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:

• Adams, Fred, "Dudley house history in Roxbury | Boston, MA," Roxbury Historical Society, Facebook, March 14, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1252706132740679/posts/1634461511231804/
• Adams, Fred, "Thomas Dudley's homestead in Roxbury, Massachusetts," Roxbury Historical Society, Facebook, February 21, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1252706132740679/posts/1618148399529782/
• Batista, Elisa, "A brief history of the founding and development of Roxbury," Bay State Banner, June 15, 2018, https://baystatebanner.com/2018/06/15/a-brief-history-of-the-founding-and-development-of-roxbury/
• Byrdsell, Auzzy J., "Roxbury Community College breaks ground on Center for Economic and Social Justice," The Boston Globe, updated June 21, 2024, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/06/21/metro/rcc-breaks-ground-center-economic-social-justice/
• "Center for Economic and Social Justice," Roxbury Community College, 2024, https://www.rcc.mass.edu/explore/visit-rcc/cesj.html

"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)

Davis, Samuel, "Roxbury," Global Boston, https://globalboston.bc.edu/index.php/home/immigrant-places/roxbury/

• 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/

• "H693: David Dudley (1787-1841)," Paintings, Harvard Art Museums, bequest of Caroline Dudley Taylor, 1988, https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/305145

"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

Remember the Refectory?

Franklin Park Refectory (1896, Hartwell & Richardson), c.1906. Photo by Thomas Warren Sears.

Franklin Park Refectory (1896, Hartwell & Richardson), c.1907.

As we celebrate the American Revolution Semiquincentennial and the golden anniversary of the American Revolution Bicentennial, I am observing a not-so-golden anniversary. Fifty years ago the Franklin Park Refectory, a Boston landmark that would be very useful today were it still with us, was laid waste and torn down.

Franklin Park Refectory (1896, Hartwell & Richardson), c.1907.

The best way to celebrate the history and heritage of our nation is to preserve, recycle and reuse its historic architecture as an educational tool for future generations and a tribute to the artisans who built distinguished social facilities to help foster a more civilly democratic society. 

Franklin Park Refectory, courtesy of digitalcommonwealth.org.

So I thought I'd recall an architectural treasure — once of high social significance and utility to visitors to Franklin Park, its zoo and its golf course, kudos to its palatial presence in a location by the entries to those popular attractions – that fell victim to shifting socioeconomic demographics, benign neglect, and the wrecking ball.

Blueprints for the Franklin Park Refectory.

Frederick Law Olmsted conceived Refectory Hill as part of his 1886 General Plan for Franklin Park as a rural retreat offering a wide variety of amenities for people of all social classes within wilderness, rolling hills and paths, overlooks, a pond, and recreational fields. He envisioned the Refectory as an eating place where "refreshments [would] be served principally out of doors under a large pergola or vine clad trellis, upon a terrace formed in the manner of the Playstead Overlook. Horse Sheds on the east side. Extended sylvan prospects from the terrace." Designed in an Italian Renaissance Revival style by Hartwell & Richardson, the Refectory was dedicated with festive excitement on July 4, 1896 – timely with America's 220th anniversary – as an open, airy, breezy pavilion with a pergola, an arcade, corner towers with classical arches and balustrade balconies, private dining rooms, a second-story loggia, and a rooftop garden, bordered by a terrace and a classical balustrade overlooking a mountainous stone foundation. All those areas for eating, drinking and lounging offered heavenly bucolic vistas extending beyond the Arnold Arboretum to the Blue Hills, as an idyllic setting for the public to benefit from the restorative powers of food, libation and nature.

Franklin Park Refectory, c.1917.

Its hilltop grandeur, presenting it as a social mecca to a shrine of refreshment and renewal, was expressed by Sylvester Baxter in his Boston Park Guide: "While all the other park buildings are simple and picturesque in character, the Refectory is marked by an elegance of style in keeping with its site and purpose." 

Franklin Park Refectory, renovated as a Boston Public Library branch.

By 1906, the Refectory proved a strain to maintain as a restaurant and café. So it became a branch of the Boston Public Library, for which its open-air first floor was closed off with an arcade of glass doors with arched transoms, making it an out-of-the-way place to read and study surrounded by the tranquility of nature. 

Franklin Park Refectory as a Boston Public Library branch, side view.

Upon its closure as a library in the late 1920s, a Catholic charity sought its conversion to a day home for children with tuberculosis, that would enable them to take advantage of the healing powers of the fresh air and natural environs the building presented in abundance. 

But neighbors objected to this proposal, afraid that it would turn the old building into something like a hospital (which, of course, didn't foreshadow the 1950s usurpation of Franklin Park's Heathfield by Lemuel Shattuck State Hospital, which remains there today).

