USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. IV > Part 61
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Asher Benjamin is less remembered for his buildings than for his books. His first work, long the sheet-anchor of house-builders throughout New England, was published as early as 1806 by Etheridge & Bliss in Boston, with this title : The American Builder's Companion ; the five orders of Architec- ture, with great alterations both in size and expense, etc., etc., by Asher Benjamin, Architect and Carpenter, and Daniel Rayner, Architect and Stucco-
Massachusetts Magazine, November, 1790. This building, when the present structure was erected, was floated on a raft to Braintree, where it became the place of worship of the Rev. Dr. Storrs's society. - ED.]
1 [See the present volume, p. 403. - ED.]
2 [See the chapter on "Canals and Rail- roads " in the present volume. - ED.]
8 [See Vol. III. p. 228, for a perspective view of this structure. - ED.]
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ARCHITECTURE IN BOSTON.
worker. This work ran through many editions, and was succeeded by the Rudiments of Architecture, the Practice of Architecture, the Builder's Guide, and last of all, in 1840, the Architect; or, Practical House Carpenter. These were what their titles implied, -practical guides to the builder who under- took the duties both of carpenter and architect; and from the faithful study of them grew the classic house-fronts and interior details of a generation to which systematic architectural education was as yet unknown.
Isaiah Rogers, a contemporary of Willard and Parris, was the architect of the Tremont House in 1828, and of the Merchants' Exchange in State Street a few years later, as of many less conspicuous buildings. It will be observed that this was the age in Boston of a sort of Greek revival, when not only churches like St. Paul's, and public buildings like the Court House, the Bank, and the Tremont House, but even dwelling-houses must be fitted out with a portico of columns in the severest cast of Doric. Often, as in the case of the Court House, this was the only attempt at architecture in the whole building; often, as in the case of innumerable suburban houses, the great wooden columns, three or four feet in diameter, were backed by a front wall pierced by three stories of parlor and bed-room windows. Perhaps no absurdity of fashion in architecture was ever more preposterous than this. Its foolishness had not yet been appreciated even as late as 1838, when the Boston Custom House, the most costly building at that time in the city, was begun. Its architect was Ammi B. Young, a man of much professional experience and ability, who was yet unable to perceive the incongruity of encumbering a building for the transaction of public business, requiring constant writing and constant perusal of papers, with such shadowy ob- structions as porticos in the Grecian Doric style.
The Greek period was followed, as was natural, by the Gothic period. The Gothic spire of Federal Street, Bulfinch's only attempt in that direc- tion, was not provocative of emulation, and remained long the solitary ex- ample; but about the year 1835 the Masonic Temple on Tremont Street, now the United States Court House, and Trinity Church in Summer Street, a massive structure of rough-hewn granite, with a low, square tower in the middle of the front,1 opened the way for this new Gothic invasion. The results were rather more serious than in the case of the Greek revival, inas- much as then the architects could conscientiously go to their books, and in- sure themselves against any too frightful solecisms by following the rules and proportions there laid down ; but in the Gothic style there are no rules, and the untutored architects found themselves afloat on an uncertain sea without chart or compass. In an evil hour the fashion caught the suburban builders, and little boxes began to spring up all over Roxbury, Dorchester, and Brookline, in which the wooden skeletons were clothed with the most extravagant details into which wood could be tortured. This was believed to be the romantic style; but it was a style which, free from the restraint of
1 [Traced partially in the view of its ruins in Vol. III. p. 457 : also see p. 63 of the present volume. - ED.]
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
knowledge and training on the part of the architects, had neither con- venience, beauty, economy, nor durability to recommend it, and it proved ephemeral.
