The West End Museum

Boston Beyond the Revolution https://linktr.ee/thewestendmuseum

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The West End Museum is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and sharing the history and culture of Boston’s West End Neighborhood.

The history of the West End is one of continual change, American firsts, Boston innovations, and modern icons. The West End Museum celebrates the story of the neighborhood that led the way in Boston’s immigrant era, supporting thousands of the world’s “huddled masses” as they found their way from North End slums to the American Dream. By then, the West End had already produced America’s first native-born architect, provided a home for free Black citizens after the Revolution, and led the way in the construction of railroads, electric street cars, and so much more. The neighborhood changed dramatically after 1950. Two decades of Urban Renewal led to the clearing of more than half the neighborhood, and reinvention in its modern form.

Today, we continue to collect West End artifacts, investigate stories of West End community and culture, and share those stories with the public through our programs and exhibitions.

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Joy St. Police Station

The West End’s Police Station at 74 Joy Street was built in 1863 less than a decade after the formation of the Boston Police Department. It served an important role in the community until 1962, after closing in 1937 and reopening due to public demand. The building now serves as the home of the Beacon Hill Civic Association.

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Image: Officer Oliver Garrett at Station 3, Joy St. (Leslie Jones Collection, Boston Public Library)

Police Station Number 3 was built on 74 Joy St. in the historic West End in 1863. The building, more often simply called the Joy St. police station, housed the Boston Police Department’s “third division” created when the modern BPD was formed in 1854. The Joy St. police station was designed by Gridley J.F. Bryant, the architect credited with the “Boston Granite Style”, who also designed Boston City Hospital (built in 1864). All of Boston’s police stations in the nineteenth century were built just before or during the Civil War: Station Number 1 on Hanover Street, Number 2 on City Hall Avenue, Number 3 on Joy Street, Number 4 on Lagrange Street, and Number 5 on East Dedham Street. The nineteenth-century West End, since the time it was West Boston, had a reputation for being a “tough” area. The Boston Globe in 1933 looked back on West Boston as “the old city’s Tenderloin” – ‘tenderloin’ being police slang for an area with the “juiciest cut” for crime – where “all kinds of dives ran more or less openly.” But as the West End grew over time, it shed this reputation at the same time that the Joy St. station played a more significant role in the neighborhood.

The thirty-five police officers stationed at Joy Street were responsible for patrolling Beacon Hill and the West End. The station had two floors, the first with jails that could hold up to thirty people (in addition to the offices), and the second with rooms for sleeping. Next door was a house for the horse-drawn patrol wagons that police officers then used to respond to calls. The Joy Street station’s presence in the West End was notable to residents, yet not by itself a deterrent of crime. On April 15, 1924, two men from the West End broke into the Balkan Bros. tailor shop on 106 Cambridge Street, just 40 feet away from the station. The Boston Globe noted that the instance of burglary was remarkable not only because the stolen goods were worth thousands of dollars, but also because of how close the police station was to the crime scene:

The robbery was the most daring that has occurred in the West End for many years, because from the premises entered the burglars, if they had the desire, could see behind the desk of the police station and also had an unobstructed view of the patrol wagon house, the next building. The burglars while inside the building could see policemen leaving and entering the police station.

Two suspects were arrested for the robbery the same day – taken from their beds into the Joy St. station.

Perceptions of crime in the West End developed over time. When the Joy St. police station set a record, on January 4, 1924, of “not one person arrested in the West End for drunkenness for…24 hours,” Superintendent Michael Crowley remarked, in the Globe’s words, that “the West End was always a pretty good place anyway, [and] that those who did make the trouble in that section came from other parts of the city.” West Enders were thankful for the service provided by the Joy Street station, such that on April 18, 1927 the West End Business Men’s Association, with residents, presented the flags of Massachusetts and the United States to the Joy Street officers as a thank-you gift. On November 21, 1928, Babe Ruth, having just won the World Series with the New York Yankees, made a surprise appearance at the eighth annual banquet of the Joy Street police station. The “Bambino” was visiting Boston on one of his regular ten-day vacations in the city; he spoke to the banquet, expressing his appreciation for the Boston Police Department being superior to police in all other cities except New York.

The Joy St. police station closed its doors the morning of August 28, 1933. This would be the shared fate of all five of Boston’s Civil War-era police stations, which closed within the previous three or four years after BPD consolidated divisions and relocated them to more up-to-date buildings. The Globe remarked that the Joy St. station, with its “shadowed, grimy wall” had been “the scene of unnumbered volumes of rich, red, racy human history.” The report compared the West End of the 1930s to the 1850s, noting that “although the district then wasn’t as ‘tough’ as history records it to have been in 1854, it was considered speedy enough–what with the ‘Diamond Lils’ of Howard and Bulfinch Sts, the Revere House “Grotto” follies and other places of amusement.” The preoccupation with pubs, bars, and drunkenness as contributors to crime is a recurring pattern in addition to reports of burglaries or murders.

After the West End’s police station closed, residents soon demanded that it return. City Councilor John Fitzgerald channeled the voice of West Enders when he advocated for a permanent police unit at the old Station Number 3; Fitzgerald communicated with Police Commissioner Joseph Leonard and suggested that the old Joy Street building be reopened as a substation at the very least. In the 1930s, police continued using the patrol wagon house at Joy Street for responding to calls from the Milk Street and North Street stations. On February 6, 1935, the Globe reported that “Police Commissioner Leonard is favorable to the demands of West End residents that the old Joy-St Police Station be reopened and reassigned its old territory, which for 80 years was Division 3 of the Boston Police Department.” On September 3, 1937, the Joy Street station reopened in the West End at the order of Police Commissioner Joseph F. Timilty, who reassigned 99 officers from stations on Milk Street and in the North End to the West End.

The Joy St. police station closed its doors once again in 1962, at the conclusion of the urban renewal period in the West End. The Beacon Hill Civic Association acquired the building for its headquarters in 1966.

Article by Adam Tomasi; Edited by Sebastian Belfanti

Source: Society of Architectural Historians; Leventhal Map & Education Center; Tufts Digital Library; The Cultural Landscape Foundation; ProQuest/Boston Globe (“No Drunks in West End: Joy-St Station Sets Up New Police Record,” January 4, 1924, page A20; “Burglary Opposite Joy St. Police Station,” April 15, 1924, page 1A; “Flags of U.S. and Massachusetts Given to Police of Joy-St Station,” April 19, 1927, page 24; “Babe Ruth is Lion of Police Banquet,” November 22, 1928, page 16; “May Reopen Joy-St Station,” February 6, 1935, page 1)

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Rose Berger Kubitsky

Rose Berger Kubitsky immigrated to the West End from Poland in the early twentieth century. In the 1930s she founded “Berger’s Deli.” On Leverett Street, the deli was known by West Enders as “Berger’s Bar” because it evolved into a tavern, where Kubitsky simultaneously worked as owner and bouncer.

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Image: 103 to 105 Leverett Street (The West End Museum Archves)

Rose Berger Kubitsky was born in Poland in 1898. When Rose was nine years old, in 1907, her mother died just as pogroms (organized massacres) of Jewish people in Russian-controlled Poland were underway. For her own safety, Rose left her family in Poland when she was eleven to immigrate to America. She accompanied another family, the Lapowskis, who passed off Rose as their daughter upon arriving at Ellis Island. Rose then moved to Boston and lived with another family whose surname was Cohen, and she worked in a cigar factory on Columbus Avenue in the South End. In 1920, Rose Lapowski married Alex Berger, and in 1923 they founded Berger’s Deli on Leverett Street (at the corner of Spring Street) in the West End. They had two children, Sylvia and Melvin.

In 1934 Alex Berger passed away; months after Prohibition ended in December 1933, allowing Berger’s Deli to became a tavern.  A few years later Rose married Louis Kubitsky, but Rose Berger was sole owner of Berger’s Deli in the interim. She worked as a bartender and, despite being 4’9”, a bouncer. According to Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe, “Rose was a legendary bouncer. The West End had its share of toughs, and Rose did not hesitate to lower her shoulder into the midsection or back of anyone who was acting up, nudging them right out the door.” Aside from the “toughs” in the neighborhood, many West Enders had positive experiences with Berger’s Deli not only because of the service inside, but also because of the Berger family’s service to the community. Arlene Shalit, one of Rose and Louis’s two children, recalled that after her mother’s visits, she “would insist that I make up six or seven extra plates and wrap them up, so she could bring them to West Enders who had no food.” Melvin Berger recalled that Rose “was always willing to give somebody a second chance,” particularly when West Enders needed to get bailed out from the Charles St. Jail, and Rose posted bond by putting up the deli as collateral.

After fifty acres of the West End, including Leverett Street, were razed by urban renewal in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Rose Berger moved Berger’s Deli to new locations, first Merrimac Street, then Lomasney Way: she was “always one step ahead of the wrecker’s ball.” In 1971, Berger’s Deli was one of thirty-three Boston bars raided by federal agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). It was one of twelve bars “suspected of having refilled or cut bottles of liquor,” which is illegal under federal law. In 1975, Rose sold Berger’s Deli and, upon retirement, moved into the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Roslindale, MA. In 1988, The West Ender recognized her ninetieth birthday with a request that former West Enders mail her cards.

Rose Berger Kubitsky died on January 24, 1993 at 95 years old. Former West Enders expressed their appreciation for Berger’s Deli in the pages of The West Ender towards the end of her life, and afterwards. In 1987, Al and Grace Cucchiara wrote that they “miss the stores on Spring St., Barnie Scheff’s, Silvers Bakery and Schnippers Fruit Store, Bergers Barroom, etc.” In 2003, Darrell Earnest, Rose Berger Kubitsky’s great-grandson, wrote to Jim Campano (who founded The West Ender and The West End Museum) about his desire to learn more about the West End’s history. Earnest wrote, regarding Rose and his grandmother, Sylvia, “I have a desire to learn more about their lives in the West End. You might remember Rose’s bar room. I know a few stories about the bar, but I want to know more about everyday life in the West End.” Berger’s Deli was just one piece of everyday life for West Enders, though it was a memorable one.

Article by Adam Tomasi

Source: ProQuest/Boston Globe (Obituary, January 26, 1993; Kevin Cullen, “She rose tall in West End,” January 29, 1993, page 13; “Hub bars raided, liquor confiscated,” September 24, 1971, page 8); The West Ender (vol. 18, no. 4 [2003], vol. 4, no. 1 [1988] vol 3., no. 1 [1987], vol. 2, no. 2 [1986]); Boston Register and Business Directory, Issue 85 (1921)

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John P. Coburn

John P. Coburn, an African-American clothier, participated in and financially supported the abolitionist movement in Boston. He later ran a gambling house out of his home on Phillips Street, one of the sites of the Black Heritage Trail.

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Image: John Coburn House (Boston African American National Historic Site)

John P. Coburn was born between 1809 and 1813 (one estimate says 1811) in Boston. A free African-American man, Coburn worked in the 1820s as a house-wright, and later ran a clothing business on Brattle Street. Before 1835, Coburn lived at the western corner of Southac Street (now Phillips Street), but on February 17, 1835 he purchased a home at 3 Coburn Court. In 1843, Coburn commissioned architect Asher Benjamin to design his new home on 2 Phillips Street, where Coburn and his family moved the following year. Coburn married Eveline Gray, from New Hampshire, and they adopted a son named Wendell. His brother-in-law, Ira Smith Gray, a caterer, married Louisa Nell, the sister of abolitionist William Cooper Nell in the early 1840s. Ira S. Gray lived with John P. Coburn at 3 Coburn Court prior to the Coburn family’s move to 2 Phillips Street.

Coburn’s clothing business stood on Brattle Street, opposite to the City Tavern. He entered into business with Jonas Clarke and Cyrus Foster, two other well-known Black Bostonians of the era. Coburn had deep ties to Boston’s abolitionist movement both as a Black business owner who raised money for abolitionist organizations and as a direct actor in the movement. He advertised his clothing business in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. In the January 31, 1845 issue, the advertisement announced “to abolitionists and friends in general” that Coburn moved his store, which sold clothing “cut and made in the neatest and most fashionable style,” from 8 Brattle Street to 51 Cornhill and 21 Brattle Street. Not only did Coburn call himself “a first rate cutter” (“cutting” refers to the sizing and shaping of tailored clothes), he also paid the highest prices in Boston in exchange for “gentlemen’s off-cast garments” to consign at his store.