It was reopened as an eatery by the Burke family in 1928. For 44 years it was the go-to concession stand for golfers, zoo crowds and kite-flyers, where Weitz Toasted Frankfurters were a specialty and Schlitz beers, Cracker Jacks, Mallomars, out-of-the-oven pizzas, ice cream, and more were served by dapper young men in white uniforms and aprons. 

This variety of victuals extended the Refectory into a jovial social center where political powwows, gala get-togethers and children's birthday parties took place by the dozen, family dinners were enjoyed on umbrella-shaded terrace tables with breathtaking country views, and toboggans were rented out for winter coasts down Schoolmaster Hill.

Seniors have shared their happy memories of the Refectory on Facebook, including Tharreni Jessie Morton:

Yes, I think this is maybe the building I have been thinking of off and on that we used to go to – it had a little lunch counter where you could get maybe a hotdog and a drink... and [an] old stereopticon picture machine, things that you looked at little scenes from – old Victorian stuff – and it was still pretty much just as it had been in the past – and this was in my teen years in [the] early-mid-sixties.

Franklin Park Refectory after closing, mid-1970s.

The rapidly changing social demographics, urban renewal, and mounting fear of crime that led to the "white flight" from Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and other neighborhoods abutting Franklin Park forced the closing of the refectory in 1972, which plunged this noble classical temple into decay and long-term neglect. A blog visitor shared his memory of this in 2008: 

I remember pulling open the large metal door on the abandoned, boarded-up Refectory back in 1974 as a 10 year old to look inside. It was cavernous. And all I could think was, "Wow, somebody should fix this place up!" That experience sparked a love for abandoned old buildings with potential that has stayed with me ever since.

Photo by Georgfotoart.

My father's scrutiny of the near-shambles Refectory sparked the same for me – especially when, in April 1976, he was notified that it was being razed, no thanks to a decree from then Commissioner of Parks and Recreation Anthony Forgione that it had to be torn down "right away." My father dashed out to the site, where he was interviewed by a major news outlet about the demolition, and an eighth-grade classmate told me she had seen my father on television.

He even reported to us that one of the wrecking crew had told him, "It's a shame that they should tear something like this down," and that about 12 mature trees were cut down in the process – as if the city had a parking lot for the golf course and the zoo in mind for the site. My father salvaged an ornate plaster bracket from the rubble, which he displayed in our garden and let the elements erode over time, as sort of a memorial to the ruination of the Refectory.

Fast-forward fifty years: What's Refectory Hill like today? Sure enough, it's another fulfillment of the prophecy Joni Mitchell made in her song, "Big Yellow Taxi":

Don't it always
seem to go

That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?

They paved paradise,

Put up a parking lot.

Trillium beer garden, Fenway (opened March 2013). Photo by Alex Zokan.

Which is a shame, considering today's popularity of beer gardens such as the Trillium in the Fenway. Today there would certainly be a market for a restored Franklin Park Refectory as a beer garden attracting the crowds that flock to the Franklin Park Zoo, the William Devine Golf Course, the annual Kite Festival, and White Stadium once it's rebuilt.

Just as Frederick Law Olmsted had predicted when he first envisioned the Franklin Park Refectory.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Big Yellow Taxi" (lyrics), Genius, https://genius.com/Joni-mitchell-big-yellow-taxi-lyrics

Boston Landmarks Commission, Franklin Park: Boston Landmarks Commission Study Report, March 4, 1980, https://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/franklin%20park%20study%20report%20no%2042_tcm3-28511.pdf

"Franklin Park," Jamaica Plain Historical Society, https://www.jphs.org/photogallery/franklin-park#gsc.tab=0

"Franklin Park: the Refectory, a building that served at various times as a restaurant and a branch of the Boston Public Library," Smithsonian Gardens, https://gardens.si.edu/collections/explore/ead_component/sova-aag-srs-ref4754

Osinski, Stan, "Boston Public Library Branch in Franklin Park," Boston Mass, Vintage, Facebook, July 6, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/1201814968754031/

Polimer, Joe, "Franklin Park Refectory as Boston Library," Boston Mass, Vintage, Facebook, October 5, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/groups/513744017561133/posts/996255315976665/

"Refectory, Franklin Park, Roxbury, Mass.," Historic New England, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/195346

"Refectory Hill," olmstedbooks, April 10, 2008, https://olmstedbooks.blogspot.com/2008/03/refectory-hill.html

Sammarco, Anthony, "Dorchester's Lost Library on Blue Hill Avenue," OFD (Originally From Dorcheste), Facebook, August 17, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheOFD/posts/10154425552196241/

"Time Traveling thru Franklin Park," Historic Franklin Park, February 16, 2012, https://historicfranklinpark.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/time-traveling-thru-franklin-park/

"Tiny Story: White Stadium," Boston Preservation Alliance, March 28, 2024, https://www.bostonpreservation.org/news-item/tiny-story-white-stadium

Little boxes on the hillside...

