Showing posts with label Boston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boston. Show all posts

Saturday, October 17, 2026

Dudley's demise – and development


While visiting the construction site of a new housing development in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood earlier this year, I couldn't help noticing something else in need of some construction: this rickety relic of what appeared to be once the noble, princely manor of a high-ranking baron in Bostonian society.

Standing cold and solitary in the snow like an abandoned stage-set from Hollywood's Golden Age of Gone with the Wind, this shell-shocker of a shrine seemed to cry out for TLC, by virtue of both its historic stature and its ruinous state – the two qualities that force us to turn, face, and fix our gaze on an old building, pity its plight, and relish its rebirth.

David Dudley House (c.1825) in 1886. Photo courtesy of the Roxbury Historical Society.
A quick bit of research revealed it to be the David Dudley House at 167 Centre Street (its rusting, cemetery-like gate still indicates its number), a rare surviving example of the Federal architectural style in Roxbury. It was built c.1825 as the country estate of David Dudley, first president of Trader's National Bank of Boston, and his wife, Hannah Davis Dudley.

Hannah and David Dudley, by Chester Harding, c.1836, Harvard Art Museums.
Hannah and David Dudley, whose c.1836 portraits (left) by Chester Harding hang in the Harvard Art Museums, lived with their family of ten in this manse until David's death at 54 in 1841. Hannah continued to occupy it as part of her marriage settlement until her death at 94 in 1886. 

Chester Harding House (1808), Boston. Photo by Adam Lenhardt.
(BTW, their portrait painter's house is a National Historic Landmark on Beacon Hill in Boston. Built in 1808, it was occupied by Chester Harding from 1826 to 1830 during a short period of his illustrious career painting portraits of British royalty and nobility and such American celebutantes as Presidents James Madison, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, as well as John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Stephen van Rensselaer III, Daniel Boone, Civil War General William T. Sherman, and many others. The house has headquartered the Boston Bar Association since 1963.)

"Meeting House Hill," 1799 copy by Samuel Curtis of original by John Ritto Penniman.
Born in 1787 in Roxbury (when it was a separate township from Boston) to Revolutionary War soldier Lt. Thomas Dudley, David was a direct descendant of Massachusetts Bay Colony Gov. Thomas Dudley, chief founder of Cambridge and namesake of Roxbury's Dudley Square (now Nubian Square). David Dudley was an extremely wealthy landowner with numerous property holdings in his town.

Site of Thomas Dudley's homestead, Roxbury, Massachusetts.
His family was as prominent a political dynasty in the 17th and 18th centuries as the Kennedys were in the 20th. They also included poet Anne Dudley, wife of Simon Bradstreet, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's last governor from 1679 to 1686; Thomas' son Joseph Dudley, President of the Dominion of New England in 1686 and Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire from 1702 to 1715 under Queen Anne; Joseph's son Paul Dudley, Attorney-General of Massachusetts from 1702 to 1718, and Chief Justice of the province's highest court, the Superior Court of Judicature; and Paul's brother William Dudley, with whom Paul served as the first proprietors and the namesakes of the town of Dudley, Massachusetts. The Dudleys' family traditions of slaveholdings and support of slavery led to Dudley Square's rechristening as Nubian Square in 2019.

David and Hannah Dudley raised ten children in their home – which explains its later addition of a rear ell and side verandah entrances. It was one of the first country estates in Roxbury's Highland Park neighborhood, built on a sweeping parcel extending out to the Stony Brook. 

