It was a seasonably mild spring evening in 1950 with a touch of rain, but not enough to dampen the spirits of the 300 of Boston’s civic, political and business leaders gathered for a grand testimonial dinner at the elegant Copley Plaza Ballroom. They’d assembled to commemorate the retirement of one of the most influential figures in Boston. This kind of grand, testimonial dinner seems particularly anachronistic these days, but then it was a genuine expression of admiration and affection for a singularly accomplished person who had quietly guided the city and the region’s planning and development for the past thirty-five years.
William Morrissey, Commissioner of the Metropolitan District Commission presided over the dinner. Governor Paul A. Dever was on the dais, along with former Governor James Michael Curley and the indomitable Commissioner of Public Works, William F. Callahan. It was no surprise to the dinner crowd when Mayor John Hynes credited the evening’s honoree with conceiving the long-awaited public works project – finally underway – that would forever transform Boston: the Central Artery. The effort to build a highway through the center of the city had slogged on for nearly forty years, so how was it that here, among the most powerful men of the city, the credit should fall disinterestedly on an up-country dairy farmer’s daughter? Modest Elisabeth May Herlihy, daughter of Irish Famine Era immigrants, would seem an improbable candidate for this distinction, yet this evening was to commemorate the close of the remarkable career of the woman who quietly, but confidently shaped every major planning initiative of the first half of twentieth century Boston.
By the early twentieth century, the art of American city planning was aspiring to a science; it had broadened from the great aesthetic impulses of the “City Beautiful” movement of Charles Burnham and his peers to encompass the determined reformers, generally upper-class, of the “Good Government” movement, disparaged by populists as elitist “goo-goos.” These were urban and social reformers with a moral certitude that the most vexing problems could be solved, and the under-classes raised, not by aesthetics but through impartial scientific observation and analysis in pursuit of clean water, sanitary sewerage, decent housing, better education, and relief from dense, congested conditions. For them, the disadvantaged were victims of their physical environment. Correct those deleterious conditions, as often as not, by grand public works or renewal schemes and a good bit of secular evangelical zeal and the uplift would follow. As Herlihy herself would write in the periodical The American City in 1919: “People cannot be compelled to live rightly until right living conditions are available.”

The young Herlihy came from far different circumstances than the typically aristocratic reformers when Mayor John F. Fitzgerald appointed her Secretary of the first Boston Planning Board in 1914. She was not born in Brookline or Wellesley, but in Wilton, New Hampshire, the youngest of eleven children of John Herlihy and Catherine Hannon. Perhaps ambition runs in the family. Her parents, he from Cork and she from Limerick, were married a year after John bought the first of three farms he would own in Wilton, a singular accomplishment for a young immigrant. Her older brother Charles studied, first in Lowell and then the law in Boston, and with his brother Joseph established a major milk distribution network. But Elisabeth would eclipse her older siblings’ accomplishments if not their wealth. After studying at Bryant & Stratton Business College in Boston, she established herself as a public stenographer, a position which brought her in contact with leading business and civic figures. Following the election of John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald as Mayor of Boston in 1910, she began working for the city as a clerk, and within a few years she rose to chief clerk and ultimately the new Board’s Secretary.
The distinguished architect, Ralph Adams Cram, was the first Chairman of the Planning Board. Those first years of the Board must have been a master class for Herlihy, and an equal and possibly greater influence undoubtedly came from Board member Professor Emily G. Balch, head of the Economics Department of Wellesley College. As Secretary, Herlihy was a shrewd choice. She provided a gentle buffer and intermediary between the sharp elbows of gritty ward politics and the fervor of the reformers. She spoke the languages of both worlds. In later years as a lecturer to students or civic groups she would advise her listeners to embrace, not shun, politics as the vehicle to accomplish reform. One politician who would prove crucial to her career would be James Michael Curley and she cheerfully returned the esteem writing speeches and thanking him for his support.

For reformers, Boston’s narrow, discontinuous, and congested streets were complicit in the degraded living conditions of the poorest citizens. “Right living conditions” would require congestion relief, primarily through roadways widening and realignment. Thus in 1918, taking up the cause of the reformist “Boston 1915” movement the nascent Planning Board presented an ambitious plan to address the dense conditions of the North End. The Board focused on a perceived lack of light, air, and playground spaces. The North End, not unlike other neighborhoods, had grown denser over the previous century with infill structures. Razing them, widening streets, and creating green spaces and playgrounds would bring welcome and uplifting change. But by far the most ambitious (and costly) element of the plan was a new cross-town street, the “Main Thoroughfare,” which would run across the North End from Atlantic Avenue to the Washington Street Bridge.

Boston Globe 12-12-1918
The thoroughfare was less ambitious than the one recommended by the Joint Board for Metropolitan Improvements in 1911, (which essentially followed the route of the modern Central Artery but included a rail tunnel beneath to link North and South Stations.)  The 1911 plan failed on cost, despite the New Haven Railroad’s pledge to pay for the tunnel.    The1918 proposal ran exclusively through the North End and was to be located further east, between higher-value and lower-value real estate, and the combined impact of the new roadway and the clearance efforts would undoubtedly pay for the improvements by increased valuations and resulting taxes.  The thoroughfare was part of a larger scheme that included numerous other roadway widening intended to transform the North End.   It was suggested that the new road be named for the Marquis de Lafayette, but despite the French name, the proposed road, with its many crossings, lacked the clarity and elegance of one of Baron Haussmann’s Paris boulevards or the power of an Emperor to make it happen. It too would fail, although various North End improvements did take place.

By 1923, just seven years after her appointment, a determined Herlihy had become a recognized planning authority, and she led Boston through the adoption of its first comprehensive zoning ordinance. She was an observant Roman Catholic, and some of the evangelical zeal of the reformers can be found in her explanation of the need for zoning. “Order is Heaven’s first law, and zoning is but an attempt to bring about order in civic development,” as she explained to a reporter for the Sunday Advertiser. An earlier zoning effort 1905 was a reactionary effort limited to regulating building heights, but this new plan would be more comprehensive, regulating uses and density of structures. When William J. McDonald, the influential developer of the Park Square District and a Curley supporter, lambasted the height cap as a drag on growth, the limit was increased from 125 feet to 155 feet. Heaven’s order could be consistent with political necessities.

Herlihy’s sense of order looked beyond Boston. When asked by a Boston Evening Traveler reporter in 1923 for her predictions for 1930 she answered:
My first hope is that by 1930 the forty cities and towns comprised in the Metropolitan District may have outgrown local prejudices and conservatism, and become banded together under a centralized form of government as a metropolitan Boston… <with> a comprehensive plan covering the entire district… <for> the preservation of order and beauty in the physical growth of the entire region.

She gained a new ally toward this vision that same year, when the Legislature created a Division of Metropolitan Planning within the new Metropolitan District Commission, with Henry I Harriman of the Boston Chamber of Commerce as its chairman. The Division was responsible for the study, planning, and recommendation of potential transportation improvements, both road and rail, for the entire Metropolitan District.
The unprecedented surge in private autos only aggravated existing congestion and inspired searches for new fixes. The previous idea of a grand boulevard to ease traffic between the rail terminals and the wholesale markets resurfaced. In February 1925, the Legislature created a special recess commission that included Harriman and Frederick Fay, then Chairman of the Boston Planning Board. The commission recommended an “interim thoroughfare” with two segments, but by March the proposal had morphed into the “Loop Highway,” a broad thoroughfare running from Kneeland Street across Haymarket and linking up at the Charles River Dam to the newly built “Northern Artery” which ran through Cambridge and Somerville. Cost estimates ranged from $33,000,000 to $50,000,000. Not everyone thought that a new roadway was necessary. Opponents, led by Representative Henry Shattuck, powerful chairman of Ways and Means, imagined that congestion could be solved by banning on-street parking, if not completely, at least before 10AM, since arriving commuters and shoppers in search of on-street parking certainly compounded the traffic problem. Why, they asked, should the city surrender this valuable real estate to all-day parkers? Shattuck also believed that the cost of a roadway would be better spent on extending the subways. The powerful legislator Martin Lomasney, the “Mahatma of the West End,” was certain that this was a scheme to benefit rich real estate speculators and his opposition insured death of the plan in April of that year. But before the project was killed the New York traffic engineer Henry M. Brinckerhoff suggested an intriguing idea to place the roadway on an overpass above Haymarket Square. New roadway proposals to follow would now take to the air.
Early 1927 brought another attempt, this time an ambitious all-elevated highway that would run from the Cottage Farm Bridge (today’s BU Bridge) along the Boston and Albany tracks to South Station, where the Atlantic Avenue Elevated train structure would be repurposed as a highway to North Station terminating as before at the Charles River Dam. The necessary legislation failed yet again due in no small measure to the opposition of Martin Lomasney.

In 1929, a new idea came out of left field, when Boston businessman Charles Curry proposed a spectacular bridge from South Boston to Charlestown across the harbor, eliminating the road through the city. The plan included a second bridge from downtown to East Boston, and the two would intersect under an Eifel Tower like “aeroplane beacon.” It was preposterous, but the East Boston bridge, not a new idea, had caught the interest of some powerful supporters particularly Mayor Curley. In fact, in 1926, the Metropolitan Planning Division had proposed a more realistic yet still dramatic suspension bridge along with a practical tunnel alternative. Curley was convinced that a bridge would allow him to drop the ferries which were an expensive liability for the city; his opinion would shadow all future proposals.

Boston Globe 11-29-1929

Division of Metropolitan Planning 1926 East Boston Bridge Proposal

Metropolitan Planning and the city Planning Board in 1928 again filed legislation for a more modest elevated highway which yet again failed but this elevated highway introduced the new term “Central Artery.” This Artery would form the core recommendation of the ground-breaking “Report on a Thoroughfare Plan for Boston,” an unprecedented, comprehensive city-wide, thirty-five-year highway plan. Proposed roads terminated tantalizingly at the city limits, because a companion metropolitan plan had been quashed.

Central Artery. Thoroughfare Plan 1930
Often referred to as the “Whitten Plan” after Robert Whitten, the planning consultant who assisted the plan however it was largely the work of the Boston Planning Board’s staff. Elisabeth Herlihy officially contributed only a chapter on the history of Boston’s streets, but her influence is apparent throughout the plan. Its recommendations were developed from actual traffic counts and observed traffic corridors identified through origin-and-destination studies analyzing drivers’ habits. The plan was what we might today call a data-based plan. It was meant to be a solid, pragmatically engineered rationale for a major roadway program with a twenty-five-year construction schedule. It even included traffic estimates and flows for 1965 -, thirty-five years into the future – which were, in hindsight, grossly underestimated. And although most experts favored a tunnel, Herlihy wisely proposed a tunnel or bridge alternative for East Boston.
The arrival of the plan at the beginning of the Depression should have been propitious. Governor Ely and the Legislature would shortly initiate an unheard-of “superhighway” program for Depression relief that would include the futuristic Worcester Turnpike (Route 9), the Southern Circumferential Highway (Route 128), and the Providence Turnpike (U.S. Route 1.) But when the vast construction program bogged down in controversy and failed to deliver the hoped for economic boost, Ely and the legislature abandoned further work. Large-scale highway construction through the rest of the ‘30s would languish until the arrival of the Federal WPA funded program. Up until the Depression, roadway funding in Massachusetts, with few exceptions, had been “pay-as-you-go” and the Legislature held wide-ranging control over Boston’s budget and debt. Thus the Legislature, leery of Curley and debt averse, authorized only $3,500,000 of the $31,000,000 he’d requested for his ambitious “thoroughfare plan.” Curley’s bridge proposal too would fall in the face of opposition from the War Department. The tunnel would be built instead but ironically it would be a financial albatross for Boston for most of the ‘30s.

