Bowdoin Beata

That's a song of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, my "dear alma mater," as that old hymn heralds. Beata, from the Latin beatus, or "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 fraternities that had been converted to student houses, the Admissions Office, and other uses in the 1990s. In the dream each house sported an emblem or seal (not Greek letters) expressing their individual pride of place. This decorative touch replaced the Animal House reputation of each dwelling with a celebration of its new and proper role on campus: to house students with academic distinction. 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 lay 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 visits to its fraternity when I was in college. The first was during the annual "rush week," when freshmen and others flocked to the beer parties the frats were throwing to recruit new members. TD's prez told me, "Everyone here plays some kinda sport," "We have the highest grade-point average on campus," and "We bid people based mainly on their personality." I decided then and there that TD was not for me.

This was confirmed when I crashed 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, when Bowdoin converted its frat houses into student housing in the 1990s and named each house after a distinguished alumnus of its 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 (above) by Felix Arnold Burton, Class of 1907, 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 its housing of students. The left-side sunporch and right-side brick extensions give it a tempting lure of luxury – which might well have lured some of those new TDers, who knows?

Helmreich 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. His sons, Jim and Alan, were also members of ARU. I was tempted to join it based on the premise on which it was founded in 1946, "All Races United" (ARU), so Jewish and African-American students, and later women, could have a frat 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 "indies," or non-fraternity students, under Ernst Helmreich's leadership as a faculty advisor. 

ARU was far from anti-frat, as I painfully discovered in my four years there. And there were warning signs of this all along: My new ARU "Big Sister" immediately left school to get married. My best friend there suddenly transferred to the University of Chicago as soon as he got word that his girlfriend there was pregnant. I was elected Orientation Chairman to plan activities for the new frosh members (including their initiation) by a margin of one vote, and fell behind in my studies as a result. An artistic "pledge plaque" for my ARU pledge class that I had put considerable time and effort into was stolen. 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. But they work in agreeable concert here: the former supplies rustic shingles, a gambrel, and picturesque massing, while the latter graces it with a Palladian window within its gable, balustrades, a classical front porch with Ionic columns, some clapboard siding, and enough semi-symmetry to keep it in line with Bowdoin's "early American" architecture. 

The side sunporch – ARU's dining hall, all-nighter study space, annual "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 considerably.

These included an extension of its side gable over the sunporch that a frat president said "looks great" but served little useful purpose except to create an oversized studio apartment for a lucky member (or two, if it was a couple). 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 student housing.

More to come...

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.

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You must remember this...

Coulton Building (c.1912). Courtesy of Henry Osteen, Boston Mass. Vintage, Facebook.

...but I don't blame you if you don't – especially given the in-your-face eyeful that replaced it (more on that later). The Coulton Building once stood at a prominent corner of Boylston and Berkeley streets in Boston's Back Bay, and was one of the city's many overlooked and underappreciated architectural gems that nobody has remembered since they were gone.

Except for three people who are not with us today (speaking of gone): architectural historian Donlyn Lyndon, the fictional private eye Spenser of the late Robert B. Parker's crime novels and the TV series Spenser: For Hire, and my father, architect and historian Leslie Larson.

YMCA (1882, Sturgis & Brigham), A Stranger's Guide to Boston and its Suburbs (1883).

The Coulton Building was itself a replacement for quite an eyeful: a majestic YMCA, built in 1882 from a design by Sturgis & Brigham. This High Victorian Gothic red brick hybrid of Queen Anne, Ruskinian Gothic and Dutch Gable styles anchored its corner with a generous helping of friendly elegance inviting people of all ages and backgrounds to come in and get fit, who were no doubt attracted by its terra cotta ornament, arched windows, and cylindrical corner turret...

YMCA (1882, Sturgis & Brigham), courtesy of Henry Osteen, Facebook.

...not to mention its smorgasbord of community offerings. In addition to the most advanced athletic facilities, it offered lodging, a library, and lecture halls. Sadly, this bastion of Back Bay grandeur was destroyed by fire in 1910, forcing the YMCA to relocate to its present larger facility on Huntington Avenue. But this building's destruction paved the way for one of the neighborhood's most creative, ahead-of-its-time structures.

Photo by Moulton-Erickson Photograph Co., courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

The completion of the Coulton Building around 1912 certainly brought fresh character to this prominent Back Bay intersection, helping to transition Boylston Street and most of its cross streets from a largely residential and cultural district, like the one extending to Commonwealth Avenue and the Charles River, to one of Boston's main commercial boulevards. It was Boston's new downtown, essentially.

Coulton Building (c.1912). Photo courtesy of Heidi Adams on Facebook.

And what a difference the new building made! Gone were the YMCA's Jacobethan windows and stepped gables in favor of innovative bay windows that stretched the Back Bay's iconic chamfered bays to new dimensions of light and space, while quadrupling the corner turret, to allow all levels to take advantage of the plethora of corner light and vistas that were foreshadowing the modern office building.