The next style to obtain popular favor was what was commonly known as the " French roof" style. In country houses, where for some years it re- tained undisputed sway, it took the form of a cubical mass covered with a steep roof violently concave, hipped on all sides, and with a flat on top nearly as large as the area of the house. The French roof, so called, had at least convenience and economy on its side, since it afforded an upper story of rooms with upright walls, and nearly as large as those below. These were strong claims, and proved for many years irresistible. The great exemplar of this style was the Deacon House, built on Washington Street, about 1850, from the designs of a French architect, M. Lemoulnier. It was a villa of the deuxième classe, as the French would say, built of brick and set in an ample enclosure bounded by three streets, with square entrance-lodge, stable, and other accessories, carried out in a style of great completeness. Its plan was admirable, the disposition of rooms being generous and noble, and on a scale very unusual in this country, and its exterior was marked by great simplicity and breadth. But the examples of the French roof style which for twenty years multiplied so rapidly in all the suburban towns had for the most part a very small infusion of these qualities; clumsy in mass and unpicturesque in outline, their details were generally execrable, - the facility with which pine wood can be tortured into forms of "ornament" being a temptation too strong to be often resisted.
In the city, the street architecture of Bulfinch - as seen in the banking and insurance buildings of State Street still standing, and in the dwelling- houses of Franklin Place and Colonnade Row which have now disappeared -was invariably characterized by good taste and absence of ambition which make it easy to forgive a certain timidity and tameness which were the in- evitable result of the slender resources at his command. For many years after his active practice in Boston came to an end, few examples of street architecture of conspicuous size or importance were erected. Somewhere about 1840 the pleasant streets to the eastward of Washington Street, which had been occupied by the old mansions and gardens of the past generations, began to be invaded by great blocks of warehouses, - massive but uninter- esting piles of Quincy granite, of which the cold monotony was unrelieved except by an order of Greekish pilasters here and there carrying a flat entablature. The greater part of these buildings were swept away by the fire of 1872, but a few of them still remain near the head of Milk Street, which serve to show what the prevailing taste was forty years ago. Toward the year 1850, however, two buildings of nearly equal frontage were built, - the Boston Museum on Tremont Street and the Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Street, which may be said to be the first since the days of Bulfinch to show a hopeful growth of architectural knowledge and capacity. The Boston Museum is built of granite, with three similar stories of round
48 1
ARCHITECTURE IN BOSTON.
arched windows, separated by strong belt-courses and crowned by a vigo- rous Italian cornicione. The Athenæum, of brown freestone, is a more pro- nounced example of a Palladian palace-front, with a high basement of rusticated piers and round arches carrying an order of Corinthian pilasters, with lofty windows between, embellished with pedimented caps. Both these buildings, though widely different in style, showed the adaptability of the Italian renaissance to the conditions and uses of modern life, and its effec- tiveness even on the smaller scale which those conditions permit.
Those were days when few costly private buildings were erected. The profession of architecture was as yet practically unrecognized, and the handful of young men who undertook to practise it had to contend against formidable obstacles, - an entire lack of confidence on the part both of clients and of builders, the absence of illustrative examples in design and construction, the want of elementary training and the stimulus of enlight- ened and generous competition. These depressing conditions were, how- ever, soon to be greatly modified. Various influences conspired to produce a rapid amelioration in the position of architects as towards the general public. Of these influences none was probably more effective than the writings of Ruskin, which, as in the case of Carlyle twenty years earlier, were perhaps more promptly appreciated in America than in England. Making all due allowance for their exaggerated moral tone, their arrogance, their partial judgments, it must yet be admitted that the extraordinary vivacity, earnestness, and force of these writings stimulated to a remarkable degree the public interest in the subjects of which they treated, and brought about a corresponding increase of artistic perception, while often leaving the reader too much in the attitude of a partisan to admit of dispassionate judgment and criticism. The introduction of photography just at this time (or rather the rapid perfecting of its processes), and the great extension of foreign travel helped forward the artistic education of architects and the artistic cultivation of great numbers of those upon whom they must de- pend for encouragement and support.
