Mission Hill (Boston)

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Mission Hill Triangle Historic District
National Register of Historic Places
Historic District
Tremont Street in Mission Hill

The Tremont Street in Mission Hill

Mission Hill (Boston) (Massachusetts)
Paris plan pointer b jms.svg
location Boston , Massachusetts
Coordinates 42 ° 20 '0.3 "  N , 71 ° 6' 27.6"  W Coordinates: 42 ° 20 '0.3 "  N , 71 ° 6' 27.6"  W.
Architectural style Colonial Revival, Late Victorian
NRHP number [1] 89001747
The NRHP added November 6, 1989

Mission Hill is a 0.75  mi² (2  square kilometers ) of large area ( Neighborhood ) of Boston in the state of Massachusetts of the United States with about 18,000 inhabitants.

The district is roughly bounded by Columbus Avenue and Roxbury in the east, Longwood Avenue in the northeast and the Riverway or Jamaicaway designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and the city of Brookline in the west. The historic district is located between Smith , Worthington , Tremont and Huntington Avenues . Mission Hill is located directly north of Jamaica Plain and is connected to the public transport network via the MBTA - Green Line E and the Orange Line , and the Museum of Fine Arts is within walking distance . The borough overlaps halfway with the Longwood Medical and Academic Area with most of the workers outside of central Boston. Because of these neighborhoods, Mission Hill is often struggling with institutional growth that is reducing residential space and taking up commercial space. In the past few years, however, some new retailers and restaurants have settled in and were accompanied by new residential development, which gave the district greater political weight and a better identity.

There are many architectural sights in Mission Hill , in particular the combination of detached houses, some of which were built hundreds of years ago by wealthy landowners, traditional brick row houses and many three-deckers , which are three-story houses that characterize many streets in New England . Many of the buildings in Mission Hill are designed as residential complexes , but there are also some two-family and one-family houses.

In March 2008, the Boston Globe selected the district as one of the top 25 best ZIP codes in Massachusetts because the value of single-family homes has increased, there are many restaurants and shops, many nationalities are represented among the residents, and 65% of the residents have theirs Traveled to work on foot, by bike or by public transport.

geography

View of Mission Church and Boston skyline from the top of Mission Hill

Expansion of the urban area

The two main shopping streets in Mission Hill, with restaurants and small shops, are Tremont Street from north to south and Huntington Avenue from east to west. Mission Hill is on the far west end of Tremont Street while Beacon Hill is on its far east end. Mission Hill has several zip code areas: 02120 covers the south and 02115 the north, while 02130 covers a small area in the southeast and 02215 covers two streets in the far west.

Within Mission Hill there are the boroughs of Parker Hill , Roxbury Crossing , Triangle District , Back of The Hill and Calumet Square .

Mission Hill's business center is Brigham Circle with its own MBTA station on the corner of Tremont and Huntington . Other smaller centers are located at Roxbury Crossing and on the corner of Huntington and South Huntington .

One block up the hill from Brigham Circle is the newest park in Boston, Kevin W. Fitzgerald Park (formerly Puddingstone Park ) .

On Tremont Street is the eponymous Mission Church , which gave the district its name and was built in 1878 by the architects Schickel & Ditmars . In 1910 the towers followed by Franz Joseph Untersee . Dominating the area's skyline, the church was the site of Ted Kennedy's funeral on August 29, 2009 .

Also nearby is the restored Parker Hill Library , part of the Boston Public Library and designed in 1929 by architect Ralph Adams Cram . The building site for the library and the neighboring Mission Hill Playground was acquired by the city through expropriation .

At the top of the hill is the New England Baptist Hospital and the Parker Hill Playground , which extends from the hospital along Parker Hill Avenue . The playground, proposed to be built in 1915 by then Boston Mayor James Michael Curley , is one of the highest points in the city and offers panoramic views of the Financial District , Boston Harbor and the Blue Hills .