Highland Park, Roxbury, Massachusetts, c.1925.
The David Dudley House stood firm on its meadow lands as its Highland Park neighborhood grew more populous and densely settled with the 1835 arrival of the Boston-to-Providence railroad along the Stony Brook (near where the Southwest Corridor Park and Orange Line/Amtrak extension run today) and evolved from farm and orchard country to a wealthy suburb for Boston's Yankee elite to an immigrant mecca attracting Irish, Germans, Jews, Scandinavians, Italians, Latvians, Maritime Canadians, Jamaicans, Barbadians, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and ultimately African Americans, as one of Boston's "streetcar suburbs" when Roxbury was annexed to Boston in 1868 so Boston could take better advantage of the industries emerging along the Stony Brook, which included rubber factories, machine manufactories, breweries, and textile mills. By the 1960s, redlining, blockbusting, "urban renewal," and "white flight" morphed Roxbury's demographics into Boston's largest Black community, while architectural remnants of its Yankee era like the David Dudley House fell victim to benign neglect, waiting for salvation.

All Saints Church and Rectory, Highland Park, Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1897.
Following Hannah Dudley's passing, her house remained in the family until Rev. John J. Williams, Fourth Archbishop of Boston's Roman Catholic Archdiocese, acquired it in 1897 as the rectory of his new All Saints Church next door and added the third story, hipped roof, and columned circular two-story portico, preserving the house's Federal form.

Demolition of All Saints Church and vicinity in Roxbury for The Inner Belt, 1968.
In 1968, the house, the church, and surrounding structures were seized by the state Department of Public Works by eminent domain for The Inner Belt, or I-695, a ten-mile, eight-lane, mostly elevated highway planned to circle from Boston's Back Bay through Roxbury, Cambridge and Somerville and connect to the I-93 Central Artery. The house's historical significance spared it the demolition done to the church and 1,200 Roxbury homes, which displaced the German and Irish immigrant families whose grandparents had been workers in the old rubber factories, machine shops, breweries and mills that had sprouted along the Stony Brook throughout the 19th century and are all but gone now. "People Before Highways" community protests and an executive order by Gov. Frank Sargent aborted the highway project in 1970, giving rise to the Southwest Corridor Park and train lines in the 1980s, and leaving the Dudley House sitting alone by a Roxbury Community College parking lot that shoulders the ghost of the house's once-generous acreage.

The latest plans for this amazing survivor of neglect and bulldozing are for Roxbury Community College to restore, renovate and sustain it as its Center for Economic and Social Justice, which will prepare students of color and low-income families to gain employment in the green-tech sector and build their own businesses in energy efficiency, green tech and sustainable design. Funded in part by a $12 million investment secured by state Sen. Liz Miranda through her BRIGHT Act amendment and by a $4 million grant arranged by U.S. Sen. Ed Markey through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the house's renovation will integrate sustainable green technology as a model for its intended enterprise, as well as careful restoration of its exterior historical details. As the first net-zero historic renovation in Massachusetts, it will expunge the David Dudley House's slavery legacy and rejuvenate it as a shrine to Roxbury's heritage, history and hereafter.

And I hope that will happen soon. As I gazed at the house's frail façade of boarded-up windows, portico barely held up by a trickle of scaffolding, clapboard front marked with the red X sign that it was unsafe to enter – I was shocked that such a significant structure, rich with historical associations extending all the way to Beacon Hill, Harvard University and the former Dudley Square, could be left to go to pot.

But then again...

Shirley-Eustis House (1747), Roxbury, Massachusetts, c.1963, before restoration.
...other long-neglected historical treasures in Roxbury have found their way back from the dead. Notable among these is the Shirley-Eustis House, built in 1747 as the country estate of William Shirley, Royal Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. It was later occupied by William Eustis, Secretary of War under President James Madison during the War of 1812. After suffering neglect as an abandoned rooming house and antiques storage facility, it was restored in 1991 as Roxbury's leading house museum.

Shirley-Eustis House (1747-1751), Roxbury, Massachusetts, today. Photo by Tim Sackton.









