Beacon Hill (Boston)

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Beacon Hill Historic District
National Register of Historic Places
National Historic Landmark District
Demolition of Beacon Hill in 1811. View from the north of the Massachusetts State House [1]

Demolition of Beacon Hill in 1811. View from north of Massachusetts State House

Beacon Hill (Boston) (Massachusetts)
Paris plan pointer b jms.svg
location Boston , Massachusetts
Coordinates 42 ° 21 '29.9 "  N , 71 ° 3' 58"  W Coordinates: 42 ° 21 '29.9 "  N , 71 ° 3' 58"  W.
Built 1795
architect Charles Bulfinch
Architectural style Colonial Revival , Greek Revival , Federal Style
NRHP number [2] 66000130
Data
The NRHP added October 15, 1966
As  NHLD declared December 19, 1962
Beacon Hill in the late 18th century, from a perspective from Breed's Hill in Charlestown .
Beacon Hill as seen from the Charles River (with the Financial District in the background).

Beacon Hill is a historic district ( Neighborhood ) of the city of Boston in the state of Massachusetts in the United States . Together with the neighboring Back Bay , which is also a Historic District , there were 27,476 residents in 2010. There are many federal style row houses in Beacon Hill . The district is famous for its narrow streets with gas lighting and sidewalks of brick . Today Beacon Hill is considered one of the most desirable and expensive neighborhoods in Boston.

The district is north of Boston Common and the Boston Public Garden . It is roughly bounded by Beacon Street in the south, Somerset Street in the east, Cambridge Street in the north and Storrow Drive along the Charles River in the west. Added to this is the block between Beacon Street , Tremont Street and Park Street , on which Boston Common is located. The area west of Charles Street is known by residents as the "Flat of the Hill".

Because the Massachusetts State House is in a prominent position at the top of the hill, the term Beacon Hill is often used by the local media as a metonym for state government or legislation.

history

The Second House Harrison Gray Otis House , 85 Mount Vernon Street.

Like many places of the same name in the USA, the district was named after a beacon that used to stand on the top of the hill and thus on the highest point in the center of Boston. It was located directly behind what is now the Massachusetts State House , where a memorial today commemorates it. The hill itself, along with the nearby Pemberton Hill and Mount Vernon hills, was significantly reduced in height in order to simplify the construction of houses in the area and to fill the northeastern Mill Pond with the material obtained in order to be able to gain further building land.

The entire hill was the property of the first European settler in Boston named William Blaxton from 1625 to 1635 , who eventually sold the area to the Puritans . The southern slope of Beacon Hill facing Boston Common was the most desirable site in the 19th century, the northern slope was known as Black Beacon Hill . Many well-known African American people including Frederick Douglas , Harriet Tubman , David Walker and Sojourner Truth made speeches at the African Meeting House on Joy Street . The Beacon Hill area was one of the most important and stable centers of abolitionism in the period before the Civil War .

The there is also a time living Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first African American woman to a university degree in medicine awarded in the United States. In 1860 she was admitted to the New England Female Medical College , which later became part of Boston College , and graduated with an MD. Her 1883 book "A Book of Medical Discourses" was one of the first books in medical science to be published by a African American woman.

The north side of the hill was an area where mostly African-Americans lived with very little or no income and where prostitution flourished until well into the 20th century . Therefore, the poorest immigrants initially lived there too, mostly Jews from Ireland , Italy and Eastern Europe . It was not until a large-scale urban renewal project in the 1950s that the red light district on Scollay Square was restricted .

In 1937 the novel The Late George Apley was published , which won the Pulitzer Prize and satirically described the life of the wealthy whites on Beacon Hill .

Beacon Hill was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 19, 1962 as a National Historic Landmark .


Culture and sights

This memorial on the back of the State House marks the location of the original lighting .

