Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900

STREETCAR SUBURBS

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UBURB THE PROCESS OF GROWTH IN BOSTON,

1870-1900

SECOND EDITION

SAM BASS WARNER,

JR.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

© Copyright

1962, 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved Second edition This book has been digitally reprinted. The content remains identical to that or previous printings. Book design by Davie! Fore!

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-90965

ISBN 0-674-84213-8 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-84211-1 (paper)

Printed in the United States of America

TO LYLE

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION When this book was written, the post-World War II suburban boom and white exodus from our central cities were in full force. The federal urban renewal legislation had been enacted and in cities across the nation old neighborhoods were being torn down, plans were beginning to take shape, and new buildings were starting to appear. The interstate highway program was just then moving from drawings to construction bids. Talk of planning and building was everywhere, and hopes for a fresh start for young suburban families, for old neighborhoods, and for dowdy central business districts suffused the public consciousness. It was not then clear, as it never is, what all this hope and change would bring. Under such circumstances it seemed appropriate for a historian to seek the precedents and to discover the traditions that have guided Americans in their city building. The questions one asks of the past, however, vary with the times which surround the historian, and today one would carry out such an inquiry differently than twenty years ago. For example, with our rising public consciousness of the necessity for the control of land, today's researcher would be well advised to spend more time with the evidence of land ownership and speculation; the Registry of Deeds rather than the Building Department should be the contemporary historian's destination. If changing circumstances dictate changes in research, they also alter our interpretation of past histories. The urban trends speeding forward during the 1950s have now had twenty years to run, and as they reveal themselves more fully they shift our focus on some of the events chronicled in this book. The creation of a two-part city, an old inner city and a new outer

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I INTRODUCTION I

city, a city of slums and a city of suburbs, a city of hope and failure and a city of achievement and comfort-this remains the central event of the 1870-1900 era. But that division has taken on a heightened intensity with the migration of people of color to the centers of our northern cities. The fears and angers of racism have been heaped upon the fears and angers of aliens and of the poor. Similarly, public control and regulation of private land has become a much more popular and widespread phenomenon than seemed likely during the 1950s. At that time only cities and inner suburbs had zoning ordinances and the long depression since 1929 had made the boards that administered these ordinances quiet places indeed. During the fifties the metropolitan-fringe towns and counties were still debating the necessity for even such modest public regulations as zoning. In fact, one of the goals of the federal urban renewal statutes was to force the cities of America to take planning seriously. Today both urban and suburban land has been politicized. The result is to intensify and to make public the class divisions that formerly were quietly expressed by the private building process itself. There is probably not a fringe town or county in the United States that will not have a significant conflict over land during this coming year-a zoning fight, a subdivision controversy, an open land campaign, a tax assessment scandal, a bond referendum for building a water, sewer, or school addition. These often narrow engineering and fiscal controversies express the class conflicts of American society, for within each deliberation is a public decision to let new people "like us" into our neighborhoods, or to keep new people "like them" out. In short, we now do publicly what we did privately before. Such conditions of metropolitan segregation and fringe land class conflict are present manifestations of tendencies that surfaced during the first suburban era at the end of the nineteenth century. They are direct continuations of our long-standing social habits. But other recent trends alter the meaning of nineteenth-century precedent. It is now clear that the central city and the outer metropolis have both taken very different paths from those anticipated in 1900, and as a result we must change our views of nineteenth-century suburbanization. The central city is still a city of poor people, to be sure, but its concentration of poverty is at a much lower density than it was. Crowding, that great evil of nineteenth-century urban poverty, is no longer a major problem for America's poor today. Rather, shifts in the