Dillaway-Thomas House (1750-52), Roxbury, Massachusetts,
before restoration. Courtesy of MIT Special Collections.
Another is the Dillaway-Thomas House in John Eliot Square, built in 1750-52 as the rectory of the First Church in Roxbury, but requisitioned by Brig. Gen. John Thomas of the Continental Army as his headquarters. Its superior views of Dorchester Heights and the Boston Neck enabled Thomas to observe Henry Knox's transport of cannons from Fort Ticonderoga, New York, through Roxbury to Dorchester Heights for their fortification to force the British Army to evacuate Boston on March 17, 1776, under the command of Gen. George Washington. By 1835 the house was occupied by Charles Knapp Dillaway, headmaster of Boston Latin School, and his wife Martha, who lived in it until her death in 1909. It was acquired by the City of Boston in 1927 with plans to replace it with a school, but public resistance to this caused the Art Deco-styled James P. Timilty Middle School to be carefully built around the old house. After miraculously surviving a boarding-up, a looting, and two fires, the Dillaway-Thomas House was restored in 1998 as a Roxbury history exhibition space as part of Roxbury Heritage State Park.

Dillaway-Thomas House (1750-52), Roxbury, Massachusetts, today. Photo by Grk1011.
With any hope, and many doses of TLC, the David Dudley House will join the company of the Shirley-Eustis and Dillaway-Thomas houses as a Roxbury relic rejuvenated.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!


Sources:

"Chester Harding House," Wikipedia, last edited on 14 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Harding_House

"Chester Harding (painter)," Wikipedia, last edited on 17 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Harding_(painter)


  • Dudley, Dean, History of the Dudley Family, with Genealogical Tables, Pedigrees, Etc. Number VIII, Dean Dudley (Wakefield, MA, 1893), ill. opp. p. 850.
"HBI Submits Proposal for the Historic Dudley House," Historic Boston Incorporated, February 28, 2020, https://historicboston.org/hbi-submits-proposal-for-the-historic-dudley-house/

Horn, Christina (author) and Jaydie Halperin (editor), "The Inner Belt: The Highway Massachusetts Didn't Build," The West End Museum, https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/modern/the-inner-belt-the-highway-massachusetts-didnt-build/

"H694: Hannah Davis Dudley (Mrs. David Dudley) (1792-1886)," Paintings, Harvard Art Museums, bequest of Caroline Dudley Taylor, 1988, https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/305199?position=9

"Meeting House Hill," Historic New England, copy by Samuel Curtis (signed and dated, 1799) of an original by John Ritto Penniman of Roxbury, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/17065

Montague, Deidre E., "RCC receives $12 million to renovate Dudley House," Bay State Banner, March 18, 2026, https://baystatebanner.com/2026/03/18/rcc-receives-12-million-to-renovate-dudley-house/

"Paul Dudley (jurist)," Wikipedia, last edited on 7 February 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dudley_(jurist)

Reyes, Max, "50 years after Inner Belt protest, activists gather again," The Boston Globe, January 25, 2019, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/01/25/remembering-highway-that-never-was/PS1jnevsnKzmFx4a1o5dqN/story.html?event=event12

"Roxbury Heritage State Park," Wikipedia, last edited on 24 February 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxbury_Heritage_State_Park

"Shirley-Eustis House," Wikipedia, last edited on 4 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley%E2%80%93Eustis_House

Smith, Dana, "Restoration of Boston's Shirley-Eustis House, a Georgian colonial mansion | Roxbury, MA," Boston Mass, Vintage, July 14, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/1207954711473390/

  • Stebbins, Theodore E., Jr. and Melissa Renn, American Paintings at Harvard, Volume One: Paintings, Watercolors, and Pastels by Artists Born before 1826, Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA and New Haven, CT, 2014), pp. 244-45, cat. 195 & 196, ill.
"The David Dudley House," RoxburyRoamer, Instagram, November 9, 2021, https://www.instagram.com/p/CWDc8sfLjI9/

"The Faces Behind Roxbury's Dudley House," Historic Boston Incorporated, December 31, 2019, https://historicboston.org/the-faces-behind-roxburys-dudley-house/

"The Forgotten All Saints Church," Historic Boston Incorporated, April 10, 2020, https://historicboston.org/the-forgotten-all-saints-church/

"Thomas Dudley," Wikipedia, last edited on 16 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dudley

