Bowdoin Beata — Part I

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

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

MacMillan's majesty

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

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

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

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

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

Helmreich's House of the Seven Gables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burnett's bounty

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

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

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

Howell's honors

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

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

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

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

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

Quinby's quirk

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

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

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

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

Reed's repose

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

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

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

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

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

Ladd's liberalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burton-Little's bonanza

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, on reaching his destination (according to legend; today there is widespread doubt that he reached the actual Pole), Peary paid tribute to his fraternity, as well as his country, as he reported in his 1910 book The North Pole:

We planted five flags at the top of the world. The first one was a silk American flag which Mrs. Peary gave me fifteen years ago... 

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

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

Baxter's bravura

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Remember the Refectory?

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

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

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

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

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

Franklin Park Refectory, courtesy of digitalcommonwealth.org.

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

Blueprints for the Franklin Park Refectory.

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

Franklin Park Refectory, c.1917.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Franklin Park Refectory after closing, mid-1970s.

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

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

Photo by Georgfotoart.

My father's scrutiny of the near-shambles Refectory sparked the same for me – especially when, in April 1976, he was notified that it was being razed, no thanks to a decree from then Commissioner of Parks and Recreation Anthony Forgione that it had to be torn down "right away." My father dashed out to the site, where he was interviewed by a major news outlet about the demolition, and an eighth-grade classmate told me she had seen my father on television.

He even reported to us that one of the wrecking crew had told him, "It's a shame that they should tear something like this down," and that about 12 mature trees were cut down in the process – as if the city had a parking lot for the golf course and the zoo in mind for the site. My father salvaged an ornate plaster bracket from the rubble, which he displayed in our garden and let the elements erode over time, as sort of a memorial to the ruination of the Refectory.

Fast-forward fifty years: What's Refectory Hill like today? Sure enough, it's another fulfillment of the prophecy Joni Mitchell made in her song, "Big Yellow Taxi":

Don't it always
seem to go

That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?

They paved paradise,

Put up a parking lot.

Trillium beer garden, Fenway (opened March 2013). Photo by Alex Zokan.

Which is a shame, considering today's popularity of beer gardens such as the Trillium in the Fenway. Today there would certainly be a market for a restored Franklin Park Refectory as a beer garden attracting the crowds that flock to the Franklin Park Zoo, the William Devine Golf Course, the annual Kite Festival, and White Stadium once it's rebuilt.

Just as Frederick Law Olmsted had predicted when he first envisioned the Franklin Park Refectory.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!