The change first made itself felt in the architecture of the stores and warehouses which were the first visible results of the growing mercantile prosperity of the city. These were now characterized by greater ambition and a more apparent striving for effect. The well studied volumes which had for generations furnished the easily contented architects with the correct delineations of the Greek and Roman orders were now thrust aside. Photo- graphy had brought to our hand the examples of Rome and Florence, of Venice and Verona, of Paris and London. Northern Gothic, Southern Gothic, Romanesque, Renaissance, - the happy architect could " expatiate free o'er all this scene of man," confident that an appreciative community would salute each new monument as a new triumph.
The limited space afforded by the territory of the peninsula had become by this time covered with close built streets, in the newer of which the prosaic and uninteresting type of city dwellings devised by tasteless build- VOL. IV. - 61.
.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
ers whose idea of elegance was realized by what was commonly called the " swell-front," had been repeated with wearisome pertinacity. With the filling in of the Back Bay, which began about 1854, an opportunity was offered for breaking away from the old traditions. The new streets were occupied with considerable rapidity by a class of houses widely different for the most part from any heretofore built, and very generally under the charge of professional architects, who had now grown more numerous, and who had made good in great degree their claim to recognition and confi- dence. In the desire to give an aspect of luxury to the new buildings, brick, which had been until now generally used for the fronts of city dwellings, fell into disrepute, and the new houses were for the most part faced with one or another variety of freestone. The early houses of this territory were un- usually ample in point of size and accommodation. As the price of lots rose with the success of the enterprise, the houses became gradually nar- rower, and a modification of the interior plan was the result, by which the stairs were put in the middle of the house, and a large room at either end covered the whole width. The octagonal bay-window on the front was early adopted as a feature both of convenience and beauty, and speedily became as much a matter of course as the swell-front of other days. In the style of the new houses, or in their want of style, there was the same variety to be observed, the same hunger and thirst after novelty of effect, which has been alluded to as prevailing among the newer stores and ware- houses. It was much, however, that the interest of architects in their work could be seen to grow year by year more serious and intelligent, and that even while their preference for one or another style was variable, their use of all the styles grew more instructed, and their choice of motives and details more refined and chastened. It was difficult for the least mercurial designer to maintain, among the multiplicity of examples presented to him from every country and every age, and in view of the shifting tastes and practice of his fellows, the steady judgment, balance, and self-restraint which are indispensable to the production of the best work in design. Of sys- tematic architectural teaching there was at the time of which I am speaking none whatever. The practice of a young architect was determined by the more or less of artistic knowledge and feeling in the office from which he had come forth, and by the individual predilections which resulted from accidental connections and opportunities. On the one hand, those most deeply impressed by the teachings of Ruskin strove to give to their designs the character of the Italian Gothic which Ruskin so warmly expounded. On the other hand, those whose training and associations were strongly classic contemned with vehemence the Gothic fever, and followed the lead of the French architects of the Second Empire, whose works were illustrated with great minuteness in numberless published serials and monographs. The public buildings of the city were generally of the latter style. The new City Hall finished in 1865, the Post Office commenced about the same time and not yet finished, and the Horticultural Hall, also built in 1865, are
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imitations, as close as the slenderer resources would allow, of that ambitious and grandiose style, of orders superimposed and heavily loaded mansards, which reached its climax in the pavilions of the new Louvre.