Coulton Building, courtesy of MIT Digital Collections.

In The City Observed: Boston, Donlyn Lyndon wrote that the Coulton Building "may be my favorite building in Boston, an astonishing combination of straightforward building construction and sheer willful iconoclasm... As you look at the building you look directly into the offices, with various forms of chairs, bicycles, plants and drapery juxtaposed against the architectural patterning." This was a good opportunity for the building's tenants to use their bay picture windows to showcase their businesses more prominently on the street, drawing upon an aesthetic pioneered by Chicago School of Architecture office buildings such as Burnham & Root's Reliance Building (1890-1895), Holabird & Roche's Monadnock Building (1891-1893) and Chicago Savings Bank Building (1904-1905), and Adler & Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange (1894, demolished 1972). This was a harbinger of modernism's dissolution of the barrier between inside and outside through the membranes of window walls.

The Coulton was also perfectly timed with the construction of the Back Bay subway extension (today's MBTA Green Line) from 1913-1914, which brought a flurry of commuters to and from Boston's new downtown, hence to the light and luxury of its new Chicago-windowed offices and back home to Boston's streetcar suburbs.

The Coulton's bay windows may also have been inspired by its Beaux-Arts neighbor across the street, the Berkeley (1905, Codman & Despradelle), which has similar windows in its tall arched openings. The Berkeley was likely the location of Spenser's office, as Parker's novel Early Autumn suggests: 

I moved down Boylston Street to the corner of Berkeley, second floor. I was half a block from Brooks Brothers and right over a bank... To the right across Boylston I could see Bonwit Teller. To the left Police Headquarters. In Bonwit's windows there were mannequins wearing tight leather clothes and chains. Police headquarters leaned more to Dacron. In the window bay of the advertising agency across the street a young black-haired woman in high-waisted gray trousers leaned over a drawing board. Her back was toward the window. "My compliments to your tailor," I said out loud. My voice sounded odd in the empty room. The black-haired woman went away and I sat at my desk...

Bonwit Teller (now Restoration Hardware), courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

Spenser was likely ogling her through a revealing bay window of the Coulton right across from his office as he kept his eagle-eyes on the city from his panoramic perch, waiting for new clients and giving the streets the once-over for auguries of criminal activity. He also had a handsome view of Bonwit Teller (right) catercorner to him, possibly another model for the Coulton's shop-window approach to architecture. (Now the RH Boston Gallery, this building was built in 1863-1864 from a French Academic / Neoclassical design by William Gibbons Preston as the Museum of Natural History, the precursor to Boston's Museum of Science.)

Woodbury Building (1898-99), 443-445 Boylston St.

In fact, the Coulton was the fourth cornerstone in a four-corner historical merry-go-round that distinguished the Boylston-Berkeley crossroads as a four-way gateway to different parts of the city. Catercorner to it was the Woodbury Building, built in 1898-99 by Woodbury & Leighton, builders of the Boston Public Library. The Woodbury is notable for its razor-thin footprint and its pressed-metal bay windows, another possible inspiration for the Coulton for their light- and space-giving qualities.

For the Coulton's historically inspired and futuristically foresighted design, my father lobbied to have it preserved. But the nine-member Boston Landmarks Commission's rejection of its landmark designation by a tie vote, with one abstention due to a conflict of interest, sealed its fate. So in 1989 it gave way for 222 Berkeley, a haphazardly massed phantasmagoria of historical allusions cooked up by Robert A.M. Stern as a bedfellow of 500 Boylston, Philip Johnson's Italianate extravaganza next door. Now 222 Berkeley commands (and demands) our undivided attention with virtually every Bostonian stylistic trick in the pattern-book: a grand arched entrance ceremonially flanked by Ionic column pairs, a brass mini-dome referencing the State House, bay windows and a corner oriel clearly taking cues from the building's predecessor, a Grecian temple front for its main entrance, a crown of festoons, and brick, brick, brick. This historical hodgepodge takes all our notice away from the three historic corners it competes with, doing grave injustice to the artful restraint, careful composition, and artistic coherence of historic Back Bay architecture in the name of the grotesque showmanship of the postmodern era. Which both the Coulton Building and the YMCA were careful to avoid by focusing on balanced composition, structural practicality, and fenestral finesse, now both long forgotten as time goes by.

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The desecration of St. Paul's

Archival image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

As a choirboy at Boston's Cathedral Church of St. Paul in the 1970s, I was always vexed and perplexed by the uncarved, uneven stone blocks in the church's crowning pediment as I faced the façade on my way to weekly rehearsals and Sunday morning services. Compromising the Greek Revival grace and refinement of the old stone temple front – which was built of light Quincy granite hauled from the Quincy quarries on America's first railroad and Ionic columns of brown sandstone quarried from Acquia Creek in Stafford County, Virginia – the pediment seemed to hunger for something to fill that gap, to climax the cathedral with a sublime signature that sanctified its patron saint in an artistic and proper Bostonian way.