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IX

location and structure of the metropolitan economy seem to be their immediate oppressor. For about a century, from the Civil War to World War II, businesses poured into our cities transforming them from trading centers to industrial metropolises. The jobs this influx of business, especially the influx of manufacturing, created constituted the opportunity for the urban poor. Since World War II, new manufacturing has become preeminently an activity of the metropolitan fringe and the centers of our cities have lost relatively, and even absolutely, thousands of manufacturing jobs. The old cities are coming more and more to resemble their pre-Civil War counterparts. They are again their metropolitan regions' largest shopping centers, the ports, the centers of finance and professional activity. Of course today's corporate office, bank, or insurance company is a far cry from the old countinghouse, and perhaps the new office and service jobs of the core cities will give the opportunities to the urban poor that manufacturing did earlier, but the wage structure in many of these businesses is as unfavorable to personal advancement as were the sweatshops and little stores of the nineteenth century. The outward migration of manufacturing has also made the metropolitan fringe less and less a collection of residential suburbs, and more and more like the old milltown fringe of the pre-Civil War era. To be sure, the fringe commuter who lives, works, and shops in the towns on the outskirts of the city does not experience the narrow confinement of the milltown; he has a great deal more spatial and economic freedom than his predecessor. But the presence of jobs, factories, labor conflict, and offices at the fringe of the metropolis at least penetrates the barrier between work and home which the former all-residential construction had erected. These recent trends in our metropolitan regions suggest that the old merchant city with its mixed peripheral towns of residence and industry may be a closer analogy to our urban future than the city of all work and the suburbs of all homes. In terms of this book there may be more Roxburys in our future than Dorchesters. The most vexing and controversial issue raised by this historical case study is its interpretation of the meaning of suburbanization for community life in America. The difficulty lies in the many meanings given to the concept of community and the conflicting purposes for which we enlist the word. Given this confusion, it is helpful to think through one's understanding of community processes in terms of a

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scale of inclusiveness which runs from the largest meanmg to the smallest. In the largest term the idea of a national democracy necessarily rests upon an assumption of a national community-a collectivity of citizens each one of whom by virtue of being an American has the right to some equality of being. Such a community requires both the civil liberties of the national and state constitutions, and the equality of being that sustains common life in our society. During the late nineteenth century settlement house workers in Boston tried to define these national community requirements in terms of an "American standard of living"; a minimum of food, clothing, and shelter which would allow a person the level of decency and dignity then commonly accepted by the majority of the society. In later times the concepts of farm parity, unemployment compensation, old-age pensions, and general relief have drawn upon this essential idea of membership in an American community for their justification. Clearly this aspect of the meaning of a democratic community has constituted a continued national failure. Despite substantial increases in the wealth of the nation created by its capitalist institutions, and despite its social and economic reforms, our steeply hierarchical distribution of wealth and income continues to deny the equality of being that a national community of citizens requires. This failure of national community has become the single most destructive force which works upon all the other levels of community. Its disorders press down upon the city and the neighborhood to prevent them from realizing their appropriate levels of social behavior. The conditions on the back streets of the old pre-streetcar city, or in the inner city slums of the streetcar era, were a consequence of that failure of a capitalist democracy. Suburbanization only gave this division of the society a different spatial configuration; it did not alter its existence or affect its intensity. When this book was written, it seemed reasonable to expect that the unification of local governments into large metropolitan governments would help to alleviate the consequences of the class divisions of the society by placing the rich, the middle class, and the poor within one political union. Today such a reform no longer seems efficacious. The poor of each metropolitan region are everywhere. They are concentrated in the old core cities, they are scattered in pockets within the interstices of the suburbs, and their largest numbers are found in the

I INTRODUCTION I

Xl

metropolitan outer fringes in small agricultural and manufacturing settlements. This wide diffusion of poverty and disadvantage suggests that state and federal action would be the only way to create metropolitan communities of equality of being. Once the conditions of the national community are understood, it becomes easier to comprehend the confusion of meanings and purposes that characterizes our debates about city and neighborhood communities. The civic community, the city or town, and the smaller communities of the neighborhood, the parish, or the congregation all exist within the national denial of a community of citizenship, and therefore each must make its compromises and balance its conflicts as best it can. The civic community in America takes on its peculiar quality because it combines two imperfectly related functions. First, it provides those limited services established by our federal structure of government. During the nineteenth century the civic community devoted itself predominantly to real estate services: streets, water, sewers, police and fire protection, and the cultural activity of education. The second function of the civic community is representation; the representation of the classes and the varying cultures which their different ways of life contain. Recent historical studies of urban politics have established that in America the representative task of the civic community generates more popular concern and enthusiasm than the services, and that the largest voter turn-outs and greatest political conflict have taken place in the realm of representation. Hence we can observe a very slow pace of change in the nature of city services despite rapid shifts in the background of mayors, city councillors, and their constituents. The intense feelings aroused by the issue of black representation in our cities, and the slight changes in governance which attend the election of black mayors, can be taken as contemporary repetitions of old battles between merchants and artisans, between natives and immigrants, and endless contests among immigrant and native coalitions. In such circumstances suburbanization can have several different effects upon the civic community. In the era of the building of Roxbury, West Roxbury; and Dorchester the creation of large residential enclaves meant only a physical separation of the classes and a separation of home from work, not a removal from the political community. Indeed, at the outset of the process the middle classes of the three