To such a style, with its columns and entablatures, the granite, so much an object of local pride, was supposed to lend itself with peculiar fitness, on account of the facility with which large stones could be quarried, and the safety with which, by reason of its great strength, large openings could be spanned. But, in truth, our native gray granite, admirable for works either of engineering or of architecture in which the chief expression desired is that of massiveness and strength, is one of the least admirable for any purposes of grace or luxury. Its color forbids any agreeable play of light and shade, and its texture scarcely admits of clean-cut ornament except at great expense; and when all is done, the ornament is without effect. The most striking example of the right use of granite is the Beacon Hill Reservoir, perhaps the noblest piece of architecture in the city, abso- lutely adapted to its purpose and absolutely free from excess or effort or affectation, - its cyclopean masonry unvexed by details and unbroken save by the single order of round arches, of which the five on Derne Street are almost Roman in their grand depth of shadow. The Reservoir has stood but thirty-five years, and having been proved to be a useless portion of the system of water-works is now being taken down. It would probably be vain to plead for its preservation on the ground of its architectural merit ; yet it is a perpetual reminder, to every thinking architect who passes be- neath its walls, of that quality in which our architecture, like our national character, is most deficient,-the quality of repose. But in buildings erected for the ordinary uses of life, such repose as this is of course unattainable. The reasonableness of leaving granite without ornament, and with its wall face untooled, was, however, at length generally recognized; and in many blocks of warehouses, notably those on Commercial Street and Long Wharf, in the new Jail for Suffolk County on Charles Street, and various other less conspicuous instances, this stone was used with right judgment and excel- lent effect.
During the period when brick was considered too common for use in fine buildings, the choice of materials at the command of the architects was practically limited to the granites of Quincy, Rockport, Concord, and other New England quarries, and the brown freestones of the Connecticut Valley or New Jersey. The effect of the latter stones when used by themselves is nearly as sombre as that of granite, as may be seen in the interminable succession of shadowy streets in the upper portion of New York; but about the time when building was commenced on the new lands of the Back Bay, other stones made their appearance one after another, until the variety now within the architect's reach is quite bewildering. The white and gray marbles of Vermont and New York were followed by the light sandstones of New Brunswick and Ohio, and the red granites of the Eastern coast. Brick was again admitted to the company of presentable materials, and its
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
near relation, terra-cotta, of which the use had been growing more common in England, was here experimented on now and then, but with timidity, until the building of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1872, when the experi- ment was tried on a large scale. This building, of which the complete design embraces four long blocks of building surrounding a quadrangle, but of which at the present time but a single block has been undertaken, is in the modern Gothic style, with much elaboration of decorative detail, and the whole of the dressings above the water-table are executed in terra-cotta from an English manufactory. The walls being of red brick, while the terra-cotta is of two colors, the result is an effective example of the capa- cities of this excellent material, which has now advanced so far in favor among us that there are half-a-dozen establishments engaged in its manu- facture in as many different cities, and great improvement has been effected in the quality of the product.1
In the midst of the widely varying styles of private and public buildings the churches have, as by common consent, continued for forty years to be built in the Gothic style. A group of freestone churches was built about the years 1846-48 on Harrison Avenue, Chauncy Street, and Bedford Street, - all of which have now disappeared, and the last mentioned of which, built by a Unitarian Society from the designs of Hammatt Billings, was a graceful and effective composition whose destruction a few years since, to make room for a warehouse, was a real misfortune. Perhaps ten years later were the two churches still standing far up on Tremont Street, the one built of Roxbury rubble, with low walls and two spires ; the other of brick, high shouldered, round arched, and rigid in outline, with a tall campanile on the corner, which was the first fruit, so far as Bos- ton was concerned, of the teachings of Ruskin. Still a few years later, and the success of the Back Bay enterprise determined in that direction the movement of several of the wealthier congregations, whose churches had been successively swallowed up by the irresistible march of trade. The first society to build on the new territory was that of Federal Street. The Arlington Street Church, the successor of the first Gothic meeting- house in Boston, is the only recent exception to the prevalence of that style. It is built with general refinement of design after the manner of Wren, with a steeple such as our forefathers loved, - the exterior wholly of brown freestone, the interior cold and correct in white plaster, modelled, as we were told by the architect, as closely as possible upon the church of Sta. Annunziata at Genoa, but with such substantial differences as a pair of side galleries clogging the sides, and cutting ruthlessly across the great columns which divide the church into an apparent nave and aisles, the for- mer covered by a barrel vault. The columns are stately, but their stateli- ness is at the expense of the convenience and comfort of that portion of the congregation whose seats may happen to be in the side pews.