...but Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds (the song's original writer) would be wrong to say these ones are "all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." No, this time the topography defines the boxology, in proper Roxbury fashion. 

This contemporary condominium on Fisher Avenue in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood is the closest thing to a "Roxbury style" I've ever seen, taking full advantage of the area's characteristically hilly terrain to evolve as a series of stepped dwelling units leading up to a "lookout" tower room at its pinnacle. Thus each level's setback along the upward bound hill yields each unit (or story, in the uppermost unit's case) a terrace from the roof of the lower unit or the ground-level garages, which comprise the first floor so that they don't intrude upon any unit's living space with exhaust odors or car motor noise. This multilevel arrangement allows each unit a great hillside view, and each level is jogged out in a zigzag form to allow it multiple sides of exposure, hence more light inside.

This creative configuration gives the entire complex a jagged, asymmetrical form that emerges as a geometric abstraction of the randomly craggy Roxbury puddingstone that characterizes this neck of the woods. This conglomerate stone, seen here in Roxbury's preserved Rockledge Urban Wild, is an aggregate of many different kinds of rocks, stones and pebbles bonded together by prehistoric volcanic and glacial action, forming the bedrock underlying the bulk of Roxbury, as well as parts of Brighton, Brookline, Canton, Dedham, Dorchester, Dover, Jamaica Plain, Milton, Needham, Newton and Quincy.

'Of the hill'

Of course, the greatest hill-house of all is Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. Far from the run-of-the-mill of little boxes on the hillside, this nature-inspired masterpiece of organic architecture comprises big slabs on the cliffside, cantilevering over the waterfall below them in a visually precarious posture — albeit in a geometrically ordered programme that reflects the machine age as well as nature's way. 

Man and nature are both at odds and in détente here, and the structural assuredness of the balcony slabs is counterbalanced by the unpredictability of their built-to-last claim, appearing ready to cascade down the rocky waterfall on a moment's notice as the water gradually erodes the rock into the soil from which all came, and to which all shall (theoretically) return. 

The stair towers are built of local stacked stone as a monument to the nature that made all things and a contrast to the man-madeness of the concrete that cast the slabs. The verticality of the towers also emphasize the upward climb of the hill the house is perched on, while the thin horizontality of the stones contrast this with a reminder of the earth the house rests on, as the prime giver of its building materials. Rarely have lodgings and land been so seamlessly unified, to the degree that both are respected in our eyes as we gaze at this architectural spectacle.

Fallingwater, built in 1934 for business tycoon Edgar Kaufmann, epitomizes Wright's prescription for all houses: 

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

— Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (1932)

On or of the hill?
 

Chestnut Street, Beacon Hill.

One wonders what Wright thought of Beacon Hill during his brief stays in Massachusetts, as a child in Weymouth and while designing his Amherst Usonian House. Though scornful of historical styles, he hopefully appreciated the way the Mount Vernon Proprietors let the hill shape a cohesive neighborhood with a rhythmic progression of brick rowhouses.

Acorn Street, Beacon Hill. Photo by Ian Howard, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Beacon Hill's homes forge a visual unity that evokes the close-knit community the developers had intended, while visually referencing the hill's contours as the homes ascend and descend the slanting streets in a consistent curve, which their general uniformity of height gives rise to. Thus they are more of than on the hill, belonging to it, since the hill was the nurturing mother of their collective design, and they are not freestanding on the hill but supporting and shoring up one another's structure with abutment, like a hill's firmly packed soil and strength-bracing rock. This is especially true of Acorn Street, the way the cobblestones allude to the natural rock and soil of the hill the community grew on.

Windowboxes on Beacon Hill.
Photo by M2525, courtesy of Wiki.

Chestnut Street, c.1869.
Photo by Philip Bergen.

And the diversity of door elements, cornice heights, fenestration, and decoration—particularly windowbox flowers and yuletide wreaths—makes Beacon Hill homes not "all look just the same," expressing the individuality of the occupants in a composition that epitomizes Samuel Taylor Coleridge's definition of beauty: "unity in variety." 

Cutting Down Beacon Hill, c.1810.

This is how Beacon Hill became a prototype of hillside development. Which would not have been possible had the hill itself not been cut down from 1807-1828, for landfill to fill in the Mill Pond and to level the hill to a comfortable live-on height. This made the neighborhood even more "of the hill," as steep inclines wouldn't have made the hill or its residents "each the happier for the other."

Right, Wright?

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!