthy merchant with an estate on South Street. His son, Andrew J. Peters, was the mayor of Boston from 1918-1921 during the violent and controversial Boston Police Strike of 1919.

The adjacent parcel extending from Walk Hill Street to Hyde Park Avenue belonged to Richard Olney. In 1864, Olney bought 10 acres of land with a house and a stable along Walk Hill Street, abutting the Minot estate. Olney’s house, at 56 Patten Street, is the oldest in this area. He reputedly had one of the first tennis courts in Boston. The neighboring families of the Minots and Guilds would often play here.

Richard Olney served as Attorney General (1893-95) and as Secretary of State (1857-97) in the administration of Grover Cleveland. A corporation lawyer, Richard Olney was born in Oxford, Massachusetts in 1835, to a wealthy cotton manufacturer. He graduated from Brown University in 1856 and from Harvard Law School in 1858. Olney worked as a lawyer, specializing in wills and trusts and worked most of his professional life at 23 Court Street. He married Agnes Thomas, daughter of Judge Benjamin F. Thomas. Olney was a leading authority on railroad law and at the age of 40 reorganized and saved the Eastern Railroad Company. This became his specialty thereafter devoting his professional career to the regulation consolidation of railroads. He joined the Board of Directors of the Boston & Maine Railroad in 1884 and served as its general counsel. Olney was recommended to Grover Cleveland in his second term and was appointed U.S. Attorney General. As Attorney General, he negotiated the end of the Pullman Palace Car Company workers strike in 1894. He also argued successfully in favor of the unconstitutionality of the Income Tax Law before the Supreme Court in 1884 (it was later enacted under President Woodrow Wilson).

In 1882, Olney sold both his house and property on Walk Hill Street to his old partner Andrew J. Peters. He moved his family to Boston’s Back Bay next door to George Richards Minot’s home on Marlborough Street. In October 1890, Richard Olney’s daughter, Agnes, married George Richards Minot III at the Olney summerhouse in Falmouth. Richard Olney retired from government at the end of Cleveland’s term in 1897 and returned to his Boston Law practice.

In 1899, two of the community buildings were erected, the Francis Parkman School, 25 Walk Hill Street and the Upham Memorial Church, 156-158 Wachusett Street. In 1896, the City of Boston took an acre of land from Andrew J. Peter’s estate for the Francis Parkman School, designed by Charles B. Perkins in several stages between 1899 and 1904. The school was named after the historian whose summerhouse overlooked Jamaica Pond. It now serves as a counseling center for the Boston School system. The Forest Hills Methodist Society began to build their church at the corner of Wachusett and Patten Streets, on land donated by Peters. The Forest Hills Methodist Society had been holding services in a rented hall in October 1893 in the Forest Hills area. The new church, designed by James G. Hutchinson in 1899, was in a Tudor Revival style with a corner tower and half-timbering. It was finished in 1901. A later addition was added in 1925. The Knights of Columbus purchased the building in 1977. Aluminum siding currently conceals all evidence of its architectural details.

The electrification of the streetcar system by the West End Railway Company by 1890, and the opening of the first subway route in 1897 improved speed and accessibility to more outlying areas, setting the stage for the Woodbourne developments. Several lots were slowly sold off and by 1898, modest construction had begun.

A later purchase in 1901 of the remaining Peters/Olney estates by Hosford and Williams signaled a new phase of development for this country retreat. The developers subdivided it and laid out Rodman, Patten, and Eldridge Streets. They advertised lots, stressing the proximity to Forest Hills Station. By 1904, Rodman and Eldridge Streets were open and Wachusett was extended to Eldridge Road. While full-scale subdivision did not begin until 1901, several houses were erected on Walk Hill Street, Wachusett Street and Rodman Road beginning in 1898. Construction continued until 1916 but was interrupted by the onset of World War I. Construction was later resumed in 1922.

Woodbourne’s core or middle section belonged to the Minot family, who initially used this as their summer estate. William Minot purchased the original parcel of land in November 1845 from Ebenezer Weld, a successful local farmer. Minot, like many other elite Bostonians such as Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Benjamin Faneuil, Joshua Loring, William Fletcher Weld, John Lowell Gardner, and Francis Parkman, purchased this outlying property as a summer home to escape Boston’s summer heat and seasonal cholera outbreaks. He was later joined by his children, William, Jr., Mary and Julia, who bought and built a house in close proximity. It soon became a compound of the extended family, with the father summering and the rest of the family living here all year round.

William was the son of George Richards Minot, a historian, lawyer and judge (1758-1802). His accomplishments included being the Orator of Boston and being a judge of the Probate Court and Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas as well as the Municipal Court Judge of Boston in 1800. He was also one of the original incorporators of the Massachusetts Historical Society. His son, William, was born in 1783 in the family house on Spring Street in Boston. Married in 1809, William Sr., moved to a town house, reputedly designed by Peter Banner at 61 Beacon Street opposite the Common in 1817. He made this his primary residence; the property at Woodbourne was his summer estate. He managed the Benjamin Franklin Trust for the City of Boston. He died on June 2, 1873 leaving the Woodbourne property to his children: George Richards Minot II, William Minot, Jr., Julia Minot, and Mary Minot.

The Minot houses were built in the 1840s; William Sr.’s was constructed in 1847. The houses were located atop a hill with scenic views to the Blue Hills. The estate was named Woodbourne by Julia Minot, the invalid daughter of William, Sr. It was named after the home of Guy Mannering in the novel Guy Mannering by Sir Walter Scott in 1829. Not only did it match the description of the woods along Bourne Street, the description of the house must have reminded Julia of her own home.

Woodbourne was a large comfortable mansion snugly situated beneath a hill covered with wood, which shrouded the house upon the north and east; the front looked upon a little lawn bordered by a grove of tall trees; beyond were some arable fields, extending down to the river, which was seen from the windows of the house. (Guy Mannering, Vol. 1. Chapter XIX, 1895 edition).

In 1855, some land was sold to Charles Eliot Guild for a summer retreat. It later became the house of Massachusetts Governor Curtis Guild.

The Minot compound contained several households, including children, servants and often guests. The terrain had a large grove of pine trees on the north side; the southern and western areas contained a landscaped area of garden, trees, and shrubs. Both father and son loved landscape gardening and made Woodbourne into a showplace. In 1850, William Minot, Jr. wrote about the estate:

Our roses are just out. Our honeysuckles too. The new mown hay, almost half a ton, lies spread on the garden lot. The pears are shaping themselves. Strawberries ripening. Raspberries well formed. The laurels are opening new leaves. All is green, growing, gracious.

In 1850, Minot and his two sons, William, Jr. and George Richard bought a large parcel on the east side of Bourne Street (originally part of Ebenezer Weld’s land), enlarging their holdings. In 1864 William Jr., who resided in his father’s house year round, purchased another parcel, which included three houses (site of #114 and #124 Bourne) at the corner of Eastland Street. George Richards Minot bought the western parcel in 1856.