Curley succeeded his intra-party Democratic rival Ely as Governor in 1935. He established a State Planning Board in 1936 in compliance with the Federal Works Progress Administration, and he turned to his long-standing ally Elisabeth Herlihy to head it. From this new position as the state’s leading planning expert, she would oversee coordination of planning efforts across the state. Her staff, swelled by WPA workers, developed detailed statistical profiles of Massachusetts cities and industries to help ensure eligibility for the Federal aid. She would be pivotal in flood protection plans along the Connecticut River following the disasterous hurricane of 1936, staring down the recalcitrant governors of Vermont and New Hampshire, and she would continue to be intimately involved with highway planning with a statewide plan in 1937 and worked with Mayor Tobin of Boston in 1940 for a yet-again revived Central Artery.

It was in the post war period however that Herlihy made some of her most important contributions to the effort to build the Central Artery. In 1947 the State Planning Board, in conjunction with the Department of Public Works, put together yet another comprehensive plan for roadway construction in Metropolitan Boston. It was commonly called the “Duffy Plan,” after Harold Duffy, the State Planning Board engineer who developed it. But the Duffy Plan ran into critical opposition from Mayor Curley, who favored a competing scheme of a waterfront artery and, yet again, that bridge to East Boston.

The competing bridge plan was proposed by the real estate investor William J. McDonald, a long-time Curley supporter. Senator Staves, the powerful Southbridge Republican chairman of the Highways Committee, was eager for a comprehensive highway program and urged Mayor Curley to find a compromise. Curley called a luncheon conference at the Copley Plaza hotel where Herlihy, a key member of the committee, undoubtedly influenced her old friend Curley to back a new compromise plan that included a second harbor tunnel rather than a bridge.

In late 1947 a group including Herlihy and led by Senator Bowker of Brookline, travelled to New York to consult the great highway oracle, Robert Moses. “Moses is taking a deep interest in Boston’s problems,” Bowker reported eagerly. Herlihy commented politely on Moses’s “information” and “cordiality” and while Moses was a proponent of bridges over tunnels, Herlihy subtly checked his influence through an unassuming comment that ‘[he] would not like to advise on the Boston situation until he had studied local conditions.” It appears that he indeed never did. She commented that Moses “he has not much faith in origin and destinations surveys,” but she pointedly observed that he did depend on engineer’s reports “and they…do rely on origin and destination counts.” For her, sound engineering trumped oracular opinion.

Without benefit of Moses, Massachusetts moved forward a new study, the “1948 Master Highway Plan for the Boston Metropolitan Area” prepared by Charles A. Maguire under the supervision of a joint board comprised of Herlihy; William T. Morrissey, Commissioner of the MDC; William H. Buracker, Commissioner of Public Works; and Harold Duffy as Secretary. The plan was influential in the final passage of Senator Staves’ $100,000,000 highway finance bill, the first of several bond bills for an “Emergency Highway Program” beginning in 1950. The long-awaited Central Artery was an early element of the program. Had the full plan been fully implemented, it would, of course have wreaked havoc on a scale similar to the disruption Moses’s handiwork caused in New York.

1948 Master Plan

Herlihly’s role in the realization of the Artery was acknowledged but this testimonial dinner was much more than that. It was an acknowledgment of her abilities, political acumen, dedication to the public good and her achievements as a nationally recognized planning expert. Her success was even more remarkable in a time when all related fields were overwhelmingly dominated by men. Modesty and gentility wedded to self-confidence and curiosity appear to have defined her. In 1934, when her expertise and skills were already notable, she could still self-effacingly write to Harvard’s Landscape Architecture program for suggestions for further study beyond what she accomplished on her own. ‘Planning is just common sense,” she would tell Louis Lyons, the legendary Boston Globe Reporter, in a self-effacing way, even as he emphasized “She is one of the most widely sought authorities on city planning in the country and is the only woman regularly elected to the American City Planning Institute.”

Despite her roadway planning, she was no single-minded highway champion, and her opinions mattered to decision makers. In 1935, she quickly ended an idea to widen and straighten the Riverway and Jamaicaway parkways. This would have meant massive tree loss and degradation of the Emerald Necklace. She made it clear that the trees were not the cause of “driving trouble. It’s the driver himself…save the beauty and warn the driver to be careful.”

Like other rare successful women of her time, Herlihy’s competence and expertise would necessarily be offered in an unthreatening manner. “She has retained a feminine charm that has made hundreds of staunch friends for her,” wrote Lyons. “A woman need not be masculine to hold down a man’s job. That is another superstition long ago exploded,” she explained. And in a time with limited options for bright, ambitious women and tightly defined gender roles, she was sanguine about her choice and its cost:
“Well, no one can make a success of two jobs at the same time…Many women are trying to do too much today and are unable to do anything well. It is not fair to expect a woman to be a homemaker and a business woman at the same time. I have not tried to be a homemaker.”
And yet she held homemakers in high regard. When a New York publication asked Mayor Curley to list the top ten women of “greatest achievement,” a list she no doubt would top, she convinced him not to do it, because “everyday mothers of families” equally deserving of honor were not eligible.

Throughout most of her life she lived with her sister‘s family in Everett or her brother’s family in Jamaica Plain. It is curious to us today that such an accomplished woman influential in her times and consequential to our cityscape is now nearly forgotten. Her modesty and endurance is an interesting contrast to her contemporary, William F. Callahan, the master builder of Massachusetts highways. Like Herlihy he also began as a stenographer with big ambitions. His career rose and fell to rise again and he was dogged by controversy and shadows of corruption. He bullied through by his will and stubbornness. She was equally ambitious in her own way but she didn’t dominate headlines. Her thoughts were several paragraphs in, but generally the most considered and reasoned. His name lives on in concrete; hers is found in footnotes. Perhaps it’s because for her the joy was in the doing and not the recognition. “When one is absorbed in one’s work, it is not hard” she simply explained.