In fact, the church's original 1819 Greek Revival design by Alexander Parris (of Quincy Market fame) and Solomon Willard (of Bunker Hill Monument fame) had called for a detailed bas-relief of St. Paul preaching before King Agrippa II to be carved into the crowning pediment.

St. Paul Before Agrippa and Bernice by David Martin (1639-1721).

It would have resembled the pediment bas-relief above, on St. Paul's Cathedral in London, had it been executed, and would have likely been modeled on various artistic interpretations of Paul's homily to Agrippa, Bernice and Roman governor Festus on his Christian conversion and the realization of Old Testament prophecies of Jesus Christ's suffering, death and resurrection, as recorded in Acts 26 in the New Testament. This carving would have been just the artistic finishing touch of Bostonian academic erudition this fine work of architecture called for. Alas, a shortage of funds made it not to be.

Photo by Beyond My Ken, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Well, the pediment was finally filled after two centuries. Only this nautilus whimsy backed in shocking blue isn't what I had in mind. True, this sculpture – "A Ship of Pearl" by Donald Lipski – was intended as a universal metaphor for spiritual evolution based on Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem The Chambered Nautilus, promoting the Cathedral as a "House of Prayer for All People" (Isaiah 56:7) rather than an Episcopalian coterie.

St. Paul's Cathedral at night. Photo by Father Tim.

But the neon of the nautilus clashes violently with the historic architecture and cheapens its public effect, especially at night (right), much in the vein of that image of mass communication (and miscommunication) in Simon & Garfunkel's song: "And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made, and the sign flashed out its warning..." And it is a warning about what we're in for when we enter.

Former interior, Cathedral Church of St. Paul. Photo by Daderot.

No, not this. This was the cathedral before its makeover. In proper Episcopalian form, rows of wooden pews faced the half-domed choir chancel (renovated by Ralph Adams Cram in 1912), physically reinforcing the sanctity of its ministers and bishops over its parishioners, and providing the choir and organist with a good acoustical channel to the congregation.

St. Paul's Cathedral before its renovation. Photo courtesy of Pinterest.

And what a coherent composition it made! The mahogany rails of the original pews (though their doors had been removed and their floors raised before I joined the choir) lent a touch of old-time New England, and blended smoothly with the chancel's carved reredos, choir benches and wainscoting that were part of Cram's sensitive remodel.

Look at it now: Original pews ripped out, replaced with freely placed chairs. Floor tackily redone with a zany labyrinth design in line with the funk of the nautilus. Altar relocated to the center. Skylights punched into the old coffers. Original windows replaced with those thermal-paned tack-ons with fake muntins, now half closed off. 

Understandably, the church wanted a more flexible, accessible meetinghouse-styled sanctuary with more democratically arranged seating in circles (for which the labyrinth provides a handy floor plan) that enabled the minister to communicate equally to all parishioners of all races, colors, genders and abilities, and "to better house a full range of ministries," as the renovation's designers, Context Architecture, put it. But this took away the Greek Revival / Classical Revival coherence of Parris's and Cram's historical visions, reducing the interior to a generic parish hall furbelowed with the frippery of historical chintz. 

Photo courtesy of the Organ Historical Society.

Even the magnificent Aeolian-Skinner loft organ that my choir director, Thomas Murray, loved to play – and I still remember the rumbles, swells and echoes of its diapasons in his stellar performance of Eugène Gigout's Grand Choeur Dialogué – was dismantled, put in storage, and listed for sale through the Organ Clearing House, to make way for...

...a handicapped-acessible elevator. Which is also understandable, given the demands of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and many churches' efforts to accommodate people of varying physical capacities. But history was lost in the process, and the church no longer exhibits its historical evolution of fine craftsmanship through the ages.

The chancel, too, broke the molds of history to extend outward into the nave to be closer to the worshippers, bidding farewell to the minister/congregation dichotomy of New England Anglican and Episcopal churches from King's Chapel to Old North to St. Paul's. The checkerboard floor looks as tacked on as the labyrinthine seating plot. 

Photo courtesy of the Organ Historical Society.

Now St. Paul's interior yields a very different effect for me from when I paraded with my fellow choirboys up the central aisle to the choir chancel, and back toward the narthex at the end of the service, while singing "God of Our Fathers" to the organ's brassy fanfare, "Onward, Christian Soldiers," and other majestic hymns every Sunday morning, and hearing the organ's soft bell-chimes solemnly close the service before Mr. Murray's postlude performance of Charles-Marie Widor's Toccata rip-roared away.

At night, St. Paul's Cathedral seems to blend more with the neon shop signs and late-night office lights than with the rest of Boston's historic architecture, on account of the neon nautilus glitz of what filled its pediment – which, indeed, comes across more like advertising than artistic homage to a saint. This is a vulgar desecration of New England's first Greek Revival church, in the name of no-more-kings social progress. I love the causes, but not the context.

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