Hidden history

Photo by Stephen Foskett (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What is commonly called "the historic North End" and "Boston's oldest neighborhood" has been branded as such by virtue of its 17th-century origins, winding and narrow street patterns from those days, and tidbits of colonial antiquity sporadically spotted along the familiar Freedom Trail: the Paul Revere House (1680), the Pierce-Hichborn House (1711), St. Stephen's Church (1802-04, Charles Bulfinch), the Ebenezer Clough House (1715), Old North Church (1723, left), and Copp's Hill Burying Ground (1659-1850s). Those are but fractions of what would have earned the North End true "historic" distinction had more of its Colonial, Federal and Victorian buildings survived as depicted in these 19th-century images before its turn-of-the-20th-century renewal changed its face forever.

Archival photos courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

Hanover Street, North End. Photo by Ingfbruno (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Largely rebuilt in brick to house extended Italian immigrant families as per updated building, fire and occupancy codes, the North End cannot be called "historic" in the Beacon Hill, South End or Back Bay sense. Yet a few more vestiges of its vintage than meet the sightseer's eye can be seen if you eye acutely as you blaze the Trail.

First Universalist Church / Samaritan Hall

As the coronavirus pandemic has swollen the new patients intake at the North End Waterfront Health clinic at 332 Hanover St., no doubt most of them have overlooked the rich history that the clinic's brick façade, Greek Revival form and vestigial cupola are very telling about. Built in 1838 for the congregation that originated when John Murray brought Universalism over to these shores from England and established a church in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1772, 

350-352 Hanover Street

For starters: Behind these protruding storefronts—tacked on at an angle to their building to parallel Hanover Street—is an overlooked exemplar of early 18th-century brick construction in Boston, dating from about the time of the restored Clough House (below), and built according to an archaic street pattern predating Hanover Street's 19th-century widening. These close-up shots reveal construction techniques of that era: Flemish bond brickwork the peeling paint is exposing, and an S-tie securing an iron floor-joist rod to a side wall. (Speculation that Paul Revere was born here is unsubstantiated.)
 

Cockerel Hall 

Across Hanover Street is Cockerel Hall, an 1870s Victorian Gothic building with a high mansard roof and a peaked corner tower honoring its historic site of the Cockerel Church, or New Brick Church (left). Built in 1721 by parishioners who had seceded from Rev. Peter Thacher's New North Meeting House, the Cockerel Church received its cognomen from its brass rooster weathervane (right) alluding to Peter's betrayal of Jesus as the cock crowed.

Cast by Shem Drowne, who created the banner vane for Old North Church and the grasshopper vane for Faneuil Hall, the cockerel vane now tops the First Church in Cambridge in Harvard Square. The Cockerel Church was made most famous in Esther Forbes' novel Johnny Tremain as the parish where Johnny's silversmith master Ephraim Lapham was a deacon:

He took his time blessing the meal. He was a deacon at the Cockerel Church and very pious... Of course, on Sunday the shop would be locked up all day, the furnace cold. Mr. Lapham would as always escort his household, dressed in Sunday best, to the Cockerel Church and after that back for a cold dinner. Whether they went again or not to afternoon meeting, the master left for each to decide. He himself always went... Johnny, Dove, and Dusty were apt to steal off for a swim, although Mr. Lapham had no idea of it. He thought they sat quietly at home and that Johnny read the Bible out loud to them. (pp. 8, 28)

5 Tileston Place

One narrow alleyway where Johnny Tremain and his fellow apprentices could have made a narrow escape to the harbor for a swim unseen by their master might have been Tileston Street. Originally Love Lane, it was renamed after John Tileston, director of the public North Writing School on the lane. Off the street through a fancily scrolled cast-iron gate is another of the North End's best-kept secrets from John and Johnny's era...
 

...5 Tileston Place, a rare remnant of the North End's pre-code wood clapboard building phase, dating from the late 18th century. And its obscurity from the public eye was its saving grace: it narrowly escaped the mass demolition of several blocks to pave the way for the Paul Revere Mall (aka "the Prado") in the 1930s.