When Garrison retired in February 1866, after thirty-five years of editing The Liberator, John and Eveline Coburn joined William Cooper Nell, Louisa Nell Gray, Benjamin Roberts, George Ruffin, and other abolitionists to raise money for a gift of $1,000 to Garrison in “recognition of his life-long service in the Anti-Slavery cause.” Nell’s announcement of the planned gift sought donations from “Colored Citizens of Massachusetts and elsewhere” in Garrison’s honor. Coburn was selected as treasurer, to collect and add up the donations, on account of his experience as treasurer for the New England Freedom Association (since 1845). The New England Freedom Association sought to assist escaped slaves who used the network of the Underground Railroad to seek freedom. Coburn also signed petitions for the desegregation of Boston’s schools, and joined the Boston Vigilance Committee, founded in 1841 to protect escaped slaves from being kidnapped. Coburn was tied to the rescue of Shadrach Minkins in 1851, a “fugitive slave” (following the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850) who was captured by slave catchers in Boston. When Minkins stood trial at a Boston courthouse, a group led by Lewis Hayden (a self-emancipated man and one of Boston’s great Black Abolitionists) broke into the courtroom and took Minkins with them; Minkins was successful in defying the Fugitive Slave Act and reaching Canada. Witnesses to the events alleged that Coburn was “making inflammatory remarks” in the hallway of the courthouse “shortly before the rescue began.” Coburn and Robert Morris, one of the first Black attorneys in the United States, were arrested on March 1, 1851 for “aiding and abetting” the rescue of Minkins; both were tried and acquitted. He and his fellow Brattle Street clothiers, Jonas Clark and Coffin Pitts, posted bail for James Scott, who was also arrested and acquitted for assisting Minkins. After the rescue of Minkins, Coburn joined other Black community leaders in founding a Black militia called the Massasoit Guards. The Massasoit Guards prepared for community self-defense in order “to discourage slave catchers” and “bolster the courage of the threatened community” after the Fugitive Slave Act forced state authorities to assist slave catchers, according to historians James and Lois Horton.

Later in life, Coburn created a “gaming house” out of his residence at 2 Phillips Street with Ira Gray. Both Coburn and Gray were very fond of gambling; the Boston Courier once described Gray as “the handsomest quadroon [one-fourth Black] of his day, and the most accomplished gambler ever seen in Boston.” Historian Walter Muir Whitehill received this undated Courier clipping from a colleague, and noted its mention that Gray “with his brother-in-law, Coburn, kept at the corner of Southac and North Russell Streets a ‘private place’ that was ‘the resort of the upper ten who acquired a taste for gambling.’” In 1976, researchers for the Museum of African American History discovered and documented the sites of Coburn’s home (as of 1831), and his gaming house (built in 1843-1844). Byron Rushing, former president of the Museum of African American History, added Coburn’s home as a Black Heritage Trail site because “to have a gambling house…is going to make the interpretation of these sites a little more realistic. No one is attempting to say when we describe this community that everything was wonderful and above board and everybody went to church.”

When Coburn died in 1873, he passed on his home to Wendell; Wendell’s wife survived him, and lived at 2 Phillips Street until the turn of the twentieth century. Coburn also left money aside for multiple Black organizations, including the Home for Aged Colored Women on Myrtle Street (incorporated in 1864). The money Coburn left aside very likely came from the wealth he generated from the gaming house, in addition to his successful clothing business.

Article by Adam Tomasi

Source: United States Congress; Victorian Boston Today; William Cooper Nell: Selected Writings; National Park Service, “John Coburn House”; Grover and da Silva, “Historic Resource Study: Boston African American National Historic Site”

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Dry Goods Stores in the West End

Exploring and Industry

The West End’s dry goods stores provide valuable insights into the economic activity of the neighborhood. With data sourced from Boston Business Directories and Barry Oshry – the son of one of the West End’s most well-known dry goods business owners – providing insights on his family business, this report explores how one of the most essential industries in industrial America fared in the West End.

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Image: The Farley, Bliss & Co. dry goods warehouse in Bowdoin Square c. 1859 (Boston Public Library)

No 19th century shopper could live without a dry goods store, where linens, dry food items like coffee beans or jerky, and other household products were sold. A hallmark of frontier outposts and urban centers alike, the storefronts dotted the American landscape providing key consumer goods from the late colonial era well into the 20th century.

Boston City directories dating back to 1850 document the presence of these stores in the West End. With burgeoning textile mills 50 miles west in the Blackstone Valley, and a growing immigrant population, these largely family-owned enterprises connected the area’s goods to its citizens.

Immigration en masse to Boston began after the potato famine struck Ireland in 1846. By 1850, 23 dry goods stores dotted the West End, ranging from the North slope of Beacon Hill to Tremont Row in the area which would eventually become Scollay Square (now Government Center). A decade later, 25 stores were counted in the neighborhood. At least 10 of the shops had been in business for over a decade, appearing in both the 1850 and 1860 Business Directory. At the time, 1 in 5 stores were listed under a women’s name – one woman, Sarah May Wells, operated her store (on W. Cedar and then on Leverett Street) for over 20 years.

Eighteen dry goods stores were recorded in the West End in 1870. Several years later, the Panic of 1873 created nationwide turmoil and resulted in 65 straight months of economic contraction. In the winter of 1873, Boston citizens protested the poor economic conditions in large demonstrations. Correspondingly, fewer stores were recorded in following years with only 6 in 1879 and 10 in 1896.

As the country recovered economically, immigrant families continued to settle in the West End – the neighborhood population swelled to 34,500 by 1900. By the turn of the 20th century, dry goods stores had recovered, and there were 27 in the neighborhood. New ventures were common, alongside a handful of longstanding ones. When Hiram N. Stearns closed his store on 17 Leverett Street sometime between 1896 and 1900, his store was the last to have been operating continuously from 1850. By this time, shops appeared more frequently in the Upper End (later targeted for redevelopment, this area is now Charles River Park). As strong neighborhood identities tied to ethnic background formed in the West End, immigrant entrepreneurs increasingly set up shop in their communities.

When David and Meyer Oshry immigrated from Lithuania to Boston in 1896, they did just that. In 1902, at just 20 years old, the brothers opened Oshry Brothers Dry Goods at 10 Spring Street the Upper End. One of the founding families of the Vilna Shul in Beacon Hill, the Oshry’s were one of several Jewish families that found tremendous success in the West End dry goods business during America’s second immigration wave.

While the West End population began to decline after 1900, the neighborhood’s dry goods industry continued to expand, with 39 businesses operating in the Upper End alone in 1922. Commercial areas developed on Lowell Street and Spring Street, and the newly invented automobile facilitated increased movement of commercial goods from producers to storefronts.

A sharp downtick in dry goods shops occurred between 1922 and 1935 for several reasons. First, the Great Depression ravaged Boston and Massachusetts as a whole. In spring of 1930, conservative estimates indicated 40,000 Bostonians were jobless; the city faced an unemployment rate of 12%. By 1934, state unemployment rate estimates neared 25%, and mill towns throughout the Blackstone Valley were forced to close, leaving textile mill workers without work and stores with fewer goods. Second, the Standardized Zoning Enforcement Act passed by the federal government in 1924 delivered uniform zoning regulations across the country for the first time; they were adopted by Boston in Chapter 488 of the Zoning Acts of 1924. Residential and commercial areas were codified (and separated) for the first time, and the sites of several former and operating dry goods shops along the southern end of Beacon Hill’s W Cedar Street became entirely residential, forcing closure or relocation. While many stores faltered, Oshry Brothers boomed. Barry Oshry recalls that they were “always looking for bargains…just coming up with ideas to scrape a living – they were very good at that”.

In the 1944 Business Directory, only 6 dry goods stores were listed in the West End, 4 of which stood on the commercial corridor on Spring Street. In the post-war era, increased migration from urban to suburban communities continued to reduce both the consumer base and number of business owning families in the neighborhood. In 1950, the number of stores had increased to eight, six of which were located in the 80-acre redevelopment zone designated for demolition by the Boston Planning Board in 1951 and further outlined in a Boston Housing Authority master plan in 1953. The dry goods stores were only a sliver of the West End business community doomed to redevelopment – barbers, grocers, butchers, and countless other businesses were subjected to a similar fate.

Population in the West End decreased sharply after the announcement, as residents relocated to avoid impending eviction. The area over 30,000 people called home in 1900 housed fewer than 8,000 West Enders as the community neared demolition. They were served by 4 dry goods stores in the redevelopment zone and 6 shops in the larger neighborhood in 1957. When eviction letters were mailed in 1958, Oshry Brothers Dry Goods was one of four dry goods stores forced to close its doors. David Oshry had done business at 10 Spring Street for 56 years, the longest running store of its kind in the West End. So how did his shop, in what was deemed by the BHA “the worst parts of the West End” with only “marginal commercial uses” thrive for so long? Barry Oshry credited the store’s success to his father’s unrelenting entrepreneurial endeavors. “Across the street there was…a similar store where the owner could be regularly seen sitting in a chair just spending the time. But my father was a real hustler”.

Oshry’s defied the commonly held belief that economic activity within the West End served minimal purpose outside it. Barry recalled cold-calling motels up Route 1 towards New Hampshire with his brother selling linens, pillowcases, and sheets out of the back of their car. Churches, fire houses, and police stations relied on the shop to rent roulette wheels and purchase prizes for their street fairs and fundraisers to further enrich their communities. The family-owned store even found success as a national retailer, amassing a nationwide mailing list of nursing homes, hospitals, and motels across the country to sell towels, pillowcases, and sheets. The mailing effort was a family affair, wrapping packages and shipping out mail orders from the shop on Saturday mornings. When his Spring Street storefront was demolished during urban renewal, David Oshry continued the mail-order business out of his son’s store in Roxbury.

The dry goods stores of the West End reflected the vitality of the neighborhood itself, operated largely by immigrant families contributing to the strong community dynamics in the area. While their rise and fall loosely followed West End population and economic trends, stories like Oshry Brothers serve as a reminder that neighborhood business impact cannot simply be reduced to a name in a Business Directory or statistic in an urban planning report. “If it weren’t for renewal, they would still be there today,” Oshry added.

Article by Meyer Aviles, edited by Adam Tomasi & Sebastian Belfanti

Sources: “Industrial Revolution: The Big Story”, Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor. https://blackstoneheritagecorridor.org/learning/history-of-the-valley/the-industrial-revolution-the-big-story/; Tomasi, Adam, “West End Population Report”; Adams, George, “Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July, 1850”. Clerk’s office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts; Adams, Sampson, & Company, “The Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July 1, 1860”. Clerk’s office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts; Sampson, Davenport, & Co., “The Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July, 1, 1870”. Clerk’s office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts; Mauldin, John. “There Are Alarming Economic Similarities Between Now And 1873.” Business Insider. 11/4/2014; Sampson, Davenport, & Co., “The Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July, 1, 1879”. Clerk’s office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts; Sampson, Murdock, & Co., “The Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July, 1, 1896”; Sampson, Murdock, & Co., “The Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July 1, 1900”; Wangsness, Lisa. “Vilna Shul Descendants Honor Their Heritage”, Boston Globe. 12/1/2013; West End 1910 – Global Boston. https://globalboston.bc.edu/index.php/the-west-end/west-end-1910/; Sampson & Murdock, Co. “The Boston Business Directory for the Year 1922”; James, Green R. and Donahue, Hugh Carter, “Boston’s Workers: A Labor History.” Pg. 106, Boston Public Library. 1979; Smiley, Gene, “Recent Unemployment Rate Estimates for the 1920s and 1930s,” Journal of Economic History, June 1983, 43, 487-9, Referenced in “Employment and Unemployment in the 1930’s” by Robert J. Margo; Plate 003 From Boston 1924 Zoning Maps, Massachusetts. Published by City Planning Board in 1924. http://www.historicmapworks.com/Map/US/1567830/Plate+003/Boston+1924+Zoning+Maps/Massachusetts/; R.L. Polk & Co., “The Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July, 1, 1944”; R.L. Polk & Co., “The Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July, 1, 1950”; Simonian, Kane. “West End Project Report. A Preliminary Redevelopment Study of the West End of Boston”. Urban Redevelopment Division, Boston Housing Authority. March, 1953; R.L. Polk & Co., “The Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July, 1, 1957”; Billboard Magazine, January 30, 1937.

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Asher Benjamin

Asher Benjamin designed the Old West Church (1806) and Charles Street Meetinghouse (1807) in the West End, based upon the Federal style of architecture most commonly associated with Charles Bulfinch and many New England homes and churches. The Old West Church has survived multiple waves of redevelopment in the West End due to its historical significance.