George Richards Minot, the eldest son of William, built a summer residence in 1846 near his father’s house. After attending private school he became a merchant like many of his Minot and Weld relatives. He began working for the firm of Chandler & Howard on Commercial Warf as an apprentice in 1829 at the age of 16. He sailed on East Indian ships for the next 10 years before opening his own Indian trading company, Minot & Hooper of Marblehead in 1839, sending ships to India and China. After a financial collapse in 1857, his firm became agents for Southern cotton mills. After the Kingston Street firm’s headquarters was destroyed in Boston’s 1872 fire, his son George Richards Minot II, rebuilt for his father who was in Europe at the time. George II lived with his wife on Pinckney Street on Beacon Hill and summered at Woodbourne; he and his family relocated to Jamaica Plain in 1849. He had vegetable gardens, pigs, horses and cows. His animals used the Stony Brook for water. George died at Woodbourne in December 1883 of a heart attack. He had been looking at the house Cabot & Chandler were designing for him at 254 Marlborough Street in Boston. His wife and children moved back to Boston after his death.

William Minot, Jr. felt most at home at Woodbourne. He was born (1817) and raised in Boston, first on Charles Street and later at 61 Beacon Street. After graduating from Harvard in 1836, he joined the family law firm. In 1842, he married Katherine Maria Sedgwick (1820-1880), the niece of Maria, the well-known novelist. They lived on Beacon Street until moving out to Woodbourne in 1847. His first child was named after this estate, Alice Woodbourne, born that same year. William Jr. was an accomplished gardener and spent much of his time improving he grounds.

William Sr. died in 1873; sister Julia died in 1875 in her Woodbourne house; Katherine died in 1880 and his other brother in 1883. Alice also died in 1883, leaving William, Jr. the lone survivor. He moved back to Boston in 1884, into a town house at 22 Marlborough Street. The estate reverted back to a summer residence. The Minot houses were torn down when the estate was sold in 1911. The family is buried across Walk Hill Street in the Forest Hills Cemetery. Those who died earlier were reinterred from the Old Granary Burying Ground in Boston to Forest Hills.

In 1895, another momentous change came to this area. The Boston & Providence line of the NY, NH & Hartford Railroad was elevated. A viaduct designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge was designed and constructed in 1898 that rerouted the Arborway under the new 4-track design. This massive elevated structure was demolished between 1981 and 1984 for the Southwest corridor project. In 1909, the Boston Elevated Railway built the new station at Forest Hills designed by Alexander W. Longfellow.

Early in 1911, Robert Winsor, investment banker with the firm Kidder, Peabody & Company, and one of the directors of the Boston Elevated Railway, raised the possibility of building a model residential enclave near the carbarns of the elevated railway system at Forest Hills for its conductors and motormen. Its location was “within fifteen minutes of the business center of Boston on a five cent fare.” He began discussing the idea of creating a “scientific, model residential enclave for its conductors and motormen as an alternative to the ills of urban housing and congestion” with an additional goal to be an “object lesson, which will lead others to make similar investments.” He also sent agents to study developments in Europe. Among developments investigated were the projects built by the London County Council as well as a large private development in London. The agents also went to Liverpool, Birmingham and Germany.

Debates over congestion and substandard housing were abounding in Boston at this time. “Boston-1915”, founded in March 1909, by Edward Filene (retailer) and other civic, educational, and business leaders hoped to provide a blueprint for coordinated response for every department in Boston. It aimed to increase efficiency and cure many of Boston’s problems.

This concern about housing workers had evolved in New England during the nineteenth century — from mill girl boardinghouse system of industrial textile centers; company-owned family tenements in factory villages; and widespread speculative building in and around large cities. A few industrialists adopted “model” housing and developed communities with an eye to sanitary, aesthetic and landscape concerns. Manufacturers willing to develop factory communities according to the ideals of the professional architects and landscape architects provided the first testing ground for the new multiple-family housing designs and garden-suburb planning. The garden-city solution was the idea of Ebenezer Howard: new towns on less expensive, cooperatively-owned land developed either to support a local industry or connected to urban centers by rail. In America, the ideal garden city became a small garden suburb at the edge of the urban core linked by transportation. Such residential developments tended to be guided by traditional American ideas of philanthropic investment: the housing was expected to earn a modest profit. Model towns based on cooperative schemes similar to those in Britain met with resistance. However, in both countries, the high cost of model housing meant that it could compete with speculative building only through “collective” purchase, design, and development of a large site.

The efforts at inexpensive home ownership in a planned natural environment required architects to define what a home should be. The home must look like a house, whether for one or two families. It must be domestic in scale and sited to provide open space for fresh air, light, privacy and recreation.

In the debate of affordable housing and lack of home ownership, Winsor envisioned his plan for housing as a “solution to some of the most serious problems of city life, the ills of urban housing and congestion.” Not only would it provide decent housing, the model community would be “an object lesson which would lead others to make similar investments.” It was during a period of concern for affordable housing and the lack of home ownership.

On November 30, 1911, the Boston Dwelling House Company was formally organized with a Declaration of Trust to develop a 30-acre site near the carbarns. Henry Howard was named the president and Robert Winsor, Jr., treasurer. The Trust was formed “with the object of providing desirable, attractive, and sanitary homes at a moderate cost or rental for persons, desiring the same and for the purpose of acquiring the real estate hereinbefore described…” The directors were many prominent social, civic and religious leaders including: Robert Woods, leader in the settlement house movement; William Cardinal O’Connell; Frank A. Day; John Wells Farley; Frederick P. Fish; Mrs. Bertha Hazard; Charles H. Jones; James Prendergast, (a Catholic stock broker who encouraged Cardinal O’Connell to join); James L. Richards; Mrs. Richard M. Saltonstall; Frederic E. Snow; and Carl Dreyfus. Two trustees were directors of Filene’s “Boston-1915” which had planning and housing reform as goals.

Henry Howard, vice-president of a chemical company, was a member of the Massachusetts Commission on workmen’s compensation, later the Mass. Employees Insurance Association, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce. He was also a classmate of Water Kilham at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Minot estate was bought in 1911. The family had contemplated selling the property off in lots, like Hosford & Williams. The estate was sold to Harriet A. Connors of Ashland on January 11, 1911. Later in the year, The Boston Dwelling House Company purchased the land from her. (The entire BDHC purchase encompassed more than is in the district, another section of Woodbourne Road, Eastland Road and Wayburn Road.)

Stock prospectus and newspaper articles appeared soon after. The trustees announced that they had shared “modern viewpoint of philanthropy, and it justifies itself when placed on a sound economic basis.” The houses would not be subsidized, but would earn an economic return. The architects identified with the project were Kilham & Hopkins, Parker, Thomas & Rice as well as Grosvenor Atterbury of New York and correspondence with Coolidge & Carlson.

With the information from recent garden cites in England and on the Continent, Winsor and similar-minded Bostonians turned to the Olmsted Brothers, landscape architects and planners, which in turned worked with three other architectural firms including Kilham & Hopkins, to demonstrate the advantages of laying out the tract as a whole and building the houses on the old Minot estate purchased in December 1911, a half-mile beyond the new Forest Hills terminal of the Boston Elevated Railway. Its location was “within fifteen minutes of the business center of Boston on a five-cent fare.” Winsor envisioned the site as a garden suburb for the carmen and solicited other stockholders for financial support. The Olmsteds’ plans and drawings were similar to their 1909-10 plans for the Long Island development of Forest Hills Gardens, financed by the Russell Sage Foundation; Grosvenor Atterbury, architect. The plans demonstrate a design relationship between the two projects that went beyond a similarity in names and proximity to commuter railways. Five of the winding streets in the Woodbourne plan met in a large circle, which held a circular pool surrounded by larger public buildings, very much like parts of Forest Hills Gardens in New York. The cottage designs of Kilham & Hopkins and by Thomas, Parker & Rice show the influence of Atterbury and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. in the New York project. The initial Olmsted plan included a curvilinear street pattern that was naturalistic and romantic.

