A prince of a Province House

Province House (1679), Boston, image from 1905.

Province Court, Boston, 1901.

I love stumbling upon images of old Boston on Facebook and Instagram. They inspire my next blog posts, and they teach me volumes about what particular neighborhoods I thought I knew once looked like, recording the memory of buildings I never heard of, and wish I could see now. This left-hand image of Province Court in 1901 is no exception, with its Beacon Hill-style brick rowhouses along a narrow alley, ending up at what I presume is Province Street in one of the cozier enclaves of Downtown Crossing. But the memory this image sparks the most is that of the building the court and the street were named after: the long-gone Province House, a majestic colonial brick mansion that was home to the Massachusetts Bay Colony's royal governors from 1716 to 1776.

Since its demolition in 1922, its remnants have been the granite steps and lanterned cast-iron gateway arch to its gardens (now to Bosworth Street), which The Abbey Group preserved during their development of the 45 Province Condominium in 2009, following Nathaniel Hawthorne's warning about the Old Province House's decrepit state in his book Legends of the Province House (1838-39): "...any jar or motion was apt to shake down the dust of ages out of the ceiling of one chamber upon the floor of that beneath it." 

Provincial propriety
 

Historical image of the Province House, courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

Memorialized by The Abbey Group with a pair of bronze plaques on the old garden stone wall (one of which lists all Massachusetts governors to date), the Province House was first built in 1679 on Washington Street in Downtown Crossing as the private home of wealthy London emigrant merchant Peter Sergeant. Like the 45 Province Condominium's developers, Sergeant built high, wide and strong, hiring the best of local English artisans and builders and embellishing his Jacobean mansion with "the latest stylistic refinements of houses of the English gentry," according to historian Fay Campbell Kaynor. Its three-story height, high basement and gable, and distinctive cupola, topped by a copper Native American archer weathervane now exhibited at the Massachusetts Historical Society, made it the ultimate in the upward mobility of Boston's emerging Brahmin class. Its high tower gave Sergeant a privileged perspective on Boston's landscape, as well as his own vast landscape of gardens, orchards, and a 75-square-foot front lawn.
 
Governors' grandeur
 

Renting his house to the colonial governor, the Earl of Bellmont, as early as 1699, Sergeant died in 1714. Royal Governor Samuel Schute moved in two years later, beginning the Province House's succession of gubernatorial dwellers — including Gens. William Howe and Thomas Gage, chief commanders of British forces at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775 — until the British Army evacuated Boston at the hands of General George Washington on March 17, 1776. (Thomas Hutchinson, governor during the Boston Massacre of 1770 and the Boston Tea Party of 1773, did not live there.) And the house was gussied up aplenty for royal ceremonies and aristocratic balls and receptions with lavish cast-iron railings, sentry-attended front-entry gates, drawing-room tapestries, Dutch fireplace tiles, window seats, paneled wainscoting...

A tavern in the town
 

Province House, drawn by Peter Orlando Hutchinson, 1837

After the British left Boston, the Province House was put to a smorgasbord of public and private uses — the Committee on Accounts office, the state treasurer's office, the state council's office, a boarding house, a tavern, a theater — and naturally went through umpteen overhauls over time, including the beheading of its tower when the king was dead from the scene. Rechristened the Old Province House tavern in 1835, it inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's Legends of the Province House (later published as Twice-Told Tales), where he takes us through its wainscoted, paint-peeling ballroom darkened by neighboring building shadows, up its bridal staircase ("a feature of grandeur and magnificence"), into its formerly grand rooms "cut up by partitions and subdivided into little nooks" for lodgers, and along its garret's "ponderous white oak framework so much more massive than the frames of modern houses... although the timbers are said to be as sound as ever... it is contemplated to gut the whole." 

It was gutted in the 1850s to become Ordway Hall, which attracted throngs to minstrel shows, burlesque circuses, Professor Harrington's magic acts, Signor Di Carlo's virtuoso violin, and more... until a fire gutted it on Oct. 25, 1864, leaving its brick walls standing, which later enclosed a cluster of lodgers' quarters and tradesmen's shops and was integrated into Province Court.
From royal ball to wrecking ball

Despite historian William Sumner Appleton's efforts to preserve the Province House because it "is one of the most remarkable houses of which there is record in America" and "must have been as satisfactory in its own way to a visiting Englishman of quality as a home in England," its remains were razed in 1922 for the Province Building, an office block and movie theater (now the Boston Jewelers Exchange Building). The demolition revealed rows of rare colonial brickwork, fireplaces and other unique features, including large brick quarter-circles Appleton had never seen in any period house, and an uncommon third-floor fireplace, "an added touch of luxury proving Sergeant to be a man of great wealth and position whose house might well differ from all others in ostentation and comfort."

Though the brick shell was all that remained of the original Province House, there was enough for a reconstruction, which would have put it in a proper place on the Freedom Trail as a Colonial complement to the Old Corner Bookstore and Old South Meeting House across the street, and the Old State House down Washington Street. This would have made the Freedom Trail more complete, covering Boston's Colonial period from royal governorship to revolution, as the symbol of a turning point in American history. Besides, if barely enough of Fraunces Tavern in New York, where General George Washington bid farewell to his officers after the Revolutionary War, remained for a reconstruction, Boston could have done the same with the Province House, using its fireplaces and brickwork as starting points.

What replaced the Province House was the fittingly named Province Building, now the Boston Jewelers Exchange Building, a commonplace cast-stone office block saved from total white-bread blandness by some neoclassical pressed-bronze ornamentation and black marble around its entrance and along its jewelry-shop corridors, a fittingly elegant ambiance for its jewelers. 

It memorializes its predecessor with a bronze plaque marking its site, which happens to be right next to – ugh – a McDonald's. This means many people having a Big Mac attack or french-fries freakout will surely not take notice of this historic site as they rush in to grab-and-go their order to satiate their fast-food fetish as fast as possible, without slowing down to ponder and reflect upon the rich history of the area. 

(The Old Corner Bookstore across the plaza makes the same mistake, by housing a Chipotle Mexican Grill that tempts consumers and passers-by to go inside for a quesadilla or burrito, thereby diverting them from stopping to think about the rich literary history that went on inside the building, an issue I explored in a previous post.)

And look at what the Province Building did to Province Court as well: it cut it off, so that it now functions as merely a service entrance to the Boston Jewelers Exchange Building and neighboring office buildings, rather than the thriving community of plumbers, painters, carpenters, tailors and other tradespeople it once was.

This made the Province Building a very early example of "urban renewal" in Boston, involving mass demolition of run-down areas without stopping to think about the historical events that took place there and the rare surviving example of colonial Boston architecture that was crying out for attention. A big building says more than a little memorial about Boston history.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!