The Best of All Worlds

A Historical View of Northeastern's Environs

 

By Will Holton

ike God, planners of the Back Bay and the Fenway gazed upon the waters and imagined creation. But while God could raise a mountain or spring a garden into bloom with a mere snap of His fingers, Boston's builders struggled against real time. By the turn of the century, they looked to the northeast and proclaimed their work good. Flanked by Commonwealth Avenue, the elegant, newly constructed Back Bay stood proudly secure along a narrow expanse from the Public Garden to Massachusetts Avenue. Turning to the southwest, however, and scanning the Fenway landscape, city planners could only proclaim, "Interesting!"

Reclaiming land from the tidal flats of the Charles River was an engineering marvel, and designs for developing it were grand. When Boston suffered a depression in the 1870s, though, the market for pricey real estate bottomed out. Lower Roxbury and the yet-to-be-filled-in Fens remained largely empty until 1900, sprinkled with an oddball assortment of temporary structures like entertainment halls, fairgrounds, sports fields, and evangelical tabernacles. But where upscale development stopped short, opportunity rose up.

While Northeastern University had its start at the Boston YMCA, located (at the corner of Berkeley and Boylston Streets) just south of the ritzy development newly constructed along Commonwealth Avenue, by 1910 it would follow its parent organization beyond Massachusetts Avenue down the recently extended Huntington Avenue. In this hodgepodge landscape, Northeastern made its home, and from that lively environment, it drew its energy. In time, as N.U. evolved into a world-class institution of higher learning, it would continue to draw its character from the neighborhood, a neighborhood that never sacrificed, but simply multiplied, its diversity.

In the early nineteenth century, the city of Boston was a tiny, bulbous peninsula jutting out into Massachusetts Bay and connected to the mainland by a mere skinny neck of land. By 1850, Boston had absorbed a huge influx of immigrants, mostly from Ireland. Overcrowding in the city and pressure from the newly rich for upscale residences were conditions begging to be addressed. The commonwealth and two private corporations launched a project to gain substantial acreage by filling in part of the Back Bay marshes. The instantly successful result was the neighborhood now called Back Bay. But a large remnant of the marsh, remaining unfilled, became increasingly polluted and subject to flooding.

In the early 1880s, renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was called in to tackle the difficulties of the extant marsh. He designed a series of connected ponds that appeared to be a continuation of the Muddy River as it flowed down from Jamaica Pond. In fact, the stream was rerouted into a storm drain emptying into the Charles River to reduce the threat of flooding. It is this system that was overtaxed in the fall of 1996 when the Muddy River poured into an MBTA tunnel and flooded several stations on the Green Line.

Out of the marshland, Olmsted created a large, shallow flood basin, known as the Back Bay Fens, with attractive walks and carriage roads around its edges. At the time, the Charles River was still open to salt-water tides, and so Olmsted created a low, hinged dam that would bring in brackish water at high tide and let out fresh water during floods. In landscaping he placed trees along the roadways but near the water chose marsh grasses and shrubs that could tolerate salt spray. Stony Brook, which flowed into the area from Roxbury, was submerged into a storm drain under Forsyth Street and beside The Fenway; high-water overflow pipes were directed into the new lakes. The large park at the center of the new Fenway neighborhood was completed by 1895.

To the south were the extensive yards of the Boston and Providence Railroad. The station was located at Park Square. Two brick roundhouses for turning and repairing engines stood near the site of today's Snell Library. Those facilities were expanded in 1872 when an old freight house was rebuilt "with a capacity for housing twenty-four long passenger cars." When the facilities were no longer needed by the Boston and Providence, they were used by another company to store and ship automobiles.

The Massachusetts Historical Society built its grand new headquarters at the corner of The Fenway and Boylston Street in 1899, and Symphony Hall opened in 1900 on the corner of Massachusetts and Huntington Avenues. The intent was that Boston's wealthier residents would follow their favorite institutions into the Fenway area. Isabella Stewart Gardner did when she completed her palace on The Fenway in 1902, but her cohort remained content to have the outrageous

Mrs. Gardner track her own course in this matter as in so many others. Most of those choosing to move out of the Back Bay traveled beyond or away from The Fenway and into the suburbs.