The house typifies the high gambrel and erratic ell extension of some 18th-century North End houses, including the long-gone Copp's Hill home of Edmund Hartt, builder of the USS Constitution ("Old Ironsides").

Mariners House

Mariner's House (1847), North Square. Photo by Beyond My Ken (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Paul Revere and Pierce-Hichborn houses are such a draw in North Square that few notice Mariners House a few doors down. It was built by the Boston Port Society in 1847 in the Greek Revival simplicity of a flat brick facade with granite post-and-lintel first floor and crowned with an octagonal lookout cupola to watch for incoming sailors, whom the Boston Seaman's Aid Society and Port Society chaplain Father Edward Thompson Taylor would lodge there, room availability pending. 

Today, Mariners House serves as an affordable hotel ($65-$110 per night, including full breakfast) for mariners on active duty or retired after 20 years of full service.

Dearborn's Reminiscences of Boston (1851) described Mariners House as follows:

This is a noble edifice of 4 stories, erected by the Boston Port Society, and leased to the Seamans' Aid Society : it contains 40 rooms over the basement story : the building is 40 feet square, with a wing extending 70 feet of three stories; in the basement is a storage room for seamens' luggage, kitchen; laundry and bathing room: in the wing, is a spacious dining hall for seating an hundred persons : it has a chapel for morning and evening services arid where social, religious meetings are held every Wednesday evening under the care of Rev. E. T. Taylor : a reading and news room, with a good library to which accessions are daily making; and a store for the sale of sailors' clothing: the building and land cost about $38,000, and it has been furnished at a cost of about $21,000, by the generous contributions of the Unitarian Churches of Boston and vicinity; a good supply of water is on the estate, and two force pumps supply each of the stories with hot or cold water, as required.

Seamen's Bethel / Sacred Heart Italian Church
 

Across North Square is Sacred Heart Italian Church, built as Seamen's Bethel in 1833 by the Boston Port Society in this location so sailors would spot it as they docked at the wharves, as a lure to come and worship. "I set my bethel in North Square because I learned to set my net where the fish ran," said Father Taylor, its Methodist preacher. His guests included Charles Dickens, Jenny Lind, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville, for whom Father Taylor inspired the character of Rev. Mapple in Moby Dick. Following his death in 1871, Seamen's Bethel was acquired by the St. Mark Society, a Catholic Italian immigrant group, in 1884, rechristened Sacred Heart Italian Church in 1888, and reclad in the spirit of the Southern Italian basilicas of their home country in the mid-1920s. Below is Seamen's Bethel c.1860:

Skinny House / Spite House
 

Photo by Rhododendrites (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Occupying the approximate site of Edmund Hartt's house (see above) on Hull Street by Copp's Hill Burying Ground is the Skinny House, aka the Spite House, which earned the distinction from both The Boston Globe and the Boston Landmarks Commission as "the narrowest house in Boston." And no wonder: it was built in the 1870s with a 10.4-foot-wide streetfront, tapering to 9.25 feet wide at the back. This yields lateral interior wall distances of 6.2 feet to 8.2 feet, only five inside doors, mostly floor-through spaces on the four levels (a rare instance of being simultaneously open-concept and closed-in), entrance through a side alley surpassing colonial standards in wiggle-room deficiency, and a decidedly "vertical life," as its 2005 owners told The Boston Globe. 

The Skinny House has been the stuff of lore regarding the rationale for its diminution. One legend has it that two brothers inherited land, and while one was in the service, the other built a house so big it left his brother with little land to build on. Miffed at this, the returning brother built the Skinny House to block his brother's light and views. 

According to another story reported by the Globe in 1997, an unidentified builder erected this sliver of a shanty to obstruct light and air from the house of an ornery neighbor he was fighting with. Regardless of which story you buy, the Skinny House has been proven over time to be a good buy, by virtue of its open-concept spaces, its sale prices under $1 million so far (until the next sale, of course), its access to the best of Boston, and, above all, its place in history—Boston's and its own.

St. Mary's Church

St. Mary's Church (1877, Patrick C. Keely) in 1897.
Photo by Rocco Marciello.

