Franklin Place - Demolition and Legacy

Demolition and Legacy

Notable residents of Franklin Place included John and Judith Sargent Murray, Abby May, James Perkins, merchant and principal donor to the Boston Athenaeum’s first building, William Tudor, Jr., founder of Monthly Anthology and the North American Review, and his literary associate Dr. John S. J. Gardiner, rector of Trinity Church. Two women owned houses: Abigail Howard, a founder of the Boston Library Society, and Elizabeth Amory. While wealthy merchants and prominent men of letters inhabited both the Crescent and the houses across the street, it was the free-standing houses that became the most fashionable, even though they were more expensive and the side yards were very narrow; Bostonians had a deep-seated preference for even the narrow yards of semi-detached houses as opposed to the block of connected houses, two walls in each of which had to be windowless. The pattern held true in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: except for a few houses in the Back Bay, Bostonians at every class level utterly rejected the connected town house block and instead turned back to some version of the 18th- and early 19th-century ideal of the garden lot and free-standing town house.

Shortly after the Crescent’s completion, the newly-widened Arch Street was extended through the center archway, and other connecting streets were opened to the south and east. The addition of these new streets reflected the growth of the downtown business area immediately surrounding the complex; this long-lasting push by businesses into the area would eventually doom Bulfinch’s buildings. After about thirty years, when the Mount Vernon Proprietors were developing an exclusive residential neighborhood on Mount Vernon just to the west of Beacon Hill that was beginning to lure affluent residents farther from the central business district, middle-class residents began to move in. The single-family dwellings were soon converted into boarding houses. The new residents were less concerned with the neighborhood’s overall appearance, as seen from late photographs that show the garden overcrowded with small shrubs planted randomly among the trees, and a wood picket fence replacing the original iron posts and chains. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. noted these changes in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, published in 1858 just as demolition was underway: “There were the shrubs and flowers in the Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Commerce is just putting his granite foot upon them.”

The Tontine Crescent and the other houses in Franklin Place were acquired by the city “for the public convenience” and razed in 1858 to make way for blocks of large stone stores and granite warehouses in Franklin Street. These buildings, along with a single elm remaining from the garden (plus three empty circular pits that once held trees), were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. The graceful curve and unusual width of Franklin Street today below Hawley Street are reflections of the Crescent’s ground plan. Architectural descendants include the Sears Crescent near today’s Boston City Hall and the façade of the Kirstein Business Branch of the Boston Public Library (built 1929-30), which replicates the entire central portion of the Tontine. Despite residents’ general aversion to connected structures, hundreds of brick row houses in the area draw inspiration from the Bulfinch structure, including Worcester and Chester Squares in the South End; West Hill Place and Charles River Square on Beacon Hill; a set of fifteen attached brick and half-timbered town houses on Elm Hill Avenue in Roxbury Highlands originally called Harris Wood Crescent; and a block of fifteen red-brick connected houses on Beacon Street in Brookline, built in 1907.

An economic downturn meant that subscriptions came too slowly to meet bills, and Bulfinch went bankrupt in January 1796, turning from a comfortable situation as a gentleman concerned with architecture to a laborious life of architectural practice and public service. Financial troubles continued to plague him, such that he spent July 1811 in debtors’ prison, but the Crescent and Franklin Place helped transform Boston from an 18th-century town into a 19th-century city.