Was Mission Hill a generation ago as part of Roxbury considered, it becomes more and more an independent profile as a separate district. However, the boundaries of Boston neighborhoods are inherently blurred, so the answer to the question of whether Mission Hill is now self-contained and adjacent to, or remains part of, Roxbury is still a matter of debate.

history

19th century

Like the neighboring district of Jamaica Plain , Mission Hill was once a district of Roxbury until it was annexed by Boston . According to maps from this time, Mission Hill was also often referred to as Parker Hill and was named after the local geographic point of the same name. After the annexation, the opinion prevailed that Mission Hill should be a separate district. The majority of administrative units, companies and institutions therefore list Mission Hill as a separate district today .

Up until the American Revolution , Mission Hill helped build large country houses for wealthy Boston families. Much of the area was used for orchards , which the Parker family owned in the 18th century . Peter Parker married Sarah Ruggles, whose family owned large tracts of land, including most of what was later known as Parker Hill and now known as Mission Hill . Peter Parker died when a barrel of his own cider fell on him. The orchards continued to operate for some time after his death, but gradually sold and developed into building plots. Many of the apple trees along Fisher Avenue and an area of ​​the playground are likely descendants of the trees that grew on the Parker family's property.

In the lower part of the eastern hill there was a quarry for a long time to mine the local conglomerate rock . The dealers Franklin G. Dexter , Warren Fisher and Fredrick Ames owned large parts of it.

Maps of the area suggest that Mission Hill development began even before the development of the Fenway and Longwood Medical and Academic Area . The Huntington Avenue , which today is one of the most important connections to the rest of Boston, once ended at the Parker Street near the present location of the of Fine Arts Museum . Until then, Mission Hill was connected to Parker Street , which meant an enormous detour via Boylston Street to Back Bay . Part of what was once Parker Street is now Hemenway Street . The intersection of Parker Street and Huntington Avenue has been adapted and redesigned to cope with the increase in road traffic, so that vehicles first have to switch to Forsyth Way and then return to the original route. Other connecting roads were also rebuilt so that both pedestrian and vehicle access were limited.

After the 1880s and the relocation of the Muddy River by Frederick Law Olmsted , Huntington Avenue was extended from Parker Street to Brigham Circle , creating the Triangle District .

The Mission Church

Real development began in the middle of the 19th century. In 1870 the Redemptorists built a wooden mission church, which was replaced by an impressive stone structure in 1876. In 1910 two towers were added to the building, which today define the skyline of the district. 1954 the church of Pope Pius XII. elevated to a basilica , making it one of 43 in the entire United States. Officially, its name is the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help , but it is colloquially - also by members of their own parish - often referred to as Mission Church .

The basilica used to have a number of outbuildings, in particular the Sister's Convent and Grammar School and St. Alphonsus Hall, administered by the community . The church closed the high school in 1992, but a church elementary school is still operating. The hall served as a meeting point for the St. Alphonsus Association, founded in 1900, and with its 1000-seat theater offered a stage for the community, politics and theater performances. The sale of these buildings allowed an extensive restoration of the church.

Another example of the highly religious architecture in Mission Hill is the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation at 514 Parker Street on the east end of the neighborhood. It is often referred to as the "mother of all churches" of the Greek Orthodox Church in New England and is the seat of the Boston diocese and the bishop . It was built from 1892 to 1927, making it one of the oldest Greek churches in the United States. As a landmark in Boston, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places . In 1927 a Greek artist was commissioned to decorate the cathedral with Byzantine iconography . The radiant stained glass windows of the church and the large crystal - chandeliers contribute also to the majestic impression of the interior at the cathedral.

In the area around Mission Hill, the locally occurring puddingstone , a rock conglomerate , plays a historical role. The large quarry located between Tremont and Allegany streets produced the stone foundations for most of the district's houses, which were built in the 19th century. This material from local sources made it possible to quickly make houses available to the working class on favorable terms. Some buildings are even made entirely of this material, including 682-688 Parker Street , 2-5 Sewall Street, and 1472-74 Tremont Street .