This piece of North End history is hidden from view in a different way than any of the above buildings. Read on and you'll see why.

The Church of St. Mary of the Sacred Heart was built in 1877 in a subdued Romanesque design by Patrick Charles Keely, architect of many notable Catholic and Protestant churches in New England and beyond, including the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End. Keely designed most of his churches to reflect the architectural character of their neighborhoods and the heritage of their parishioners. 

He fashioned St. Mary's in brick to blend with the predominantly brick residences in the neighborhood, and with just enough Romanesque trim and ornamentation to recall the Irish and Italian basilicas the residents remembered from their homelands. Thus the churches signified their sacredness, but in an inviting, not overbearing, way.

Bereft of its baroque belfries following hurricane damage and tarnished in its trim from decades of dirt, St. Mary's looked like this when I came here with my boys' choir at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston in 1976 to record some music for a record we were going to make, but never finished. Our choirmaster, renowned organist Thomas Murray, chose this as our venue because he had recorded organ music by César Franck for the Nonesuch label on the church's famed Johnson & Son organ and thought highly of its acoustics. I vividly remember the words he spoke to us as we were about to enter, imparted with the solemnity of Ephraim Lapham and Father Taylor:

This church is almost one hundred years old. But by the time you get back from camp, it won't be here. A lot has been done to it already. The pews have been removed. But the organ has been saved. It will be reinstalled in a church in Minnesota. Now I think you'll find the acoustics splendid in here. But I must tell you that every noise you make and every word you utter carries a long echo in this big space. So please go in quietly, and please show respect. This is a very sacred place.

Sacred, indeed! The relative simplicity (and sordidness) of the exterior hardly prepared me for the heavenly baroque extravaganza of Corinthian columns, springing arches, stained-glass windows, marble statues, intricate frescoes, polychrome trim, and innumerable other artistic articulations of God's creation that permeated the barrel-vaulted hall, culminating at the most richly adorned chancel I had ever seen. It seemed sacrilegious to reduce this masterful artistry to the dust from which man had crafted it as God had sculpted Adam and Eve out of the clay He had created. But, sure enough, the pews had been ripped out of the marble floor and piled at the sides, awaiting the Dumpster. And rubble and debris were scattered about—prompting some choirboys to capitalize on the acoustics by jettisoning pieces from our choirloft down into the sanctuary to hear gunshot booms report and reverb throughout the space as they struck the stone.

Uninclined to such shenanigans, I enjoyed the acoustics sensibly. I was stunned as we concluded our renditions of Gustav Holst's "Lullay my Liking" and Henry Purcell's "Rejoice in the Lord Alway," heard our harmonies fade to a whisper in that hallowed hollow of a hall, then paused in silence for six seconds before Mr. Murray said, "Cut"—which was also a cue for the kids to cut up with fake flatulence and other infantile tomfoolery. Despite all that, there was something that forged perfect visual harmony with the sonority of our seraphic singing: the altar (right), an ornate display of angels, columns, arches, scrolls, and the Virgin Mary and Jesus, all painstakingly wrought by richly carved old-school craftsmanship.  

Nobody seems to know what became of the altar when the church finally met its Maker in 1977, but one of my fellow choirboys reported that it had been "chopped up into ashtray-sized pieces," as this newspaper image of the church's demolition suggests. Which was shocking but not totally surprising, given the clergy's rush to tear it down ASAP before it could be landmarked. 

That cause, of course, was furthered when the newly formed Boston Landmarks Commission rejected the church's landmark designation by an 8-1 vote (the sole dissenter being noted preservationist and historian Pauline Chase-Harrell). The reasons for the decision were mainly economic, as expressed by a local blogger – "Maintenance costs were prohibitive" – despite the very good condition the church was in at the time they started degrading its condition.

This bland piece of housing sits on the site now, superficially blending with its neighborhood with the use of brick, forever erasing all memories of the magnificence of St. Mary's, which itself was but a tiny chapel "tucked into the corner of the ground floor of Casa Maria Apartments on Endicott Street," in Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen's words, until it closed in 2010, thoroughly obliterating all ghosts of the grandeur of its predecessor.

More to come...