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Image: Ascher Benjamin (Historic Deerfield)

Asher Benjamin was born on June 15, 1773 in Greenfield, MA. Owing to his humble, rural origins, Benjamin became a housewright who designed country houses in Greenfield and surrounding areas as an apprentice of a local builder. In 1795, at the age of twenty three and shortly after the end of his apprenticeship, Benjamin was hired to carve two Ionic capitals (Greek-style building supports with a “spiral scroll-like carving”) for Oliver Phelps in Suffield, Connecticut. That same year, he designed a spiral staircase for Charles Bulfinch’s State Capitol building in Hartford, Connecticut; this was the first spiral staircase ever built in New England. In 1797, Benjamin published The Country Builder’s Assistant, an architectural handbook which promoted the Federal style of architecture commonly associated with Bulfinch. Benjamin wrote The Country Builder’s Assistant because of his displeasure with the complicated ornamentation of the European, particularly British, architectural styles that were popular at the time. Benjamin was living in Greenfield the year he published his first book, and married Achsah Hitchcock, but later that year he moved to Windsor, Vermont. In Windsor, Benjamin designed the Old South Church which reflected the advice he gave in the Assistant. In 1803, Benjamin and his family moved to Boston, and shortly thereafter he designed multiple West End landmarks.

In 1806, Benjamin published The American Builder’s Companion, which reflected his ongoing effort to popularize throughout New England a distinctive American style of architecture. This style both emulated Bulfinch and introduced some originality. The same year, Benjamin’s West Church opened up in the West End on Cambridge Street, replacing the original building from 1737 at the same site. The original West Church was torn down because it was too small for the growing congregation; in 1776, British soldiers razed the West Church’s steeple during the Siege of Boston so that the colonists could not use that steeple to send signals. Benjamin’s redesigned West Church (today known as Old West Church) was inspired by Bulfinch’s designs for the Holy Cross Church (1800) and New North Church (1802), yet the West Church was unique in that Benjamin gave it a top-heavy facade. Benjamin also designed the Third Baptist Church (also known as the Charles Street Meetinghouse), built in 1807 at the corner of Charles and Mt. Vernon Streets. The Third Baptist Church hosted many speeches by abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, and it became the Charles Street A.M.E. Church in 1876 (before moving to Roxbury in 1939).

Benjamin proceeded to publish five more architectural handbooks: The Rudiments of Architecture in 1814, The Practical House Carpenter in 1830, The Practice of Architecture in 1833, The Builder’s Guide in 1838, and Elements of Architecture in 1843. By the 1830s, Benjamin put the Federal style aside to join the Greek Revival movement. According to art historian Jack Quinan, Benjamin became more famous for his handbooks than his buildings, and “his handbooks helped to disseminate ‘Asher Benjamin’ buildings throughout the northeastern United States forcing Benjamin, the architect, into competition with his numerous readers.” Benjamin was elected as an alderman in 1823 and 1824 as part of the “Middling Interest” movement, representing middling (a early version of the term middle-class) artisans who resisted the platform of the Brahmin-aligned Federalist Party. In addition to the public buildings that Benjamin designed, he designed residences for prominent Bostonians. John P. Coburn, a successful African-American clothing dealer, hired Benjamin to design his new house that was built in 1843 at the corner of Phillips and Irving Streets. Coburn turned his home into a “gaming house,” which became known as “the resort of the upper ten who had acquired a taste for gambling.” Coburn re-invested the money he made from the gaming house into the church he attended, as well as abolitionist activity. Benjamin died two years after the completion of Coburn’s house, on July 26, 1845.

The Old West Church closed in 1892, though it was saved from demolition after being purchased by the City of Boston in 1894. According to a 1915 City Planning Board report, the Old West Church was preserved in order to save “a really distinctive example of very early nineteenth century architecture,” and to house a new West End Branch library (built in 1896) that had been widely desired by residents. In 1919, some officials proposed razing Old West Church during the project to widen Charles Street, but “public sentiment for its preservation led to its being moved 10 feet toward the river and the exterior restored to its original appearance.” The Old West Church was one of the few buildings to survive the razing of 50 acres of the historic West End during urban renewal in the 1950s, though locals originally worried that the Church would not survive. According to George Collins of the Boston Globe in 1963, “With the redevelopment of the West End area the library was closed and for a while it was feared that this beautiful Federal-style building might feel the wrath of the wrecker’s hammer.” But Old West Church survived due to the work by multiple agencies to preserve it, which would ultimately “provide the New West End with a vital, vibrant new Protestant church.” The First Methodist Church Society, created in 1962, purchased the Old West Church building and spent $300,000 to renovate it. In 1971, the Old West Church received national landmark status, cementing Asher Benjamin’s architectural innovations in the surviving features of the historic West End.

Article by Adam Tomasi

Source: WEM–Old West Church, Annual Report of the City Planning Board (1915); ProQuest/Boston Globe (“Silences Old Church Bell, Lands in Cell,” May 13, 1935, page 1; George Collins, “West End Library To Be Church Again,” June 3, 1963, page 1); Britannica; Hayden, African-Americans in Boston: More Than 350 Years (1992); New England Historical Society; Lost New England (Old West Church, Charles Street Meetinghouse); Jack Quinan, “Asher Benjamin and American Architecture”; Glossary of Medieval Art and Architecture

[thewestendmuseum]

Fanny Goldstein

Fanny Goldstein, as head librarian of the West End Branch library from 1919 to 1957, bridged the West End’s diverse communities through literary exhibits and events such as “Jewish Book Week.” Goldstein, who immigrated from Russia as a young child and resided on Joy Street, was a true West End community leader.

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Image: Two little readers, West End Branch, undated (Boston Public Library)

Fanny Goldstein was born on May 15, 1895 in Kamenets-Podolsk, Russia (in present-day Ukraine), the second-oldest child (out of five) for Bella and Phillip Goldstein. The Goldsteins immigrated to the North End in 1900, when that neighborhood had a large Eastern European Jewish population. In 1913, Goldstein was hired as an assistant librarian by Edith Guerrier, the head librarian at the North End Branch of the Boston Public Library. During that time, Goldstein edited the newsletter for the Saturday Evening Girls Club, headed by Guerrier and financially supported by Helen Osborne Storrow; the Club invited young immigrant girls to participate in discussions of books, politics, and culture, and to pursue art. The activities of the Saturday Evening Girls Club ensured, as Goldstein wrote, that “the doors of America literally opened up for” immigrant girls in Boston. Goldstein transferred to the Tyler Street Reading Room (the Chinatown branch of the BPL) in 1919, and she became head librarian of the West End Branch in 1922. Goldstein, living on Joy Street at the time, was paid $31 a week at the West End Branch.

When Goldstein joined the West End Branch, she became the first Jewish woman to direct a branch library in Massachusetts. Goldstein was simultaneously interested in giving immigrants the social and cultural knowledge to “Americanize,” and in celebrating the diversity of the West End’s racial, ethnic, and religious communities. According to the Globe, Goldstein particularly “took it upon herself to explain America to the Jews and to give the non-Jewish community an opportunity to learn about Jews and Judaism.” In 1925, Goldstein held a Jewish Book Week at the West End Branch with Goldstein’s own small collection of books by American Jewish authors. She was inspired by requests from social workers, and non-Jewish residents, who wanted to learn more about Judaism and Jewish traditions. Goldstein regularly promoted the concept of Jewish Book Week in the bulletins and conferences of the American Library Association, and her efforts inspired the national founding of Jewish Book Month in 1943. When the Nazis in Germany burned Jewish books in 1933, Goldstein spoke out against the Nazis in the Globe and displayed, at the West End Branch, a collection of many of the books the Nazis destroyed.

Goldstein held book weeks for other racial, ethnic, and religious groups as well, such as Catholic Book Week, and Negro History Week (in 1950). When West End Branch reference librarian George Washington Forbes, the first Black librarian hired by the Boston Public Library, passed away in 1927, Goldstein translated Forbes’ obituary from the Yiddish press and mailed it to W.E.B. Du Bois who republished it in The Crisis. The Globe reported in 1933 that because of Goldstein’s exhibits about all of the nationalities represented by the West End, “her library is eagerly sought by hundreds, they finding a medium of understanding between the cultures of the old and new worlds.” Though Goldstein’s specialty was “Judaica,” or collections of books by Jewish authors, Goldstein was equally interested in what she called “Westendica,” or books written by residents of the West End and Beacon Hill. In 1930, Goldstein collaborated with the Massachusetts Tercentenary Commission on a collection of Westendica to honor the neighborhood’s diverse histories. In addition to promoting diverse literature, Goldstein hosted interfaith holiday celebrations at the West End Branch library, such as a “unique joint Chanukah-Christmas party” in 1943. The predecessor to this party was Goldstein’s “Good Fellowship Party” which she initiated in 1928 for anyone who needed somewhere to stay during Christmas Eve, and the party ran every year until it was moved to a date between Hanukkah and Christmas.

The West End Branch, since its founding in 1896, was located on Cambridge and Lynde Streets in the building of the former Old West Church (built in 1737 and later re-built in 1806 because the original building was too small). The City acquired the church building in 1894, according to a city planning board report, “in response to a wide appeal that the people of the district [West End] might have the benefit of a branch library, and also that the building, which was then known as the old West Church, a really distinctive example of very early nineteenth century architecture, might be preserved.” On January 16, 1938, Goldstein gave a lecture at the Central Branch of BPL titled “The Old West Church of Boston: Its Historic and Dramatic Background” in honor of the Church’s 200th anniversary. In February 1946, when the West End Branch celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, Goldstein told the Globe of the significance she placed upon the fact that five ministers preceded the four librarians who came before her. Goldstein remarked, “My philosophy has been to preserve as much as possible the liberal teachings of the old ministers whose words colored the life of the church and its relation to the community. Since coming here, it has been my ambition to benefit from them and to carry on their aims and ambitions.” Goldstein’s office at the West End Branch was located in the ministers’ study, and she appreciated how the legacy of the Church (and the paintings which remained in her office, such as that of Rev. Jonathan Mayhew who participated in the American Revolution) conveyed the important ideal of “the brotherhood of man.”

Goldstein paid close attention to the reading trends of West Enders who visited the library. She found that in 1922, 67% of the books checked out were “juvenile books” and 33% were “adult books” (20% of which were fiction). Yet in 1946, following the end of World War II, adult books became 65% of those circulated and the proportion of fiction books declined. Goldstein attributed this shift, in the words of reporter Leo Shapiro, to the demand for “serious reading, especially for books on technical and vocational subjects…particularly on the part of the veteran seeking to better his position.” Because of Goldstein’s efforts, the quantity of books held by the West End Branch increased significantly, from 8,000 volumes in 1896 to about 20,000 by 1946/

Goldstein announced her retirement at the West End Branch’s annual Christmas-Hanukkah party in 1957. The Globe reported the next day, on December 20, that “the West End changed a little last night.” Goldstein’s Judaica collection lived on at the Central Branch, as her thousands of Jewish books were purchased by David Weltman from the Jacob Ziskind Fund for Charitable Purposes, who then turned over the books to Sidney Rabb, vice president of the Board of Trustees of the BPL. Rabb announced the night of Goldstein’s retirement that her collection would be permanently housed at the Copley branch, just three years after Goldstein was appointed Judaica curator for the BPL in 1954. Goldstein’s Judaica collection became the second-largest in Massachusetts (Harvard’s collection then being the first). Goldstein died on December 26, 1961 after battling illness for a year, and she is remembered today for bridging diverse communities in the West End and Boston as a whole.

Article by Adam Tomasi

Source: Boston Women’s Heritage Trail; Boston Book Blog; Jewish Women’s Archive; ProQuest/Boston Globe (“What People Talk About,” October 29, 1947, page 16; “Fanny Goldstein,” December 27, 1961, page 18; “West End Branch Librarian, Fanny Goldstein, Retires,” December 20, 1957, page 15; “Librarian to Lecture on Old West Church,” January 13, 1938, page 14; “West End Library Observes 50th Anniversary in Old West Church,” February 11, 1946, page 9)

[thewestendmuseum]

George Washington Forbes

George Washington Forbes was hired by the West End Branch of the Boston Public Library when it opened in 1896, and thus became the first Black librarian working in the BPL system. At the West End Branch, Forbes served the neighborhood’s Black and Jewish communities until his passing in 1927.

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Image: George Forbes, c.1910 The Crisis, July 1927).

George Washington Forbes was born in Shannon, Mississippi in 1864 to Sarah and William Forbes. His parents were formerly enslaved and emancipated in 1863. In 1878, when George was fourteen years old, he moved to Ohio and later enrolled at Wilberforce University, the first university to be owned and operated by African Americans. In the mid-1880s, Forbes moved to Boston and worked as a laborer for Harvard University, before enrolling at Amherst College and graduating in 1892. Forbes’s academic training prepared him to be a journalist with a strong literary background, as he edited the Boston Courant from 1892 to 1897. In 1896, George Forbes was hired as one of the first librarians for the West End Branch of the Boston Public Library, which opened that year on Cambridge Street. Forbes thus became the first Black librarian to work in the Boston Public Library system. At the West End Branch, Forbes served the children and adults of the West End’s Black community, and then the West End’s Jewish community after Black West Enders largely moved to the South End.