By late 1962, William F. “Big Bill” Callahan was in a rush to finally build the Boston Extension of the Massachusetts Turnpike — and he was ready to move the Charles River, or a good portion of it, to do it. There were few obstacles, natural or political that could contain his ambition. “When we start we go. We don’t waste time.” He’d already moved the Sudbury River when it proved convenient for his plans, and the Charles would be no different.
Callahan had been trying to build the turnpike to Boston since its inception in 1953. When opposition from Waltham and Watertown proved overwhelming, he dropped a planned eastern terminus outside of Watertown Square, retreating back to Route 128 in Weston. This was no rout but merely a temporary fallback. He was determined that his road would continue east to meet the new Central Artery, and he fought a concerted battle particularly from 1960 on to make it happen.
Even at 71, Callahan, the “Maharajah of Macadam,” was one of the most powerful men in Massachusetts politics — although he never held or sought elected office. The shoemaker’s son from Stoughton, the once ambitious young stenographer, was now driving the highway policy of the state. One critical legislator dubbed him the “Fourth Branch of State Government.” And Callahan was often likened to his contemporary Robert Moses the storied New York powerbroker.
“The nearest thing Massachusetts has to the dedicated, ruthless, unrelenting drive of New York’s Commissioner of Parks Bob Moses is Bill Callahan.”
Norton E. Long, Visiting Professor of Political Science, Harvard University
As a Democrat, Callahan had twice served as the Commissioner of Public Works. He was removed in 1939 under accusations of scandal by the incoming Republican Governor, Leverett Saltonstall. He returned triumphant in 1949 under Governor Paul Dever to oversee the “Accelerated Highway Program” of the early 1950s, a program most remembered for the “Northern Circumferential Highway,” Route 128. He learned, like Moses, to build and consolidate his power base and insulate himself from his opponents through a nearly autonomous agency, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority (MTA), virtually created for him in 1952.
Also like Moses, Callahan augmented his power by becoming Chairman of the Massachusetts Parking Authority and the State Office Building Commission and serving on the Mystic River Bridge Commission. As Chairman of the MTA, he oversaw construction of the largest highway project undertaken in Massachusetts to date, a toll road from the New York State line to the new Route 128 in Weston, a road he’d built just a few years earlier. Simultaneously, he built a new tunnel under Boston Harbor which he named for his only son, a World War II casualty.
Callahan worked with teams of professionals, including financiers and in-house and consulting engineers, but he always promoted himself as the man in charge, calling the shots. His admirers believed his self-burnished persona and promoted him as the “man of action.” “Let Callahan do it” read the headline in 1934 when he first joined the Public Works Commission after building his reputation in marine engineering; tough, public projects needed “a man like Callahan,” “the greatest builder of public projects in the state’s history.” He was personally formidable as well. He had survived a laryngectomy ten years earlier and arduously learned “diaphragmatic speech.” He used the disability to his advantage in his often-repeated joke, “In 1952 I had my throat cut – by a doctor. I’ve had it cut in many other ways, in many times since.” When in 1963 an intruder disguised as a Catholic priest invaded his Waban home and pistol-whipped him, Callahan shook that off as well. His critics thought him fast and loose. Fast wasn’t the problem but loose was.
“He gets things done but…he is convinced that the end is more important than the means and …will exploit all devices to get what [he] want[s].” Elliot S. Richardson, U.S. Attorney
“He has bought power over investment houses, bankers and insurance companies and he has bought it with public money.” Senator Phillip A. Graham
Callahan was a master power broker and political operator with deep support in the legislature, which he cultivated through financial and political favors. He was also reputed to be a prodigious political fund-raiser. He boasted that he’d never lost a legislative vote regardless of the party in the majority. His MTA, as created by 1952 legislation, was virtually autonomous, accountable to no other state entity — not even the Auditor. As Commissioner, Callahan could negotiate contracts directly, unburdened by competitive bidding. Only the DPW held any oversight, and that was to approve the location of the turnpike. The always savvy Callahan stayed on as DPW Commissioner until the Public Works Commission which he chaired, approved his proposed route, a highway lay-out developed largely in secrecy. If he could sell the bonds, he could build it and apparently no one and nothing could constrain him.
Even as what Callahan would call the “initial pike” was still under construction in 1955, a compliant legislature changed one word in the original legislation to permit him to continue the highway into Boston. He was seemingly at his peak, but the limits of his power were at last showing and there were efforts to restrain him. He’d stepped down from the Parking Authority, reportedly voluntarily, and he was  forced to resign from the State Office Building Commission on reaching mandatory retirement age. (the subsequent building would be named for his one-time political nemesis, Leverett Saltonstall.) Still he managed to block the creation of a regional planning agency for several years for fear of interference, until he got the road he wanted.
Before the 1960 gubernatorial election, Democratic Governor Foster Furcolo pushed through Callahan’s reappointment as Chairman of the MTA months ahead of the expiration date, and in advance of the Republican John A. Volpe’s election as Governor. Volpe was well-liked and respected; he was one of the rare Republicans to survive the Kennedy Democratic wave of 1960. His election was a challenge for Callahan and his Boston Extension plan when Volpe committed himself to a competing freeway in his inaugural address. The two would spar over their road schemes for the next two years.
Volpe had succeeded Callahan as DPW Commissioner in 1953 and often leavened his measured criticism of Callahan with muted praise. In 1958, a politically ambitious Volpe criticized Callahan for his inaction on the proposed Turnpike Extension, even though the 1958 Recession had stymied any bond sales. Taking aim at the vanity of a man who boasted that he didn’t “waste time,” Volpe again lambasted Callahan in 1960 for making no progress since the 1955 legislative green light.
Volpe’s criticism was both political and targeted to promote his own competing road scheme, the “Western Expressway”. Since 1956, it was understood that Callahan wanted to continue the Pike into Boston along the right-of-way of the Boston & Albany Railroad (B&A), now controlled by the struggling New York Central Railroad. The B&A had been eyed as a highway location at least since 1930, when the “Boston Thoroughfare Plan” debuted. But in 1948, the DPW, the State Planning Board, and the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), under Republican Governor Robert F. Bradford collaborated on a new “Metropolitan Highway Plan,” which proposed a comprehensive ring of radial highways from the city to the suburbs. Unlike the 1930 Boston Thoroughfare delimited by the city line, the more ambitious 1948 plan proposed a new “Western Expressway,” largely paralleling the Charles River and terminating near the Boston University Bridge at an Inner Belt, a ring road arcing from Roxbury to Somerville. But just as the 1930 plan hadn’t anticipated or ignored the prospect of the Worcester Turnpike “Super Highway” of that same year, the authors of the 1948 plan didn’t foresee of the Massachusetts Turnpike of 1952 or expect the return of the formidable Bill Callahan. The “Metropolitan Highway Plan” might be the putative highway policy of the Commonwealth but the master builder had his own plans.1930 Plan1948 Plan
Supporters of a toll-free expressway, including Volpe, argued that it could be built with 90% federal reimbursement and that Pike extension would only worsen traffic in the center of the city. Callahan countered that he could deliver a roadway in two years, while the rate of federal funding would mean years of delay in constructing the Western Expressway and Inner Belt. He also knew he had the support and independence to build his road. His only notable opposition came from the City of Newton led by Volpe allies Mayor Howard Whitmore and his successor Donald Gibbs. Callahan characterized the opposition from wealthy suburbs as “smug selfishness.”
Callahan’s plans were boosted in 1959 when the Department of Public Utilities, dominated by three Furcolo appointments, approved the B&A’s petition to drop statewide train service from 30 trains daily to 4 freeing up his preferred location. Complicating matters but again adding to Callahan’s advantage — was the Prudential Insurance Company’s massive redevelopment plan for the B&A railyard in Back Bay. In one a failed strategy, Callahan sought legislation that would permit the MTA to acquire the railyard site, construct and operate the three levels of the garage, and lease out air rights to the insurance company. Prudential would commit to buying a portion of the turnpike bonds. The state Supreme Court however killed this idea, and the race was on between Volpe and Callahan.
Volpe requested that the Interstate Commerce Commission delay approval of B&A’s plan to drop service; Callahan’s longtime ally, state Attorney General Edward J. McCormack, deemed the Western “Freeway” “unconstitutional” because the Turnpike Authority had an exclusive right by legislation to build the Extension. When Volpe tried to test this opinion before the Supreme Judicial Court, Callahan pressured the Executive Council, the bane of every Governor, to block the request.
This was a battle that Volpe couldn’t win. The urgency of the Prudential project to lift a depressed city was compelling and no one wanted to block it through confusion or delay. Callahan’s influence in the legislature was also too great; Volpe would never get the necessary funds and his Western Expressway had a critical flaw. It required the Inner Belt which was hugely unpopular in Cambridge and Somerville. Callahan argued persuasively that the Inner Belt and Western Freeway would be hugely expensive and starve needed highway projects across the state. But in an ironic parallel, Callahan’s only real obstacle too was financial as well. If the cross-state turnpike had been the most expensive road project to date, the cost of the Boston Extension would dwarf it with a per-mile cost four times greater than that of comparable roads. The original turnpike ran a deficit for its first eighteen months of operation, and financiers were increasingly skeptical of turnpike bond issues as reliable investments. Academics at Harvard and MIT deemed the road and its financing plans financially unworkable. Indeed, just as Callahan awarded construction contracts to three firms, the first attempt at a bond issue, for $175,000,000, failed to sell out in April of 1961. A second bond issue of $183,000,000 in June failed as well. In a surprise October announcement, Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters Union announced that he had put together a syndicate of labor unions that would buy a portion of the Extension bonds for their pension funds. The Teamsters represented Turnpike workers but in the background, the AFL-CIO was attempting to take over representation of the turnpike workers, with Callahan unsurprisingly backing Hoffa in the fight.
At last in January 1962, the third $180,000,000 bond issue was proclaimed a success — which was only technically true. It would take several more months for the underwriters to resell the bonds. To celebrate the long delayed start, Big Bill inaugurated construction on March 5th and with his usual bravado personally set off the first blast of dynamite at Weston end of the project.
Time and money and perhaps his secretly failing health – he’d undergone surgery the previous year – were now the dynamic factors for Callahan.. He must build within the terms of his bonds and there were no contingencies in his budget. Thus he began looking to shave costs and they found what appeared to be easy savings in Allston where the Extension must wedge between Commonwealth Avenue and Soldiers Field Road within the narrow railroad right-of-way. He needed to maintain two railroad tracks preserving the minimal remaining commuter rail service but that required a viaduct with an ICC mandated clearance of 18 feet over the tracks. Better, he decided, to eliminate the expensive structure and lay his new road over the adjoining stretch of Soldiers Field Road which would be pushed out into the neighboring Charles River by filling eight acres with the effect of twelve lanes of traffic across the two roadways, along with necessary medians and barrier, all between the rail tracks and a shockingly narrowed river channel. For good measure, he could save disposal costs by using stone blasted away in Newton as the fill. Narrowing the river’s width from 500 feet to 320 feet was no issue for the Chairman. Still, the threat of flooding caused by reducing the river was something Callahan would not be able to ignore.
Callahan often boasted of the beauty of his roads; he likened Route 128 to Connecticut’s storied Merritt Turnpike but he was no environmentalist. His plan was”… the best and cheapest way to [do} it.” As for filling the Charles River, he wondered, who would want to “save eight acres of a polluted, muddy river bottom?” But the Charles River would in fact swamp his plans for a time. He had dismissed Republican opponents handily. He’d swept powerful politicians like Governor Volpe and Senator Howard Whitmore out of his path. Republican Mayor Gibbs of Newton was no obstacle. Gibbs managed to gain some modest concessions through an appeal to the Interstate Commerce Commission but those concessions were mostly face-saving items – Callahan had his road across Newton exactly where he wanted it. It would be a fellow Democrat and sometimes ally who would ultimately check Callahan’s overreach.
It’s hard to conceive now, over half a century later, the kind of autonomy that Callahan’s Turnpike Authority enjoyed. “Neither clapping nor tears will move this authority,” pronounced Associate Commissioner Grout at one public hearing. There was a near total lack of oversight over its activities and plans and absolutely no environmental stewardship. NEPA, MEPA, EPA, DEP, 4F, ACHP, SHPO- the alphabet soup of environmental regulators we rely on today – none existed in Callahan’s day. Negotiations occurred out of the public view among the most powerful political and financial figures of the day — all men — in a complicated game in which Callahan usually held the advantage.
Two years earlier in October 1960, and just weeks before the gubernatorial election, Governor Furcolo reluctantly appointed Lieutenant Governor Robert F. Murphy as the MDC Commissioner in response to a scandal at the agency. Reluctantly, because Murphy was a political rival and the MDC Commissioner was a powerful position, overripe with opportunities to grant political favors through its important responsibilities overseeing the water supply and sewage collection systems for the metropolitan area, tens of thousands of acres of regional parks around Boston, skating rinks, pools, beaches, a police force (whose policing responsibilities included the Central Artery and over 150 miles of key regional roadways), hundreds of thousands of acres of watershed land in the center of the state; and numerous flood control facilities, none more significant than the Charles River itself. Aerial view not to scale
Murphy was alarmed by the flooding risk potential of Callahan’s scheme and dismissed it as “an eleventh-hour effort to cut construction costs…” The construction of Storrow Drive several years earlier had filled sixty-four acres of river, and a study by the Charles B. Maguire engineering firm warned that the river’s flood storage capacity was now at a critical level. If the locks couldn’t be opened during a large storm, due to a high tide or storm surge or both, there was no way to draw down the flood-swollen river basin. (That capability wouldn’t be added to the system until the construction of the new Gridley Dam and Pumping Station opposite the Museum of Science nearly twenty years later.) In a compromise and to avoid the need for filling, Murphy suggested that Soldiers Field Road be relocated over the river on pilings, as MDC had done just a few years earlier in 1958 with the Cambridge Parkway Extension beside the Longfellow Bridge. Callahan dismissed the flood risk and objected to the cost of Murphy’s solution. The Army Corps of Engineers, the sole regulatory authority over the project, agreed that the river could be filled with the condition that a commensurate area be dredged in compensation. Callahan proposed to excavate the necessary amount and even fifty percent more on the Cambridge side, essentially moving the Charles for three-quarters of a mile, and for good measure straightening out a bend in the river. What loss was Magazine Beach, MTA representatives asked? The beach was abandoned to pollution and now was only used as free parking for Boston University students! Alarmed Cambridge forces organized to protect Magazine Beach and a contemptuous Callahan pledged that he would “not touch a single weed or tin can on the play fields of Magazine Beach.”
To win over Murphy, in June 1962, Callahan finally settled an MDC lands claim from years earlier and conceded a design modification in the planned turnpike bridge over the Muddy River that would save the MDC $400,000 on its Charlesgate bridge – today’s Bowker Overpass. But Murphy did not relent. By December 1962, with the roadway construction to the west well underway and negotiations over the river deadlocked, the MTA took the unprecedented step of attempting to seize the disputed river acreage by eminent domain. Callahan boldly (and preposterously) announced the contractor would be at work in the area within two weeks.
Murphy succinctly observed:We are a state agency; they are a state agency. The state cannot take land from itself.”Murphy’s attorney, Harvey E. Weir, was sworn in as a special assistant to Attorney General McCormack to procure a temporary injunction, and he called out the cops, directing the MDC to block any work in the disputed area. Callahan, bluffing or perhaps convinced that he would win the fight with Murphy as he had with others, continued engineering and design on his plan. In February, MDC police chased Turnpike Authority surveyors off the frozen river, purportedly for safety reasons. Legislators, beholden to both men, chose to sit out the battle, eliminating one of Callahan’s familiar options.
Time also worked to Murphy’s advantage. The Authority was reportedly paying $22,000 a day in interest, so a significant delay would be expensive — and of course the construction contracts included penalties for delays as well. Callahan bluffed that if he was denied the river, he would shift the road to the south, taking millions of dollars of taxable properties along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston and Brookline. In reality, he had no reasonable options for relocating the extension, because he couldn’t afford anything else financially or politically. He was anchored by his massive Allston interchange and the freight and tandem-trailer yard on one end and the constraints of the BU Bridge area on the eastern side, where construction work had already begun.
At last on June 20, 1963, after six months of dispute, the state Supreme Court appeared to resolve the issue by finding that the Turnpike Authority lacked the authority to take the river acreage, but Callahan wouldn’t yield until the following September when he announced a plan for a 3000-foot viaduct, from the Allston intersection to just west of the BU Bridge, to carry the Extension over the railroad tracks. Callahan had been bested by a surprising adversary he couldn’t overcome, — a neglected river abetted by its champion in Murphy.
Callahan wouldn’t live to see the completion of the Extension in 1965. He died on April 20, 1964, just months afterwards the first segment of the road from Weston to Brighton was opened on September 3rd. There would be no dynamite this time, the subdued ceremonies were a muted celebration of the road’s opening and a commemoration of Callahan himself. At the unveiling of a plaque in his honor, the rarely concise Richard Cardinal Cushing, in a bit of uncharacteristic understatement, commented, “I doubt if this could have been built without him.” Newton Mayor Donald Gibbs was present and peevishly commented, “What does one say who fought the road for five years?” Years earlier he asked, “Why should we be forced to pay tribute to one man named Callahan?” Now they were memorializing him in bronze.
The dynamite this time would be the explosive announcement by Callahan’s successor, John T. Driscoll, that the Extension had cost $35,000,000 more than projected. The Allston viaduct wasn’t the only factor in the increase. In his customary “build fast” improvisational style, Callahan hadn’t anticipated the special construction precautions through the Copley Square portion of the project necessary to protect the likes of Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library. Another casualty of the budget and the rush to build was the promised lush parks, complete with sparkling fountains, proposed for the unsightly cleared parcels, the site of today’s Copley Place. One thing did more than meet the promises, the 90,000 vehicles expected to use the Extension daily which in fact was easily exceeded. Despite Callahan’s assurances and confidence, the traffic chaos at the Extension’s intersection with the Central Artery predicted by the critics also ensued. Forty years later the massive Central Artery project, whose notorious costs far surpassed the record-breaking cost of the Extension, would attempt to remedy it.