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towns felt confident that by joining their towns to the city they could, with their Bostonian counterparts, dominate the entire city. Their expectations have been correct. The former three towns represent the largest block of voters in the city, most of the twentieth-century Boston mayors have come from the district, and today the area represents an even larger fraction of the city voters (54.1 percent in 1970 as opposed to 40.5 percent in 1900) than it did years ago. The question to be evaluated in this sort of suburbanization is the contribution to civic consciousness of physical separation of homes from the conflicts of the workplace, and the contribution of the heightened contrast between the new residential world and the old inner city neighborhoods. Did such a physical and social transformation of the city intensify its class conflicts, or did it leave them virtually unaltered? Suburbanization in Boston and elsewhere in the nation, however, most commonly did not include the political annexation of fringe settlements and the enlargement of the civic community. Instead it generally meant either the settling of old fringe towns or the creation of new fringe local governments. Thus in the typical American case the building of residential suburbs has meant not only the physical isolation of the classes but also the addition of middle class privileges as new settlers escaped the social and fiscal burdens and conflicts that inevitably attend the hierarchical distribution of the nation's wealth and income. The urban consequences of this process are clear enough; they are the suburban injustice which has been the subject of American thought and polemics for the past twenty years. The consequences for our national community, however, are less clear. It is by no means obvious that suburban voters, physically isolated as they may be from the poor, are more unwilling to vote for national remedies for the class failings of our national community than were their middle class predecessors who lived next door to the poor. In Boston, the civic community is as fragmented as in any metropolitan region in the United States. Historically, the core city has passed through all the stages of municipal service and all the rivalries of representation which were common elsewhere. In addition, a historical peculiarity of the city has continuously limited the popular understanding of civic community and has thereby constantly handicapped the city's efforts to soften the local consequences of the national class divisions. Since Puritan times generations of Bostonians have believed that a civic community should not only provide municipal services and represent the citizens, but should also promote and extend

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the dominant culture of the city. Thus at no moment in its history did Boston ever have a truly civic community; instead, it has been a gathering of conforming and nonconforming residents. This cultural tradition has many accomplishments to its credit. It has encouraged a proliferation of both municipal and private philanthropies. At one time or another in its history the city led the nation in the establishment of public and private schools, in religious innovation, in the creation of hospitals, libraries, colleges, universities, symphony orchestras, art museums, and all manner of charitable undertakings. Today Bostonians live within a density of cultural and philanthropic institutions unmatched by any other American city. But the addition of the goal of cultural dominance to the definition of the civic community is also charged with enormous costs. It has intensified the conflict for political representation and exacerbated the conflicts within the rendering of municipal services to an intolerable degree. As a result the Boston community, weakened as all American communities are by the disorders of class privilege and disadvantage, frequently collapses under the weight of its burden of cultural dominance. The trouble started the moment the Puritans landed, and the impropriety of adding the task of cultural conformity to a civic community manifested itself in the weakness of a number of Boston institutions during the eighteenth century. It surfaced during the Revolution, and, with the coming of the Catholic Irish immigrants during the middle of the nineteenth century, it assumed what Bostonians now see-incorrectly, I think-as their major cultural division. This is not the place to review the modern cultural history of Boston, but it should suffice for the purposes of a discussion of the history of the city's civic community to note that, since the Civil War, first the formation of Protestant-Catholic political coalitions, and later the formation of predominantly Catholic coalitions, have all been hampered in their flexibility and inclusiveness by the addition of the demand for cultural dominance to the legitimate goal of representa,tion. Whether one considers the performance of good mayors like Hugh O'Brien and Josiah Quincy, who led Protestant-Catholic coalitions, or whether one considers a bad mayor like James Michael Curley, who fashioned mainly Catholic coalitions, the drive for cultural dominance hampered all of them and their constituents in any address to the social differences which the class divisions of the city pressed down upon the city's politics. The bitter costs of representational conflict in a city of this sort has