Museums

Buildings

Parks

Regular events

Personalities

Houses in Louisburg Square

Many famous personalities lived and still live in Beacon Hill including:

Selected Beacon Hill attractions

The Chester Harding House , a National Historic Landmark , the 1826 to 1830 from the portrait painter Chester Harding was inhabited and today the Boston Bar Association hosts.
Street House number description
Beacon Street 1 One Beacon Street - An eponymous high-rise office building on the corner of Tremont Street . It ranks 14th on the list of tallest buildings in Boston .
8th Home of the Osgood family early from the late 19th / 20th century
10½ Boston Athenæum
16 Former home of painter Chester Harding , now the seat of the Boston Bar Association
22nd The Amory-Ticknor House was built by Charles Bulfinch in 1804 . Today there is a Fox News television studio there .
25th Headquarters of the Unitarian Universalist Association
42-43 The painter John Singleton Copley owned a house here, as did David Sears II , which is now the Somerset Club .
45 Harrison Gray Otis ' third home , now the seat of the American Meteorological Society
84 Cheers Beacon Hill - formerly known as the Bull & Finch Pub , which inspired the TV series Cheers .
Bowdoin Street 122 Registered address of John F. Kennedy
Brimmer Street 44 Registered address of Samuel Eliot Morison
Cambridge Street Massachusetts General Hospital
131 Old West Church
141 Harrison Gray Otis ' first home , built by Charles Bulfinch .
Charles Street 44A This is where Mary Sullivan , the last victim of the Boston Strangler , was murdered.
Chestnut Street 6th Beacon Hill Friends House
13-17 Row houses designed by Charles Bulfinch for Hepzibah Swan
18th Birthplace of the poet Robert Lowell
50 Home of Francis Parkman
57A Seat of the Harvard Musical Association
Grove Street 28 Home of the Reverend Leonard A. Grimes , a well-known pastor with connections to the Underground Railroad and the Abolitionist Movement . He was one of the men who bought Anthony Burns ' freedom after his arrest.
Irving Street 58 Charles Sumner's birthplace
Joy Street 46 African Meeting House
67 Home of Rebecca Lee Crumpler , the first black woman to graduate in medicine in the United States.
Louisburg Square 4th Home of William Dean Howells when he was on the Atlantic Monthly
10 Home of Bronson Alcott , Louisa May Alcott and family
19th Home of John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry
20th Here the singer Jenny Lind married the conductor Otto Goldschmidt .
Mount Vernon Street 32 Home of Samuel Gridley Howe and his wife Julia Ward Howe
41 Headquarters of Beacon Press , a division of the Unitarian Universalist Association that published the 1971 Pentagon Papers edited by Mike Gravel .
76 Home of Margaret Deland
77 Home of Sarah Wyman Whitman and later the club house of the Club of Odd Volumes .
85 Harrison Gray Otis's second home , built by Charles Bulfinch .
127 Former fire station of the Boston Fire Department and location of Spenser and The Real World : Boston .
Myrtle Street 109 Home of Lysander Spooner
Phillips Street 18th Location of the Vilna Shul Synagogue
83 Home of the famous black dentist , lawyer and abolitionist John Sweat Rock
Pinckney Street 15th A nursery school run by Elizabeth Peabody

See also

literature

  • Joy Street Frances Parkinson Keyes, 1950.
  • Beacon Hill: A Walking Tour, A. McVoy McIntyre, 1975. ISBN 0-316-55600-9
  • The Mount Vernon Street Warrens, Martin Green, Simon & Schuster, 1989 ISBN 0-684-19109-1
  • Beacon Hill: The Life & Times of a Neighborhood, Moying Li-Marcus, 2002. ISBN 1-55553-543-7

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Walter M. Whitehill: Boston . a topographical history. 2nd Edition. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1968, ISBN 978-0-19-626565-0 , pp. 81-84 .
  2. ^ Entry Beacon Hill Historic District on the National Register Information System . National Park Service , accessed June 21, 2016
  3. ↑ Listing of National Historic Landmarks by State: Massachusetts. National Park Service , accessed August 5, 2019.
  4. ^ Back Bay - Beacon Hill. (PDF; 304 kB) 2010 Census Population. (No longer available online.) Boston Redevelopment Authority, March 2011, archived from the original on July 12, 2012 ; accessed on February 24, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bostonredevelopmentauthority.org
  5. ↑ Great Neighborhoods: Boston. Retrieved February 24, 2012 .

Web links

Commons : Beacon Hill, Boston  - Collection of images, videos, and audio files