Waiting out multiple traffic light cycles in an endless queue at Eliot Street in Newton, or weaving through the mad traffic along the once heralded “Miracle Mile” of Natick and Framingham, you might find it ridiculous to imagine that the Worcester Turnpike (Route 9) was once hailed at the Finest Motor Road in the World — or even more incredibly, America’s first “Super Highway.” And yet, at the time of its construction and for several years afterward, it was the most sophisticated and technically advanced roadway of the day. It introduced many of the characteristics of the expressway that we take for granted, and it wouldn’t be equaled for nearly a decade. It initiated a new era of highway development that changed everything — construction techniques, policy, the road bureaucracy, and means of funding. Moreover, it inspired a wholesale rearrangement of the landscape of the state and its communities to create a new style of living — the expansive suburbanism of today. The comprehensive bureaucracy to plan, build, and oversee a statewide network of advanced highways would emerge with construction of the Worcester Turnpike.
But first let’s answer the question of what to call it. Is it the Worcester Turnpike or Route 9? In this piece we are talking about the Turnpike and not the cross-state Route 9 which it also generated. In the simplest terms, roads have names and routes have numbers. But more specifically, routes are itineraries that direct drivers — often over numerous roads. In the early years of motoring, recreational enthusiasts and automobile clubs began identifying and marking routes as wayfinding tools for intrepid new drivers, routes sometimes identified by names, symbols, colors or numbers. Before then, few people had reason to explore the roads beyond their own neighborhoods, relying instead on railroads and streetcar lines for travel of any distance. With the adoption of cars guidebooks proliferated, filled with routes and lists of critical facilities like garages and hotels and inns.
Road construction and maintenance was scattershot but generally the responsibility of local communities, with counties often providing regional connections. Roads were usually better in cities and more established towns, but there was often no coordination beyond municipal boundaries. In 1922, the New England states adopted a cooperative system of route marking which is still largely in use today. This was complemented in 1927 by the “voluntary” network of so-called interstate routes identified by the U.S. shield. Under this new program, the principal east-west route across Massachusetts was designated U.S. 20. Still today it runs from Kenmore Square in Boston across the nation to Newport, Oregon. In Massachusetts, it passes through Worcester, Springfield, and Pittsfield, and from Boston to Worcester, it largely follows the historic Boston Post Road, an artifact of the 18th century, running through intervening town centers. It was perhaps a charming and practical drive in the early auto days but less efficient for distance travel with each passing year.
Cars made a huge contribution to the fabled roar of the 1920s. The number of vehicle registrations tripled over the decade, and with this explosion in autos and driving came new developments, in roadway engineering, regulation and as well as driver education. Accompanying these new developments were , along with increased expectations and the inevitable impatience for speed. Virtually everything we understand about driving now had to be developed in this brief time. 1920 arrived with no official highway network, standard signage, traffic lanes, or signals. Even the most basic traffic regulations were lacking, and chaos ruled the rudimentary roads. Yet by the end of the decade, most of these necessities were in place as the automobile assumed a central role in modern life.
By the ‘20s, bustling Worcester was the brash and wealthy “second city” of Massachusetts, and city leaders were demanding a more direct and express route to Boston to bypass the intermediate town centers clogged with local auto traffic and trolleys, trucks, and pedestrians. The need was clear: the Boston Post Road carried the highest traffic of any state highway. What Worcester Mayor O’Hara, neighboring towns, and the influential Bancroft Auto Club wanted was unprecedented: “a super type of roadway with two traffic lanes elevated at the intersecting streets.” It was a dream of a road type that did not yet exist, the “super highway.” What’s more, the resources, financial and legal, necessary to build it didn’t exist either, at least not yet.
Massachusetts was an early leader in traffic engineering theory if not always practice, aided by resources like the Erskine Bureau for Street Traffic at Harvard University. The state established a state highway commission in 1893, the second in the nation, following New Jersey’s lead. But progress in road improvement was hampered by the Commonwealth’s notorious parochialism and local resistance to state leadership. There was also a lack of significant financial resources dedicated to roads, and a conservative mentality among the state’s engineers that favored piecemeal development connecting existing centers over large schemes. Henry Ford’s privately funded $200,000 bypass skirting the historic Wayside Inn in Sudbury was one of the few new ideas outside of Metropolitan Boston. A so-called “Good Government” reorganization of the state created a Public Works Division in 1920, and in 1925 the legislature created a “highway fund” drawn from fines, fees, and local maintenance assessments. Still, the Republican-dominated state government was averse to debt and refused to issue bonds for roadway construction, insisting instead on a “pay-as-you-go” policy. Funds were so limited that new construction was constrained to no more than ten miles per county per year. As one Worcester booster wryly noted, at that rate it would take ten years to finance their grand scheme of a new road.
But from calamity comes opportunity. Worcester’s scheme got a providential boost with the petition by the Boston, Worcester Street Railway Company on January 28, 1927 to drop service to Boston. The streetcars largely followed the old Worcester Turnpike, a nearly forgotten relic of the turnpike enthusiasm of the first decade of the 19th century. The Turnpike had been chartered and laid out in 1807 as a private toll road, and like other turnpikes of the era, it followed the straightest, most direct route and deliberately avoided town centers. It was dissolved in 1841 in the face of insurmountable competition from the faster railroad, foreshadowing the streetcar’s future demise in the face of automobiles. The very next day, Franklin T. Miller, the receiver of the streetcar company, petitioned the legislature for a resolve to study a new state highway on the Turnpike route. The proposal of course would also include “compensation” to the company. (The compensation issue would inevitably spark contentious partisan politics.) It would take another two years, replacement of a reluctant Highway Commissioner, and the eventual establishment of a gasoline tax (a measure in which Massachusetts lagged 44 other states) before the Worcester super highway dream would come to life. But the ultimate factor in favor of the road was an even greater calamity, the great stock market crash of October 29, 1929 and subsequent Great Depression, and the desperate need to create “material relief to the unemployment situation.”
1930 was an election year, and the Democrat Joseph B. Ely successfully challenged the Republican incumbent’s poor record of highway construction. Ely’s inaugural address signaled a momentous departure from “pay-as-you-go” and called for a $20,000,000 bond issue for public works, including finishing the Turnpike. Adding to the urgency was $80,000,000 nationwide in Federal aid to be spent by September; Massachusetts was determined to get its share. Ely eventually won nearly $13,000,000 in short-term notes and an increase in the gas tax from the Republican legislature. With these state funds and Federal aid, he pursued an ambitious “super-highway” program across the state. Grander in scope than the Worcester road, the program also included a new turnpike to Providence, the Southern Circumferential Highway to the south of Boston, and a new bypass around Worcester, the Southwest Cut-Off – a portion of the multi-state trunk road between New York City and Boston. But first, and unsurpassed in scale, engineering sophistication, and controversy, would be the Worcester Turnpike.

.Everything about the Turnpike was exceptional, especially its cost: a staggering $200,000 a mile, or $3,000,000 for the first seventeen-mile leg between Worcester and Southborough, “the most expensive piece of highway building the state has ever undertaken.” The cost was just one of its wonders. The new super highway, straight-arrow and almost without curves, would cut perhaps five miles off the trip between the cities and save twenty or even thirty minutes. Plus it would be the safest road imaginable. With three ten-foot-wide travel lanes, a ten-foot landscaped median to prevent head-on collisions, no grade crossings, and cloverleafs or innovative rotaries to eliminate left hand turns, it was expected to be serenely safe. Remarkably, there was no set speed limit. As one report put it, “Go as fast as you like…within reason” because “As a matter of fact, it’s difficult to see how, with normal conditions, good judgement and fair luck, any bad accident could happen on the Worcester Turnpike.” Reality, as always, differed from theory, and when an early segment was unofficially opened to traffic, it had to be closed again immediately because of excessive driving speeds. When the road was officially opened, neophyte drivers were intoxicated by its novelty, and speeds as high as 85 miles per hour were recorded. Drivers added to the recklessness by wandering wildly across the roadway, contemptuous or uncomprehending of the concept of fixed travel lanes.
“…every known trick of building safety in the roads – and still the motorists mowed down 28 persons last week on the new Worcester Turnpike within the limit of Wellesley alone,” noted one reporter in 1933. This was only mild hyperbole — 28 were indeed injured, but only one death recorded. Driving was inherently dangerous and still a kind of extreme sport, with Sundays seeing the heaviest traffic. By the end of November 1933, there had been 731 fatalities in Massachusetts, and 1934 would bring 953 road deaths, with the total number of vehicles in the state hovering just below 800,000. (By comparison, the number of highway deaths in Massachusetts 80 years later in 2013 was 351, for around 2.4 million vehicles.)
In the face of this rolling disaster, in the early 1934 Registrar of Motor Vehicles Morgan T. Ryan announced a crackdown, “a campaign” which would “severely” penalize “flagrant offenders.” Dorchester-born Ryan was an ambitious young attorney and close associate of Governor Ely when he was appointed Registrar. He introduced several safety measures, including regular auto inspections and mandatory insurance, and he was not slow to suspend the driving licenses of offenders. Among his less successful initiatives was his naive New Year’s resolution for drivers – not effective then and likely not now either:
I resolve that during 1935, I will drive sensibly and courteously with due regard for the rights and safety of others, both motorists and pedestrians.
After one accident, he required President Roosevelt’s son to pass a Massachusetts driving exam, and at different times he suspended the licenses of James Michael Curley’s sons Leo and Paul. Those last actions, along with political rivalries within the Democratic Party, drove the newly elected and vengeful Governor Curley to demand that “Big Bill” Callahan, new Commissioner of Public Works, later known as the “Maharajah of Macadam,” fire Ryan. Curley replaced Ryan with Frank Goodwin as a reward to an erstwhile Republican and ally, himself a former Registrar and, as Sinclair Weeks pegged him, a “stooge” opponent to Curley in the Governor’s race.
If the Turnpike failed to insure safer driving, it did pioneer a number of roadbuilding innovations, some successful and others not so, including portable concrete mixers and a curious system of paving over burlap to theoretically ease future resurfacing. This “burlap road” would be used by the Republican Lieutenant Governor Youngman, possibly at Curley’s behest, to discredit Governor Ely. And as the construction moved eastward towards Boston, the unanimity of Worcester County waned, pockets of opposition arose, and unavoidable compromises followed. The City of Marlborough, afraid of being bypassed by the new road to the south, fought the project. To appease the city, the U.S. Route Number 20 would remain on the Post Road and not be moved to the new superhighway as might logically be expected. The village of Oak Hill in Southborough protested and blocked an underpass, concerned that it would ruin the character of the community. Many other dreaded grade crossings would remain only to be closed up in future safety campaigns. The “super” qualities of the roadway were also compromised as it passed through Framingham Center, where trolley tracks persisted, albeit in a center reservation. While an extensive underpass s pared Wellesley Hills from Turnpike traffic, the stubborn Lally sisters, in one of the more humorous highway-building episodes, fought the state over the value of their house. The state announced it would take the necessary half by eminent domain and the resolute sisters insisted they would remain in the surviving half. More densely settled Brookline rejected the state’s plan of underpasses and overpasses and choose instead a narrower roadway with a novel system of synchronized stop lights—traffic signals were still rare, particularly outside the city center.
Brookline’s opposition was pecuniary rather than aesthetic, since the town was to be responsible for a large portion of the cost of the road, which Chairman of the Board of Selectmen Charles F. Rowley fumed was “…an example of extravagant public expenditure.” “One would assume that every vehicle travelling upon the road was tearing madly between Boston and Worcester …The great majority of the vehicles … are pleasure vehicles… which will in no way be financially affected [by] arriving three or four minutes later at their destination.” Brookline’s plan saved two-thirds of the cost of the state’s proposal. It also didn’t hurt that it would spare the Longwood Cricket Club and the now-defunct Chestnut Hill Golf Club.

