Our Flag over the Common
Northeastern signed its John Hancock for a Beacon Street building with a storied pedigree -- one stretching all the way back to Hancock himself.

By Karen Feldscher

In the late 1820s, on an early December evening, the front parlor at 34 Beacon Street would probably have been quiet, lit by flickering lamplight, as Boston merchant Nathaniel Pope Russell arrived home at the end of the day.

But on an early December evening last year, the parlor was bright and abuzz with members of a new family, the North­eastern family. A spectrum of university folk—faculty, students, administrators, trustees, and alumni—had gathered at a reception, hosted by President Aoun and his wife, Zeina, to celebrate the holiday season.

In a way, the revelers were also celebrating this 182-year-old red-brick townhouse, which is now a Northeastern building, after previously serving as a home to generations of prominent Boston citizens and, throughout most of the twentieth century, as headquarters for the venerable book publisher Little, Brown and Company.

Beneath the building’s foundation, the lineage goes back even further: The house was erected on land that used to be part of the John Hancock estate.

Today, the structure gives all North­eastern presidents an established residence while they’re in office and serves as a venue for important university functions and for welcoming the community.

It also, officials say, puts North­eastern’s footprint on Boston’s best-known street.

Having the house, which is part of the Beacon Hill Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, allows Northeastern to contribute to Boston history, says history professor and former Massachusetts Historical Society director William Fowler, LA’67, H’00.

“The university,” Fowler says, “is helping to preserve the historic fabric of the community.”

Location, location, location
For a long time, the Board of Trustees had been interested in finding a president’s house in Boston for the university.

When they learned about the house at the corner of Beacon and Joy Streets, they decided it fit the bill.

Not only is it near the State House, it’s directly next door to the city-owned Parkman House, the site of many civic functions and meetings. For an extra touch of convenience, it’s also steps away from the public parking garage under Boston Common.

The house’s previous owner, Rosalind Gorin—a longtime Boston real-estate broker and supporter of the city’s civic and cultural life, who used to be a member of the Northeastern Corporation—was happy the university wanted the home she and her husband had purchased in 1997.

“To know the building would have a long life in the hands of an institutional user was very gratifying for me,” says Gorin. “It should be a wonderful building for the school, which has done such a great job of raising its profile and increasing its academic stature. Having this building as a symbol of the presidency will add to that.”

Neal Finnegan, BA’61, H’98, chair of the Board of Trustees, says the house will serve the university well as it continues on its upward trajectory.

“The university has strong partnerships with political, civic, and business leaders,” he explains. “The residence is the appropriate place for those important discussions. It’s an investment in the future of Northeastern.”

Associate political science professor Christopher Bosso agrees the house is “superb” in the way it creates a presence for Northeastern on Beacon Hill and provides an elegant yet understated locale for the president to host guests.

The house will be good for North­eastern, says Sara Wadia-Fascetti, associate vice provost for faculty advance­ment and an associate professor of civil engineering.

“I think every university should have a home for the president to host guests,” she says. “It’s a welcoming environment, and it provides a signature banner for Northeastern.”

“This is much more than a residence for the sitting president,” says Finnegan. “This is North­eastern’s torch, and all that it signifies, shining brightly on historic Beacon Hill.”

Architectural harmony
The newest Northeastern edifice is also the oldest.

This 9,000-square-foot five-story house was built in 1825, designed in the Federal/Greek Revival style popular during the Amer­ican republic’s first decades.

Tall windows in the front façade look out onto Boston Common. At one corner, the front rooms jut out a bit, to match the slight acute angle at which Joy Street hits Beacon.

Inside and out, the house retains much of its period detail: Ornate molded ceilings. An elegant wooden staircase. Elaborately carved marble fireplaces. A wood-paneled library. Canopy-roof, Regency-style iron porches outside floor-to-ceiling second-floor windows. Two large rooms on the first and second floors, ideal for hosting dinners, parties, and other big events.

Gorin says she and her husband, Matthew Budd, spent two years renovating the house, which, when they purchased it, was configured as Little, Brown office space.

As the drop ceilings and the partitions between rooms came down, Gorin paid careful attention to preserving historic touches, both those original to the house’s construction and many Vic­torian additions from a late-nineteenth-century renovation.