As a West End Branch reference librarian, Forbes assisted and mentored children and college students by locating books, helping students with difficult mathematics or grammar assignments (such as Latin translations), and offering practical advice. Forbes worked every evening, and every Sunday, with West Enders at the library’s many tables, in the library’s children’s room and reading room for adults. While at the West End Branch, Forbes continued his work in journalism by co-founding the Boston Guardian newspaper with William Monroe Trotter in 1901. Forbes left the paper in 1903, but he regularly wrote columns that were critical of the accommodationist philosophy of Black intellectual Booker T. Washington (Washington argued for acquiescing to segregation in order to pursue Black economic development; Washington conflicted with another Black intellectual, W. E. B. Du Bois, and his advocacy of prioritizing full citizenship rights for African Americans). After leaving the Guardian, Forbes wrote for magazines such as The Crisis, published by the NAACP and originally edited by Du Bois, and newspapers such as the Boston Transcript. He married Elizabeth Harley, from Kingston, New York, in 1900. In addition to working at the West End Branch, Forbes arranged the Theodore Parker Collection at the Central Branch (comprised of the books and papers of abolitionist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker) and had been working on a book that compiled biographies of notable African-American historical figures.

When the West End became a hub for Boston’s Jewish community at the turn of the twentieth century, Forbes became a role model for many Jewish West Enders who recalled how Forbes improved their performance at school. George Forbes worked at the West End Branch continuously until his death in 1927, a few days after he suffered a terrible bout of pneumonia. The West End Branch library received a phone call from Elizabeth Forbes notifying them that George had passed away, and the children who regularly visited the library raised their own funds to purchase flowers for the funeral. Fanny Goldstein suggested to the children that because they raised more than enough money to purchase flowers, they should use some of their funds to purchase a gift for George’s wife. George Forbes’ funeral took place on Sunday, March 14, 1927 at his home in the South End, and hundreds of people lined up down the street to pay their respects. On March 14, 1927, Du Bois sent a letter to Elizabeth Forbes offering his sympathy and a willingness to publish any of George’s books and articles in The Crisis provided that Elizabeth could send him a picture of George. After Forbes’ thirty-two-year career at the library, Fanny Goldstein sent a letter to Du Bois on April 1, 1927 that notified him of Forbes’ death and passed along an obituary from the Jewish Daily Forward, which Goldstein translated from the original Yiddish, for Du Bois to publish in The Crisis. Goldstein wrote:

My dear Dr. Du Bois: It has been brought to my attention that you were a personal friend of George Washington Forbes, for many years an employee of the Boston Public Library, who recently passed away. Mr. Forbes was associated with this Branch Library for thirty-two years serving in the capacity of Reference Librarian, which brought him in very close touch with the Public, especially with the children. He was ever modest and faithful, and always gave to this Institution the best that was in him. At the time of his death all the Boston papers commented on his very faithful service rendered these many years. Of all these obituaries, however, I think that the Yiddish press was even more than the Colored newspaper deeply appreciative and sympathetic. In view of the fact that you were his friend and are connected with The Crisis, it has been suggested to me that you were be particularly interested in the enclosed translation which I am sending you of the article that appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward of March the 26th. This article, you will agree, is a splendid eulogy and a glowing tribute to this “hidden servant” from one race to another. If Mr. Forbes’s life was simple, he was supremely happy in his work, and always gave of himself unstintingly. We may well say of him in closing “well done Thou good and faithful servant.” Very respectfully yours, Fannie [sic] Goldstein

W. E. B. Du Bois responded on April 25, 1927 that “I thank you so much for the translation of the Jewish Forward article on the late Mr. Forbes. We are going to use it. Very sincerely yours, W. E. B. Du Bois.” Elizabeth Forbes replied to Du Bois’s letter, on May 29, 1927, noting that she had been hired to a clerical position at the West End Branch “as a tribute to the memory of my husband,” and that Fanny Goldstein was “anxiously awaiting the number of the Crisis containing some mention of George’s passing.” The obituary was subsequently re-published as “George Forbes of Boston: A Servant of Jew and Gentile” in the July 1927 issue of The Crisis, with some introductory text from Du Bois. Du Bois recognized Forbes for his radical writings in the Guardian, particularly his critiques of Booker T. Washington; these contributions to Black journalism meant that “Forbes holds an important place in the development of American Negroes.” Du Bois introduced the obituary written by “M. Bender” for the Jewish Daily Forward with a note about the West End’s changing nineteenth-century demographics: “as Forbes formerly served his own people so now he served the Jews.” Du Bois, and Bender in the obituary, commended Forbes’ ability to bridge the Black and Jewish communities through his service to the West End Branch. Bender concluded that “his death is being mourned by the Negro population which was justly proud of him, but still more is he being mourned by the Jewish children of the West End of Boston.”

Article by Adam Tomasi

Source: Boston Public Library; Digital Public Library of America; The Crisis; Herbert Aptheker (ed.), The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, Volume 1 (1973)

[thewestendmuseum]

Hotel Waterston

The Hotel Waterston, built in 1874 through a remodeling and expansion of the Charles Bulfinch House on 8 Bulfinch Place in the West End, maintained Bulfinch’s facade while adding additional stories. The Waterston had many prominent guests, including Walt Whitman, during the late nineteenth century, and the hotel stayed in business until it was demolished by urban renewal in 1961.

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Image: The Charles Bulfinch House, later the Hotel Waterston, at 8 Bulfinch Place, built 1793-1794, photographed 1918. (Charles Bulfinch and Boston’s Vanishing West End)

“The last week of the 19th century has been an ideal one for the real estate men of Boston,” said the Boston Globe on December 30, 1900. The most notable transaction that week was Horace W. Baxter, Jr. ‘s purchase of the Hotel Waterston from David L. Webster. Baxter had already owned an estate, on Bowdoin Street, which adjoined the hotel. The Hotel Waterston resided on 8 Bulfinch Place, with the facade that survived of the Charles Bulfinch House at that address; the hotel was assessed at $56,000 ($1,930,000 in 2022 dollars), though the sale price was not disclosed in the report from Edward T. Harrington & Co. (a real estate brokerage in Boston). The Globe described the Hotel Waterston as “the famous West End hotel,” and reminded readers that it was the “former home for many years of Walt Whitman, [William Dean] Howells, and other literary men.” The Hotel Waterston, given its physical ties to Bulfinch and its longevity up to the urban renewal period (when it was demolished on September 4, 1961), represents the West End’s neighborhood history over nearly two centuries.

The Charles Bulfinch House, designed by Bulfinch in 1793 or 1794, was occupied by the merchant William Clapp from 1797 to 1811, when Clapp died and his wife deeded the house to Henry Rice, the merchant who occupied 8 Bulfinch Place as a winter home until 1841. On November 5, 1841, Rice sold the Bulfinch House to merchants Robert Waterston, Isaac Pray, and John Hall, co-owners of “Waterston, Pray and Company.” Robert Waterston assumed sole ownership of the house in 1850 and occupied it until his death in 1869; Waterston’s executors sold 8 Bulfinch Place to David L. Webster in 1870. In 1874, Webster made significant alterations to the Bulfinch House to convert it into a hotel, adding three-and-a-half stories, changing the window openings, and building a new entrance. None of the interior of the original Bulfinch House survived construction, though elements of the original facade remained. For this reason, architect Abbott Lowell Cummings remarked in 1961 that “the building as it had been known to recent generations of Bostonians was largely the work of the 1870s.” The construction of the hotel had cost Webster more than $90,000, though the investment paid off. The Globe reported that “in its day,” the building “was considered a superior type of architecture of the sixties [1860s]” and that the hotel was advantaged by its “choice location in the midst of Boston’s wealth and culture.”

Hotel Waterston was family-owned, but not by the Waterston family: Clark’s Boston Blue Book in 1890 reported that the hotel was owned by “Pyne, Mrs. & family.” The Globe reported that “the hotel was named in honor of Rev. Dr. Waterston, the eminent Scotch divine, the memory of whose able ministry yet lingers in the minds of our oldest residents.” The Rev. Dr. Waterston was actually Robert Waterston’s son, Robert Cassie Waterston, born in Boston in 1812; the elder Robert, a merchant, was born in Scotland in 1778, and Robert C. was a Unitarian minister in Boston. The Hotel Waterston’s newspaper advertising told of a well-furnished hotel with comfortable rooms. On November 20, 1876, the following appeared in the Globe: “TO BE LET–At Hotel Waterston, No. 8 Bulfinch Place. A sunny suite of eight rooms, with all modern conveniences, and heated by steam; open fireplaces; excellent arrangements for economical housekeeping. Apply to the Janitor” [the nineteenth-century meaning of “janitor” was a guard who watched the door]. Repairs continued up to 1890, and the retrofitting was referenced by another advertisement on October 11 that year, which described the Hotel Waterston as a “family hotel” (meaning it had enough space to accommodate families) available to “those looking for desirable winter homes.” When heating one’s home could often be a difficult logistical challenge for Bostonians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Hotel Waterston served as a comfortable, modern “winter home” for those who could afford it.

Throughout the nineteenth century the Hotel Waterston’s “spacious apartments were the home of many persons distinguished in state, church, literature, drama and commerce.” The Globe concluded in 1900 that “there is not another building in Boston that can boast of such a number of noted guests through a long period of years as hotel Waterston.” The eminent poet Walt Whitman lived at the Hotel Waterston for three years. Whitman traveled to Boston in 1881 to supervise the printing of his latest re-write of Leaves of Grass, and he stayed at the Hotel Waterston during that time. On August 27, 1881, Whitman wrote a letter to Louisa Orr Whitman, Walt’s sister-in-law (who married his brother George in 1871), in which he wrote:

All goes satisfactory here—I keep as well as usual—have a very good room & board in a kind of half hotel half boarding house, the hotel Waterston—the landlady Mrs Moffit, has a hundred guests when full, mostly families, very nice—capital table, (most too good for me, tempts me too much)

Whitman paid Eva Moffit $8 a week to live at the Hotel Waterston in 1871. Moffit managed the Hotel Waterston and had leased the building for over 25 years by the time it was sold to Baxter in 1900. $1 in 1871 has the equivalent purchasing power of $23.70 in 2022, making $8/week the equivalent of paying $192/week in today’s dollars. The Hotel Waterston advertised in 1895 that its prices were “moderate,” and that the hotel’s prime location in the West End made it a “three minutes’ walk from [the Boston] Common.”

Some other notable guests during the late nineteenth century included novelist William Dean Howells (the “Dean of American Letters,” who lived at the hotel with his family for three years), Eben Tourjėe (appointed dean of Boston University’s college of music in 1871, and Col. Frank Howe (the newspaper reporter who became Vermont’s lieutenant governor in 1912). The novelist Ellen Russell Emerson stayed at the Waterston, as well as the British actor Fanny Vining, known as “Mrs. E.L. Davenport” for her marriage to actor Edward L. Davenport (born in Boston). Jane G. Austin, the prolific author who wrote novels about the Pilgrims (and likely used her middle name to distinguish herself from Jane Austen), died at the Hotel Waterston on March 31, 1894.

When Horace Baxter purchased the Hotel Waterston in 1900, he intended to connect the hotel with his home next door “in anticipation of the great improvements which are going on in that vicinity, notably the changing of Bowdoin St.” This expectation reflected how redevelopment of the West End was ongoing, piece by piece, at the turn of the twentieth century. The updating of streets in particular had ramifications for historic buildings, such as the home of Dr. Joseph Stevens Jones (d. 1877), the West End’s playwright and physician whose 1 Bowdoin Street home was torn down in 1924 following the widening of Cambridge and Court Streets. The Hotel Waterston stayed in business until its demolition on September 4, 1961 by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, during its major land clearance projects in the West End for urban renewal. Abbott Lowell Cummings, the leading expert in early New England architecture who vehemently opposed “slum clearance” for its devastation of the West End’s historic architecture, visited the Hotel Waterston to measure and study the surviving facade of the Charles Bulfinch House months before that fateful September day.

As a successful hotel, and the physical afterlife of the Bulfinch House, the Hotel Waterston connected multiple centuries of West End history up until its end by urban renewal.