In the Central Church, built four or five years later, on the corner of
1 [A heliotype is given herewith of the Art Museum. - ED.]
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Boston.
Heliotype Printing Company.
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS.
HUNTINGTON AVE., COR DARTMOUTH STREET.
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ARCHITECTURE IN BOSTON.
Berkeley and Newbury streets, and in the Emmanuel Church also on New- bury Street, the Gothic style is as conscientiously followed as the re- naissance was in the Arlington Street, and with the same adherence to the forms of past ages, without reference to their convenience or fitness for the uses of the present. The walls of both these churches are of the Roxbury
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F. MYRICK.
THE FIRST CHURCH.
pudding-stone, - an admirable material, with great variety and richness of color. The exterior of the Central Church is designed with dignity and knowledge, and is ennobled by a fine and very lofty spire. The interior is high in the walls, with an open high-pitched roof; and although its plan is a rectangle, yet it is divided, by the arrangement of large piers of stone, into something like the nave, aisles, and transept of a mediaval church. Such a compromise between ambition and convenience has probably never proved quite satisfactory, since the features which are so impressive and admirable on the scale and with the resources of mediaval art are apt to lose their interest when copied on the reduced scale and with the limited resources of modern church building; while, on the other hand, they are
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
inevitably fatal to the one requirement of modern congregational worship, - the perfect seeing and hearing of what is done or said.
In the First Church, on the corner of Berke- ley and Marlboro' streets, built a year or two later than the Central Church, these principles were frankly recognized; and while the Gothic spirit governed every feature of the design, and expressed tself with conspicuous grace and vigor of detail both within and without, yet the treatment was made to adapt itself to the uses for which the house was built. The walls are low, the space they en- close is unobstructed by columns, and the only possible inconvenience arises from the sombre- ness of the interior, the windows being filled with very dark glass.
The old church in Brattle Square was sold in 1871, and a new and costly edifice was built on the corner of Common- wealth Avenue and Clar- endon Street, of which the somewhat clumsy body is redeemed by a square tower of remarkable beauty, with the unusual TOWER OF THE NEW BRATTLE SQUARE CHURCH. decorative feature of a band of colossal figure- sculpture girdling the tower between the belfry arches and the cornice. This church has the high walls, the low roof, and the round low arches which are characteristic features of the Southern Romanesque style. The decay of the society which built it, added to some acoustic defects which might doubtless have been overcome by persistent effort, have
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prevented the use of this fine church, and it is now in danger of being destroyed.
In the new church of the Old South society, finished in 1874, the style is that of the Gothic of Northern Italy. In its high tower it was attempted to gain something of the expression of an Italian campanile with its simple shaft, its decorated belfry, and its short, pyramidal spire. The pitch of the roof is low, the princi- pal windows are grouped under bearing arches, and the surfaces as far as possible are broad and unbroken. In the interior the con- struction is empha- sized by allowing all the wall piers, which
MYRICK
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THE NEW OLD SOUTH.
carry the main trusses of the roof, to appear and make an important fea- ture of the interior design. We touch here one of the points where both the New England climate and the New England habits of congregational worship are at odds with the traditions of European church building. As long as the churches were first of all monuments, and the services held within them were in the nature of spectacles addressed by a ruling priest- hood to the eyes and ears of a crowd of ignorant worshippers, so long the splendor of the monument was everything, -the comfort of the people was of small importance. The walls, floor, and commonly the roof of the Me- diæval church were therefore of stone, treated with as much richness of
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
material and decoration as the resources at the command of the builders would allow. In the climate of New England the warmth and general comfort of the congregation is enhanced by a carpeted floor and a plas- tered wall, - concessions harrowing to the ecclesiastical mind, but too strongly supported by common-sense to be generally resisted.
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