Walker, Grant, "Roxbury Community College to begin work on social justice center," Boston Business Journal, June 21, 2024, https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2024/06/21/roxbury-community-college-building-new-center.html
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Thursday, October 8, 2026

Hancock's haunt



When I was a Ghost City Tours tour guide, I'd point out Boston's sole surviving ghost of John Hancock, a little-known landmark sequestered in the shadows of the city's oldest street pattern, the Blackstone Block, as the sole remnant of that pattern's period in history. The Ebenezer Hancock House, which John built in 1767 as the home and office of his younger brother, Deputy Paymaster-General of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, has an angular shape unusual for its time, being built within the confines of the skew lanes and cowpaths that defined it. Since it changed hands last month and has an iffy future, perhaps it's time to revisit its architecture, history and backstory.

What makes us stop and stare at it the most is that it thinks outside the box, having no right-angled corners – as well as a cropped corner, which John may have arranged to bring his brother more sunlight or to allow freer passage of cows and horses there. Its iron S-ties secured its structure at another corner, and the stringcourses in its Flemish-bond brickwork defined its floors. Its larger first-floor windows likely illuminated Ebenezer's disbursements of payments to troops during the Revolutionary War. But despite its less-than-erudite form (compared to brother John's manor, which I'll go into later), it can proudly boast that George Washington Slept Here when it was an inn later on, as well as Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette.

In 1778, the house stored a loan of 2 million French silver crowns from Louis XIV of France, negotiated by Benjamin Franklin as Minister to France and brought into Boston by Admiral Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, as back payment to Washington's Eastern Continental Army. In 1798, Benjamin Fuller opened America's longest continually operating shoestore on the first floor.

William H. Learnard took over Fuller's shoestore in 1821, and ran it until 1886, but it miraculously remained in the building as a shoestore until 1963, as other enterprises in the house and the Blackstone Block came and went over the years, including the Marshall House restaurant, inn and tavern, which operated mainly in the 1890s and the 1910s.



By the early 1970s, the East India Trading Co. antique and souvenir shop was operating in that space. Over the years the house fell into disrepair, even though most of the original interior details remained amazingly intact, probably due to underutilization. I remember walking past it with my father around that time and noticing that its storefront was smashed; my father suspected a break-in. Later the house was "left vacant following a serious car accident in the 1970s, which nearly destroyed the storefront at the corner of the building,” wrote city archaeologist Joseph M. Bagley in Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them. Swartz & Swartz came to the rescue, acquiring it as their law office in 1974 and restoring it to its colonial condition, preserving as much interior detail as possible.

And look at what they did...


Of course, their intricate preservation of all those rooms in their original dimensions, materials and structural elements, from hand-hewn beams to brick walls to wrought-iron cauldrons and andirons, entailed considerable sacrifice of valuable space to conduct legal business. So Swartz & Swartz built an addition on the back in the parking area, careful to hide it from the view of Freedom Trail tourists and to distinguish its modern architectural style from the original. 

Incidentally, that parking area once contained a row of houses John Hancock had built on spec to abut Ebenezer's digs. Sadly, they did not survive past the 1950s, leaving the Ebenezer Hancock House as a "holdout" from Boston's Colonial-Revolutionary era:
Hancock Manor (1737-1863), Boston. Photo c.1859.
Engraving of Hancock Manor, Alexander Jackson Davis & Thomas Illman, 1832.
They don't compare in social standing, do they? More than a holdout, the Ebenezer Hancock House is the sole surviving building in Boston associated with its favorite son, due to not only the razing of his spec rowhouses but also the leveling of his own manor, which stood on Beacon Hill on Beacon Street by the site of the Massachusetts State House from 1737 to 1863.

View of Hancock Manor from the Boston Common by Christian Remick, 1768.
Built by Joshua Blanchard for John's merchant uncle Thomas Hancock and later willed to John, this brown Braintree granite and Connecticut sandstone manse was bedecked with corner quoins, a gambrel roof balustrade, and a Juliet balcony from a French window capped with baroque volutes, and it commanded a peerless view of the Boston Common's pastureland.