More controversy would follow construction, when the roadway between Framingham and Brookline started deteriorating almost immediately. It was suggested that the resulting cratering was caused by calcium chloride de-icing. A $20,000 study by Charles Breed of MIT was commissioned and its results then suppressed for eight years. When the study was finally made public, it revealed that the real problem was construction deficiencies cause by poor oversight and missing and poor quality concrete. The collapse of one approach to the new Huntington Avenue overpass in Boston a week before it was scheduled to open to traffic was also met with great cynicism. There was also  criticism that the road was overbuilt, too large for the traffic it carried although it was never characterized as a ‘White Elephant”  like the Sumner Tunnel that was bleeding tens of thousands of dollars monthly in deficit.
“You know every time a new highway is built, you see hot-dog stands, gasoline filling stations, and dine-and-dance spots popping up overnight,” commented DPW Commissioner in 1938, while speaking on plans for a new super highway between Boston and Lowell, doubtless alluding to the experience of the Worcester Turnpike. Contemporary accounts describe the “decentralization” – which we would recognize as “suburbanization – that immediately followed the opening of the Turnpike. “A modern cry of freedom from cramped house lots and city traffic congestion…” as new subdivisions followed the roadway to Brookline, Newton, Wellesley and beyond. It was a model that would be replicated many times over. The department store Jordan Marsh joined with local builders in producing model homes to demonstrate the advantages of this convenient new dispersed and leafy style of living. Even if unaware of the full implications, the pioneering influence of the Worcester road was immediately apparent to contemporary observers:
“What the Worcester Turnpike has done to boom building from Brookline Village to Framingham in only seven years, the Concord Turnpike is expected to do shortly for the territory that lies between Lexington, Arlington, and Concord.”
In 1948, Jordan Marsh itself would follow the new homeowners along the Turnpike to Framingham and into the first regional shopping center. A year later, competitor Filene’s would build its largest store outside of Boston along the Turnpike in Chestnut Hill. Ironically, the development drawn magnetically to the Turnpike would ultimately destroy its “super” luster, abetted by a flaw in its original conception. The Turnpike was built on an existing right-of-way, so abutting property owners could not be denied reasonable access to the public road. Thus the “express” road eventually turned into a congested boulevard just like the ones left behind in the crowded city. Massachusetts passed a “freeway” bill in 1944 to permit total control of access, facilitating the construction of a new state-wide turnpike in 1954. The free-wheeling Federal highway spending of the following decade would create the network of highways that make the Worcester Turnpike seem almost quaint today. But for better or worse, modern highway system of the 21st Century found its inspiration in “The Finest Motor Road in the World.”

Who was the architect of two of the most sophisticated houses of Lowell’s first half-century? When I came across a credit for the architect of the two houses, I knew I wanted to know more about him.  With some digging, I found an architect of substantial accomplishment in the decades before the Civil War who did much to shape the developing city.  Unfortunately, his bold but unconventional choice to base his practice in Lowell rather than Boston, his birthplace, obscured his legacy. Unfairly James H. Rand is only remembered today, if at all, as the architect of the handsome but much-maligned 1855 Lowell Jail (better known locally today as the former Keith Academy; its second act and coincidentally my high school Alma Mater.) This a revised version of my original 2017 post updated with additional new research.

James Hovey Rand was indisputably Lowell’s first professional architect with a substantial body of work in Lowell, and later Boston and Maine.  Despite his accomplishments and prominence in his day, his memory has largely faded but what does remain in histories and John Coolidge’s work, Mill and Mansion, is unfairly overshadowed by the controversy surrounding his most notable surviving work, the 1855 County Jail. Rand however left a legacy of design and advocacy and a broader and richer volume of work. Ironically, unbeknownst to Coolidge, Rand was the architect of what the architectural historian declared “the handsomest buildings in Lowell…”

The indomitable Kirk Boott, the multi-faceted factotum of the Boston investors who founded Lowell designed many of the city’s first structures, according to John Coolidge in his seminal 1940 book on Lowell architecture, Mill and Mansion. In fact, Boott is the only designer credited by Coolidge who ascribed the Town Hall and Saint Ann’s Church and Boott’s own imposing home to him. But Boott’s primary role in Lowell was as an engineer and business agent for the clique of Boston investors he served. Boott’s work, other than his own house and Saint Ann’s, was founded in utility and economy and informed by his military engineering training. Boott’s Lowell was a provisional, economic experiment or venture, not a full-fledged metropolis. Nonetheless, he was “The Architect of Lowell,” itself, the planner of the city. His choices, engineering, planning and economic, dictated the form and shape of Lowell and its institutions for decades to come.

The enterprising James Hovey Rand overlapped with Boott in Lowell’s second decade. Rand had come to Lowell to pursue a career primarily as an architect. Coolidge has little to say about Rand in “Mill and Mansion.” He is dismissive in his comments on Rand’s best known surviving work, the 1857 design for the Jail. “Clumsy” he fulminates, “The design is a matter of rote. The architect knew all the answers.” Had Coolidge looked more closely at Rand’s design, particularly in the context of other contemporary prisons, he might have recognized that the design was anything but rote. Rand discarded the accepted conventional prison plan of the day, and gave his jail a novel and distinctive profile, impossible to overlook. This ambitious design was an affront that his critics and political enemies would not forgive.

Coolidge is dismissive of Rand as well suggesting “He seems to have been a local person, perhaps a builder who arrogated to himself this more pretentious title [architect]” Coolidge seemed to assume that an architect outside of Boston could not be taken seriously and there were few enough of them.  But Rand “arrogated” nothing; he earned his title through the accepted path in the miniscule architectural fraternity of Boston (The 1848 Boston Directory lists a total of just 21 architects.) The Jail too, seemingly unbeknownst to the historian, was the culmination of a twenty-five-year career in Lowell. 

Coolidge did have restrained if qualified praise, for a grand house that Rand built for himself in 1850 calling it “The most splendid mansion of the Italian style...” His confident opinions are all the more curious because the house was destroyed decades before Coolidge’s writing and Coolidge could only have known it from small image on the margin of an illustrated map of the city prepared in 1851. Splendid perhaps but he goes on to describe it as “a ponderous structure, reflecting in its cubic form some influence from the neighboring Nesmith and Lawrence [(Butler] houses.” Coolidge’s admiration for these two works is unrestrained. “In both houses the details are of purity of form and delicacy of execution unmatched anywhere in Lowell.” He continues, “It is regrettable and significant that these two houses, perhaps the handsomest buildings in Lowell, should stand completely alone. Their designs must have seemed too subtle, too reserved to the average man of the time.  Yet the influence of these two houses on the design of Rand’s own house was not coincidental for Rand was in fact the architect of all three. An 1843 account of Rand’s design for the new Nesmith House revealed as well that Rand’s design was more than “subtle” aesthetics, but technologically advanced as well. It included an early, unprecedented central heating system, just three years after steam heating was introduced into the Merrimack Corporation, along with a four-season conservatory amidst, in the spirit of Andrew Jackson Downing, two acres of gardens containing ‘‘…fruit trees, shrubs and flowers of every variety, [and] an artificial pond …” The house cost a substantial $15,000 and it was expected that Samuel Lawrence’s new house to the east would cost at least as much.

…that which attracts the most attention is the new dwelling house of John Nesmith, Esq., which occupies a fine position on the summit of the hill and commands a view of the entire city and its environs. It is a very beautiful and substantial edifice, the plan of which displays a taste and skill that gives great credit to the Architect, James H. Rand of this city…

Samuel Lawrence himself would occupy his grand home for only few short years. His attention was focused just a year or so after its construction on an even bolder scheme: plans for the new city downriver that would bear his family’s name. In 1848 Lawrence subdivided his Lowell and Tewksbury lands and conducted a great auction, chartering a special train from Boston for bidders and catering a lavish dinner.   Judging by land records, interest lagged but James Rand acquired several parcels with fine views of the falls. Even with a plan for selling out, Lawrence had insured that this seemingly natural untamed stretch of the Merrimack would be protected. The 1845 legislation incorporating the Essex Company specifically addressed the Hunts Falls.

That said dam shall not be built to float the water in said river higher that the foot of Hunt’s Falls, in the ordinary run and amount of the river.

The section continued on to establish a commission which included a representative of the Locks and Canals of Lowell, to determine and set a permanent monument for the foot of Hunts Falls as well as to determine and fix the top of the new dam in Lawrence. When after the dam’s construction, the Hunts Falls were indeed swamped, the top course of the new dam downriver was removed to restore the Falls integrity and beauty.

The influence of Rand’s Hunt’s Falls house radiated beyond Lowell. In 1844, Oliver Hastings, a Cambridge builder and lumber merchant, built himself a substantial house on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, another distinctive example of Regency Greek Revival.  The three houses share remarkably similar massing and architectural detailing.  Hastings and Rand almost certainly would have known one another in the small world of Middlesex County and through the lumber trade.  Lowell, twice the size of Cambridge, was the center of a thriving timber and lumber business. The lumber wharf on the Pawtucket Canal was the depot for the Merrimack River timber runs from up-country and would have brought Hastings to Lowell. In fact, Hastings took a mortgage on a Lowell property owned by two local carpenters in 1843.

James Hovey Rand was born in Boston in 1814, the middle child of Gardner Hammond Rand, a sailmaker and Sally Frothingham; Gardner and Sally were both descended from early settlers of Charlestown. Gardner’s sail loft was in the monumental Charles Bulfinch designed India Wharf perhaps stimulating his son’s affection for architecture. India Wharf was owned by many of the same Boston businessmen who financed Lowell, including Amos Lawrence. Tragedy stalked the young family however, first with the 1815 death of James’s two-year-old, elder brother George of “worm fever,” followed by the death of “dropsy” in August of 1817 of his infant sister Abigail, and finally by the death of his father in Havana in November of that same year. How Gardner came to be in Havana is unknown. Coincidentally, Benjamin F. Butler’s father, a privateer, died on St. Kitts in the West Indies in 1819 a fact which political rivals used to try to shame Butler in the 1850s when the political and personal bonds between Rand and Butler were strongest.

Following Gardner Rand’s death, James’s mother married another sailmaker, William Scott, in 1819 but young Rand did not follow his father or stepfather into sail making but entered an apprenticeship as a housewright, serving his apprenticeship in Boston. He arrived in a booming Lowell in 1832, just after his journeyman years. An apprenticeship as a housewright in Boston was the conventional method for young men to enter the nascent profession; a housewright society supported its members with a substantial architectural library and other forms of enrichment. During Rand’s apprenticeship, for example, the architect Solomon Willard, best known for the Bunker Hill Monument, offered lectures to aspiring students. Nearly all of Boston’s architects and Rand’s peers entered the profession by this path. Where he parted from the conventional, was with his decision to establish his career in Lowell¹, rather than among the small fraternity of Boston based architects.

The developing town of Lowell was the only urban place of any significance in Massachusetts outside of Boston and the ambitious eighteen-year-old must have sensed opportunities in the rapidly developing industrial center. Lowell was a phenomenon; there was nothing quite like it and it drew in the best engineering minds and the most ambitious of the day.  Lowell is best known for the young women drawn to work in the mills but Rand was representative of another important migration of young New England men, mostly from upcountry New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, all seeking financial success and opportunities to develop as tradesmen and mechanics.

Soon after arriving in Lowell, Rand joined fellow house wright Cyrus Frost as the junior partner in “Frost & Rand” located on the Lumber Wharf on the Pawtucket Canal.  It was a short-lived enterprise. The pair contracted to erect a house on South Street for Cyril Coburn a lumber dealer and sometimes carpenter. All three were boarders at the widow Catherine Parker’s place on Appleton Street. Coburn had recently married Parker’s daughter Harriet. Coburn would go on to be a real estate investor and speculator; Coburn would later buy and quickly resell the prominent Merrimack House, the city’s principal hotel, in the great Locks and Canals land sell-off of 1845. Coburn and Rand would engage again in a few years in a business transaction with the Samuel Lawrence estate.