The cottages and community would have been completed by the next year if there had not been a conflict between Henry Howard and the landscape planner, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. The Olmsted firm had been hired to plan the development, but heard nothing for several months. They presented their first plan in April 1911. It was reminiscent of their Riverside, Illinois, and Forest Hills, New York plans, particularly with curvilinear streets off an axis. There were many multi-family houses with gabled central bays and an open gateway leading to a playground, while two attached towers flank an arched gate. There were apartment buildings along Hyde Park Avenue. It contained many curvilinear streets and picturesque islands with multifamily and double cottages.

Howard felt that the Olmsted plan was too expensive and had circulated an alternative plan prepared by another designer, Robert Anderson Pope of New York. This breach of contract and trust caused Olmsted to withdraw from the project on February 8, 1912. In a letter to Winsor, Olmsted stated that he was “unable to understand Howard’s action (and certain other indications of his attitude toward my firm that have come to my attention) upon any other ground than a lack of frankness and of ordinary business decency on his part…” Pope was able to reduce the cost of the design, an expertise he was later known for. In his report to the BDHC, Pope thought the need was to minimize development cost by economizing in use of land and by fitting as close to possible the roads to existing topography. He based his design on the assumption that the natural beauty not be sacrificed for the purpose of getting fill to raise the low property. He wrote that the low areas could be filled with the excavation from the Hyde Park Avenue apartments and some roads; he also advised using a greater amount of the existing vegetation. He redesigned the plan for the knoll — 18 house sites at the same elevation, grouping the houses to make possible a “picturesque result”, saving the important pines on the slopes and using existing old roads.

Pope was a self-proclaimed specialist in the design of model communities. He was a more radical thinker than Olmsted and was influenced by Ebenezer Howard and Piton Kropotkin. Pope adopted Kropotkin’s belief in decentralization, cooperation, and “mutual aid” as forces in racial evolution. (Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist who believed that pre-industrial craft villages could be recreated in modern decentralized “industrial villages” communes. He believed that communal spaces and interchanges were also important.) Like many of his generation, Pope believed that the physical environment could affect man’s morality and development. He stressed that planned communities should be designed to relieve urban congestion and ameliorate the struggle between capital and labor. Pope also was an enthusiast of the Garden City movement. He felt that good planning could feed physical and spiritual needs.

The emphasis on Garden City tenets and the belief in communal arrangements were designed into the Boston Dwelling House development. There was not only the grouping of multi-family houses, but there were also community gardens and spaces. Pope modified the Olmsted plan by adding a roadway that had octagonal and lozenge-shaped dividers (not extant). He was able to redesign the streets based on traffic projections: those to be used solely for residential use were made narrower than these for through traffic. A large oval island (similar to the Olmsted plan) to the south was designed with small cottages by Kilham & Hopkins. The communal playgrounds and open spaces are surrounded by two groups of brick multifamily units. These were built on a slight rise and placed so as to “preserve the wonderful old trees that occupied the land before.” This gave each house a view of park-like space and an unbuilt area across the street. At the end of these complexes stood a group of one and two-family cottages designed by Allen & Collens for the smaller family or newlywed couple. Pope’s plan called for gardens behind the apartment buildings. The land between Stony Brook and Westbourne Terrace (now Bournedale) held double or multifamily units with two circular turnarounds.

The housing project of Woodbourne was designed by the firm of Kilham & Hopkins. Formed in 1901, the firm specialized in public schools, urban apartment houses, and Arts and Crafts and Colonial Revival homes for the middle class. By 1912, on the eve of the designing of Woodbourne, Herbert Croly described the firm as “fairly typical of the better contemporary architectural practice” with a region-wide reputation for holding a high level of excellence.

Forest Hills Cottages — quickly renamed Woodbourne — had four separate areas each with a distinctive character. Along Hyde Park Avenue, screening the cottages behind from traffic stood six large apartment buildings designed by Kilham & Hopkins, no longer extant, were said to be the creation of Henry Howard, these were to be “a new type of low-priced apartment house that surpassed the triple-decker in cost, convenience and appearance.” Enclosed loggias, with flower boxes, on the front and rear facades created an open wall, extended the living space and provided fresh air while preserving privacy. The roofs were built for use of all the occupants, giving each family and opportunity to develop roof gardens (an idea that had appeared earlier on the Phipps House tenement in New York, designed by Grosvenor Atterbury). These apartments were demolished in 1970s.

Single-family cottages were constructed on the oval island between Wachusett and Florian Streets. Designed for the smaller family, these hollow-tile dwellings were parged with stucco; some were further embellished with half-timbering. They were built facing each other with a communal path through the middle. These stand at #288, #296 and #302 Wachusett, #90, #94, #96, #98 Florian Street and #15 and #21 Southbourne.

The next area contained two clusters of brick housing along Southbourne Road, #30 to #84 Southbourne (1912). Jordan Marsh and Co. furnished #48 in 1913. Each group had two single-family houses (similar in plan to the ones on Florian), at the ends, two brick duplexes and a U-shaped six-family house at the center facing open park space with paths. They resembled the buildings constructed at Forest Hills on Long Island. This section also had playgrounds and communal park areas, an important ingredient in Pope’s belief and design system. The Boston Herald reported in July 1912 that the development “was located on a high knoll, with long vistas under tall pines.”

Sitting right next to these up the hill was a cluster designed by Allen Collens at #78, #80-82 and #84 Southbourne Road. A small stucco one-family house frames either end with a duplex set back in the center. In 1914, Charles Collens designed the Clubhouse at #83 Bourne Street. The Clubhouse was a comfortable lodge with an exterior chimney and two tennis courts of crushed stone. This club was used in the promotional material to emphasize the sense of community, and was said to “stimulate social life.”

After construction began at Woodbourne, Kilham embarked on a trip to England in the autumn of 1911. He visited Lever Brothers’ Port Sunlight near Liverpool and then Cadbury Cocoa Village of Bourneville, near Birmingham, which he felt was “architecturally charming, but fearfully paternalistic as only the English can be.” He also reviewed Hampstead Garden Suburb where he met Raymond Unwin who showed him plans for the new town. Kilham thought Hampstead more practical, but it was still a white-collar place, which did not solve any social problems. He also compared the English buildings with those in Boston, stating that the “Letchworth house without cellar, closets, bathroom, electricity or furnace cost the equivalent of 15 cents per cubic foot, while his own Boston houses, also built of brick with slated roof, containing all these amenities, cost no more and were better.”

The development was meant to provide housing for the moderate-income worker. The cottages, especially, were intended to foster home ownership. This project was meant not in “the spirit of charity, but in the spirit of good citizenship.” The financial success of this development never fully materialized and the project was financially successful only because the company sold off unused land for new single-family house lots in the 1920s, erasing the original plan by Pope.

Woodbourne, like the Filene Cooperative Homes project in Franklin Heights, Roxbury (several years before) and many others of this period, never fully lived up to the goals of their creators.