By 1875­80, when the Trustees of Huntington Avenue Lands were selling lots lining the new boulevard extending beyond Northampton (now Gainsborough) Street, it was no longer a viable option, either socially or architecturally, to replicate Commonwealth Avenue. As Walter F. Kilham lamented in Boston after Bulfinch (1946): "Huntington Avenue came into popularity at a moment when 'French flats' were the last word, particularly for medium-priced habitations, and it was rapidly built up with apartment houses of the four- or sometimes five-story 'walk-up' type of building." Also to be regretted was that in this particular half-decade, the "Queen Anne" movement in architecture was exerting a confusing effect "upon the still only slightly understood Romanesque." Thus, while Huntington was an interesting historical document, it had little architectural significance.

Although aesthetes might complain, those of us who now live and work in the area find its eclectic character intriguing and exhilarating. Moving from the bustle of Huntington Avenue to the serenity of Fenway Court and back again offers a perspective on the city and its population few other Bostonians have the privilege to enjoy.

Indeed, it is enjoyment and enlightenment that brought Bostonians to the neighborhood even before it was thoroughly developed. Despite the unconquerable mud, the Huntington Avenue area was a favorite entertainment district in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first attraction to appear, built in the late 1870s, was a "Shoot the Chutes." Brave souls mounted stairs to a platform sixty feet from the ground. There they stepped into a toboggan that shot them down a steep incline and into a long body of water labeled "Artificial Lake" on the 1879 Sanborn map.

In 1881, the New England Manufacturers and Mechanics Institute was the first major structure to be built on Huntington Avenue. Sited at the cross street Rogers Avenue (now Forsyth Street), where Cabot Gym now stands, it spread over nearly five acres of land. Bridging the gap between entertainment and education, the institute-not to be confused with the similarly named Mechanics' Hall, which was built about the same time near today's Prudential Center-sponsored annual industrial fairs, a miniversion of a World's Fair. An advertisement in the Boston City Directory touted a "Grand National Industrial Exposition, Showing the Rich and Varied Resources of the South, the Products of the West, the Inventive Genius and Mechanical Ingenuity of the North" and running from September 5 to November 3, 1883. To entice potential exhibitors, there would be "No Entry Fee. No Charge for Space." And space there was. In 1883, King's Handbook, that era's tourist's guide to Boston, noted that the hall's "available floor space for exhibition purposes exceeds eight acres." Certainly the building was intended to awe its visitors. It had a vestibule measuring 134 feet by 250 feet, a main hall 400 by 126 feet with no obstructing partitions, and a ceiling 80 feet high. Side galleries 63 feet wide stretched the entire length of the building.

Although sugarcoated, education was still education. It was an activity to be pursued in the serious seasons of the year. In summertime, though, Victorian Bostonians were just as ready for fun as we are today. The proprietors of the institute understood their audience. King's Handbook of 1883 offers a description: "During the summer the building of the institute is utilized as a great popular summer-amusement establishment, in which there is provided a large theatre, an extensive billiard-room, a roller-skating hall, a bicycle and trotting (horse) track, a shooting-gallery, a spacious bowling-alley, a large restaurant, and various other novel and familiar attractions, all under one roof. It is called 'The Casino.' It is open daily and Sundays, and is largely patronized. At night it is brilliantly lighted by the electric light."

But on June 21, 1886, the "substantial, permanent, fire-proof" building, valued at $400,000, burnt to the ground. At least eight lives were lost; arson was suspected. The Pompeian Amphitheatre rose from the ashes in 1888. And what an amazing spectacle it offered the people of Boston: a cast of hundreds; a full military band; choruses; acrobatic feats, wire walking, and sword and trident combat by the celebrated Phanlon Brothers; a grotesque act and high kicking by the Merry Martells; and, capping the evening, a grand display of modern fireworks.

The real draw of the Pompeian Amphitheatre, though, was "The Last Days of Pompeii," re-created "every evening, Sunday and Monday excepted, at eight o'clock (weather permitting)." The set was enormous-temples and houses, Vesuvius looming in the background, a vast lake in the foreground-and against it a love story unfolded in the midst of the annual pageant honoring the goddess Isis. The denouement involved the denunciation of Isis, the triumph of Christianity, and the lovers' escape as lava poured into the lake across which they fled.