The first floor has a high-ceilinged dining room facing Beacon Street, a kitchen and a service pantry, and a more intimate family living area at the rear. On the second floor is a large living room, a library, and another service pantry. The floors above are devoted to personal living space.

According to Gorin, the entire house has excellent “feng shui.” She laughs a little at the phrase, but she means what she says.

“You feel good when you walk into each of the rooms,” she says.

History all around
The house at 34 Beacon stands on land that once belonged to legendary patriot and Declaration of Independence signer John Hancock.

Thomas Hancock, John’s uncle and a prominent Boston merchant, originally owned the estate, which included pasturelands and a mansion built in 1737, the year John was born. After Thomas’s death, John inherited his uncle’s business and vast wealth, making him, many said, the richest man in New England.

Originally a financial backer of the American rebellion, John became more and more political in his interests, eventually serving as the president of the Second Continental Congress and the Congress of the Confederation, as well as the first and third Massa­chusetts governor.

John Hancock lived until 1793. Neither of his children survived into adulthood. By the time his widow, Dorothy Quincy Hancock Scott, died, the family heirs didn’t have enough money to maintain the great mansion.

So pieces of the estate were sold off. The section known as lot 34 was sold in the early 1820s, along with lots 32 and 33. Other sections bordering Mount Vernon Street and Mount Vernon Place were sold over the following decade. The mansion itself was sold in 1863 and later demolished, despite the Hancock heirs’ request that the Commonwealth preserve the house as a museum.

The State House was erected on the Hancock estate’s east pasture; it opened in 1798. Twenty-seven years later, identical townhouses arose on the lots at 32, 33, and 34 Beacon, built by Beacon Hill architect and developer Cornelius Coolidge.

Number 32 has been rebuilt twice. In an odd twist, its street address has also been renumbered, from 32 to 25. Robert Guar­ino, BA’63, who lived on Beacon Street for many years and is researching its history (see sidebar, this page), explains the switch: The building’s current tenant, the Uni­tarian Universalist Association, was originally located down the street at the “real” 25 Beacon. When the association moved to 32 Beacon, it wanted to keep the same address. Thus, 32 became 25.

The middle house—the Parkman House, at 33 Beacon—has its own interesting history. The widow of Dr. George Parkman moved there with her son, George Francis, after her husband met his death in an infamous 1849 murder.

Dr. Parkman had loaned substantial sums of money to John White Webster, a Harvard Medical School professor who made a habit of living well beyond his means. Angered by Parkman’s constant requests for repayment, perhaps, or fearful of his debts being publicly exposed, Webster is believed to have killed Parkman in a rage and dismembered the body. Parts of Parkman’s remains were discovered hidden in Webster’s Harvard laboratory. The professor was found guilty of the Parkman murder and hanged.

Fortunately, 34 Beacon’s back story is considerably more genteel. The house has never been rebuilt; the original structure still stands. From 1825 to 1913, a series of well-heeled Bostonians called the townhouse home (in several Massachusetts Historical Commission documents, it’s called the Russell-Bradlee House, a combination of the first two owners’ names).

Then, in 1913, a new tenant moved in: Little, Brown, one of the world’s best-known publishing houses.

Founded in 1837, the company has published many classic titles, including Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men, John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and the Fannie Farmer cookbook. The list of Little, Brown authors includes Emily Dickinson, P. G. Wode­house, Erich Maria Remarque, Ogden Nash, Herman Wouk, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, J. D. Salinger, William Manchester, Gloria Steinem, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama.

Neal Finnegan is proud the university has taken ownership of a house with such a rich arts-and-letters provenance. “Just think of the literary ghosts who walk those halls,” he says.

Now the house has morphed into a center of activity for the members of the bustling North­eastern clan. Junior Krystal Beaulieu, a political science and journalism major, and a Student Govern­ment Association vice president, says she enjoyed the holiday reception at 34 Beacon last December.

“I think it’s excellent that Northeastern has such a prominent piece of real estate,” she says.

“And the fact that the president opened his house to the entire community was wonderful.”

Karen Feldscher is a senior writer.