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in time impressed itself upon both citizens and politicians. Perhaps more important, the influx of new immigrants from overseas, especially Jews and Italians, and the ceaseless in- and outflow of the native Protestant and Catholic population have made the city more cosmopolitan and have weakened its tradition of defining its citizen-s-as conformists or nonconformists. As a result, since World War II Boston mayors and many other local politicians have been more figures of mere representation than were their counterparts fifty or one hundred years ago. It is now possible to hope that, despite the intensity of black-white feeling, the civic community could offer at least some softening of the harshness that the failure of the national community presses upon us. At times Americans despair of both their national and their civic institutions and turn defensively toward smaller groupings in the hope that among acquaintances and neighbors they can cushion the impact of poverty, civil disorder, and war. At such times an amorphous community, a community without its own formal institutions-the neighborhood-rises in public consciousness and people try to attach some of the powers of the civic community to clusters of residential blocks. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, settlement house workers alternately appalled by the conditions of urban poverty and impressed with the sociability and helping patterns of the poor, founded neighborhood institutions themselves and led a national movement for the representation of neighborhoods within the civic community. In some cities, like Cincinnati, this drive achieved a formal political status, and in most cities settlement houses fostered the increase of municipal social, health, educational, and recreation services through reforms in public school, hospital, and park policies. During both World War I and World War II, when the national government wished to mobilize the population, it encouraged neighborhood-level organizations for war. In the past all such campaigns had proved ephemeral and only settlement houses, health clinics, and the schools have survived. In short, without formal institutions and functions the neighborhood in America is not in itself an enduring collectivity. To observe that neighborhoods are ever changing gatherings of people is not to say they are unimportant to everyday life. Although Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester did not produce any significant neighborhood institutions, they did, like all American cities and

I INTRODUCTION I xv

suburbs, enjoy an active and successful neighborhood life. Edwin O'Connor, in The Edge if Sadness (1961), has written about the tightly knit middle-class parishes of Dorchester where for a time families of common circumstance and culture joined church, street, and home into one unified pattern of social activities. David S. Viscott's Dorchester Boy (1973) is a memory of a parallel Jewish community, and Francis Russell has recalled the similar churches, streets, and clubs of the Protestants in The Great Interlude (1964). The three themes are essentially the same despite their ethnic diversity: a comfortable home life supported by blocks of neighbors who attended to each other's children, gossiped about each other's lives, met for church and shopping, and occasionally visited together. This was the good domestic life in America of the years between the two great wars. What is missing from these books save O'Connor's, and what is missing in the current political drive for neighborhood power, is the recognition of the essential class foundation which underlay these social conditions. The physical setting of these neighborhoods was good because they were relatively new and because their residents were regularly employed at decent wages. The city services to these neighborhoods were also good because they were new and because their residents were the dominant voters of the civic community. In lower Roxbury during the same years conditions were otherwise. There poor people, mostly white, had moved into the old working-class houses. The schools were not teaching the children successfully, gang violence threatened residents' civil liberties, and old photographs from the Building Department clearly depict the failure of minicipal services to maintain a decent standard of public space. In short, in lower Roxbury, although neighbors undoubtedly helped each other as best they could, poverty destroyed the kind of neighborhoods in which the more affluent residents of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester took pride. Today there is renewed hope for the three towns. The price of new suburban housing has made the old suburban homes of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester attractive purchases for young families. Some of the worst buildings of the nineteenth century have been torn down, although not fast and cleanly enough. In the black ghetto of Roxbury some very successful new urban renewal housing has been built at Washington Park, and the neighborhood of Eliot Square has organized itself for its own reconstruction. Young professional families

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are purchasing homes in Dorchester and Jamaica Plain. Both the black and Hispanic populations contain a small middle class of families capable of renewing old houses on a private basis. All such families deserve whatever aid the larger civic community can give because they are restoring a part of the city's public capital which otherwise would be heedlessly consumed. But most of today's problem in Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester is poverty. Thousands of families cannot keep up their houses and neighborhoods because they cannot earn wages sufficient to maintain the environment they now occupy. Roxbury could be one of the most beautiful places in all of Boston; poverty now makes it the ugliest. It is possible to imagine a scenario for the future in which the rising costs of housing and energy make it profitable for the well-to-do to reoccupy our old inner suburbs and through a process of incremental purchases to drive the poor of our cities out to the fringes-out to where most of them were in the eighteenth-century city. In such an event it would be a cruel irony that their new isolation had been accomplished in the name of community and neighborhood reconstruction. Boston, Massachusetts August 1977

Sam Bass Warner, Jr.