Most of the houses in the neighborhood have stone foundations and were then built from wood, but in the Triangle Historic District they are made of stone and brick along Huntington Avenue . These 71 buildings between Huntington Avenue , Tremont Street and Worthington Street exemplify the development of the district from the 1870s to the 1910s. The construction phase began in 1871, from 1884 to 1885 the apartment hotel The Helvetia was built at 706-708 Huntington Avenue . The Esther apartment building at 683 Huntington / 142-148 Smith Street followed in 1912 . Both buildings have shops on the ground floor and apartments above. There are also many similar row houses on Dell Avenue .

By 1894, an electrically powered streetcar was in service on Huntington Avenue . Real estate developers began cutting blocks of streets through the farmland and building commuter homes on Parker Hill Avenue , Hillside Street, and Alleghany Street . A good example of this era is the Timothy Hoxie House at 135 Hillside Street : the detached Italianate-style mansion was built in 1854 opposite its current location by the Hoxie family, who moved from Beacon Hill to Mission Hill. Today houses of this size are rare - as the demand for living space increased, multi-family houses were built on smaller plots. After Timothy Hoxie's death, John Cantwell , who himself lived in a neo-Gothic country house at 139 Hillside Street , bought the mansion and moved the building to its current location so that Upper Sachem Street could continue to be built. Cantwell also built three-story houses ("triplane") on adjacent lots on Darling and Sachem Streets . In 1890 he subdivided the property of the villa and built further three-deckers in parts at 17 and 19 Sachem Street .

By the 1890s, the district was already taking on urban forms and the hill was littered with three-deckers. The streets Calumet , Iroquois and others with Indian names developed into a densely populated area of ​​three-deckers in Queen Anne style within 10 years . This architectural style is predominant in Mission Hill, as the building boom coincided with the popularity of this style. The restoration of the houses along Parker Street creates polychrome rows of houses.

Before 1900, the neo-Gothic New England Baptist Hospital (then Robert Breck Brigham Hospital ) at 125 Parker Hill Avenue was one of only a few facilities of its kind in the borough. But others soon followed, moving from the city center to Mission Hill and Longwood, where they got more space at more affordable rates. The completion of the Emerald Necklace was another incentive for the settlement, and so in 1906 the Harvard Medical School moved to five buildings on Longwood Avenue . In 1911 work began at the Wentworth Institute on 360 Ruggles Street , in 1912 what is now Brigham & Women's Hospital opened at Brigham Circle and in 1914 the Children's Hospital followed .

Industrial development

The former Alley Brewing Company building at 117 Heath Street

The first industrial companies settled in the area around Mission Hill as early as the 17th century. The first brewery was built at the foot of Parker Hill in the 1820s, and by the 1870s beer production was the main industry in the district. Most of the breweries were located along the Stony Brook , which now flows as a culvert along the Southwest Corridor . After three periods of Prohibition (1852-1868, 1869-1875 and 1918-1933) and due to the change of the local production for the country and the world mass production, the number of breweries declined markedly, and many of the buildings still standing were to loft apartments converted .

20th century until today

From the late 19th century to the 1970s, Mission Hill was home to many families of former immigrants , most of whom came from Ireland , but also from Germany and Italy . After the 1950s, the combined effects of urban renewal , the white flight and institutional growth led to a large decline in population in the district. In the early 1960s, the Boston Redevelopment Authority demolished several houses in the Triangle District to make way for the Whitney Redevelopment Project , which included three high-rise buildings on St. Alphonsus Street . This project was one of the first of the Boston renovation projects that was not funded with government support. Across the street is Mission Main , one of the oldest public housing facilities in the United States. The originally 38 three-storey brick buildings erected between 1938 and 1940 were demolished in the mid-1990s and replaced by 535 new apartments that are both subsidized and offered at market prices.