A view of Hancock Manor and the Boston Neck, Richard Williams, 1775.
As these drawings show, Hancock Manor had the advantage of being built on many acres of rural virgin land. This afforded it a full pasture and garden and a breathtaking view of the Boston Common that extended into the Boston Neck, which attached the town to the mainland by a narrow isthmus at the time, making John Hancock feel like master of all he surveyed. By contrast, the Ebenezer Hancock House had the disadvantage of having to conform to densely settled, firmly established urban street patterns, which hemmed it in considerably.

Hancock Manor staircase. Wood engraving from Ballou’s Pictorial
Drawing-Room Companion, March 26, 1859. Courtesy Bostonian Society.
Hancock Manor's lavish interior began with a paneled parlor with a bridal stair of carved twisted balusters leading up to a landing with a circular-headed window overlooking the garden of ornamental flower-beds, fruit-bearing box trees, mulberry trees and other exotic plantings. "As you entered the governor's mansion, to the right was the drawing or reception room, with furniture of bird's-eye maple covered with rich damask. Out of this opened the dining-hall [...] in which Hancock gave the famous breakfast to Admiral D'Estaing and his officers," reported Eliza G. Gardner, who lived in the Manor for many years.
John Hancock House, painting by Charles Furneaux, c.1859.
The house was occupied by Lt.-Gen. Hugh Percy during the British Army's 1775-1776 Siege of Boston, and then Gen. Henry Clinton set up his headquarters there, all while Hancock was in Philadelphia as President of the Second Continental Congress, and shortly before he inscribed his venerable "John Hancock" on the Declaration of Independence. After the Second Treaty of Paris concluding the Revolutionary War in 1783, Hancock entertained luxuriantly at his Manor, attracting the likes of le Comte d'Estaing, le Marquis de Lafayette, and, yes, George Washington, and Hancock lived there as the first and third Governors of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. On his death bed he dictated his will to give his home to the Commonwealth but died before the will could be finalized in writing.
Protest sign calling for the preservation of Hancock Manor. Courtesy of Historic New England.
Following many failed attempts to preserve Hancock Manor – ultimately because the Legislature were too preoccupied with Civil War matters to agree upon the terms of acquiring the house – it was sold at public auction for $230 on June 16, 1863, and demolished, despite a rallying cry to preserve this icon of history. But its demise sparked one of the first historic preservation movements, which led to the salvation of Boston's Old South Meeting House (1729) and Old State House (1711).

Ultimately, we lost Hancock's historical treasure for nothing, for the fancy rowhouses that replaced it were removed for the construction of the State House's marble wings in 1916, leaving but a ghost of what once stood there and should still be standing there today, as well as a plaque marking its sad site:



Ebenezer Hancock House at night. Photo by Ryoko Sha.
So Ebenezer Hancock's old haunts are all the architecture we have left to memorialize John Hancock's immeasurable legacy in the growth of our city, the founding of our Commonwealth, and the declaration of our independence as a nation. Now that the house is under new ownership, it'll be interesting to find out what ghost will haunt it now, and how well it'll preserve the ghosts of the past...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!


Sources:

"Ebenezer Hancock House," Wikipedia, last edited on 4 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebenezer_Hancock_House

Floyd, Margaret Henderson, "Measured Drawings of the Hancock House by John Hubbard Sturgis: A Legacy to the Colonial Revival," Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume 51: Architecture in Colonial Massachusetts, https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1965

"Hancock Manor," Wikipedia, last edited on 13 July 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hancock_Manor

Killen, Dave, "Ebenezer Hancock House, 10 Marshall Street," LandVest, 2026, https://landvest.com/listing/MA4941/10-marshall-street-boston-ma-02108/