Kilham, commenting on the Woodbourne project in later years, describes what he thought went wrong with this and other similar projects for low-income workers. Although they started off with providing “simple habitation for working people,” architects tended to incorporate too many amenities such as “fireplaces, furnaces, and piazzas.” These extras pushed the rental and sales prices beyond what working people could afford. At Woodbourne, stated Kilham, “the apartments were immediately seized upon by teachers, dentists, and so on, and the houses similarly.” The Boston elevated “mechanics and street-car workers never got their houses.” About a decade later this area was predominantly upper-middle class. Kilham & later partner, William Roger Greeley, blamed the failure of reform housing (as did many others) on land and building costs for new construction. Critic Lewis Mumford adopted a similar position, although coming to a different conclusion, during the early years of the Depression. Rejecting the ideas of those who envisioned factory-made prefabricated housing as a panacea, he stated that to “Modernize the dwelling house and create adequate quarters for our badly housed population,” the government must be involved. (Lewis Mumford, “Mass-Production and the Modern House,” Architectural Record 67, no. 7 (February 1930: 116).

Florence Street, renamed Southbourne, bisected the lower or southernmost parcel from the Minot property. George H. Williams and Charles F. Curtis bought the site in 1871 for $25,000. The land then included a house and some outbuildings, a stream and a pond. Thomas Weld who left it to Elizabeth Bradstreet, possibly his daughter, had originally owned it. In May 1873, the Boston North End Mission became the new owner of the property. The estate was bought to provide a summer residence for children and a year-round house for women in need.

The Boston North End Mission was established in June 1865 as the Hanover Street Home Mission Society to service the poor immigrants of Boston’s North End. In 1870 it was reincorporated as the Boston North End Mission. They purchased a former dance hall at 201 North Street and renovated it as a school and shelter (an airshaft for the Callahan Tunnel sits on the old site today). The Mission was a Protestant religious society, with most of its missionaries from Baptist and Methodist sects. Its purpose was to be a temporary refuge for fallen women (as stated in the Annual Reports), providing them with a room, education and training until employment could be found. One of the leaders of the Mission was Eben Tourje, the founder and Director of the New England Conservatory of Music. He became the Superintendent of the Sunday school in 1867, and served as President for a term. The North Street building held an industrial school, which taught young women and girls to sew and to make their own clothes in preparation for being a seamstress. It also held religious services seven times a week, which tried to include the sailors from the docks. Temperance meetings were held every Saturday.

The Trustees of the Mission bought the land at Woodbourne for the same reason as the Minot’s — to escape the crowded city for open land. The Curtis/Williams Estate was bought as a summer home for inner-city children and as a year-round home for some of the women to remove them from the temptation of their former lives. The trustees named it the Mt. Hope Home. It was a substantial brick structure built before the Civil War. The property originally had a large pond at the corner, but it was filled in by 1914, perhaps in response to the 1909 cholera epidemic.

By 1874, 86 women lived at this estate, rotating through every six months. The Mission encouraged daily church services and scripture readings. A laundry was established next to the house where girls and women took in washing and ironing from the surrounding area; the laundry generated a small income. The seamstress school also continued here in the summer. It cost $4,765 to operate the home. Due to financial strain, in 1877, the Mt. Hope Home was closed for women and remained open only as a summer camp for children. This camp was described in the 1876 Annual Report: “Their pale little faces seen in such numbers in the neighborhood of the Mission — often peering in at its doors — have long appealed to the sympathies of those who labor here.” Friends of the Mission conceived of the plan of opening a summer home, to give the children of the poor a glimpse of God’s beautiful world, a respite from noise and strife, and a few weeks of pure air, good food, and tender treatment. A large and well-ventilated building on the Mt. Hope Home estate with a cottage attached was fitted up for them, with 59 roughly made bedsteads in two large chambers. As many as 104 children a season spent their summers there, staying for two weeks.

In August 1923, John Goodway bought the Mt. Hope Home property and subdivided the property into house lots with a road through the middle, named Goodway. He retained the original building for himself and an acre of land (now #59) Southbourne Road and #30, #34, and #38 Goodway Road. He built a number of houses as well as selling off lots. He built #35 Southbourne Road as a Boarding House for Infants, probably for the continuation of the North End Mission’s work. Goodway’s house and land were sold to John Gately in 1963. The old house either burned or was razed for five single-family houses and one duplex on the site in 1963-64 by Gately.

World War I brought a halt to any residential building in the entire Woodbourne district. There were some houses built in 1916 and a few a garages before 1922. Both the BDHC and individual developers began anew in 1922. Kilham & Hopkins were no longer involved with the BDHC and it appears that this project went the way of most others in New England — reform housing was no longer a big priority. The BDHC became strictly a real estate developer. They constructed seven houses in 1922, nine houses in 1923, four in 1924, six in 1925 and one in the years 1926, 1927 and 1937. The architects they used were Mulhall & Holmes, Woodbury & Stuart and James G. Hutchinson. By 1929, the company sold off large blocks to two developers — Martin J. Herbert and James C. Martin. Herbert put in a street and named it after himself. He bought land not included in the NR district as well as a parcel on Herbertson Road and Eldridge Road. It appears that Herbert built the first houses in this area with built-in garages. Albion Brodin, a local architect, moved to 30 Bourne by 1931 from 10 Hadwin Place in Roslindale. Godway resided at 15 Southbourne. The northern parcel continued to be developed by property owners and small developers.

James C. Martin, an architect from the office of Kilham & Hopkins, bought many of the 77 lots taken from the BDHC by the City of Boston in back taxes in 1934. Martin began by converting the clubhouse on Bourne for his own uses to a one-family and built three more houses by 1937. He designed and constructed 12 more houses on Northbourne and Wachusett by 1942, with an additional one in 1955. (The lots also included land on Eastland, Wayburn, and Woodbourne Road, not included in the NR District.) He also purchased a bit of land designed by Pope as part of the common green for the Southbourne houses. He altered the property lines and built a house on the service drive at #24 Southbourne Road in 1937.

Over the years, Southbourne, Bournedale, Northbourne and Bourne have been widened. The Stony Brook was converted in 1934. The City of Boston took the land from the BDHC and an individual between Eldridge and Northbourne for the Edwin P. Seaver School at #35 Eldridge in 1929-30. The city leveled the parcel and built a huge concrete retaining wall in the rear. John F. Cullen designed the present Colonial/Georgian Revival building in 1930; the side wings added in 1931. Seaver had been the headmaster at English High School in 1874 before becoming Superintendent of Schools in Boston from 1880 to 1904. This building was sold by the City and turned into condominiums in 1983 by the Finch/Abbey Group.

While there have been a few additions and intrusions since 1945, the Woodbourne area with its model houses and design along with the harmonious residences remains a testimony to the housing styles, trends and development practices of the early twentieth century. Much of the early picturesque curvilinear designs of Pope remain, respecting the topography and landscape. Many of the trees of the nineteenth century still grace the streets and front lawns. The core of the area contains the brick housing, set back and on the rise, the stucco cottages on the oval island are surrounded by compatible houses, which match the scale, detail, set back and feel of this early period. Many of the properties now have garages, added or built on, reflecting the shift from streetcar suburb to automobile suburb. They represent the ways suburbanization developed in Boston.