In the late 1960s, Harvard University acquired the houses on Francis , Fenwood , St. Alban's, and Kempton Streets , and a section of Huntington Avenue, and announced plans to demolish them. Most of the old houses were replaced by what is now the Mission Park residential complex in 1978 , after local residents persuaded the property owners to convince the university to build a new one. One of the towers is on the grounds of the House of the Good Shepard , which was once a large and well-known orphanage . The entrance gates to the complex and the brick wall along Huntington Avenue have survived from this period.

The US federal government also announced in the 1960s that it would extend Interstate 95 into central Boston and began buying land and demolishing houses in the Roxbury Crossing district along the Boston and Providence Rail Road . Although the governor postponed the extension of the interstate in 1971 due to protests, Roxbury Crossing was nearly razed to the ground. Ten years later, the Southwest Corridor was built into central Boston as a parking system with bike and footpaths. In November 2007, transferred MBTA the Mission Hill Housing Services to develop a new ten-story building with mixed use, which today compared to the MBTA station the right to Roxbury Crossing is located and is known as "Parcel 25".

By the early 1970s, Mission Hill was considered dangerous, and most whites and rich blacks had moved away. The 1989 incident in which Charles Stuart was implicated further supported that impression. Due to the low land prices, many houses and apartments were bought by slum lords and converted into tenement houses. The low rents attracted many students from the surrounding colleges and universities , particularly the Massachusetts College of Art and Design , Northeastern University , the Wentworth Institute of Technology, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts , which has its own studio at Mission Hill.

With fear subsiding, the area began to change in the mid-1990s when new owners moved into newly renovated homes to enjoy great city views and proximity to Longwood Medical Area , the MBTA, and downtown Boston .

Today, the district is in a phase of lively gentrification and diversification, which has resulted in a colorful mix of new luxury condominiums and loft apartments , three-decker apartments converted into condominiums, student rental apartments, newly built social housing and long-term residents. Today in Mission Hill there are many people of different origins with only a few related conflicts.

Economy and Infrastructure

traffic

As part of the public transport system , Mission Hill is served by various bus and train lines. The Green Line E stops at Longwood Medical Area , Brigham Circle , Fenwood Road , Mission Park , Riverway and Back of the Hill , the Orange Line at Roxbury Crossing .

Bus route 39 runs from Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain to Copley Square , bus route 66 goes from Dudley Square in Roxbury via Brookline to Harvard Square in Cambridge . In the far east of the borough, the Urban Ring Project runs along Longwood Avenue and Huntington Avenue through Mission Hill.

media

The main newspaper in the district is the Mission Hill Gazette.

Personalities

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b National Register Information System . In: National Register of Historic Places . National Park Service . Retrieved January 23, 2007.
  2. ↑ Overview map. In: Google Maps . Retrieved January 25, 2012 .
  3. ^ Matt Mahoney: The Best ZIP Codes. Where neighbors are smart, restaurants are plentiful, commuting is easy, and, best of all, home values ​​are still strong. In: Boston Globe . March 16, 2008, accessed January 25, 2012 .
  4. ^ Parker Hill Branch Library. In: Boston Public Library. Retrieved January 26, 2012 (English).
  5. ^ John William Linzee: The history of Peter Parker and Sarah Ruggles of Roxbury, Mass. and their ancestors and descendants . Samuel Usher, Fort Hill Press, Boston 1913, OCLC 3527856 .
  6. ↑ a b Boston Redevelopment Authority. District Planning Program. (Ed.): Background information, planning issues and preliminary neighborhood improvement strategies . Boston 1975, OCLC 2758767 .
  7. ^ Mission Hill Building. In: School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Retrieved January 30, 2012 (English).
  8. ^ Therese Murray. In: The 187th General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Retrieved January 30, 2012 (English).

Web links

Commons : Mission Hill, Boston  - Collection of pictures, videos, and audio files