Lankston, Charlie, "Founding Father John Hancock’s Boston Home Is on the Market for First Time in Half a Century—More Than 250 Years After It Was Built," realtor.com, July 17, 2025, https://www.realtor.com/news/unique-homes/john-hancock-founding-father-home-boston-sale/

Marian, Sara, and Clio Admin., "Ebenezer Hancock House," Clio: Your Guide to History, June 3, 2022, accessed October 12, 2026, https://theclio.com/entry/22660

McDonald, Danny, "For sale: the only house left in downtown Boston that was built in the run-up to the American Revolution," The Boston Globe, updated July 13, 2025, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/13/metro/for-sale-house-boston-american-revolution/?event=event12

Rosen, Andy, "The Massachusetts governor’s mansion that might have been," The Boston Globe, November 27, 2014, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/11/27/the-massachusetts-governor-mansion-that-might-have-been/B06ZY75VkWCVkjnVbVGjbO/story.html

Smith, Dana, "John Hancock House, a historic Georgian estate in Boston, MA," Boston Mass, Vintage, Facebook, May 25, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/1167845008817694/

Strahan, Derek, "Ebenezer Hancock House, Boston," Lost New England, August 14, 2014, https://lostnewengland.com/2014/08/ebenezer-hancock-house-boston/

Strahan, Derek, "John Hancock House, Boston," Lost New England, October 23, 2017, https://lostnewengland.com/2017/10/john-hancock-house-boston/

"The John Hancock House, Boston, Mass., Historic New England, 2008, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/103657

"Tiny Story: Ebenezer Hancock House," Boston Preservation Alliance, February 6, 2025, https://www.bostonpreservation.org/news-item/tiny-story-ebenezer-hancock-house
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A West End wonder

Photo by Alexander Tang.
Boston's West End is notorious for being bulldozed into a memory in the 1950s and 1960s, displacing an entire immigrant community with the big-box high-rises of Charles River Park. However, a low-rise gem hides behind a near-jungle on Cambridge Street as a paradigm of how pure geometry can define, shape and organize a quiet study space.

The West End Branch of the Boston Public Library, built in 1968 from an unusual hexagonal design by Eugene Kennedy of Maginnis, Walsh & Kennedy, also presented the hexagon as a considerable exterior space saver and interior space economizer, allowing the placement of books along its perimeters so that they left an open-concept central space for many different kinds of library activities at once, all within a small footprint.

Now, with proposals in the offing to replace the West End Branch Library and top it with 119 units of housing, I had to revisit it before it went the way of the West End.

Its footprint yields acreage for not only parking, but also a peace garden to introduce the entrance with a calming intimation of the peace and quiet one expects in a library.
The garden, the path from the street, the ceiling-high window walls, and the open porch all present us with a very friendly gesture of welcome to the library, giving us an external indication of the generous sitting space and reading light we're in for when we pass the book-sale carts in the vestibule and enter the main room.
Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Rachel Moon.
Sure enough, the room is one open, bright, fluid atmosphere with light (natural and fluorescent) extending to all, in-the-round displays of over 20,000 books of all subjects extending space to all, a myriad of seating options. and a deluge of activities open to all. These include exercise and tai chi classes, movie discussions, story hours, technology instruction, and origami, LEGO and construction clubs.

Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Rachel Moon.
Kennedy wisely designed the interior as a hexagon within a hexagon. This created a smaller hexagonal central space with a slightly dropped ceiling installed with circular "moon" lights. Picking up on a mode of lighting in Alvar Aalto's Baker House dormitory at MIT, this scheme shed extra light on the office-reference desk below. The open shelves pick up on the hexagon theme to create mini-hexagon study spaces.
Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Alexander Tang.
This open-access concept was mirrored in the librarians' accessibility when school paper assignments brought me to the West End Branch Library, a short walk from my Beacon Hill home. For a biology report on hibernation of bears and social studies papers on U.S. westward expansion and Sudbury's colonial settlement, the librarians helpfully supplied me with the books I needed to get an A each time.