Description
The Woodbourne National Register District is a residential district located in the northeast section of the Jamaica Plain area of the City of Boston. It encompasses Walk Hill Street, Bourne Street, Florian Street, Wachusett Street and Goodway Road. This 30-acre parcel was originally several separate mid-nineteenth-century estates; it is now a cohesive and harmonious enclave of buildings primarily from the first four decades of the twentieth century. Woodbourne represents several important developments of early- twentieth-century housing — the transformation of country estates to housing, the culmination of Boston’s long experiment with reform/model housing, the rise of streetcar suburbs and the early influence of the automobile. This district is an almost intact example of the development of middle-class housing of New England in the first decades of the twentieth century. The district was developed in three distinct patterns, but the result is a cohesive neighborhood with a range of housing styles nearly intact from the early twentieth century.

The district contains 424 resources, none previously listed on the National Register: 332 contributing buildings, 46 contributing structures, and five contributing objects. There are 41 non-contributing buildings, mostly built outside the area of significance. The contributing buildings primarily consist of one-family to multi-family residences from the streetcar suburb and garden city suburb traditions. These buildings represent a range of suburban house forms — the suburban villas, homestead temple/end house, bungalow, four square and cape. Other types include Shingle Style, Queen Anne, Craftsman single-family, two-family houses, Colonial Revival residences, in many variations, duplexes and a range of Arts & Crafts model housing. The contributing outbuildings are primarily detached garages located to the sides and rear. They represent the evolution of this building type in early suburbs. Contributing non-residential resources include two schools (one is now a condominium; one is an administration site), walls and sidewalk cobbling.

The overall design of Woodbourne is one of modest single-and multi-family houses with uniform setbacks and a design that follows the topography. The highest elevations are at the top of Bourndale Street where the original nineteenth-century houses were located and a section of Northbourne Road. The southern side of Walk Hill Street faces St. Andrew’s Church and the fence along a section of the 1848 picturesque Forest Hills Cemetery. Proceeding down Bourne and Wachusett, the two outermost streets in the district, the land slopes down towards Hyde Park Avenue. Wachusett has small curves at either end, while Bourne Street is curvilinear all the way down. Patten Street also begins on a high slope near Wachusett and rolls down the hill to Bourne. Rodman and Eldridge have a similar profile. Northbourne Street and Bournedale both have higher elevations in the middle of the street and slope down at either end. Many of the houses on the north side of Northbourne are built on the hill with garages at street level, built into the hill. The north side of Southbourne is also on a ridge; the houses are built on a rise above the level of the street. The Florian island and the lower part of Wachusett are on the flats. Because of the topography, the street design is curvilinear and varied. There are no grid patterns; each block has its own unique shape and configuration. Outside the original building design of the Boston Dwelling House Company’s (BDHC) houses, the majority of the house lots are similar, but the placement on the lot is somewhat varied due to the differences in elevation.

The northern section of the district lies between two older streets, Walk Hill Street and Hyde Park Avenue and what is now Northbourne Road. The development took place beginning in 1898 when the open land around the Olney estate was sold and subdivided. Lots were laid out and streets put in by 1905. The streets were primarily curvilinear, following the varying elevations.

The middle or core section’s landscape and architectural design are the result of BDHC original plans from 1911-1913. This section was originally the Minot family compound that was built as a model housing development. The designer, Robert Anderson Pope, respected the topography and existing landscaping. The Garden City movement and the importance of open space and gardens also influenced him, as reflected in the design of curvilinear street patterns and different shaped blocks and picturesque groupings. He retained as many mature trees as possible. Pope’s original design can still be seen in three complexes on Southbourne with the open parks and paths in front, the Florian island cottage complex and the outline of Northbourne (the lozenge-shaped and octagonal dividers were never built). Walls of stone stand behind the houses on Northbourne.

The smaller southern section was laid out by one developer, John Goodway, on the parcel that had been the property of the North End Mission. The older nineteenth-century house was destroyed in the 1960s and modern residences put in. Goodway built a few houses himself and sold off the rest of the lots. This section is a more grid-like plan, but is less noticeable because of the changes in elevation and residual landscape elements of the nineteenth century; like the BHDC section, large pines and walls remain scattered on Southbourne and Goodway.

Aspects of the nineteenth-century estates still remain along Southbourne and Goodway Streets. Large pine trees of the Minot estate and the Mt. Hope Home are scattered throughout this section, as are several large oaks. Large pines are located throughout the brick Boston Dwelling House complexes on Southbourne and between #43 and #51 Soutbourne Road. They are also visible at #14, #22, and #26 Goodway Road. Coupled with stone walls and outcroppings and rear retaining walls, some of this area conveys the sylvan nature of the original Minot/Olney estates. There is cobbling at the edge of the sidewalk along sections of Bourne Street.

Residential Resources
The majority of the housing resources of the Woodbourne Historic District are representative of modest middle-class suburban development of the early decades of the twentieth century. The forms included homestead temple, bungalow and cape as well as the period revivals. The styles include Queen Anne, Shingle Style, Craftsman, Art & Crafts, Colonial Revival and Dutch Colonial. There is also single-family, two-family and multi-family garden city suburban housing.

The earliest contributing house in the district is #71 Walk Hill Street (1896). This Queen Anne style house has a two-story pitch roof with paired brackets and bays on the front and side, distinguished by a two-and-one-half-story conical roofed corner and a projecting portico with columns. The next group of houses was constructed between 1898 and 1899. They include #162 Wachusett Street (1898), #6-8 Rodman Street (1889), #47 and #55 Patten Street (1899); #162 Wachusett is a two-and-one-half story suburban Queen Anne style house with a front porch; #47 Patten is a two-and-one-half-story structure with a Palladian window in the front gambrel gable. The projecting front porch has two sets of paired half columns; #55 Patten is a two-and-one-half-story house covered in shingles with a projecting entrance portico. The most distinguishing feature is a balustraded recessed curved arch in the gable with a balustrade across it in the gable.

Examples of the suburban Shingle Style are primarily found in the northern section. They include #15 Bourne Street (1909), reminiscent of #47 Patten, with its intersecting overhanging gambrel roof and grouped half column porch. It has eyebrow windows in the gables. A later variation of the Shingle Style are the houses at #186-188 Wachusett Street (1911) and at #16, #28 and #34 Rodman Street (1905) with large gambrel secondary mass dormers on the front roof slopes.

A common house type in Woodbourne is the Homestead suburban temple house, or end house, that became popular in the nineteenth century and allowed the development of suburban subdivisions on small rectangular lots. The main body of the house was reoriented and the roof ridge is perpendicular to the front wall showing the narrow gable end to the street. These could vary from modest one-story examples to two story versions. They were clothed in a variety of styles. The internal layout was often the side-hall plan, with an entry in the side bay. This house type reached its apex in the years preceding World War I.

Examples of this form include the one-and-one-half story gambrel roofed Dutch Colonial style end houses with full length front porches at #15 and #17 Rodman Street (1911); #35 Southbourne Road (1914); and #189, #193 (1911), #197 (1925), #201 (1911), #205 (1912) Wachusett Street.

The two-family house with its stacked apartments is another variation on the Homestead temple house. They include hipped roofed Craftsman structures, and gable and gambrel-fronted houses with Queen Anne and Colonial Revival details. Common secondary masses include bay windows and/or porches. Examples of this type found are the very articulated at #165 Wachusett Street (1914), to moderately detailed ones at #177 (1906), and #181 (1910) Wachusett Street. Other examples can be seen at #55 (1913), #61 (1931), and #63 (1907) Walk Hill Street. Two unusual brick buildings of this type stand at #32 and #40Eldridge (c.1925).