Still, Lowell was a risky choice for an aspiring architect. The profession was firmly centered in Boston. Being removed from the counting houses of State Street and the nabobs of Pemberton Square could be a disadvantage but throughout his career, Rand has business relationships with members of the Lawrence family, whose interest in Lowell coincided with the architect’s own arrival. Nonetheless to succeed would require entrepreneurship in multiple ventures and the ambitious twenty-year old started a sash and blind business as the junior partner with another housewright William Field. The exacting, detailed joinery required to craft window sash and blinds requires a high degree of skill. Rand bought the local patent rights to a new machine to simplify the manufacturing. He soon landed a contract for 2000 window blinds for the corporation boarding houses.  Nonetheless, despite his many future ventures, his primary professional identification was as an “architect” as he declared his 1835 on the record of his marriage to Laurinda Moore, a dressmaker and the daughter of a farmer from Bolton in Worcester County.

His ascent in Lowell was swift. By 1836 young Rand, was running his sashworks alone and was sufficiently successful to hire house wright Joseph Buswell to build his modest first house on the corner of Fayette Street and Andover Street, the first of four houses he would build for himself, showcasing his talent and each more impressive than the last. Just five years later, 1841 he built himself a second, more substantial house on the corner of Andover Street and Harrison Street. His house may have been on the slope and not the crest, but it was in the same neighborhood as the influential and wealthy Nesmith brothers. In just two years, he would build that distinguished house for John Nesmith. This 1841 house is the only one of Rand’s four personal homes in Lowell to survive.

In 1844, following the celebrated success of the Nesmith and Lawrence houses, Rand confidently advertised his services as a design architect as well as his availability to supervise the construction of others. He’s clearly successful. An 1845 news account boasts he has offers for designs of 20 houses and it’s at this time that, he brings in Isaac Place as junior partner in the sashworks, freeing Rand to focus more on his architectural practice and his growing business interests.

Beyond simply designing their houses during the 1840s, Rand had numerous business dealings with both John Nesmith and Samuel Lawrence; it’s reasonable to assume that he produced more designs for both. Rand is the likely architect of Nesmith’s “New Block” of 1852 an Italianate style commercial building that wrapped from Merrimack Street to John Street around an earlier corner block. The Merrimack Street side has been much altered over time and split into two halves, but the John Street elevation is largely intact. It’s also possible that Rand made designs for Samuel Lawrence in his new city.  Rand himself did buy one lot there on speculation.  Rand designed a double house on Kirk Street for the agents of  Boott Mills and the Massachusetts Mills (known more commonly as the Linus Child House.) This is perhaps not the only work he prepared for the corporations. City records indicate that during this period he designed schoolhouses and engine houses for the city along with one of the many remodeling’s of the original Kirk Boot designed Town Hall.  Rand was also building modest houses on speculation including a surviving trio on Harrison Street.  He was the proprietor the Mechanics Mills on Warren Street which he sold to Samuel Lawrence for expansion of the Middlesex woolen mills.  He relocated the Mechanics Mills and his sashworks to Western Avenue, just beyond the Northern Depot.

1850 and the following decade are pivotal for Rand. In that year, he built his third house further up the slope on Andover Street, the grand Italian Villa styled house that inspired Coolidge’s measured praise. It sat proudly between its neighbors, John Nesmith’s house and the Lawrence House, now owned by Benjamin Butler. Rand’s house was destroyed in a spectacular fire 1894.  There are only two know images of it, both dating from 1850.  In a testimony to its prestige, the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, the most powerful of the corporations, acquired it in 1860 as a house for their Agent, perhaps the most influential figure in the city².

1850 was also the year that James C. Sidney, the noted Philadelphia cartographer, civil engineer and architect, along with partner James Neff, published their exceptional, illustrated map of Lowell. Sidney and Neff made a number of city maps but the Lowell example is the most distinctive. Sidney was the original designer of Philadelphia’s celebrated Fairmount Park. Rand’s house was one of the principal buildings that illuminated the map’s margins. Sidney must have been significantly impressed because he not only included it on the map but also as an example in his, American Cottage & Villa Architecture, A series of Plans and Views of RESIDENCES ACTUALLY BUILT. Intended as models for those about to build, as well as Architects, Builders, etc. It was published that same year as a subscription series. Unfortunately, there is no existing floor plan but the perspective view better demonstrates the architectural finesse that Coolidge admired and showcased Rand’s talent to a wider audience beyond Lowell. Coincidentally, the only other Boston area work illustrated was the Abbott Lawrence House in Brookline designed by Richard Bond of Roxbury.

Rand must also have had a large hand in the Sidney & Neff map and may have selected and produced the marginal illustrations.  The handsome map is peculiar because while it illustrates the major corporations, absent are typical local landmarks, such as churches, schools and commercial blocks found on the other Sydney and Neff works. In truth, there were few landmarks beyond the millyards to showcase. Among the substantial mansion houses, are three coincidentally designed by Rand. It’s quite possible that Rand designed more if not all of the houses illustrated such as the Fletcher House and Moody House which share stylistic elements of his known works.

Rand’s on-going business dealings with Samuel Lawrence are hinted at in their many real estate transactions and particularly the 1844 house on Andover Street. The Lawrence House would go on to have a significant history following Samuel’s brief residency when it became the residence of General Benjamin F. Butler³. 

Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Rand’s entrepreneurial ventures grew. He was an incorporator of the Appleton Bank as well as the architect and part owner of the bank’s business block. The bank block was unexceptional and typical of other contemporary commercial and civic properties found around the city, simple, single gabled brick blocks with minimal architectural relief beyond a whisper of Greek Revival styling. It’s not that Rand wasn’t capable of more imaginative design; his work demonstrated his expertise and knowledge of current fashions, but in workaday Lowell, unnecessary ornamentation or novel design was ostentatious and superfluous excess. Lowell still had a provisional character; it was a place to make money, not display.  Its largely transient population was ready to depart for new opportunities. As Cowley would comment, various in origin, heterogeneous in character, thrown together by chance, constantly distributing itself hither and thither, with nothing about it permanent except its changeability, – is, and always has been, grossly wanting in the municipal spirit…  This same lack of attachment and a parsimonious attitude carried over to the Whig dominated city government and its spare facilities. 

 In 1851 Rand was again an incorporator of another bank, the Prescott Bank on Central Street housed in the singularly ornate and picturesque Italianate style and it stood out among its staid neighbors. The bank block also housed the Traders and Mechanics Insurance Company of which Rand was a founding director along with Rand’s architecture office. Unquestionably, a more cosmopolitan Rand was the designer, and he was transitioning to more romantic designs even if Lowell resisted. During this time, it’s known that Rand designed Lee Street Unitarian Church (the older portion of Saint Joseph’s the Worker Chapel) a rustic stone and brick Romanesque chapel. The Lee Street work bears a striking resemblance and shares many architectural features with the contemporaneous, now demolished “Grist Mill” the romantic styled hydraulics laboratory of James B. Francis of the Locks and Canals Company although that structure was designed by Edward C. Cabot of Boston, architect of the shaky Huntington Hall.

I arrived in Liverpool the 23d of March, after a fine passage of eleven days and a half, making the run to Halifax in 26 hours and reaching Liverpool in 26 hours after touching the Irish coast.

 Rand travelled in the company of several Lowell notables, including John Avery, the Agent of the Hamilton Mills, George Carleton of Carleton and Hovey, leading druggists along with the chemist, Adolphis Schlieper among others. In London, he settled in at the celebrated London Coffee House in Ludgate Hill, in the shadow of Christopher Wren’s Saint Paul’s Cathedral. The London Coffee House was a favorite of visiting Americans beginning at least with Benjamin Franklin. Rand was, as the British say, gobsmacked by what he encountered.  Astonished, he reported back to the readers of the Lowell Daily Advertiser, I have been here, in London, two weeks and have made up my mind that London cannot be seen in that time. And still he reported that he’d been to the opera and five theaters over the fortnight.

If a more cultured and cosmopolitan Rand returned from his travels with an invigorated imagination, Lowell would only disappoint him.  In 1852, the City of Lowell finally addressed the problem of the inadequate, too small City Hall still housed in the frequently renovated former Town Hall. The solution was novel enough: Build a shared structure with a larger city hall, a huge meeting space, atop a new depot for the Boston & Lowell Railroad. The existing City Hall building would be renovated for office uses exclusively. When the inevitable confusion ensued between the new city hall and the old Hall building, the new hall was named Huntington Hall for a former mayor. A second smaller hall was named Jackson Hall, for Patrick Jackson, the engineer, a founder of Lowell.  The Whig bosses made clear that it was most definitely not named for Andrew Jackson.  Like the disfavored Jackson, Rand was a Democrat along with Ben Butler.  However, if the Democrats were the minority party in Lowell city, they were the majority in firm charge of Middlesex County. Rand was generally respected in both camps at least for his professional skills, but the increasing political crises of the 1850s impacted him personally.

The commission for the design of the hall and depot went to Edward C. Cabot, a fashionable young Boston architect and favorite of the Boston Brahmins. He was well connected to the Boston elite and had won acclaim for his design for the Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Street. The construction was supervised by Samuel K. Hutchinson, another Whig and a Lowell based superintendent for mill construction around the state, notably Holyoke. Hutchinson had also overseen the construction of the now forgotten Gridley Bryant designed addition to the Massachusetts State House, itself the subject of another political tug-of-war.

Cabot’s design for the hybrid hall and depot was a lumbering structure in a sort of Romanesque style then referred to as “Norman.” It lacked the elegance and stature of his Athenaeum. The finished building would be plagued with structural problems and functional inadequacies throughout its life until its destruction by fire in 1904.  One terrifying and near tragic instance of its deficiencies occurred shortly after its construction. On the night of October 27, 1856, the hall was packed with a crowd of 3,000, an overflowing and enthusiastic Democratic rally assembled to hear the celebrated Rufus Choate speak.  Over the stomping and cheering of the spirited throng “a jar” was heard “like the report of a canon” followed by panicked cries of “the floor is sinking!” and then ten minutes later terrifyingly it dropped again, causing a panicked rush for the doors. The center of the hall floor had indeed dropped six inches. Rand was at the rally and he and the intrepid Ben Butler went to investigate the cavity between the floor and ceiling of the depot below.  Butler returned to reassure the crowd.

Colonel Butler arose, and with a calm clear voice, arrested the multitude, and telling them that the architect Mr. Rand was present and apprehended no danger.

The hall emptied and the rally continued outside. In the aftermath several newspapers around the country falsely reported that Rand had fled the hall rather than the truth that he had bravely risked his life. The Lowell Daily Courier, a Whig paper, felt it necessary to defend Rand from these outside attacks in the Boston Post.

A report having gone abroad in connection with the account of the Democratic meeting of Tuesday evening, that James H. Rand, Esq. was the architect of the New City Hall, which behaved so badly on that occasion, it is but justice to Mr. Rand to state that the report is erroneous. He was not the architect of that building, but Messr. Cabot of Boston. Mr. Rand was called upon Tuesday evening to make an examination into the condition of the hall, as an expert, and we are of the opinion that great praise is due to him for the coolness and the skill which he displayed which he displayed on that occasion…the Boston Post and Courier of this morning… do gross injustice to Mr. Rand…His wife and child were in the hall at the time and he himself, while making the investigation, was in a situation of more peril than any other in the building, if the flooring had fallen through, for he was directly underneath the cracking and settling floor…We have no sympathy for Mr. Rand, politically, but simply desire to do him justice.