CONTENTS I

A CITY DIVIDED

1

Who Built the Metropolis? Common Ideas and Experiences II

THE LARGE INSTITUTIONS

15

The Walking City The Street Railways Other Services to Home Builders Common Patterns of Decision III

THE THREE TOWNS

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The Discipline if History and Geography The Three Towns, 1870-1900 IV

A SELECTIVE MELTING POT

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The Street Railway and Class Building Patterns The 1900 Segregation V

THE WEAVE OF SMALL PATTERNS

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Central Dorchester Tremont Street District Roxbury Highlands VI

REGULATION WITHOUT LAWS

117

The Home Builders The Grid Street and Frontage Lot Suburban Architecture VII

THE CONSEQUENCES

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APPENDIX A A LOCAL HISTORIAN'S GUIDE TO SOCIAL STATISTICS

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APPENDIX B

179

TABLES

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

187

NOTES

193

INDEX

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ILL USTRATIONS MAPS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

The pedestrian city of 1850 and the suburban metropolis of 1900 Railroad trackage, 1870-1900 Street railway tracks, 1872 Street railway tracks, 1886 Street railway tracks, 1901 The three towns in 1870 Rate of new residential construction, three towns, 1872-1901 Amount of street railway service in the three towns, 1872-1901 Approximate class building bands of the three towns in 1900 Dorchester Roxbury

2 21

22 22 23 36 50 51 63 71 87

CHART New residehtial construction, 1870-1901, the three towns and the nation

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FIGURES All uncredited pictures were taken by the author during the winter of 1958-59. Unless noted to the contrary all houses in the illustrations were still standing in 1961. 1. A romantic cottage, West Roxbury, 1856-1857

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Twenty-acre estate of Stephen M. Allen, 44 Allandale road, near Centre street, West Roxbury. The house burned in 1889 and was replaced by a new and enlarged building which still stands on the same site. Private lithograph by J. H. Bufford. Courtesy Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (S.P.N.E.A.).

2. The suburban achievement, 1903

13

Humphreys street, Dorchester, looking from Dudley street. Dudley street carline in the foreground, late eighteenth century house on the left, and rom of 1890 medium-price two-family houses on the right. Courtesy Metropolitan Transit Authority (M.T.A.).

3. An antique omnibus Courtesy M.T.A.

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4. Middle class single-family houses of the peripheral towns, c. 1830-1870

18

Numbers 380, 382, and 386, West Fourth street, South Boston. Substantial single-family houses of the main streets. Working class row houses and tenements were built in the alley behind. The main street houses have long narrow lots which take up two thirds of the distance to the center of the block, the alley houses the back third. Numbers 382 and 386, center and right, are classic revival single-family houses of the second quarter of the nineteenth century; 380 is a Third Empire house of the 1860's and 1870's. 5. Mid-nineteenth century working class alley housing, located to the rear of houses in Figure 4 Numbers 238-246 Silver street, South Boston. Row singles of the 1840's. Many such little wooden houses run along the twenty-foot alleys which were let into the inner half of South Boston's generous street grid. The lots on the alleys, like the houses themselves, were minimal for their day, 800-1,000 square feet being common.

6. Medium-priced two-family house, c. 1850

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Number 124 Princeton street, East Boston. There is a two-story kitchen ell in the rear. The original siding was clapboards. Often these houses were built in pairs or in rows of a half-dozen. The lots are 125 feet deep and only very rarely were any structures placed in the back yard. The result of this land plan was the most open and pleasant medium-priced housing ever built in Boston. Today the lots still remain open except in the few cases where the first builder placed his house behind a long lawn. In this case a later house was often built in front on the lawn.

7. Roxbury Village, Dudley and Warren streets, c. 1860

21

Courtesy S.P.N.E.A. 8. Horsecar in front of the Metropolitan Street Railway car barn, South and Jamaica streets, Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury, c. 1880 In rush hours when the cars would be crowded teams of four and sometimes six horses were used. The capacity of such a car, with standees, was about forty. Courtesy M.T.A.

9. Open horsecar on Centre street, Jamaica Plain Village, 1883

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Picture taken from Burroughs street, looking north. Courtesy Miss M. Souther. 10. Downtown traffic, Post Office Square, May 23, 1904 There were many severe traffic jams in Boston long before the automobile. This little confusion is mild. Courtesy M.T.A.