Another popular house form was the four square which emerged at the turn-of-the-century. The house is a cube-shaped structure with a hipped or pyramidal roof and dormers. Often, there is a one-story porch across the front. This form developed as a reaction against the clutter and excesses of the Victorian period. Both the interior and exterior is simple and restrained. Four square examples include #42 (1925), and #43 (1922), Patten Street. The Craftsman style can be found at #87 Walk Hill Street (1925), #30 Bourne (1930), #42 Eldridge Street (1929), and #18 Goodway Road (1927).

By far, the most common style in the Woodbourne district is the Colonial Revival. It appears in a variety of forms and interpretations. The Colonial Revival style coincided with a period of growing self-consciousness and self-awareness of the professional and upper middle class elites and was set against massive changes brought on by urbanization, industrialization and immigration. Professional and upper class Americans sought to bring to life idealized colonial attributes that would reaffirm their traditional role and would help them in their efforts to redirect American society. The elite’s goal was to create an “ideal” of a higher community, to create a sense of loyalty to an abstract community ideal above personal greed. The movement was characterized by a dual nature — its adherents were believers in social progress and advance as well as advocates of a nostalgic and sentimental vision of the pre-industrial era.

The Colonial Revival style began in the 1880’s and reached its peak in the period between 1890 and World War I. The Centennial in Philadelphia focused the nation’s attention on its heritage. As the early decades of the twentieth century progressed, the style spread to encompass suburban housing, apartment buildings, and even gas stations and settlement houses. For the client, the colonial revival was the physical representation of the values and lifestyle sought during this period. For the architect, the colonial revival was one answer in the search of a national style and an alternative to the Late Victorian aesthetic of overindulgence. The Colonial Revival style was rooted in the past with traditional values of nationalism, harmony, refinement, and restraint. On the practical level, buildings in the colonial revival were cheap and economical to build, strengthening its appeal to a broader, less self-conscious audience.

The Colonial Revival as built at Woodbourne represents the suburban, practical aspect of the style, which is also found throughout the Northeast, and appears in pattern books and mail order catalogues.

The Colonial Revival and Dutch Colonial appears in Woodbourne in a host of variations which include the center and side-entrance gable block; the center-entrance gambrel block; and the gable-fronted end house and gambrel-fronted end house forms and four squares.

The gable block center entrance as seen at #40 Bourne (1927); #6 (1923), #10 (1923), and #41 Bournedale Road (1926); #29 Goodway Road (1927); #18 Northbourne (1922); and #236 (1941), #238 (1941); #251 (1926); #199 Wachusett Street. Many have pedimented porticos and sun porches. Gable block houses with off-center facade gables are located at #1 Goodway Road (1926). Structures at #25 Bourne Street (1925), #23 Bournedale Road (1937), #30 Northbourne Road (1937), and #271 (1926) and #285 (1937) Wachusett Street are examples of side passage entrance gable block residences. A representative of the gambrel-block central entrance can be found at #51 Southbourne Road (1926); a similar grouping of this variation is lined up at #32 (1926), #27 (1922), #33 (1924), #36 (1926), and #37 (1926), Bournedale Road.

The district’s two rare triple-deckers display Colonial Revival ornament and represent two typical Boston types; #235 Wachusett moved from Hyde Park Avenue is a gabled-roofed structure with the characteristic projecting bay and open porch features. There are dentils around the cornice. The other, at #211 Wachusett (1923) has a flat roof with brackets, and a wide entablature. There is also a three-story side-bay and balustraded porch on all three floors.

Another two-family solution was the side-by-side house, or duplex. Examples can be found at #18-20 Northbourne Road and #239-241 Wachusett (both 1939) and are sheathed in Colonial Revival detailing.

There are two distinctive Tudor Revival house types in Woodbourne. The Tudor Revival was popular during the early decades of the twentieth-century, especially in suburban developments. It offered a picturesque, asymmetrical element to the houses and the streetscape.

The Woodbourne example is an unusual house type, described as a gable-fronted saltbox, has the signature roof profile with one slope significantly longer than the other. It originated in the Colonial-era when lean-to additions were made to the rear of gable-block houses. Each has side-passage entries with gabled pediment at the doorway, often with one or two square oriels on the facade and a gable dormer on the side slope. All the examples have Colonial Revival detail. These first appeared during the second phase of BDHC development beginning in 1922, #14 (1922), #24 (1923), #26 (1923), #30 (1922), #49(c. 1923) Bourndale Road; #10 (1922), #33 (1924) Southbourne Road; #55 (1922), #59 (1922), #60 (1924), and #63 (c.1923) Bourne Street.

Another Tudor Revival house type in Woodbourne was designed by local architect Albin Brodin for private owners. These houses are actually gable block-center or side-hall entrance in form with asymmetrical facade gables and the high pitch roof profile, characteristic of this style. They are located at #42 (1933) and #46 (1933) Bourne Street; #50 (1931) Northbourne Road; #263 (1932) Wachusett Street.

The other housing types scattered throughout the district include the bungalow, cottage and cape. The bungalow, similar to the four square house type, was connected with the home economics movement and the efficiency movement. The word bungalow is derived from the Hindustani word “Bangla” used to describe low houses with a verandah used by the British colonists in the nineteenth century. The American bungalow is a one-story structure with a broad covered porch created by the extension of the roofline and exposed rafter ends. A true bungalow stands at #259 Wachusett Street (1924), and at #20 Bourne Street (1930). Not many of this type were constructed, but bungaloid buildings (houses with bungalow features more than a single story) add to the variety in the district. The cape style, a small, three bay, one-story house appeared in New England in the 1600s. It became popular in the early twentieth century because of its modest size, ease of caring and simple, efficient plan. Capes are located at #19 Bournedale Road (1937); #43 (1937), and #47 Northbourne Road (1934). This style was very popular in this area, but the majority of those built lie outside the designated district. One-story cottages are found at random. Nestled into the hill amidst the pine trees stands #22 Goodway (1923).

Many of the Woodbourne houses have single or two-car freestanding garages from the 1920s and 1930s reflecting the shift from streetcar transportation to automobile culture. The first houses built with garages were #22 (1927) and #26 Eldridge (1928). Several houses have an attached garage such as #238 Wachusett (1941).

The most unique housing of the district are the buildings designed by Kilham & Hopkins and Charles Collens for the BDHC in 1911-1912. These range from one-family, duplex and multi-family dwellings designed together with the plan of the development. Robert Anderson Pope was the designer.

The Boston Dwelling House Company bought the Minot estate in 1911, razed the old houses on Northbourne and reconfigured the landscape for model housing. Fill from excavating the foundation of the apartment buildings (demolished) on Hyde Park Avenue was used. Southbourne, Northbourne, Florian (then Florence), Bournedale (then Westbourne Terrace), and the lower part of Wachusett (then Westbourne Road) were laid out, taking into account the contours of the hills and the existing trees. The houses were constructed to fit into the plan by Pope and to convey a sense of garden city community living. The first phase of construction took place between 1911 and 1914.