Trading Space
A timeline of 34 Beacon residents

In 1821, Israel Thorndike, a leading Boston real-estate speculator, pays $46,790 for land to the west and south of a mansion once owned by John Hancock.

Two years later, John Hubbard buys the land from Thorndike. In 1824, Hubbard hires architect and builder Cornelius Coolidge to erect three houses, at 32, 33, and 34 Beacon.

In 1826, Nathaniel Pope Russell, a China-trade merchant, buys the house at 34 Beacon, which he owns until 1850.

James Bowdoin Bradlee—who runs Josiah Bradlee & Company, a well-known mercantile company on the Boston waterfront—owns 34 Beacon from 1850 to 1878.

Susan Burley Cabot—wife of Joseph Cabot, who was once the mayor of Salem, Massachusetts—is the owner from 1878 to about 1909.

Although some records show a Charles W. Allen owned the house from 1909 to 1913, he may have acted simply as a purchasing agent; various other documents indicate publisher Little, Brown and Company took possession of the house in 1909.

Little, Brown moves its operations into the building in 1913, staying until 1997, when real-estate broker Rosalind Gorin purchases the townhouse and turns it back into a residence.

In 2006, Northeastern creates a permanent president’s house there.

— Karen Feldscher

Streetwise
Need information on the oldest section of Boston’s Beacon Street? Robert Guarino’s your man.

Guarino, BA’63, who now lives in Bennington, Vermont, has become something of a Beacon Street expert. In fact, he’s working on a book that charts the history of the earliest addresses on the fabled thoroughfare—the buildings numbered 1 to 99, which run from the Tremont Street intersection, past Boston Common, to the end of the Public Garden.

How did a business major and former automobile dealer wind up with a passion for chronicling the evolution of Beacon Street?

For about twenty years, Guarino lived in the brownstone at 90 Beacon. One day during the mid-1990s, while browsing at an antiques fair, he found some old fire-insurance maps of downtown Boston, which color-coded buildings according to the degree of fire hazard associated with them. Among the documents was an 1883 map for Beacon Street, listing the names of the contemporary owners of 90 Beacon and nearby houses.

Guarino’s interest was piqued. He decided to find out who had built his house as well as everyone who had ever lived there.

His curiosity soon veered off to different addresses. “It just kind of expanded,” he says. “When I would walk up Beacon Street, I found myself with the same questions about the other buildings’ origins. Then I found there were Boston city directories that were pretty comprehensive, listing every address and every person who lived in each building. I also found photographs that showed how things had changed. Eventually, I decided to research the whole street.”

Poring over dusty books in the Suffolk County Courthouse basement, Guarino found large tomes—some dating back as far as the 1600s—containing copies of deeds. Before the age of typewriters, the deeds were written in beautiful old script. “It was like finding a treasure,” he says.

The history of Beacon Street is fascinating stuff, says Guarino. Take, for example, how the street came to be. In the early 1600s, two men named James Penn and John Wilson owned adjacent properties in Boston. When town fathers decided to erect at the top of the highest hill a beacon—a wooden structure supporting a big tar-filled cauldron, to be lit in case of emergency—they needed to make an access road. And so, a path was created through the land owned by Penn and Wilson. Originally, it was simply called “the lane to the beacon.”

Houses along Beacon Street have been owned and used by a succession of Boston’s most prominent citizens, says Guarino. One of the more famous structures is at 84 Beacon, the Hampshire House. The five-story Georgian Revival townhouse—boasting Italian marble, carved oak paneling, crystal chandeliers, and tall Palladian windows—was built in 1910 by Bayard Thayer, who razed two houses to make way for what would be one of the largest single-family residences on Beacon Hill. In the mid-1940s, the forty-four-room house served as a small luxury hotel. In 1969, it became a restaurant and bar with function rooms.

But what makes this particular building so famous? In the 1980s, the Hampshire House bar, then called the Bull and Finch, provided the inspiration for the TV show Cheers. In a bit of cyclical homage, the bar later changed its name to Cheers.

Just ask Guarino. He’ll tell you all about the place “where everybody knows your name.” And spin a few more centuries’ worth of yarns for good measure.

— Karen Feldscher

 Photography by Peter Vanderwarker