Article by Adam Tomasi

Source: Boston Globe/ProQuest (“Display Ad 9 – No Title,” October 11, 1890, page 2; “Display Ad 3 – No Title,” July 11, 1895, page 1; “The Real Estate Market,” December 30, 1900, page 10; American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (for Henry Rice); WEM-Abbott Lowell Cummings; WEM–Dr. Joseph Stevens Jones; Boston Athenaeum; In2013Dollars.com; New England Conservatory; Ann Arbor District Library; “Keeping Warm in Early America,” by Richard Klingenmaier (Winter 2015); The Walt Whitman Archive; University of Michigan; Clark’s Boston Blue Book (1890); Abbott Lowell Cummings, “Charles Bulfinch and Boston’s Vanishing West End” (1961); Charles Alpheus Place, Charles Bulfinch, Architect and Citizen (Houghton Mifflin, 1925)

[thewestendmuseum]

Abbott Lowell Cummings and the “Vanishing West End”

Abbott Lowell Cummings, once the leading expert on early New England architecture, spoke out and took action in response to the indiscriminate clearance of the West End during the urban renewal period.

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Image: Bulfinch's original drawing of the Joseph Coolidge Jr. House, on the corner of Bulfinch and Cambridge Streets, built 1794-1795 (Boston Athenaeum via Charles Bulfinch and Boston’s Vanishing West End)

Abbott Lowell Cummings was born in St. Albans, Vermont on March 14, 1923. Growing up in Connecticut with his grandmother on his father’s side, Cummings cultivated a strong interest in New England’s architectural past at an early age. When Cummings was fifteen years old, his grandmother gave him a membership to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (founded by William Sumner Appleton, Jr. in Boston in 1910). The mission of SPNEA (presently Historic New England) since its founding has been to “rescue and restore”’ historically significant buildings in New England. Cummings studied art history and American architectural history at Oberlin College, receiving his BA in 1945 and MA in 1946, then completed his PhD at The Ohio State University in 1950. Between 1948 and 1951, Cummings taught courses at Antioch College in Ohio, and during that time he studied the architectural style of Asher Benjamin by analyzing his pattern books. In 1806, Benjamin designed the Old West Church on 131 Cambridge Street in the West End, which replaced the original church built in 1737 on account of inadequate space and the need for major physical repairs. The West Church was Benjamin’s first commissioned work in Boston, and Nancy Voye argues that this West End landmark is “central to a study of Asher Benjamin as a stage in his architectural career in Boston.” After studying Asher Benjamin’s work, and joining the staff of SPNEA in 1955, Cummings became the leading authority on “First Period”  (seventeenth and early-eighteenth century) architecture in New England when he wrote The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625-1725 (published in 1979).

Prior to writing Framed Houses, Cummings focused his appreciation of historic New England architecture towards the historic buildings of the West End, specifically those buildings torn down by urban renewal. Cummings wrote “Charles Bulfinch and Boston’s Vanishing West End” in the October-December 1961 issue of Old-Time New England, the journal published by SPNEA. Urban renewal razed 50 acres of the historic West End, starting in 1958; Cummings addressed the land clearances taking place between 1960 and 1961. Cummings argued that indiscriminate urban renewal in the West End was a serious offense against the architectural and historical integrity of Boston. He began the essay arguing that urban renewal in the West End “created a devastation here unmatched since that of the fire of 1872 in the downtown area.” The city preserved Asher Benjamin’s West Church and Charles Bulfinch’s First Harrison Gray Otis House (because it housed SPNEA), which Cummings called “the two most important local monuments,” but the destruction was nonetheless too indiscriminate from Cummings’ perspective. Cummings observed:

Some of the buildings swept away [in the historic West End] were obviously beyond reclamation, but the ancient street pattern, the eighteenth-century street names, and many pleasant small brick town houses [sic] of the period between 1800 and 1850 had survived in only partially run-down condition. Though not necessarily historic landmarks these houses were nevertheless distinguished by their good lines, many original features, and a patina which only time and associations can create.

Cummings lamented that the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) did not pursue “spot clearance,” or demolishing only those buildings which were absolutely beyond repair while maintaining the integrity of the neighborhood. This had been impossible because spot clearance was not funded under the Housing Act of 1949 (which established urban renewal). While it had been incorporated into urban renewal policies by 1954, full clearance had been the only policy option for the West End Project when it was proposed in 1953. 

Cummings also argued that one of the greatest harms of urban renewal in the West End would be the negative effect upon tourism, as many people visit Boston to experience the historical legacy that lives on in its old buildings. He continued:

Instead just that much more has been lost of Boston’s individual character and quality which have so long attracted tourists from all over the country. For these many Americans Boston represents a tangible link with the past…Will they not think it something of a paradox in a nation whose architects from coast to coast design countless imitations of New England’s Colonial- and Federal-style houses that here in her most historic city we busily stave down the genuine article-whole streets at a time? Later generations who examine our twentieth-century protestations of interest in an American heritage will find such raids on cultural capital totally incomprehensible.

Most of the essay focused on the West End’s early architectural history rather than the present day. Although critical of indiscriminate neighborhood clearance, Cummings acknowledged that the destruction and replacement of notable buildings had routinely occurred in early Boston. After an extensive discussion of Charles Bulfinch’s property holdings in the West End, before and after losing his fortune in the Tontine Crescent development, Cummings concluded with a personal observation Bulfinch wrote on June 12, 1843, a year before the first American-born architect’s passing. Bulfinch saw the house he designed for Joseph Coolidge, Jr. (built in 1795) being demolished: “I have this morning viewed those [alterations] going on in Bowdoin street. Mr. Coolidge’s noble mansion, trees and all, are swept away, and 5 new brick houses are now building on the spot.” Cummings imagines what Bulfinch must have been thinking as he witnessed the disappearance of one of his creations, a house which once reflected the “new and brilliant architectural style that made Boston in the nineteenth century one of the most attractive cities on the eastern coast.”

Cummings did not merely lament the destruction of historic architecture in the West End; he took action. Cummings recalled in an interview in 2007 that “On one occasion I actually locked horns with Ed Logue, the head of urban renewal in Boston. I don’t like doing this, but I found myself actually engaged in a shouting match.” He described urban renewal in the West End as “one of the greatest black marks against Boston in all its long history.” When urban renewal was inexorable, Cummings aided SPNEA in preserving what they could for future historians and architects. The Bulfinch House on 8 Bulfinch Place (later occupied by the Hotel Waterston in the early twentieth century) was slated for demolition on September 4, 1961. Months before, in May, Cummings and John Obed Curtis measured all remaining elements of the original facade of the Bulfinch House, interviewed the Waterston family for their memories of the old Bulfinch House, and kept some of the bricks for the Society’s archive. 

Abbott Lowell Cummings had a long teaching career at Boston University, the University of Masssachusetts Amherst, and Yale University before passing away in 2007. 

Article by Adam Tomasi, edited by Sebastian Belfanti

Source: Abbott Lowell Cummings, “Charles Bulfinch and Boston’s Vanishing West End” (1961); Jessica Neuwirth et al. “Abbott Lowell Cummings and the Preservation of New England” (2007); WEM – Old West Church; Richard Candee, “Abbott Lowell Cummings, 1923-2017” (2018); James Q. Wilson, “Urban Renewal; the record and the controversy” (1966); Nancy Voye, “Ascher Benjamin’s West Church: A Model for Change”

[thewestendmuseum]

Boston's Ropewalks Part 2

A digital reframing of “Ropewalks of the West End and Beyond”, an 2012 exhibit designed and written by Duane Lucia and Tom Burgess.

Read on our website.

Image: This map by Rev. Jeremy Belknap shows the Pearl Street ropewalks and marks the origin and extent of the fire with a dot and dashed line, respectively. (Massachusetts Historical Society)

Mapping Ropewalks at the Turn of the 19th Century

Myrtle Street:

Image: This map made by Samuel Clough c. 1920 shows 3 ropewalks along what is now Myrtle Street. (Massachusetts Historical Society)

Above 3 ropewalks are visible along the future Myrtle Street operated by the Austin brothers, the Cade brothers, and Joseph Carnes. Related ropemaking operations were carried out by the Austins and Aniope Boynton on lots east of the ropewalks.

These ropewalks were sold to residential developers in 1805.

South Russell Street:

Image: Clough map c. 1920 shows ropewalks at New Street (South Russell Street) and Joy Street (Massachusetts Historical Society)

Along (modern) South Russell Street, William Taylor and Elizabeth Carnes owned a pair of ropewalks. Taylor held a second walk along Allen’s highway, and Elizabeth, who had inherited the ropewalk from her deceased husband, likely left hers to the operation of Joseph Carnes, who owned another walk on Beacon Hill.

Allen Street:

Image: Clough map c. 1920 shows 3 ropewalks along what became Allen and Poplar Streets (behind modern-day Massachusetts General Hospital). (Massachusetts Historical Society)

Three ropewalks remained in West Boston (formerly the New Fields, modern West End) in 1798. They were owned by Tyler and Caswell, John Winthrop, and Jeffreys and Russel, respectively. Jeffreys and Russell produced the anchor cable for the USS Constitution in 1797.

The West Boston ropewalks were sold to residential developers in 1807.

Ridgeway Lane:

Image: Clough c. 1920 shows property of the Austins and William Taylor likely used for ropemaking. (Massachusetts Historical Society)

The plots owned by the Austins on this map are likely the ropewalk formerly owned by Samuel Waldo. The lot owned by Taylor between George (Hancock) and Belknap (Joy) Streets may have been a warehouse used to store hemp and rope.

Charles Street:

Image: This detail of the 1814 Hales Map shows the ropewalks on Charles Street (Library of Congress)

After the Great Fire of 1794, 6 ropewalks were established on Charles Street across from the Boston Common on filled land that is now part of the Public Garden. This group of ropewalks suffered a fire in 1806, but survived as the last operational walks in Boston in 1815. In 1819, however, 3 successive fires and the Panic of 1819 effectively ended the viability of the ropewalks on Charles Street.

A Declining Industry in the Industrial Age

Despite ambitious efforts, Boston’s ropewalk industry was unable to survive a mix of national consolidation and the decline of sailing vessels. While the city continued to house multiple ropewalks until the end of the 19th century, and a single walk survived until 1975, the industry steadily declined from the 1820s until its extinction.

By the 1830s there were no longer ropewalks in Boston’s traditional downtown. The walks that remained occupied landfill areas in the Back Bay and Fenway. Eventually the Charlestown Navy Yard held the last surviving walk in Boston (after Charlestown was incorporated into the city in the 1870s).

The McIntyre map of Boston shows how the Back Bay residences were marching steadily toward the fens and the Mill Dam, from which the Boston Hemp Manufacturing Company was constructed. A number of other walks are also visible. (Boston Public Library)

The Last Walks in Boston

Back Bay:

The Boston Hemp Manufacturing Company occupied a site on the engineering masterpiece that was the Back Bay Mill Dam starting in 1831. The only mill dam in history to be capable of operating 24 hours a day, the Back Bay Dam was never fully utilized due to the combined challenges of encroaching railroads and rising prevalence of coal. The ropewalk and other mill-powered factories operated for only a few decades before they were replaced by Commonwealth Avenue and the rest of the Back Bay.

The inventor Daniel Treadwell’s mechanized ropemaking machines were first implemented at this site after successfully creating the machine in 1829. Mechanisms capable of spinning 1,000 tons of cordage a year were installed at the Back Bay site.

Fenway:

In 1835 the Sewall and Day Cordage Company opened on the site of Wentworth Institute and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Six years later Moses Day adopted the spinning jenny for cordage use, an improvement on Treadwell’s mechanization system. The company survived until 1890, when it was taken over by National Cordage Company, an attempted monopolistic venture based out of New Jersey that collapsed during an 1895 recession, closing the Fenway walk. Most of Boston’s other ropewalks underwent a similar takeover and failure with National Cordage, only two private walks – Pearson and Plymouth Cordage – survived past 1895. Plymouth Cordage continued to operate until 1970, serving as America’s premier fabricator of rope for much of that period.

Charlestown:

Between 1834 and 1837 Alexander Parris designed and built the ropewalk at Charlestown Navy Yard. The immense granite structure was the principle manufactory of rope for the US Navy from its completion until 1950, and held a complete set of machines designed by inventor Daniel Treadwell. Along with Plymouth Cordage, this ropewalk was one of the first factories to employ women.

Despite a 1880 fire, The Charlestown Navy Yard Ropewalk operated at or near capacity until 1950, when production was reduced to a minimum. Twenty-five years later, in 1975, the walks were permanently closed. The building retained its machinery for decades, but a fire in 2002 made use as a historical landmark challenging (despite it being the only complete ropewalk in the US). In 2021 the building began undergoing conversion into residential units – with a public exhibit meant to highlight the structures historic significance.