11. Working class wooden houses and tenements in the West End; photograph c. 1890

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Numbers 38-32 Lynde street, still standing in 1935, now torn down. Number 38, far left, is part of a series of pre-Civil War brick row houses; 36-34 are old wooden houses c. 1830-1840. Both groups were undoubtedly converted to multiple tenancy by the 1880's when the five-story tenement was put up at 32 Lynde street. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

12. The moral influence of the street railway, outer edge of new construction, 1904 Spring and Centre streets, West Roxbury. Courtesy M.T.A.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

I

13. Typical electric streetcar, 1900

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29

Picture taken in front of the Boston Elevated Railway car barn, Jamaica and South streets, Jamaica Plain. Courtesy M.T.A.

14. Open electric car for summer service, about 1903

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The boys hanging on the sides were posed there by the photographer who was making a series of safety pictures for the newspapers. Courtesy M.T.A.

15. Speculator's 1887 Back Bay row houses, 517-523 Beacon street

47

This row of four-and-a-half story expensive houses was put up by the speculative builders Chadwick and Stillings in 1887. The houses carried construction mortgages for $16,000 apiece. Suffolk Deeds, L. 1791, f. 418; Building Permit no. 78, 1887.

16. Dense West End land plan, code tenements c. 1890. Buildings now torn down

48

Farwell avenue, West End; the alley turns to the left. Some of the buildings could only be entered from the alley. These brick structures met the 1892 Fire and Sanitary Code, and were the intown alternative to the cheap suburban three-decker. At the end of the century many such tall buildings replaced the wooden houses of the 1830-1870 era.

17. Upper middle class suburban street, c. 1890

54

Sigourney street, Jamaica Plain. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

18. Pre-suburban housing of the central middle class, c. 1850

54

Corning street, Lower South End. These rows of houses run back to back and have almost no land between them. The central middle class used such structures as single-family houses, the lower middle class often took in a boarder or two to help with the rent bills.

19. Suburban house of the central middle class, c. 1885

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47 Rockwell street, Dorchester. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

20. Some lower middle class suburban alternatives

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Houses c. 1885, Moreland street, Roxbury. The three-decker gave one large apartment on each floor. Because of its height and small narrow lot it was a poor neighbor to small singlefamily houses.

21. Businessman's cottage; house 1846, picture 1878

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Number 89 Pilgrim road, Longwood, Roxbury. The house is now torn down. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

22. Lucy Stone House; house c. 1860, picture c. 1890

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Home of the famous feminist, Boutwell avenue, near Train street, Neponset, Dorchester. During the years 1885-1895 her husband, Henry B. Blackwell, did some suburban development on the streets nearby. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

23. Central Dorchester, 1903; Ceylon street from Bird

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Bird street railroad station on the left, a neighborhood dwelling and store unit to the right, low-priced single-family houses of the 1870's and 1880's along Ceylon street. Courtesy M.T.A.

24. Professional builder's middle-priced single, 1880 Number 1 Victoria street, Dorchester. Built by DaVId M. McKay, a Canadian immigrant lumber dealer and speculative builder. This house was part of a series of eight. It sold new for

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ILLUSTRATIONS $6,000. The lot size is 4,400 square feet; the house is 23 by 32 feet with an ell 20 by 20, or 1,100 square feet to the floor. Building Permit no. 118, 1880.

25. Single-family house, 1885

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Number 1 Elm Lawn, Dorchester. The house fronts on a short one-block street which was laid out to provide a small lozenge grass strip in the center. This kind of modification of the standard forty-foot grid street became increasingly popular in the late 1890's and early twentieth century. It was undoubtedly inspired by the park streets of the South End which were laid out in the 1850's. George F. Pinkham, an inventor of the common acid and soda fire extinguisher, was the developer. Building Permit no. 1006, 1885.

26. Two-family house, 1894

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Number 20 Chamblet street, Dorchester. This house was put up by the long-time Boston and Dorchester residents Albert G. and Frank M. Frost. The Frost brothers were very active suburban real estate dealers and builders. The lot size is 4,500 square feet; the house is 29 by 30 feet, or 870 square feet to the floor. Building Permit no. 1104, 1894; subdivision plan, Suffolk Deeds, L. 2061, f. 17.

27. Neighborhood dwelling and store unit, c. 1880

77

Duncan street, Dorchester.