Florian Island, a landscaped oval developed with 10 stucco-parged, hollow-tile single-family two-story cottages, is part of the original BDHC construction. This cluster contains six single-family houses facing a central walkway with four houses on the ends, #288, #296 and #302 Wachusett, #90, #94, #96, #98 Florian Street and #15 and #21 Southbourne (1912). The pathway down the middle evokes an English village lane. Several houses have jerkin-head roofs with half-timbering. The others have gambrel roofs with dormers and inset porches and attached trellises. All the houses within this pod share the following common features: green slate roofs, copper flashing and dormers on either side or on the front. Each cottage had a living room, dining room and kitchen on the first floor, with four bedrooms upstairs. The rooms’ dimensions were a cozy 11 feet by 11 feet; 10 feet by 11 feet; and 13 feet by 15 feet.

Across the street and up the hill stand the two terraced housing clusters, also part of the original BDHC plan, #30 to #76 Southbourne (1912). These tapestry brick houses, also of hollow-tile construction, frame a geometric open space. These developments are raised above the sidewalk and nestled in a designed wooded landscape. Each grouping has a pair of single-family houses at the edges, a pair of two-family houses and at the point a U-shaped path, a six-family attached unit facing a U-shaped park-like area with paths. All reflect Arts & Crafts (English vernacular) design and correspond to the snugness and compactness of the Florian Island cottages. The single-family houses are similar in form to the Florian Island houses, but are sheathed in brick. The duplexes have pitch roofs with pent roof dormers across the facade and an enclosed porch with a flat arch entrance. Some entrances have been closed in. The six-family houses are U-shaped in plan. They are one-and-a- half stories with pent roof dormers with jerkinheads and three gables. Each unit has an enclosed porch that opens onto the living room. The saltbox profiles are reminiscent of C.F.A. Voysey’s home, the Orchard (1900-1901) and a pair of Voyseysque cottages at Letchworth Garden City (1905) by M. H. Bailie Scott.

While each complex contains three distinct building types, each blends with the others in materials, detail and scale. In the original design the land adjacent to the multi-family buildings was intended for use as playgrounds. These are now used for parking. One side section was sold to James C. Martin, who constructed a residence on the site, #24 Southbourne.

Adjacent to the Southbourne complexes stands yet another component of the original BDHC development. Similar in plan and scale, the complex at #78-84 Southbourne was designed and developed by Charles Collens of Allen & Collens. Designed in a “U”-shape plan, these are more diminutive than the brick complexes. A pair of stucco singly-family cottages stands towards the street with a double stucco-parged house recessed at the center facing a green open space. Each unit has a living room with a fireplace and a kitchen downstairs with two bedrooms and a bath upstairs nestled under a green slate roof.

The Woodbourne Clubhouse at #84 Bourne Street (1914) was constructed in order to reinforce the concept of communal living and provide recreational amenities (which probably helped put this development out of reach for the intended audience). It was a one-story bungalow lodge with fieldstone foundation and a fieldstone end wall chimney. In 1934, James C. Martin purchased the property and remodeled it, adding a colonial portico. Four houses were erected over the tennis courts.

The district has gone through minor changes since its period of significance. There have been major alterations to a small number of historic buildings, 14, making them noncontributing; the rest have undergone minor changes such as window or door modifications and porch enclosures. The single-family buildings that were constructed after 1945 are compatible in scale, materials, size and setbacks.

Non-Residential Resources
The contributing community buildings of the Woodbourne district are two schools and a church. In 1899, The City of Boston built the Francis Parkman School at #25 Walk Hill Street (1899, Perkins; addition 1904). Located on a rise surrounded by a wall, the original Classical Revival school building was a rectangular red brick edifice with a projecting portico. The most distinctive characteristic is the terra cotta trim on the stringcourse, windows and cornice. The first story windows have flared lintels and the second story ones are round arched. The rectangular addition towards the north is also of red brick with terra cotta trim at the cornice.

The Edwin P. Seaver School, at #35 Eldridge Road (1930) is a Colonial Revival structure from the 1930s with minimal detailing. The original school was built in 1924 by Blackall, Clapp & Whittemore and was remodeled or rebuilt in 1930. It is an H-shaped building that was cut into the hill. The entrance has a large entablature with dentils and medallion designs. The half columns are fluted. A leaded fanlight in a glass transom highlights the doorway. There are small modillions around the eaves. Although it has been changed into condominiums, it still retains its educational appearance.

Non-Contributing Resources
The oldest house in the district is #56 Patten Street, built in the mid-nineteenth century and owned by Richard Olney from 1864 to 1882. The Olney House originally faced Walk Hill Street and its property line extended down to Hyde Park Avenue. It is a non-contributing resource to the district, due to its early date and the major alterations completed in 1921. Due to the twentieth-century application of stucco and half-timbering, an addition, and a change in orientation, it has lost its original integrity. Local resident Harold Peters bought it in 1914.

The most dominant non-contributing resource is the Upham Memorial Church at #156-158 Wachusett Street (1899, Hutchinson; additions, 1920 & 1925). The Upham Memorial Church was originally a Medieval Revival edifice with a stucco-and half-timbered gable roof and square tower. The tower and the main body each had an entrance ornamented with a hood with vergboards. It was bought by the Knights of Columbus, Shawmut Chapter, in 1977 and was subsequently stripped of the high tower and covered in blue aluminum siding.

Another non-contributing community structure is the low horizontal St. Andrew’s Community Building at #43 Walk Hill Street (1923). A portable, prefabricated building by Brooks- Skinner, it stands on a rise surrounded by a wall and a large puddingstone outcropping facing Patten Street. St. Andrews the Apostle Church lies across the street. The parish was created out of the St. Thomas Parish in 1918; the church structure was built in 1921, designed by Richard Shaw and lies right outside the district.

Post-1945 has occurred primarily in the southern section along Goodway Road and the lower section of Bourne Street. The houses are of the same scale and setbacks as the contributing properties.

Designers
Walter Harrington Kilham (1868-1948) was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, the son of a banker. He graduated in 1889 from the pioneer architectural course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After working for several prominent firms in Boston, he won the Rotch traveling scholarship, which allowed him to study independently through Europe from 1893- 1895. He returned to the U.S. and began work for Winslow & Wetherell and in 1898, struck out on his own with fellow designer James Cleveland Hopkins. The firm was established in 1901, with the first large apartment project, Technology Chambers in Boston.

James Cleveland Hopkins (1873-1938) was the son of a Boston leather merchant. He grew up in Jamaica Plain near Centre Street and the Jamaica Pond. After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1896, he went to work at the firm of Winslow & Wetherell. He rose to the status of supervisor before forming a partnership with Kilham. He married a socialite in 1908 and moved to the pastoral town of Dover. Hopkins was not as involved in the public arena as Kilham (or later partner William Roger Greeley), but he did visit England every year, influencing his taste for half-timbered residences and keeping him abreast of the garden-city movement.

Kilham lived in suburban Brookline and served on the committee that in 1914 became the local planning board under the leadership of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. He was also a member of Robert S. Peabody’s circle, which met often to discuss improvement schemes for the City of Boston. In 1906, these ideas were collected for publication by the Boston Society of Architects as the, Report on Municipal Improvements, and Kilham joined Peabody’s “flying column of members” which promoted these ideas through lectures and lantern slide talks to the city’s clubs and societies. Kilham was the author of Boston After Bullfinch. Among Kilham’s special concern was the “three-decker evil, which has ruined so many suburbs of Boston.” He championed the Massachusetts zoning law, which permitted local governments to outlaw this building type. (His Brookline adopted this statute). He designed brick two-family houses on Highland Road in Brookline to show an alternative to the wooden triple-decker.

