Building order on Beacon Hill, 1790-1850
Date
2016
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
“Building Order on Beacon Hill, 1790-1850,” considers the history of Boston’s iconic Beacon Hill neighborhood during the period of its most intensive development. It reconsiders the scholarly and popular understanding of this place as a district of wealth and refinement to show that its inhabitants and their houses reflect a more complete cross-section of Boston’s population. It provides a much fuller accounting of this neighborhood’s significance by interpreting the residences of a wide range of its population, including the free African-Americans and Irish immigrants who occupied Revere and Joy streets in the 1840s as well as the developers, merchants, and attorneys who built along Beacon and Mount Vernon streets in the 1790s and 1800s. At the same time, it illustrates how houses, whether expensive mansions, speculative rows or tenements, worked to bring order to everyday life, whether by regulating the movement of guests and servants through a gentry house of the 1810s or by providing an arena for polite sociability in the double parlors of the 1830s and 40s. This analysis shows how the residents of Beacon Hill attempted to solve perceived social problems through building. While it is attentive to built form, recording standing buildings in plans and photographs, it also takes pains to populate Beacon Hill’s buildings through careful attention to the documentary record, to show how the significance of architecture is contingent and dependent on use. Several of Charles Bulfinch’s remarkable mansions, for example, were demolished within two generations, converted to rows of smaller and more profitable houses in the 1830s and 40s. By considering the changing significance of the neighborhood and its individual buildings over several decades, it shows the fleeting quality of architectural significance as well as the limitations of any approach to architecture that only considers the moment of its creation.