Making Rope at the Charlestown Navy Yard

Allen Smith feeding the breaker machine. Breaking is the first step in turning hemp into cordage. Breaking removes the bark and core of the stalk, leaving behind fibers. (Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

Center section of the breaker machine showing comb-like teeth that separate the hemp. The inventor got the idea from watching his wife comb her hair. This portion of the Charlestown Walk's breaker machine had been a separate process called hackling until the industrial revolution. The hacklers removed the remaining pollutants within the fiber, which was wound into skeins. (Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

Thomas Reynolds tending the ends of the coarse spreader machine. The prepared fibers seen here may have undergone as many as 3 hecklings of increasing fineness. The shorter fibers that failed to make it through the machine, called tow, were mixed with tar to make oakum. Oakum was useful as a caulking for ships. (Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

John Allen at the finishing machine that prepares for spinning. Here the hemp has been refined to its finest purity, and is ready for spinning into thread. (Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

T.J. Kaes (with hat) foreman of rope making crew and oldest employee at Navy Yard started at age 15 in 1898 working with his hand spinner, has worked for 41 years. F. B. Christensen - quarter man - also started in 1898, have worked together for all of 41 years except for one month. Spinning turned the refined hemp fiber into yarns that could then be combined into larger ropes. (Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

Head man, Charles Leary, employed for 39 years in the rope walk - watching the threads passing through the tar trough. After being spun into yarns the hemp passed through the tar troughs. While this process had once been a massive fire hazard, buy the time this photo was taken the tar was heated with hot water pipes, not an open flame. (Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

James Hickey, 1st class rope maker and his helper, Wm. Whitfield, showing general view of forming machine. The forming machine spun yarns into a strand. (Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

George Cadigan, Frank Hogan, George Morse, laying the rope as it is about to be twisted into one piece. The strands seen in the bottom right will be twisted using another cart not pictured here, which is capable of spinning the strands. The carts moved to accommodate the forming of the rope, which is shorter than its constituent strands. (Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

John Driscoll, running the rope laying machine. This end of the walk mechanism spins the rope's strands, allowing them to be merged into a single unit. In pre-industrial ropewalks this portion would have been stationary. (Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

Finished cordage, ready to be used by the US Navy. (Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

Article by Sebastian Belfanti

Source: Ropewalks of the West End and Beyond, Lucia and Burgess, The West End Museum; Boston Public Library Leventhal Collection

[thewestendmuseum]

Boston's Ropewalks Part 1

A digital reframing of “Ropewalks of the West End and Beyond”, an 2012 exhibit designed and written by Duane Lucia and Tom Burgess.

Read on our website.

Image: This map made by Samuel Clough c. 1920 shows 3 ropewalks along what is now Myrtle Street. (Massachusetts Historical Society)

From it’s earliest days until the late 19th century, Boston’s economy was predominantly a maritime affair, but when the puritan’s arrived in 1630, they did so with a different plan – to recreate the economic model of the Spanish imperial holdings in the Americas. The Puritans intended to mine, process and export the precious metals of New England to Europe. That plan hit a snag, however, when there were no precious metals to be found.

For a little more than a decade, the early Bostonians worked to find an alternative to mining. Eventually one presented itself, the carrying trade, in which Boston’s embryonic merchant elite began a series of disorganized enterprises that would develop into the infamous Triangle Trade, as well as the China Trade and many lesser-know trade routes.

From that point on, shipping was the key to economic success in Boston, and since shipping required ships, naval supplies – wood, cordage, caulking, and the like – became critical to the success of the city.

Establishing an Industry in the Colonial Era

Until 1640, the Massachusetts Bay Colony relied on Great Britain to supply the majority of its finished goods. Any rope or twine that was produced in the colony had to be made with locally grown flax or hemp, and was most likely produced by families for their own use with any excess being sold locally.

In 1638 the Boston area’s first “ropefields” were established in Charlestown. “Rope-maker’s Lane” ran along the town’s colonial waterfront, which is now the cite of City Square and Lynde Street. Soon Boston would have it’s own ropemakers and shipbuilders.

By 1642 shipping and its constituent industries were expanding significantly in Boston. The English Civil War reduced immigration and support from the mother country and limited imperial oversight. As a result, colonists were able to establish their own trade routes to other colonies, and even foreign nations, for the first time. These gains were further solidified during Queen Anne’s War in 1709, confirming Boston as a leading port in Colonial America.

The First Ropemakers

Nehemiah Bourne: In 1641 the shipbuilder Nehemiah Bourne came to Boston on a special permit from England and launched the Trial, Boston’s first merchant vessel. The 160-ton ship carried goods from Boston to the Azores and West Indies. Three years later he returned to England to fight in the English Civil War.

John Harrison: In 1642 John Harrison was invited to Boston to establish a cordage business. In 1666 he had acquired additional land and built a 984 foot long ropewalk. Clough’s reconstructed map of Boston in 1673 shows Harrison’s ropewalk running along modern-day Purchase Street.

Twenty years after it’s construction, in 1685, Harrison sold a 1/3 interest in his ropewalk, including the tar-house and warehouse, to James Barton.

John Heyman: In 1662 John Heyman received a license to produce fishing lines in Boston, but a year later he was ordered to stop producing rope and moved to Charlestown.

William Tilly: By 1697 at least one more ropemaker was running a successful business in Boston. Mr. William Tilly had the resources to hold slaves, and when one of them, Tom, escaped in June of 1697, Tilly advertised for his return with the promise that any would-be slavecatcher would “have Satisfaction to Content (sic).”

Tilly remained involved in the ropemaking industry into the 18th century. In 1705 he seems to have taken full control of the Harrison walk, which had moved from it’s previous location to the area between modern day Atkinson and Pearl Streets. Two years later, records show Tilly building 3 workhouses and a “shedd (sic) of 100 fathoms long and 11 foot wide”.

James Barton: In 1700, James Barton set up a ropewalk on land he was renting from the Leverett family in the New Fields (now the West End). The area became known as Barton’s Point, as it is marked on Bonner’s map (below).

Stephen Minot: Around 1700, Stephen Minot set up a ropewalk on the north slope of Beacon Hill at Ridgeway Lane.

Theodore Atkinson: The namesake of Atkinson Street, Theodore Atkinson operated a ropewalk parallel to William Tilly’s in 1705.

Edward Gray: In 1705 Edward Grey owned a ropewalk parallel to William Tilly and Theodore Atkinson’s. In 1712 he improved his facilities with a range of wood sheds 400 feet long.

Edward Carnes: In 1771 at least one more ropewalk stood in the historic West End (in the area then, and now once more, included in Beacon Hill). Edward Carnes is recorded purchasing a ropewalk on Joy Street in that year, which had begun operating sometime after 1743.

Boston c. 1640 (left) A rough and inaccurate sketch of the streets of Boston as they are supposed to have been first laid out & the owners of the soil, from 1630 to 1650 or thereabouts (Map by William Appleton, Boston Public Library), | Boston c. 1730 (right) The town of Boston in New England by John Bonner, 1723-33 (Boston Public Library)

The ropemaking industry continued to expand between the 1730’s and the Revolutionary War. By 1743 two additional ropewalks were added to William Prince’s edited version of the Bonner Map, and later maps show seven operating in the area by 1790.

Ropewalks and Revolution

In 1770, Boston’s ropewalks became one of the many places where resistance to the Crown developed into a fledgling revolution. Scuffles broke out between British soldiers and workers at the Atkinson Street ropewalks. Soon after, ropewalk workers took center stage in the Boston Massacre. Samuel Grey and Crispus Attucks were both ropewalk workers killed in the Massacre, and other workers including Jeffery Richardson and John Gray also participated in the affair.

The practice of tarring and feathering provided another intersection between the ropewalks and the revolution. The tar used in these mob attacks, which could leave severe burns that occasionally led to death, came from the city’s ropewalks. The feathers were commonly taken from household pillows, sometimes ones stolen from the afflicted person’s home.

Ropemaking in the Federalist Period

Despite numerous challenges posed by conflicts with France and Great Britain, Boston remained a major port into the latter half of the 19th century. As it’s ships circled the globe, the city’s ropemakers continued to supply the cordage required for naval vessels.

Unfortunately for Bostonians, ropemaking came with some serious drawbacks. The ropemaking process involved keeping hot tar – and corollary open flames – in the presence of numerous airborne hemp fibers. These fibers were constantly at risk of igniting, as they did at one of the Pearl Street walks on July 30, 1794. After the fire, six of the seven Pearl Street ropewalks relocated to filled land at the eastern end of the Boston Common on what is now the Public Gardens. The seventh, owned by John and Samuel Gray, moved to Charlestown. Two years later a ropewalk on the Charles owned by MacNeills burned, and that business moved to Charlestown as well.

Fires continued to threaten Boston’s ropemaking industry throughout their history, and are recorded burning ropewalks at least three times between 1795 and 1824 alone.

Despite the fires, in 1798 Boston could claim more than a dozen ropewalks, including 5 on Charles Street (Public Garden), 3-5 on Beacon Hill and another 3 on Allen Street. The Ridgeway Lane ropewalk seems to have survived to the end of the century as well, along with one on South Russell Street.

Article by Sebastian Belfanti

Source: Ropewalks of the West End and Beyond, Lucia and Burgess, The West End Museum; Boston Public Library Leventhal Collection

[thewestendmuseum]

Chemical Man & the 1939 World’s Fair

At New York’s 1939-40 World’s Fair, a young man from the West End presented the Chemical Man, a working model of the human digestive system.

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Image: The ‘chemical man’. Label (on rear) read "Elektro, famous mechanical man at the World's Fair, will have a home-made rival right under his nose at the Westinghouse Building. "The chemical man" shown here eats, breathes, digests food, and responds to pain. He has been built by Hays Gordon, 16, of the Science & Engineering Club of Elizabeth Peabody House, Boston. This unusual robot will be on display in the Student Science Laboratory of the American Institute in the Westinghouse Building. Hays will be on hand to put him through his paces." (New York Public Library)

The 1939-1940 World’s Fair drew more than 44 million eager spectators to Flushing Meadows in Queens, New York over the course of its two seasons. The attractions took the fair’s theme of “The World of Tomorrow” to great heights by showcasing a myriad of remarkable advancements and visions of the future. Reports at the time widely acknowledged General Motors’ “Futurama” as the fair’s most popular attraction. The ride, designed by Norman Bel Geddes, trekked passengers around in chairs on a conveyor system to view an enormous model representing America in 1960. Billy Rose’s “Aquacade,” which featured a synchronized swimming show starring former Olympic gold medalists Eleanor Holm and Johnny “Tarzan” Weismuller, also wowed the crowds.

Among hundreds of influential creations produced by big-name companies worldwide stood the work of 16-year-old Hyman Gordon from the West End of Boston. Gordon’s science project, called “Chemical Man,” demonstrated the human digestive system in a very innovative way.

Gordon drew inspiration as a member of the science club at the West End’s Elizabeth Peabody House. Established in 1896, the settlement house focused largely on children’s issues and education, but also uplifted and educated the adult immigrants in the community. When a program initiated by the American Institute of New York to bring science club members to the 1939 World’s Fair, the Peabody House group took part. The Institute had begun running children’s science fairs more than a decade earlier as part of its mission to strengthen science education in the United States. In 1938, the organization convinced Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company to donate space and equipment in its building at the World’s Fair to showcase award-winning exhibits from the Institute’s annual Junior Science Fair. In the 1939 season of the fair, 825 students presented projects on a range of science fields. Due to its location, it is not surprising that most came from New York; the Peabody House science club represented one of the few out-of-town groups.

Student’s projects stood in the Westinghouse building along with other important exhibit items like the Westinghouse Time Capsule (to be opened 5,000 years in the future) and an early robot called Elektro. One of just 40 projects on display in the Junior Science Hall, Gordon’s Chemical Man had a face like a mask with a wide mouth on top of a skeletal frame featuring bottles and beakers labeled for the stomach and liver and thin, winding tubes labeled for the small and large intestines.

Gordon’s Chemical Man may look a bit unwieldy compared to modern models of the digestive system, but it was extremely inventive for its time. It showed World’s Fair visitors the internal process of how the digestive system worked in the least sickening manner possible. A lot of what is known about the digestive system at the time came from groundbreaking experiments conducted by U.S. Army doctor William Beaumont on Alexis St. Martin between 1822 and 1833. St. Martin had suffered a gunshot wound that never healed completely, leaving a hole through which his digestive system could be observed. Hyman Gordon’s model allowed people to experience the same scientific phenomenon in a far more ethical and sanitary way.

Gordon’s and other student’s projects boosted the growth of science education in America and the World’s Fair itself. The fair provided the American people some relief and distraction from the Great Depression, and the focus on future technologies helped prepare the next generation of young scientists for the challenges to come. By the end of 1939, the American Institute added 800 new science clubs to its roster, more than tripling its membership from 6,000 to 18,500 students.