28. Lower middle class minimum-priced single, c. 1870

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Number 48 Greenwich street, Dorchester. The original siding was undoubtedly clapboards. The lot size is unusually large for this price range, being 4,500 square feet. The house is 20 by 24 feet, or 480 square feet to the floor. Such a house represented about the minimum in new housing and probably sold new for $1,000. This street was subdivided by Samuel B. Pierce, a Boston china dealer who as a part-time real estate speculator pioneered in the selling of houses and lots with amortizing mortgages.

29. Meeting House Hill, First Parish Church (Unitarian) and Lyceum Hall in 1900

82

This Georgian church was built in 1896 to replace one destroyed by fire. It is the sixth church on the site. The Lyceum is now torn down. St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church borders the town green to the right. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

30. Meeting House Hill, St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church in 1903

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The cornerstone of the church was laid in 1873, the building completed in 1884. The famous Gothic architect Patrick C. Keeley designed the church and it is made out of Roxbury pudding stone taken from the site. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

31. Expensive houses, Magnolia street, Dorchester in the 1890's

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To the left, a house finished in the popular shingle style; to the right, the 1890 Colonial Revival manner. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

32. Neil McNeil's Newport style mansion, 1887 Number 59 Stanley street, Dorchester. The house sits on an acre lot and is about 42 by 42 feet, or 1,767 square feet to the floor. Building Permit no. 986, 1887. In the background is a threedecker. The lower part of the street has a great number of three-

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deckers, some of which McNeil put up himself. McNeil was a Nova Scotian who became a fashionable contractor. Among his most notable construction jobs were the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the Vanderbilt Mansion in Newport, R.I. 33. Lower middle class housing, the walking city c. 1850 Number 46 Porter street, lower South End. The land was almost entirely covered by these cheap structures. To reach the rear of the houses, where the privies presumably were, one had to go through the basement. 34. The walking city styles carried to the suburbs, 1873: numbers 1485-1495 Columbus avenue, Roxbury This row of tenements and stores was part of a series of nine put up by a Nova Scotia immigrant carpenter, Abraham Lent. He seems to have been bankrupted by the Depression of 1873. These structures, located in the midst of the Stony Brook manufacturing area, represent the outer limit of dense walking city building styles. The upper floors of the units contain three apartments, each one is 20 by 36 feet, or 720 square feet to the apartment. Building Permit no. 352-355, 1873. 35. A lower middle class suburban alternative, minimum-priced threedeckers of the 1890's Ingleside street, Roxbury. 36. Working class barracks, c. 1850; picture taken during the great Stony Brook flood of 1886 Haskins street (formerly Belmont street), lower Roxbury. Such large wooden multiple structures were common in New England mill towns, but were forbidden to inner Boston by fire regulations. Barracks replaced in the early twentieth century by a yellow brick three-story apartment house. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A. 37. Working class housing, lower Roxbury, during the flood of 1886 Haskins street, opposite the barracks of Figure 36. These small wooden mid-nineteenth century houses were presumably all in multi-family use as were the cheap versions of South End row housing which can be seen on Ruggles street in the background. Ruggles street houses now torn down. A few of the wooden houses on Haskins street still standing. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A. 38. The Mission Church and Back Bay looking north from Parker Hill. The church when new in 1878 (top), and in 1910 with towers added (bottom) This church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help was built during the years 1873-1878. In the background can be seen its partially built-up neighborhood, and in the distance the still unfilled Back Bay Fens (top). The second picture was taken on the occasion of the adding of the church towers in 1910. The surrounding neighborhood was then completely filled with houses (bottom). Courtesy Boston Redevelopment Authority. 39. The old industrial relationship: millowner's house overlooking his mill. House c. 1860, picture 1880 Number 37 Centre street, Roxbury. Home of Louis Prang, owner of the large lithographing plant shown in the background. The house still stands, although much modified. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

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40. Stony Brook Valley, workers' houses and mill; houses 1872-3, mill late 1890's

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Numbers 79-85 Bickford street, Roxbury. A whole series of cheap imitations of South End row houses were built here in the 18651873 boom. The Bromley Park federal housing project replaced most of them. The large mill in the background, originally a shoe factory, was not built until the late 1890's, but there were factories on all sides of this housing at the time of its construction.