Old West Church (1806) as West End Branch Library, c.1920.
Interestingly enough, the modernism of the West End Branch originated in the classicism of the Old West Church, when it was a library from 1896 until the "urban renewal" of the West End forced its closure in 1960. Designed by Asher Benjamin in a Federal style with pilasters, panels and a cupola-crowned clock tower, it was built in 1806 for a Congregational fellowship to replace a church damaged by British forces in 1775. Rev. Charles Lowell, who commissioned the new church, was a major abolitionist who desegregated seating in the church, sheltered renegade slaves in the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, and provided Sunday school for people of all economic backgrounds. In 1887, the congregation dissolved, and Andrew Wheelwright purchased the church to preserve it and turned it over to the city for library use, for which its column-supported open space (below) served it very well – as sort of a model for the columned hexagonal central space of its successor. 

Old West Church, West End Branch Library interior, c.1930.
Jewish Book Weeks and immigrant literacy services were offered at the library for West Enders, courtesy of Fanny Goldstein, its head librarian from 1919 to 1957 and Massachusetts' first Jewish librarian. Shortly before the building's reconversion to a church – this time with a Methodist congregation – John F. Kennedy cast his ballot there on the eve of his historic presidential election in 1960.
The one-story height and generous setback of the West End Branch Library's new home made it a polite neighbor for Cambridge Street's extant historic West End structures, the First Harrison Gray Otis House (1796, Charles Bulfinch) and Old West Church, by virtue of its lowly deference to its elders. By contrast, the library-housing tower proposals for the site look rather corporate and would add to the skyscraperization of the West End by dwarfing its landmark next-door neighbors and making them look even more like "holdouts" from urban renewal. So I'm not too thrilled about it, aside from its provision of much-needed affordable housing in our housing crisis. 

I would preserve the West End Branch Library as a modernist landmark, for its use of innovative geometrics to create a model of the free-to-all inclusiveness that befits a public library design.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!


Sources:

"151 Cambridge Street (West End Library)," City of Boston, https://www.boston.gov/buildinghousing/151-cambridge-street-west-end-library

"About the West End Branch," Boston Public Library, https://www.bpl.org/about-west-end/

"Boston Public Library: West End Branch interior," Flickr, uploaded December 3, 2010, https://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/5229424305/in/photostream/

Brinker, Andrew, "Housing at the Library? It may be coming to your neighborhood," The Boston Globe, updated April 6, 2023, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/04/06/business/housing-library-it-may-be-coming-your-boston-neighborhood/

Chen, Queenie (author), Bob Potenza (editor), "The Old West Church," The West End Museum, https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/west-boston/the-old-west-church/

Loth, Renée, "Eight high-profile teams compete to design West End library, complete with affordable housing," The Boston Globe, updated December 8, 2023, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/12/08/arts/eight-high-profile-teams-compete-design-west-end-library-complete-with-affordable-housing/

Roche, Daniel Jonas, "Books over Beantown: MASS Design Group, Mikyoung Kim, Shigero Ban Architects, and others throw their names in the hat to design a new library in Boston's West End," The Architect's Newspaper, August 21, 2023, https://www.archpaper.com/2023/08/mass-design-group-mikyoung-kim-shigeru-ban-architects-others-throw-names-hat-design-new-library-bostons-west-end/

Roche, Daniel Jonas, "A Propensity for Density: MASS Design Group and The Architectural Team to design combined housing and library project in Boston's West End," The Architect's Newspaper, January 28, 2025, https://www.archpaper.com/2025/01/mass-design-group-the-architectural-team-housing-library-boston-west-end/

Smart, Janelle (author), Jaydie Halperin (editor), "The West End Branch of the Boston Public Library," The West End Museum, https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/immigrant-neighborhood/the-west-end-branch-of-the-boston-public-library/

Welker, Grant, "Boston has a new place to put housing: Above its libraries," Boston Business Journal, May 19, 2026, https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2026/05/19/boston-now-putting-housing-above-its-libraries.html?cx_testId=62&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s
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