Clearly Rogers Avenue had achieved a reputation in the city as a fun place to go. Even as the Pompeian Amphitheatre, with its capacity to seat 8,000 Bostonians, faded into memory, another entertainment center rose to take its place. In 1901, the Huntington Avenue Ball Grounds were constructed on the same site to launch the American League. The two-deck stadium of the competing National League had stood across the Boston and Providence Railroad tracks since 1871. Two major-league baseball teams played on the future Northeastern campus until 1914.

In 1903, crowds flocked to the "First World Series" to watch star pitcher Cy Young, whose statue now stands in front of Churchill Hall. Only after they forced management to grant them two weeks' extra pay did the Boston Americans (or Pilgrims, the most popular nickname of the future Red Sox) agree to face the Pittsburgh Nationals (Pirates) in a best-of-nine-game series. The Pittsburgh team won three of the first four games, including two on Huntington Avenue. Then, in the fifth game, "the Pilgrims became terrific fighting galoots and tore the Pirates limb from limb in Pittsburgh, October 7, winning by a score of 11­2." The Boston team went on to win four straight. The ball grounds were abandoned when Fenway Park was built in 1914. In 1916, Billy Sunday's Tabernacle was built over the old ballpark. The great evangelist must have smiled when the site was located. Between 1883 and 1890, he had played professional ball himself.

Those who visited the Tabernacle could have watched the crowds arriving for another, more secular spectacle. In 1909, Eben Jordan, a cofounder of the Jordan Marsh Department Store (now Macy's) and an opera lover, bought a large, undeveloped lot at the corner of Huntington Avenue and Opera Place. There he built an ornate, $700,000 theater modeled after Symphony Hall, which stood only a few blocks east of it. In 1904, he had added a performance hall, named for himself, to the New England Conservatory, which in 1902 had left its quarters in the South End's former St. James Hotel for a newly created home on the south side of Huntington Avenue, at Gainsborough Street. To the west, a few more blocks down Huntington, construction was underway for the Museum of Fine Arts, begun the same year as that for the Opera House.

In 1912, the renowned Enrico Caruso graced the Opera House in a staging of Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West. Somewhat less classical performances included the Passion Play, imported from Freiburg, Germany, in 1931. Over the years, the Opera House fell into disrepair. In 1957, Northeastern purchased it for $160,000. A number of Fenway neighbors remember, and few will forgive, the sound of the wrecker's ball tearing down the stately brick building where Speare Hall now stands.

 

With the destruction of the Opera House, the north side of Hunting-ton Avenue presented a particularly grim face. The imposing brick wall of the Boston Storage Warehouse, its brooding presence unrelieved by any windows, climbed abruptly from the sidewalk. So poised, it had watched countless comings and goings on the other side of the street. It watched as Northeastern occupied and began to grow into its space. Indeed, there the warehouse remained until about 1960, when president Asa Knowles purchased it to make room for dorms and a parking lot.

Today's Forsyth Building was built as a garage by 1920. The large, round, concrete columns one still sees throughout the building were intended to support the great weight of the cars, trucks, and buses parked there. By the 1930s, the building had housed, among other businesses, an auto repair school, a bus line, and a furniture moving company. The Sylvania Electric Company operated its fluorescent light division there until Northeastern bought the building in 1951.

Across the street and around the corner on Leon Street was born a company that grew into the world's largest conglomerate of franchised drugstores. In 1902, Louis K. Liggett convinced forty druggists to invest in a company to manufacture and distribute most of the products they sold in their stores. By cutting out the middleman, Liggett argued, product quality could be better monitored; prices could be lowered and profits increased. In both corporate organization and in advertising, United Drug was an innovator.

The United Drug Company launched its operations in rented quarters at 43 Leon Street (now Meserve Hall) in January 1903. Round about 1911, a company publication illustrated the early stages of the building that now includes Holmes, Lake, Meserve, and Nightingale Halls. By the 1930s, the company's six buildings covered the entire block bounded by Forsyth, Greenleaf, and Leon Streets and the MBTA and Amtrak lines. The present Ryder Hall, at the far end of the property, housed research and development laboratories. Pharmaceutical products and perfume with the trademark Rexall name (meaning "king of all") were manufactured at the site. Other desirable products bearing the signature of the neighborhood included Symphony Lawn stationery and Fenway chocolates.