Investigations determined that “green” timber was used in the construction, causing it to shrink as it dried. The structural support was likely inadequate as well.  Rand and others, including, James B. Francis, the Locks & Canals engineer, proposed various structural fixes and it fell to the Alderman Rand, as chairman of the City Council’s Lands and Building Committee, along with fellow members, to reassure an apprehensive public that the building would be made safe.

During the 1850s Rand’s political profile rose with his increased activity in the Democratic Party. He was selected chairman of the city’s Democratic committee and was elected to the City Council in 1856 after several prior attempts. While he held the respect of Lowell’s Whig leaders but being an ally of Ben Butler and other leading Democrats, he could not avoid enemies or politically motivated critics. His architectural ambitions, out-of-step with Lowell’s more utilitarian preferences, provided easy opportunities for criticism. In 1857 the city rejected his design for a new Myrtle Street School (Varnum School) which he’d proposed in the most modern and fashionable Italianate style. It was too expensive and frivolous.  Instead, the city selected an alternative design, a customary brick barn by engineer J.W. Phillips. Coolidge, in commenting on this conservative architecture, noted the similarity of Phillip’s design to five other schoolhouses built in the prior two decades.  But presumably Coolidge was unaware that Rand was the architect of at least one of these, the 1845 Branch Street schoolhouse (Franklin School,) and very likely the nearly identical Moody School of 1840 (demolished 1965.)  Rand was trapped by the precedent of his own previous success.

Another source for this conservative school design was undoubtedly Henry Barnard’s 1848 design manual, “School Architecture or Contributions to the Improvement of School Houses of the United States.” which the Massachusetts legislature distributed to every city and town in 1849.  Among the few design examples included was Lowell’s high school building of 1840.  An architectural perspective drawing of the high school in the collection of the Lowell Historical Society presents a more ornate scheme, larger, and with considerable detailing including full articulated pilasters in contrast to the familiar, customarily muted design demonstrated in Barnard’s manual.  Rand may well have been the architect of both the original and muted design in the Barnard illustration.  Constraints in his creativity may have begun early.

The ultimate insult to Rand’s professional ego would be the criticism of his best remembered but most controversial design, the County Jail. Again, John Coolidge was no fan, dismissing it and its “bulging heaviness” and “insensitivity.” He was however an enthusiast of the nearby “charming” county courthouse of 1850. Coolidge did not apprehend the obvious design relationship between the two buildings. Rand’s jail and the courthouse would sit across from one another on opposite sides of the recently acquired South Common.

Modern readers may not comprehend the power of county government in 19^th Century Massachusetts. Surviving counties today are vestiges of their once broad authority. The county budget was funded by assessments on the cities and towns which was often bitterly resented should the local government be controlled by the opposing party.  The county budget was beyond their reach and control and so all expenditures were closely observed and excessively criticized.

The site for the courthouse was controversial from the start but the site of the future jail railroad was not. Both were selected in 1847 by the County Commissioners. The proximity of the two sites was not coincidental. The selection was deliberate and symbolic.  The recent acquisition of the South Common on a highland on the southern edge of the city had also been contested. Siting these two prominent facilities on either side of the hard-won parkland was a political and aesthetic statement. The Commissioners entertained numerous locations for the courthouse but rejected the preferred location of the corporations and their proxies, a site owned by the Merrimack Manufacturing Company (the site of the today’s City Hall.) Deliberate or not, the county had created an independent civic center beyond the control of the corporations. The court house site was bitterly opposed. Local attorneys derided the location as the outskirts of the city. When the courthouse opened in 1850 the local Whig dominated bar association refused to host the customary building dedication. 

If the city was miserly with its public buildings, the county was not. During these same years, the county would reconstruct the Bullfinch designed courthouse in East Cambridge, build a new Cambridge jail and replace the fire-ravaged Concord court house.  All would be designed by the established Boston architect Ammi Young who would also design the Lowell courthouse. None would suffer the same criticism as the jail. At the time of the site’s purchase, Rand also had had his eye on the court design job. Apparently unsolicited, he built a model in the “Athenaeum Doric Temple” style, reflecting the much-admired design by Henry Cabot for the Boston Athenaeum. He didn’t get the job; the jail must have been offered to Rand as a consolation prize.

Young’s design for the Lowell courthouse was in the latest “Norman” (Romanesque) style and Rand would follow in complimentary fashion a few years later with his jail creating an architectural “conversation” across the South Common.  Easy appreciation of the strong visual relationship between the two buildings has been obscured over the years by intervening development, particularly by a late 19th Century addition to the front of Young’s courthouse along with changes to the 1850 court house itself.

Rand was certainly influenced by Bryant’s 1851 jail. Rand’s design shares with Bryant’s, not only the monolithic natural faced granite but more pertinently the advanced humanitarian features of reformed prison design of the time including provisions for adequate light and air, hospitals rooms and separation of male and female inmates. But Rand parted from Bryant’s distinctive plan, an octagonal central tower with radiating wings. This “panopticon” design provided easy surveillance of the entire facility quickly became the paradigm for jails and prisons in eastern Massachusetts and beyond. Contemporaneous examples were built in nearby Lawrence and Dedham.  The spider-like massing of these jails sits awkwardly in the setting, at odds with the street and with no readily distinguishable façade. Rand intended with his design to make an architectural statement.  He pulled his jail to the street with a central gabled block and grand entry stair scaled to mirror the courthouse across the Common and to provide a proper presence on the street.  He placed two substantial, conical roofed towers on each side of the central block reflecting the tower-like cupola of the court house. A separate women’s cell block to the north and a keeper’s resident to the south both linked by passageways, reinforced the primacy of the central block.

While in London a few years prior, Rand most certainly would have visited the substantial Holloway Gaol then under construction. The British were not reticent about embellishing their public buildings with substantial architecture and the Holloway Gaol enjoys a robust, romantic Gothic styling. For Lowell, despite its flourish, Rand’s jail was far more modest; American sensibilities (and pocketbooks) would not tolerate anything approaching the Holloway’s exuberance. Still, Rand’s restraint was not modest enough for his waiting critics. While they couldn’t criticize his architectural skills, they could attack his work for its presumed extravagance and there was outrage and embarrassment that now the most imposing civic structure in the city was a seemingly luxurious jail for mollycoddling miscreants.

When the Middlesex Mechanics Association held its second exhibition in September 1857, Rand, a member, entered a model of the new Jail in competition but when the award winners were announced, Rand took deep umbrage with the characterization of his work by one of the judges.

One juror, John Wright, wrote a stinging commentary:
One of the few ornamental structure of our unadorned city; affording evidence of a very creditable amount of architectural skill in its constructions and arrangement, and furnishing a safe and commodious habitation for that large and increasing class, whose energies seem mainly and assiduously exercised in securing for themselves an abiding interest in such institutions; and affording moreover on the part of those who have sanctioned the erection of that costly and imposing edifice, an example of unwise, extravagant and unjust administration of public affairs; in giving to the abode of the criminal a magnificent outside appearance and imposing on the home of frugal industry, and even struggling poverty, burden and retrenchment that crime may be cooped in a palace.
The incensed architect took the extraordinary and rare step of responding in writing over his own signature in a letter published in several Lowell newspapers. He responded:
I did not enter the new jail on the doings of the commissioners or a premium; but simply a design, plans and model of the Jail, as an architect supposing that should the Judges find my design new and useful, they would award me a diploma which would benefit me in my profession; instead, however, my contribution to the exhibition, was made an excuse, seemingly, for censuring the commissioners, deeming this opportunity to good to be lost.

Despite what was meant as an attack on the Commissioners, the claim of extravagance proved lazily persistent. Ten years later, the censorious attorney and historian Charles Cowley in his “Illustrated History of Lowell” would overstate the cost and carp of the Senseless manner in which the county commissioners wasted the people’s money on this jail…

The criticism of extravagance was baseless. A comparison of the county’s capital expenditures during the 1850s reveals that the County had spent $100,000 on the 1851 courthouse to little criticism (other than location.) A new courthouse in Cambridge cost the same and the new Cambridge jail cost $175,000. What’s more, the County’s debt was substantially reduced during this same time. A more apt comparison might be between the Lowell Jail, at a third of the size of the contemporaneous Charles Street Jail in Boston (84 beds versus 224.) At $117,000 cost the Lowell jail was far less than a third of $460,000 cost of the Boston jail.  But the claim entered the realm of folklore and was repeated uncritically. Nearly a century later it may well have subtly colored Coolidge’s impressions of the jail and its beleaguered architect.

Earlier in April of 1857, in a prelude to the indignities of the Mechanics Fair, the Trustees of the Lowell Cemetery, a landscaped garden cemetery in the same tradition as the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, rejected Rand’s design for a new stone gateway because of its presumed high cost.  It was estimated to cost $4500. The Committee commented that a “massive granite gateway” would not “harmonize” with the slender wooden paling that surrounded the cemetery yet acknowledging that it was the best available to the committee in the time available but that it was best to keep looking. Rival S. K. Hutchinson was invited to submit a design. Nothing resulted. But four years later in1861 the committee did select a winning design by Charles W. Panter of Brookline who would later design the 1865 gateway to the Forest Hills Cemetery in West Roxbury. The committee taking advantage of the Civil War economic troubles was able to build the design for $3100, which was then said to be one-third the conventional cost and coincidently a massive granite gateway.

Rand had been elected an Alderman in 1858, so an announcement that he was leaving Lowell that year was abrupt and unexpected and his reasons for leaving Lowell were not immediately clear.  Puzzlingly, there’d even been repeated reports that he’d sought the Lowell postmaster position, although this may have been simply mischief on the part of Whig enemies. A melancholy notice in the Whig Lowell Daily Courier reflected,

Our friend, James H. Rand, has today removed from this city, which has been his home for 25 years…We are sorry to lose Mr. Rand, as he is a public spirited man, and has a warm and active heart, delighting in deeds of true charity and benevolence.

His last known local design job in that same year was for a modest but charming Italianate style schoolhouse in North Tewksbury (Ella Fleming School,) a style too dear for closed-fisted Lowell but welcome in this prosperous farming community. When it was revealed that Rand had won the design for the City Hall and Courthouse in Portland, Maine, his motivation was perhaps revealed.  He must have believed that his abilities were receiving deserved attention beyond the sniping tongues of his Lowell critics. He abruptly disposed of all of his Lowell properties and returned to Boston after 25 fruitful years in the Spindle City. In Boston he shared an office with the Roxbury architect Richard Bond.  With Bond’s death in 1861 Rand continued to occupy the office in the City Exchange on Devonshire Street for another ten years. 

In Portland, Rand received a king of appreciation that Lowell had seemingly denied him. This City Hall “Florentine” design was admired and received praise from Henry Ward Beecher who wrote in the New York Independent that he would have “liked to borrow it for New York or Brooklyn.” Rand also published an image of it in the premiere edition of the New York based, The Architect’s and Mechanic’s Journal.

So impressed were the Portlanders, that a 42-foot-high pyrotechnic model of the proposed City Hall was the grand finale of the fireworks display for the city’s 1858 Fourth of July commemoration. Unfortunately, the pyrotechnics proved disastrously prophetic: the finished City Hall was destroyed in the great fire of July 4th 1865; embers from a neighboring structure ignited its dome and roof. The City Hall was rebuilt using much of the surviving Rand structure but under the supervision of a local architect.

Rand would go on to design important work in Charlestown and Boston but never a project to match the stature of the Portland work or even the Lowell jail. He settled in Charlestown where he designed a school, the Warren Savings Bank and a redesign of the “Harvard” or Second Church of Charlestown along with numerous houses both there and in the growing South End and the new Back Bay along with commercial buildings in Boston and Portland; he remained politically active petitioning for the annexation of Charlestown to Boston. In a last notable controversy, when he disregarded the deed restrictions with an unorthodox facade for a house on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay in 1865, he was sued by abutters and forced to reconstruct a more compliant front.