While Gordon’s project was small on its own, the work of this teenager from the West End contributed to a movement of student work that helped prepare a generation of U.S. scientists. Their work led the nation through the Cold War, the Space Race and a half-century of immense progress in science and engineering.

Article by Angelica Dilorio, edited by Sebastian Belfanti

Source: Price, (2018 August 13) Probing the Mysteries of Human Digestion. Science History Institute; Rydell, R. W., Findling, J. E., Pelle, K. (2000). Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States. Smithsonian Institution Press; Terzian, S. G. (2009). The 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair and the transformation of the American science extracurriculum. Science Education, 93(5), 892-914; Wruts, R. (1977) The New York World’s Fair 1939-1940. Dover Publications

[thewestendmuseum]

Chinese Laundries in the West End

Chinese immigrants owned and operated laundries in the West End during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an under-emphasized aspect of the historic neighborhood’s multi-racial and multi-ethnic diversity.

Read on our website.

Image: An undated drawing of Chinese laundry workers during the 19th century. (Richard Auffrey/Sampan)

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants, many of whom were men, settled in New England in order to earn money for their families back in China. Nativist backlash to Chinese labor in construction and manufacturing, in Boston but especially on the West Coast, culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which prohibited virtually all Chinese workers from immigrating to the United States (until the law’s repeal in 1943). Chinese immigrants already in the US faced preexisting discrimination that denied them opportunities to work in most professions. One of the limited options available to Chinese men was the operation of laundries in many of Boston’s neighborhoods. In 1879, Boston had just 120 Chinese residents, and 100 of them worked for 40 different laundries; 10 of those laundries (25%) were in the West End. Chinese laundry owners usually had residences in the buildings where they washed and dried clothes, which meant many of them called the West End their new home.

Chinese laundries in Boston required only a modest initial investment and minimal English language skills. The laundries offered cheap services to city dwellers who found laundry work difficult, especially if they lived in crowded housing. But as Chinese men were confined to laundry service in a racist labor market, this work also reinforced racist stereotypes of Chinese men as effeminate. Laundry was widely understood as “women’s work,” even in China, and so whites in the United States often perceived Chinese men not only as “womanly” but also, related to cleaning clothes, “dirty.”

The West End’s Chinese population in 1890 was large enough that it merited a visit from the aldermen of Boston to “the Chinese quarters in the West End.” The city councilors met up at the Joy Street police station, which was “considered the most complete station in the city.” Walking through the West End, the aldermen visited a laundry owned by Sing Lee on the corner of Howard and Bulfinch Streets, the tea importers of Hop Yum & Co. on Howard Street, and an opium den on an unnamed street. They found that Sing Lee’s laundry was “in very good condition, and not a sign of anything other than an active set of laundrymen was found.” They commended the “progressive merchants” of Hop Yum & Co. for a “tastefully painted shingle” outside their building on 39 Howard Street. The councilors finally visited a Chinese social club on Howard Street, which boasted “charter members” including “some illustrious pugilists and sports.” Yet despite these words of praise, the Globe reiterated the aldermen’s resort to racist stereotypes after inspecting the West End’s Chinese enclave: “It was plain that it was useless to visit any more places, as the sons of the Flowery Kingdom were, in the language of the street, ‘dead on.’” 

Chinese laundries in the West End, as in other neighborhoods, were often sites of burglaries and the occasional murders of laundry owners. On July 25, 1898, the Boston Globe reported that police officers from the Joy Street station were looking for a “colored man” they suspected to have robbed and stabbed Sing Lee at his laundry on 90 Cambridge Street. Lee was asleep in the back room of his laundry, and he leapt from his bed after awakening to the burglar moving towards the cash drawer. After Lee was stabbed in his back and seriously wounded, he was soon brought to Massachusetts General Hospital. On August 9, 1899, the day after three young men robbed Yen Tan and his laundry in the South End, authorities suspected the next day that the “method of last night’s job [in the South End] was similar to that of the West End one,” at a Chinese laundry on 38 Causeway Street.

The murder of West End laundry owner Chin Hing, around January 26-27, 1918, received the most press attention. Chin, who also went by Chester Lee and Chin Don Kang, ran a laundry at 25 Temple Street in the West End. Police found Chin Hing murdered and lying on the backroom floor with the cash register emptied. Harry Goodsnider, an errand boy who lived on 36 Staniford Street, saw the door left open and stepped inside the laundry to investigate. Goodsnider swiftly ran to the Joy Street police station to notify the authorities. The Globe reported that “Chin Hing has conducted the laundry for four years and was well known and liked by his 200 or more customers.” Chin Hing was also the cousin of Charles K. Shue, the first Chinese-American justice of the peace in the United States; Shue lived in Chinatown, on Harrison Avenue. The following day, Goon Lee, a Chinese laundry operator from East Cambridge, was arrested at the Joy Street station and charged with Chin Hing’s murder. Goon Lee was “a close friend of the dead man” but “said to have denied all knowledge of the murder.” Chinese community leaders declared that Chin Hing was likely murdered by a white man. Mary Barrows Lee, a white woman from Roxbury, claimed to have married Chin Hing in Providence eleven years prior, and claimed his estate – including the laundry business and a $2,500 life insurance policy. West End residents recalled frequent visits by Lee to Chin’s shop, where he would give her gifts or money. On February 8, 1918, the murder charge against Goon Lee was dropped. 

The deaths of Chinese laundrymen in the West End became the subject of rumors throughout the neighborhood. On May 22, 1922, Yee Gon Bo, a 42-year-old Chinese laundry operator, was found dead on the floor of his shop on 129 Chambers Street in the West End. Michael Lewis, who resided on 58 Leverett Street in the neighborhood, discovered Yee’s body while passing by and reported what he saw to the Joy Street police station. “Residents of that vicinity” around Chambers Street suspected a murder, though police determined that Yee died of natural causes and could not ascertain a motive for anyone to kill him. Yee Gon Bo, before his death, immigrated to the US in 1912 (evading the Chinese Exclusion Act’s restrictions), had a wife living in China, and a relative named Yee Wing who lived on 17 Lyman Street in the West End.

Chinese laundries in the West End were not always sites of tragedy. On May 1, 1936, Abraham Goldstein, a Dorchester native who ran a tailor shop on 37 Howard Street, fled his shop as a fire broke out inside due to an “explosion of cleaning fluid.” Goldstein ran outside instantly instead of covering himself with any suits in the store, and soon became a “human torch.” Despite sustaining many serious burns, his life was saved by Terry Tobin, a Boston attorney who saw Goldstein after turning the corner from Scollay Square. Tobin saw residents struggling to take off Goldstein’s coat and stop the flames, and so he threw his own coat around Goldstein to finally put out the fire. Tobin recalled, “We took him then into a Chinese laundry next door and wrapped him in a blanket.” Goldstein apparently tried running back into the shop and had to be restrained, but Tobin felt relieved to have intervened: “But what difference does a suit make, when a man’s life may have been saved.” The fact that a Chinese laundry on Howard Street served as a safe place during a life-threatening emergency demonstrated how common and familiar the laundries were to the neighborhood.

The extensive history of Chinese businessmen operating laundries in the historic West End reflects not only the cultural, legal, and economic obstacles that Chinese immigrants faced throughout the country, but also an under-emphasized story of the West End’s multi-racial and multi-ethnic diversity.

Article by Adam Tomasi

Source: University of Victoria; Sampan; National Park Service; ProQuest (“Aldermen On A Junket,” Boston Globe, April 20, 1890; “Burglar Stabbed Sing Lee,” Boston Globe, July 25, 1898; “Gun At His Head,” Boston Globe, August 9, 1899; “Chinese Laundry Owner Murdered,” Boston Globe, January 28, 1918; “Charge Chinaman Murdered Friend,” Boston Globe, January 29, 1918; “Widow Seeks Estate of Slain Chinaman,” Boston Globe, February 8, 1918; “Chinese Found Dead in West End Shop,” Boston Globe, May 23, 1922; “Lawyer Saves Human Torch,” Boston Globe, May 2, 1936)

[thewestendmuseum]

Dr. Joseph Stevens Jones

Dr. Joseph Stevens (J.S.) Jones, who lived most of his life in the West End, was a successful actor, playwright, theater manager, and physician in the nineteenth century. Jones graduated from Harvard Medical School and wrote between 150 and 200 plays in his lifetime. In 1924, the City of Boston tore down Dr. Jones’s home on Bowdoin Street, and other historic West End sites, in order to widen Court and Cambridge Streets.

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Image: The National Theatre in the West End, 1858 (Boston Public Library)

Dr. Joseph Stevens (J.S.) Jones was born in Boston on September 28, 1809 at the corner of Eliot and Tremont Streets. His father, Abraham Jones, was the second mate on the merchant ship O’Cain, which sailed from Boston to trade with China and along the Northwest Coast. In 1803, Abraham Jones became an interpreter for Aleksandr Baranov, governor of the Russian-American company, after Baranov and captain Joseph O’Cain agreed to cooperate in hunting sea otters, and sharing the catch, to subsequently trade with China. The O’Cain transported the indigenous Aleutian laborers employed by Baranov as hunters. When J.S. Jones was ten, Abraham died on the island of Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands; he may have been killed by native people after hostilities ensued. The Jones family soon moved to the West End, residing on the corner of Cambridge and Bowdoin Streets.

Jones attended the Boston public schools, and worked in a cordage (rope) store and the “counting-house” of a banker. While picking up practical business experience, Jones cultivated a deep interest in plays and pursued both acting and playwriting. He participated in “private theatricals,” or productions put on at house parties for elites (as opposed to public theaters). The banker Jones worked under discovered that his clerk was interested in theater, and used his connections to secure a part for Jones in an upcoming production in Providence, Rhode Island. Jones played the role of “Crack” in a comedy called “The Turnpike Gate,” and his performance was received positively by critics. Upon returning to Boston, Jones acted in many of his own productions at the Tremont Theatre, on 88 Tremont Street (open from 1827-1843). Author John Bouvé Clapp, in his biography of Jones (published in the Boston Transcript in 1910) wrote that Jones became “a favorite with Boston theatregoers and his dramatization of ‘Eugene Aram’, which was successful, added to his fame” (Jones adapted the play from a novel based on the true story of Aram, an English scholar executed in 1759 for murdering his business partner).

Jones later worked as an actor, playwright, and stage manager at the Warren Theatre, later called the National Theatre, in the West End. On the corner of Portland and Traverse Streets, William Pelby established the National Theatre in 1836 on the site of the American Ampitheater, which was built in 1832 and briefly called the Warren Theatre. In 1832, the Warren Theatre presented Jones’ “Liberty Tree, or the Boston Boys,” which had Jones play the lead character (a comedy role) and supported by a cast of “some of the most popular Boston players of the day.” In 1837, the new National Theatre’s first production was Jones’ “Carpenter of Rouen,” a successful play that later became a popular “stock piece” in Great Britain. In addition to writing many plays for the National Theatre, Jones managed its financial affairs. In 1839, the owners of the Tremont Theatre offered him management of their playhouse with a four-year lease. Jones negotiated for the right to end the lease after half of its term (two years) passed, and in 1841 he cut ties with the theater after two lackluster seasons. When the Tremont closed for good in 1843, Jones retired from acting after performing in two plays in New York and Philadelphia respectively.

While working for William Pelby at the National Theatre, Jones studied surgery at Harvard Medical School. At the time, Jones had no intention of pursuing the medical profession; his enrollment in medical school merely reflected his “avidity for knowledge.” Jones graduated some time after he retired from acting, and taught courses on anatomy and physiology at Tremont Temple in addition to working as a practicing physician. Dr. Jones continued regularly writing plays, many of which were commissioned by theater managers who simply wanted the prolific playwright’s name on the billing. Boston’s medical community occasionally recognized Jones’s theatrical prowess, such as when the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal reported on December 27, 1848, in its “Medical Miscellany” section, that “Dr. J.S. Jones, of Boston, has received the prize recently offered for the best local drama.” In 1858, Jones was credited with a successful “pumpkin-seed remedy” for treating human parasites by the same journal.