By 1929, United Drug boasted twenty-one manufacturing plants, employed about 25,000 workers, and supplied over 10,000 independent Rexall Drug Stores in small- and medium-sized towns in the United States and Canada. At the same time, it operated a chain of more than 500 Liggett Drug Stores in America's large cities. Brief ownership of the Boots drugstore chain in England ended with the stock-market crash.

After Liggett died in 1946, the company's new president changed its name to the Rexall Drug Company and moved its headquarters to Los Angeles. Northeastern bought the Boston complex from United Realty in 1961. Three buildings in the middle of the block were eventually demolished, but the rest remain in use by N.U. Evidence of the United Drug Company survives. Fired terra-cotta shields at the tops of the beveled corners at Greenleaf Street carry the lettering "UD Co." On the fifth floor of Lake Hall, the math department enjoys the dark wood paneling and marble fireplace of United Drug's president's office. Every floor in the building carries a large, walk-in safe, perhaps for protecting secret product formulas. And on the Leon Street end of today's Ryder Building is a carved sign over the door: United Drug Company Department of Research and Technology.

Besides the impressive panorama of American history it offers, Boston is best known for its educational institutions. The Tufts University Medical and Dental Schools brought higher education to the future site of N.U. in the 1890s. Tufts's main, four-story brick facility stood at the corner of Huntington Avenue and Rogers Avenue (now Forsyth Street), where the Northeastern Law School is now located. A smaller building was tucked behind it, on Greenleaf Street. The Greenleaf Building remained long after N.U. bought the property in 1949. Into the 1970s, when ROTC and the departments of industrial engineering and earth sciences had their offices in the facility, occupants would report that on hot summer days the odor of formaldehyde would rise from the basement, where cadavers had once been stored. Kariotis Hall replaced this old structure in 1982.

In January 1910, the YMCA's stone building at Boylston and Berkeley Streets was destroyed by fire. Before that date, the directors had planned to move the organization to the corner of Arlington and Newbury Streets, and a building fund had been established for that purpose. After the fire, as programs continued in rented and borrowed buildings in the Back Bay and on Beacon Hill, the directors searched for a more economical alternative. Following the lead of other institutions, they settled on Huntington Avenue, just west of the New England Conservatory of Music.

First the YMCA built a small, brick Vocational Building (now about half of the Cullinane Building) on the back of the site, near the railroad. It was completed just before the November 1911 groundbreaking for the main building. Classes and laboratories for the Electrical School (later Electrical Engineering) and for the Automobile School were held in the small structure, which was expanded in 1936. Northeastern has occupied it ever since it was opened.

From that locus, the university would spread. In the 1930s, N.U. began to build its own campus. It took its place among other area institutions of note: Symphony Hall, Horticultural Hall, the Opera House, the Museum of Fine Arts, Wentworth Institute, and the New England Conservatory of Music, to name a few. But the neighborhood was not completely dominated by high culture and intellectual endeavor. Huntington Avenue was still a working community, and a fun place to be. Northeastern would find a place in that world as well. As it grew over time, it rented space in other buildings along Huntington Avenue-above a Rexall Drug Store-and in the Huntington Building next to Symphony Hall-above two dance halls and over a large bowling alley.

Combining recycled older buildings with modern structures designed for specific purposes, Northeastern has evolved within a wonderfully diverse cityscape. Never walling itself off from its environment, it has played a key role in defining and developing the Huntington Avenue­Fenway area into a thriving section of Boston. Indeed, the story of N.U.'s response to its surroundings parallels its modern mission: combining scholarship, teaching, and learning; work, culture, technology, and business; sports, recreation, and community service. In other words, Northeastern has remained dedicated to pursuing nothing less than the best of all worlds.

Will Holton is an associate professor of sociology and anthropology. This article is excerpted from a book of essays celebrating Northeastern's centennial, edited by Linda Smith Rhoads. The book will be available in the fall of 1998 and may be ordered by calling 617-373-1998.

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