41. Philanthropic housing for the "substantial workingman," 1886

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Numbers 7-11 Sussex street, Roxbury. Robert T. Paine sponsor and developer. Although fire resistant and sanitary these were extremely small for their day, 720 square feet of floor space in all. The lot was only twelve feet longer than the house so that the rear alley is miniscule. Building Permit no. 255-257, 1886; Suffolk Deeds L. 1762, f. 177; L. 1765, f. 598.

42. Workingmen's Building Association, 1891 model single-family house

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Number 46 Sunnyside terrace, Roxbury, part of a group of sixty houses in a single planned development of the 1890's. The building association also erected similar houses in Dorchester on Oakley and Holiday streets. These are excellent examples of the best low-priced single-family houses of the day. Subdivision plan and prices, Suffolk Deeds L. 1943, f. 586; L. 2011, f. 520.

43. Urban styles in Roxbury highlands, marble block, built c. 1870, picture c. 1890

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Cedar street in 1870 lay at the outer western edge of the highlands. It was cut off from the main body of expensive construction by cheap developments which went up along Washington street in the 1880's boom. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

44. Cheap wooden imitation of the town row house, 1872. Perhaps such houses were the inspiration for the three-decker

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Numbers 8-12 Fountain street, Roxbury highlands. It seems likely that these houses were built originally for two-family use. The developer was Benjamin F. Bean, a New Hampshire man who came to the city as a youth and made a fortune in suburban real estate. Each house is 18 by 36 feet, each lot 18 by 73. In 1884 the house at 8 Fountain street sold for $6,600, a price that indicates rental income. Building Permit no. 44, 1872; Suffolk Deeds, L. 1217, f. 152; L. 1497, f. 433.

45. First Church (Unitarian), John Eliot Square, Roxbury; church built in 1804, picture c. 1860

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The original congregation was formed during the years 16311632. This church is the fifth on the site. It has recently been renovated and still stands on the remains of the town green. Courtesy Holman Print Shop.

46. Upper middle class suburban single-family houses, picture and houses c. 1890 Townsend street, Roxbury highlands, between Washington street and Walnut avenue; houses now torn down. The large porch, the shaded house, the rubble wall, and the open lawn are in keeping with the approach to landscaping demonstrated nearby at Franklin Park. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

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47. Reverend Edward Everett Hale House, 39 Highland street, Roxbury highlands. House c. 1840, no longer on site; picture c. 1890 Home of Boston's famous reform minister. An example of the expensive railroad commuter's houses of the pre-streetcar era. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A. 48. High-priced multiple housing: suburban apartment hotel, Roxbury highlands. Hotel built 1884, picture c. 1890 Hotel Dale, Dale street, corner of Regent at Washington Park. In the background is the Hotel Regent; both are still standing. Since the eighteenth century, there had been multiple units in row houses, however, the boarding house was the usual form of multifamily middle class living until the end of the nineteenth century. Apartment hotels, with their common dining rooms, were the transitional structures to modern apartment houses. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

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49. Expensive three-deckers, Roxbury highlands; houses and picture c. 1890 Numbers 121 and 119 Dale street at Washington Park. Still standing. The size and finish of these houses produced apartments fully the equal of the ordinary Back Bay apartment house. Compare with the cheap three-deckers of Ingleside street, Figure 35. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

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50. Contractors' building with Owen Nawn's shop, Roxbury; picture 1894 Number 2078-2080 Washington street, Roxbury. Owen Nawn (born Ireland, 1804; died Roxbury, 1901) was one of the 122 most active landowners of the three towns. A builder by profession, between 1872 and 1895 he put up twenty-six houses in Roxbury and West Roxbury on his own account. He shared this Washington street building with half a dozen other concerns. The firm he founded still continues. Courtesy S.P.N.E.A.

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51. Timothy Connolly's 1894 minimum housing. Adjacent houses have been torn down Numbers 1 and 2 Connolly place, Roxbury. Building Permit no. 182-3, 1894. In the narrow alleys off Harrison avenue and Lenox and Albany streets Connolly and his son put up dozens of these small brick three-unit structures. Their brick construction, required by the fire code for lower Roxbury, and cramped land plan make them much like Robert T. Paine's nearby 1886 philanthropic housing. Compare with Figure 41. Connolly, an Irish immigrant, was the local ward boss. He was driven from power by James M. Curley. "The ward remembers him by some of the worst tenement property in the community, so badly planned and constructed that it argues a special dispensation from their building department of that day for its execution."AlbertJ. Kennedy, The