Jones could not personally recall how many plays he wrote in total, but estimates range  between 150 and 200 plays over his lifetime. Many of his productions were based upon historical events and figures, such as “The Siege of Boston,” “Moll Pitcher” [sic] (for Mary Hays, the woman who fought in the Revolutionary War), and “Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty.” Jones’ most successful play in Boston was “The Silver Spoon, or Our Own Folks: A Joiner’s Job in Four Parts,” produced in 1852 and held at the Boston Museum, a theater hall between Scollay Square and School Street. “The Silver Spoon” satirized the state legislature, and William Warren acted in the lead role as Jefferson Scattering Batkins, the fictional representative from “Cranberry Centre.” The Boston Museum put on “The Silver Spoon” for three weeks on account of its popularity, even among actual members of the state legislature. J.S. Jones followed up with a sequel, “Batkins at Home, or Life in Cranberry Centre,” which did not take off, and a novel published in 1871 called “Life of Jefferson S. Batkins, Member from Cranberry Centre. Written by Himself.” Jones dedicated the novel to William Warren, the actor, and Moses Kimball, who built the Boston Museum. Kimball replied to “My Dear Doctor,” in a letter dated September 25, 1871, that “Batkins” was a “very ingenious narrative” which had really “shown up the shortcomings and intrigues of ‘legislators’.” “Paul Revere” was Jones’ last play, produced on March 6, 1876 at the Boston Museum.

Dr. Jones died at his 1 Bowdoin Street residence on December 29, 1877. One of his three sons, Nathaniel “Nat” D. Jones, was a well-known Boston actor and comedian in his own right until he died in 1912. Nat Jones owned the copyright on the 1911 edition of “The Silver Spoon,” reproduced by Boston-based publisher Walter Baker for “The William Warren Edition of Standard Plays.” In 1924, Dr. Jones’s home was one of the historic West End sites torn down to widen Cambridge and Court Streets. The Boston Globe profiled each of the neighborhood’s historic buildings being razed or moved by the new thoroughfare, and remarked that “a few old Bostonians still remember…when West End boys availed themselves of the opportunity to coast from Beacon St. down Bowdoin St., swinging around Dr. Jones’s corner into Cambridge Street.” The Globe acknowledged then how “50 years ago,” as Dr. Jones’ childhood home was torn down for urban redevelopment, he built a legacy as an actor, playwright, and physician in the West End.

Article by Adam Tomasi

Source: Internet Archive (Clark’s Boston Blue Book; From the Volga to the Yukon by Daniel Henderson, 1914); Google Books (Boston Medical and Surgical Journal; The Silver Spoon); West End Museum (National Theatre); Famous Americans; E.W. Geisicke, “Discovery of Humboldt Bay, California, in 1806 from the Ship O’Cain, Jonathan Winship, Commander: An Episode in a Bostonian-Russian Contract Voyage of the Early American China Trade”; Boston Athenaeum; Boston Globe (“Famous Landmarks in West End Razed to Widen Court and Cambridge Sts,” December 28, 1924, page 17)

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The West End Land League

The West End branch of the Land League made political and financial contributions to the original Land League in Ireland, an organization of tenant farmers and Irish nationalists that resisted high rents and evictions in the 1880s.

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Image: Anna Parnell, sister of Charles Stewart Parnell and known as the “Irish Joan of Arc” for her activism with the Land League in Ireland. (Irish Examiner)

The Land League was founded in Ireland in 1879 by Michael Davitt, an Irish republican and son of an evicted tenant farmer, and Charles Stewart Parnell, who led the Irish Home Rule Party in the British Parliament. The League’s purpose was to resist high rents for tenant farmers in Ireland, as well as the subsequent evictions of those farmers. Ireland experienced a famine between 1878-1880 which threw 600,000 Irish people, mostly from the western counties, into starvation. The Land League’s platform was defined by the “Three F’s”: fair rent, fixity of tenure (a tenant should not be evicted if they paid rent), and free sale (a tenant should be able to sell their tenancy to another person without needing a landlord’s permission). The “Three F’s” were borrowed directly from the original Tenant Right League in Ireland in 1850, and the movement overlapped strongly with the popular demand for “home rule,” or the self-government of Ireland as opposed to British rule. The word “boycott” originates from the Land League’s response to Charles Boycott, a former British Army officer who became a land agent for Lord Erne, a prominent landlord who charged exorbitant rents. Boycott was in charge of evicting tenants, and some of those evictions turned violent. On September 23, 1880, one-hundred members of the Irish Land League arrived at Boycott’s farm and ordered all of his workers to withhold their labor. The Land League not only convinced the laborers to leave Boycott’s farm, they also persuaded local shops to refuse service to Boycott. This successful “boycott” by the Land League, and more overt acts of resistance by tenant farmers (including injuries to cattle and the murder of some landlords) inspired Irish-Americans to form their own chapters of the Land League.

Irish-Americans in many US cities, including Boston, made financial and political contributions to the Land League after learning of events abroad in the Irish-American press. They did this by forming their own Land Leagues in the US: not only the Irish Land League of the United States, but also chapters in many different neighborhoods. Neighborhoods of Boston with Land League chapters in the 1880s included Roxbury, the North End, South Boston, and East Boston. The West End had its own chapter, which first met on November 30, 1880 in Federhen Hall on North Russell Street. The Boston Globe, which ran a nearly regular column on Land League affairs between 1880 and 1882, reported that the West End Land League had an “enthusiastic meeting” led by chapter president Patrick O’Laughlin, and one of the speakers included P.J. Flatley, the Boston lawyer and Irish nationalist who wrote Ireland and the Land League  in 1881; abolitionist Wendell Phillips wrote the book’s introduction. In the words of the Globe, Flatley “referred to the origin and progress of the movement in Ireland and also to the system of ‘Boycotting’ recently established,” and noted that “the Land League deprecated any violence.” The West End Land League subsequently held weekly meetings at other locations, including St. Joseph’s Hall on Cambridge Street, Armory Hall at the corner of Cambridge and North Russell Streets, and an unnamed building on 6 North Anderson Street. Many of these meetings focused on British authorities’ arrests of tenant farmers following the Coercion Act of 1881, which suspended habeas corpus and jury trials in response to the Land League’s activities. The Globe reported on March 16, 1881 that “the interest in the cause of Ireland’s freedom is unabated at the West End, and still the work goes on.”

The Ladies Land League was essential to maintaining the movement in Ireland, after men of the League including Charles Stewart Parnell (who was earlier ejected from Parliament) were arrested by the British in the fall of 1881. Anna Parnell, Charles’s sister, assumed leadership and organized women to keep up the fight until Parnell’s release in April 1882. American chapters of the Ladies Land League were active at the same time, as the “central branch” of the Ladies Land League in Boston met weekly on Tremont Street. Women of the West End met the evening of March 10, 1881 to establish their own branch of the Ladies Land League. One man named Thomas M. Brady spoke to the women assembled at Federhen Hall and “urged the ladies to take up the work which the gentlemen have begun.” An ad hoc committee of five women unanimously elected Mrs. Maurice R. Barry as president of the West End branch of the Ladies Land League. With growing local support, the West End Land League had 190 members, men and women, by June 1881.

When Parnell was imprisoned in Britain, he wrote a “no-rent manifesto” which inspired tenants to go on rent strikes. On February 28, 1882, the West End’s Land League endorsed a series of resolutions that echoed Parnell’s anti-rent position, and sent those resolutions to the Globe, the Herald, and the Pilot. The League unanimously voted in favor of resolutions that denounced “feudal landlordism,” particularly its unequal distribution of land by inheritances, as “the bane of Ireland’s universal ruin and prolonged degradation.” But when British authorities released Parnell in April of 1882, he agreed to retract the no-rent manifesto. This compromise on Parnell’s part was met with Prime Minister William Gladstone agreeing to erase tenant farmers’ back rent and gradually scale back the Coercion Act, making for a successful movement by tenant farmers.

The Land League, including its West End branch, made connections across the Atlantic, and united Catholics and Protestants both in the US and abroad, to resist economic exploitation and harsh evictions in Ireland.

Article by Adam Tomasi

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica; The Irish Story; Hayes, A Political and Social History of Modern Europe (1916); IrishCentral; Moloney, “Land League Activism in Transnational Perspective” (2004); Boston Globe/ProQuest (“The Land League,” December 1, 1880, page 4; “The Land League,” January 26, 1881, page 4; “The Land League,” February 9, 1881, page 1; “Land League,” March 11, 1881, page 4; “The Celtic Cause,” March 16, 1881, page 4; “The Battle in Ireland,” March 23, 1881, page 1; “Land League Matters,” April 13, 1881, page 1; “West End Land League Branch,” June 22, 1881, page 4; “Land League,” December 21, 1881, page 4; “Land League Matters,” March 1, 1882, page 2)

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Senda Berenson

Senda Berenson, the “Mother of Women’s Basketball” in the United States, grew up in the West End after her Lithuanian family moved to the neighborhood in 1875.

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Image: Senda Berenson (Senda Berenson Papers, Smith College Libraries)

Senda Berenson was born as Senda Valvrojenski in Vilnius, Lithuania on March 19, 1868. Senda’s father, Albert, immigrated to the West End in 1874; he sent for the rest of his family to arrive in the neighborhood the following year. Upon settling in the West End at 32 Nashua Street, Albert had Senda and her older brother, Albert, change their surname to Berenson in order to Americanize their identities. Senda Berenson soon attended the Girls’ Latin School, then located in the South End, but did not graduate. She then enrolled at the Boston Conservatory of Music to study piano. One major difficulty appeared: she was too physically frail to practice piano for extended periods. This obstacle motivated Berenson to enroll at the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics in 1890, so that she could become physically stronger. The school was founded by Mary Hemeway in 1889 in order to improve women’s health through physical education, at a time when women faced the societal expectation that they be physically frail. 

Berenson’s motivation to become stronger developed into an appreciation for physical education, which became her career. In 1892, Berenson was hired by Smith College, a women’s college in Northampton, MA, to teach physical education, particularly Swedish gymnastics (which she learned at the Boston Normal School). That fall, Berenson introduced basketball to her students roughly a year after James Naismith invented the game in Springfield, MA in December 1891. Berenson visited Naismith in Springfield after reading an article of his about basketball, and she revised his original rules in order to adapt the game for women. Unlike Naismith’s version, which involved full-court movement and battling for possession of the ball, Berenson assigned players to one of three zones which they could not leave. Women were prohibited from dribbling more than three times, holding the ball for more than three seconds, or snatching the ball out of an opponent’s hands. Berenson’s rationale for modifying Naismith’s rules was to give women a fun opportunity for exercise without fostering “dangerous nervous tendencies” that could adversely affect “the grace and dignity and self-respect we would all have her foster.” Berenson made concessions to this gendered preoccupation with women’s ‘grace and dignity’ because she was concerned that women would never be allowed to play basketball unless it was consistent in some way with their “womanliness.” But in 1894, Berenson challenged patriarchal attitudes about women’s physical fitness when she remarked that “until recent years, the so-called ideal woman was a small waisted, small footed, small brained damsel, who prided herself on her delicate health, who thought fainting interesting, and hysterics fascinating.” 

After Berenson taught her students to play basketball, she organized, on March 22, 1893, the first women’s collegiate basketball game between a team of freshmen and a team of sophomores at Smith College. The sophomore team won the game 5-4 in front of a crowd of all women (men were not allowed then to be spectators). Low-scoring games were common in collegiate basketball at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1896, when Stanford and UC Berkeley held the first intercollegiate women’s basketball game, the final score was 2-1. In 1899, Berenson published her rules for women’s basketball, and two years later edited the first Women’s Basketball Guide published by A.G. Spalding. Berenson left Smith College in 1911 after marrying Herbert Abbott, an English professor, though she continued to edit Spalding’s rulebooks. Berenson’s version of basketball spread to many other women’s colleges across the nation, and she continued to edit updated rulebooks for the game. Because the sport was relatively new, the pioneers of women’s basketball were open to modifications in the game and suggestions for improvement. The Spalding’s rulebook for 1916-1917 told readers to mail their input to Berenson:

We hope the rules for 1916-17 will be approved by all players who have the best interests of basket ball [sic] at heart. We have always in mind, however, the great danger of over ruling the game. We would urge all players to adopt the rules as revised in this issue–without any modification. If, after using them strictly and with the right spirit for a season, some changes still seem necessary for the good of the game, under all conditions, we shall be very glad to get suggestions for such changes and shall consider them with care. These should be sent to Mrs. Senda Berenson Abbott, 72 Dryads Green, Northampton, Mass.

When the National Women’s Basketball Committee formed in 1905, Berenson served as its first chair and held the position for twelve years, until 1917. The following year, women’s basketball adopted a basket with an open bottom, just like the men’s games, replacing the original closed basket with a pull chain.

Berenson died on February 16, 1954, as a resident of Northampton, MA. But in 1985 she joined Margaret Wade as one of the first two women to be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA. Berenson was one of the first inductees to the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, in Knoxville, TN, when it opened in 1999.

Article by Adam Tomasi

Source: Chicago Tribune; Smith College; NewsSmith; New England Historical Society; Encyclopedia Britannica; McCullick and Lomax, “The Boston Normal School of Gymnastics: An Unheralded Legacy” (2012); Basketball Hall of Fame; HathiTrust; Boston Women’s Heritage Trail