By 1911, the firm of Kilham & Hopkins began to define their own ideas about affordable housing, which would serve the users and community aesthetics. They compiled a scrapbook of published housing projects at the same time they began to design Forest Hills Cottage, later known as Woodbourne; their first self-contained suburban housing development built on garden-city principles.

Kilham & Hopkins went on to design many other model developments as well as single-family houses, schools, and town halls. They designed, with Philip Horton Smith, a group of low-rent brick cottages in Salem after a fire in 1914. The Salem Rebuilding Trust had bought land to erect some “low cost cottages for workmen with the idea of getting them to see the advantages of living away from congested sections.” They next designed housing and a community building for the Mt. Hope Finishing Company in North Dighton, Mass. The Massachusetts Housing Commission (MHC) sponsored the next major housing project, a state agency established to “assist mechanics, laborers, and others to acquire homesteads or small houses and plots of ground in suburbs.” MHC hired Kilham & Hopkins to design houses for a plan drawn up by Arthur Comey. Lowell, Mass. was chosen as the site for this experiment. Although 50 houses had been planned, only 12 were built starting in 1917. The MHC lasted only six years before being absorbed into the state’s planning agency. World War I provided the last opportunity for large-scale housing projects. The federal government, in order to maintain the necessary armaments for war, needed to build communities to house war workers. One agency responsible for the shipyard workers was the Emergency Fleet Corporation. It hired Kilham & Hopkins to construct the community at Atlantic Heights, Portsmouth, Maine. The firm’s experience at Woodbourne and subsequent jobs stood them in good stead, as speed was the essence in this period.

Herbert Croly observed that Kilham & Hopkins were not innovators, but added to the region’s stock of well-built traditional buildings and to reform housing. They did however make a substantial response to the housing and planning issues of the early twentieth century. Their synthesis of the New England village tradition and the picturesque suburban movement with the garden-city philosophy contributed to the larger efforts of the emerging regional planning movement.

Charles Collens (c. 1873-1956) designed the small stucco single-family houses and duplex at the edge of the development as well as the Clubhouse at 84 Bourne Street. Charles Collens apprenticed with Peabody & Stearns before establishing the firm of Allen & Collens in 1904 at 6 Beacon Street Boston, with Francis R. Allen (1865-1931). The firm is best known for their institutional projects. Its commissions included the Women’s Hospital NYC (1904); Williams College Infirmary (1912); Second Church, Newton, Mass. (1917); Union Theological Seminary, NYC (1909); City Hall, Newton, Mass. (1933); Riverside Church, NYC, (1930); the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum, NYC (1934-38); and buildings on the campuses of Middlebury, Vt.; Andover Theological Seminary, and Vassar College, NY. The complex at Woodbourne is a rare and early domestic design for Charles Collens.

Peters & Rice, architect of #162 Wachusett consisted of William York Peters (1858-1938) and Arthur Wallace Rice. Peters was related to Andrew J. Peters and designed his and his wife’s headstone at Forest Hills Cemetery. Peters graduated from Harvard College in 1881, apprenticed at Strugis & Brigham in Boston before going to Paris in 1883. In Paris, he studied at the atelier of Julian Gaudet, never attending the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Peters returned to Boston and opened his own practice before joining with Rice in 1898. Peters withdrew from active practice in 1903 due to ill health.

James C. Martin was a draftsman and designer in the Kilham & Hopkins firm in the early twentieth century. He retained an active interest in this area and bought land and designed over fifteen houses from 1935-1941. He converted the old clubhouse into his private residence in 1934.

Frederick H. Gowing was a local architect who lived at 74 Monmouth Street in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1899. His office was located on Tremont Street in Boston. He began as a builder and began to design houses by 1913. He published a pattern book with his designs in 1920, entitled Building Plans for Modern Houses. His houses appear in a number of surrounding towns and cities near Boston.

Albin F. Brodin was listed as a draftsman in 1925, living in Roslindale, Massachusetts. By 1931 he resided at #31 Bourne and designed many houses in the area. Mulhall & Holmes had an office at Copley Square in Boston. The firm, J. Edward Holmes and William J. Mulhall, designed the Hugh O’Brian School in Boston as well as the Dorchester District Court on Washington Street, Dorchester, Massachusetts.

Daniel Howard Woodbury and George B. Stuart established their firm in 1916; the partnership lasted until 1936. By 1926, they labeled themselves as church architects. The firm designed the Methodist Church in Clinton, Mass. in 1926-27. Each had a practice before their partnership. Woodbury designed a house for the Harriman Brothers in Annisquam, Mass. in 1896; the Town Hall in Wrentham, Mass., and the Fiske Memorial Library, both c. 1896; a three-family brick house at 151 Highland, Roxbury, Mass., in 1900 and Valencia Chambers, 164 Strathmore Road, Brighton, Mass. in 1913. Stuart lived at 677 Wachusett for a time. Murdock Boyle designed several apartment blocks on Beacon Street in Brookline as well as a house at 53 Bay State Road in Boston for Frederick Johnson. The firm of Dow, Harlow & Kimball lasted from 1921-1929 with partners Albert H. Dow, Hamilton Harlow and Kenneth C. Kimball. Joseph Selwyn was a local architect/builder who also designed houses on Cushing Road and Somerset Road in Brookline in 1941 and 1942.

Bibliography
Bergeron, Ralph. “Housing the Middle Class Man, ” Technical World 14, no. 2, April 1913

Boston Dwelling House Company. Woodbourne: A Real Estate Development of the Boston Dwelling House Company. Boston: Walton Advertising and Printing Co., n.d.

___________. Circular. Boston (May 1912)

Boston American. “Scientific Model House Community,” December 19,1911

Boston Herald. Articles (April 24, 1899; May 8, 1904; April 18, 1913; July 3, 6, 1913)

Boston North End Mission. Annual Reports 1877 - 1890.

Candee, Richard and Greer Hardwicke. “Early Twentieth Century Reform Housing by Kilham & Hopkins Architects of Boston,” Winterthur Portfolio, Spring 1987, no. 1, vol. 22.

Channing, K.M. Minot Family Letters, 1773 -1871. Sherborn, Mass., 1957.

City of Boston. Inspectional Services Department. Building permits.

Croly, Herbert. “The Work of Kilham & Hopkins, Architects of Boston, Mass.” Architectural Record 31, no. 2 (Feb. 1912).

Drake, Francis S. The Town of Roxbury. Boston: Alfred Mudge and Son, 1878.

Eggat, Gerald. Richard Olney, Evolution of a Statesman. 1847.

A Genealogical Record of the Minot Family in America and New England. Boston, 1897.

Heath, Richard. “Summer House to Garden Suburb: A History of Woodbourne in the Forest Hills Section of Jamaica Plain,” Boston, 1997.

Kilham, Walter H. Autobiographical Sketch in the Third Book of the Class of Eighty-Nine. Boston, 1915 (M.I.T.)

____. “Group Housing,” Our Boston 2, no. 5 (April 1927)

____. “Personal Reminiscences,” 1937. Typewritten mss. In two vols. At the Massachusetts Historical Society.

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Jamaica Plain Historical Society note: Annie Finnegan informs us that the description listed for #55 Patten Street is actually for #63 Patten Street.  The date of construction for the house is 1902.