Rand’s own third and fourth impressive Lowell houses have disappeared with his memory, He had sold his celebrated house on Andover Street in 1854 to the lumber baron Nicholas Norcross (Norcross defaulted and the house was acquired by the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in 1860.) Rand had built his fourth house in 1854 diagonally across the street; he subsequently sold it in 1857 to the manufacturer Charles B. Richmond whose misfortune is to be best known as the husband of Edgar Allan Poe’s paramour “Nancy.” This house also disappeared about 1937 and there is no known surviving image of it.

Rand appears never to have returned to Lowell until his 1883 burial in an unmarked grave in the Lowell Cemetery.  The Panic of 1857 shook the city but Rand could not have known what lay ahead. The Civil War years were disastrous for Lowell due to strategic blunders by the corporations.  The Panic of 1873 set back post-war recovery but by 1877 a different, more confident city was emerging.  Grand homes by a new generation of local architects would join Rand’s elegant houses overlooking the Falls in Belvidere and on the slopes of the new Highlands neighborhood.  Substantial new commercial buildings would follow and in the 1890s there was an explosion of imposing religious and civic buildings such as Rand and his compatriots could only have hoped to create.  Rand’s 1848 Appleton Bank Block would be reconstructed in 1877 in a flamboyant Gothic Revival style by the local architect, Otis Merrill, whose firm would later design the suitably imposing City Hall of 1892, itself an object of numerous controversies.

The power of the corporations to shape Lowell’s fate may have been curtailed but not eliminated. In 1895 Joseph Ludlam, last resident of Rand’s Italian Villa and the all-powerful agent of the dominant Massachusetts Manufacturing Company declared Lowell was too expensive and that the corporation would pursue expansion in the cheaper southern states.  The Merrimack mill in Huntsville, Alabama followed, signaling the beginning of Lowell’s decades-long decline.

Yet at his death in 1883, Rand was still remembered in Lowell.  Still, there was that jail which would not be forgotten even it was now overshadowed by far grander public edifices. Commenting on Rand’s death, the Courier would note: [He] was for many years a well-known architect in this city and made the plans for the Lowell Jail. He also designed several of our best residences.

[1] The historian Jack Quinan, in his essay in Old Time New England, (the publication of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities aka Historic New England,) Some Aspects of the Development of the Architectural Profession in Boston Between 1800 and 1830, provides an extensive discussion and explanation of the central role of the Housewright Society to the professional development of architects and the interchangeability of the titles of “housewright” and architect. Fortuitously, the time era of his study coincides with Rand’s apprentice and journeyman years just prior to his arrival in Lowell.

[2] Following the 1894 blaze that destroyed the third house, Lowell’s then architect of record, the MIT trained Fred Stickney, was on site the following day to begin design of the replacement. He incorporated the surviving rear ell into the new house, so some fragment of Rand’s original work survived. Significantly, this new agent’s house is unlike Stickney’s other work of the period which was generally in the then popular Queen Ann and Shingle Styles. The symmetrical double bay façade, Georgian details and hipped roof would appear to make a noticeable architectural nod to the neighboring Lawrence-Butler House. 

3.It’s been wrongly assumed by at least one historian that Ben Butler acquired the Samuel Lawrence House in conjunction with the 1857 collapse of the Middlesex Corporation, a financial disaster precipitated by Lawrence’s personal insolvency and the scandalous failure of his firm, Lawrence, Stone and Company. For Butler detractors, it’s yet another allegation intended to impugn the General’s character. In fact, records show that Rand purchased the house and its fourteen acres from Lawrence in 1850 at a greatly reduced price. The 1848 auction showed that there was a limited market for country villas but Rand perhaps thought otherwise.  He carved out the lot for his own house and resold the Lawrence house and substantial remaining lands to Cyril Coburn, at a substantial profit, on paper at least. Coburn however defaulted on the mortgage and Rand was forced to foreclose. Butler, savvy, honestly redeemed the mortgage for two-thirds its value and acquired for himself one of the two most imposing houses of Lowell. All occurred in 1850, years before the 1857 collapse of Lawrence, Stone and Company and its victims the Middlesex Woolen Mills of Lowell and the Bay State Mills of Lawrence.

Merrill & Cutler may have secured the City Hall contract but they may not be in full control of the design as Prentiss Webster says, “The Commission had ideas of its own in regard to the building…” and the Daily News could provocatively ask, “Who are the architects of the new city hall anyway? Some say Merrill & Cutler have the honor; others say the city hall commissioners have drawn the plans and that they, and they alone, are responsible for the abortion.” Fred Stickney may have been the real winner after all. His design and construction of Memorial Hall will proceed quietly except for one incident instigated by the Commission.
When plans for both buildings are ready to bid in January of 1890, there are several notable changes. The City Hall estimate is now $300,000 and the Memorial building has grown to $150,000 an increase of 50% for both. The city hall floor plan more closely represents a Clough design with an open courtyard and the Merrill’s plain hipped roof has now sprouted gables but perhaps most significantly both buildings are now to be built in granite. And there’s the matter of the bid form; contractors will be required to identify the granite companies so that the Commission may select their preference. That’s not how architects do these things.
Webster says that the unconventional bidding format will inspire competition among quarries. The most obvious competition is among the Commissioners themselves as some appear to favor Butler and his Cape Ann quarry and others appear to want to exclude his company. H.H. Richardson has made the “reddish and pink colored granites” from Milford Massachusetts fashionable; the Commission has selected the similar “reddish hue colored granite” from the White Mountain range. This would appear to eliminate General Butler’s Cape Ann quarry and its grey stone but it may also be an attempt to shut out the respected Norcross Brothers contracting firm with whom Commissioner Runels appears to have a business relationship. Norcross Brothers has an arrangement with alocal firm, Sweatt and Davis, to do stone cutting in Lowell and Runels has a finger in that firm.

Prior to the first bid, there was agitation from labor, local contractors and the press that the work for such large and lucrative contracts should go to local firms. But when bids were opened on February 10th all bids for City Hall, local and out-of-town, were substantially over the estimate, as much as $90,000 over. There’s no choice but to rebid.
Worth noting however, among those discarded bids is one curiosity. The second lowest “local” bidder is that firm called Sweatt and Davis. Covering all options, this company reportedly is a sub-contractor on Norcross Brothers’ bid to cut stone for the Worcester firm here in Lowell. But it’s not clear just who this firm actually is and where it may be located. There was a Simeon Sweatt, a local stone cutter, but he died in 1861. Nor is there a Nathaniel Davis in Lowell in 1890, although there was one who worked for George Runels many years before. An advertisement says the firm located on Thorndike Street, near the Jail, but there’s only stone concern in this area and it’s George Runels business. Sweatt and Davis’s address is a post office box in Lowell and there’s a mail drop at the Master Builders Association on Devonshire Street in Boston.  Any one might think it’s a paper company run by Charles Runnels, son of Commissioner George Runnels from the father’s stone yard. In subsequent bids in fact, the firm will be identified as “Sweatt Davis and George Runels.”

When the second set of bids is opened in late February, Norcross Brothers is the apparent low bidder at just $14,000 over the estimate. This should be good news. Norcross Brothers is perhaps the most respected contracting firm of the day. They are Richardson’s preferred contractor their business and reputation growing with him from their first collaboration the Worcester High School of 1869 (incidentally considered the worst of his early work.) In fact it’s easily argued that the genius of his architecture owes as much to their skill and craftsmanship as much as to his design talents. But Norcross has failed to specify the source of their granite in the bid as required. This should be no surprise to anyone. Norcross owns their quarries. Their Milford quarry supplies the fashionable pink granite in such high demand and used in Richardson’s designs. They also quarry sandstone in Longmeadow and marble in Connecticut. But to everyone’s astonishment, they are disqualified. There’s some funny business going on though and it’s not just the mysterious trip by the City Messenger to Norcross Brothers in Worcester. Finally, on a motion by Commissioner Phillips, the contract is tentatively awarded to the second lowest bidder, Darling Brothers, also of Worcester. Per bid rules, Darling Brothers have identified several granite sources and the Commission also selects the Cape Ann Granite option. Phillips will later claim his first motion was to award to Norcross but it failed. Darling Brothers hadn’t offered Cape Ann stone in the first round of bids but they did this time for the second round and on good advice. Jaspar Darling will testify later in the law suit against the City:

“I had a conversation with Mr. Webster…Mr. Webster told me to see Col. French and get the best prices on Cape Ann Granite and said we would have a good show on this bid, as our estimate was the lowest on the first bid.”
The Commission, as secretive as ever refuses to release the bids to the public. But we do learn that Mayor Palmer and Commissioners Welch and Webster voted for Cape Ann option and Commissioners Howe and Phillips voted against it; Commissioner Francis abstained. Commissioner Runnels was out of town at his Florida house.
“Jobbery!” Claims the News and asks further “Must the taxpayers suffer at the expense of General Butler’s Granite Quarry?” Sentiment around town says if the work didn’t to go to a local firm, then it should have gone to Norcross Brothers. The recently formed Master Builders Association meets and fumes that their members have been deliberately excluded from bidding by the form of the bid process. If the Commission had bid the components rather that the buildings in their entirety, we hear repeatedly, the buildings could be built for the budget and local builders would have a better chance of winning work. And of course, bidding by trades increases the burden but also the control by the Commission. One contractor says, speaking clearly of Butler and Webster, that he has “nothing against old soldiers but there is a drummer boy on the commission and he drummed the members into line as he wished.”

Local contractors are demanding that Commissioner Runnels return to Lowell quickly. Commissioner Howe goes on record as opposed to the contract and claims that Runnels and Francis share the same opinion.
And then there’s the problem of The Darling Brothers themselves. They are brashly telling the Worcester papers that they’ll have the building up and roofed over by winter. Jaspar Darling has been bold enough to call on Norcross in Worcester to tell them to withdraw or else. Nobody has a good word to say for them. The Central Labor Council calls a meeting at Jackson Hall and all hell breaks loose. It’s reported that the Darling Brothers have threatened local labor unions not to interfere. Labor groups slam Darling Brother’s bad reputation and poor working conditions. They hire scabs. Even the bricklayers of Worcester, who know the Darlings well, have nothing good to say for them.
Lowell’s fractious bicameral City Council weighs in. The Common Council resolves for a committee to investigate the Commission. In a bit of political theater in the Board of Aldermen,  Alderman Fuller and Alderman Drury thunder against the Commission but then the Aldermen unanimously vote down the investigation idea. But when the Common Council refuses to approve any additional appropriation, the City Hall Commission has no choice but to throw out the bids along with the bids for the memorial building, even though a local contractor has come in under estimate for that work. Darling Brothers will follow through on their threat to sue the City but ultimately lose. Commissioner Prentiss Webster astonishingly, is the attorney defending the City in the suit.
For the third bid, a chastened but wiser Commission announces that it will give preference to local bidders and both projects will be bid in their entirety and in parts as the local contractors have demanded. Plans are modified again to bring bids in line with the appropriation and greatest change is the substitution of a low tower for the original tall one. But keeping all its options, the Commission includes an option for the high tower as well.

Low tower, high tower quarry options, general bids and bids by trades, preparing bids might take as long as the actual construction. Significantly, contractors must again supply bids with different granite options and now the granite companies have the chance to bid directly on the stone work. This “inspiration” to competition seems to provide more chances for one firm to snag the prize. When bids are opened on June 18th, Norcross Brothers is once again the low bidder for the overall City Hall job yet again failing to specify its granite source, but because the combination of individual trade bids is lower,  Norcross Brothers is again pushed aside. Because the lion’s share of work will go to local contractors, there’s no controversy and perhaps least surprising, Cape Ann is the lowest bidder for the stone work.
John Murphy, low bidder for Memorial Hall in the last round and this one too, complains that he has made a mathematical error of $10,000 but the Commission will not allow a correction. He says he will honor the price error but when requested, he refuses to name his sub-contractors and so he is disqualified. Murphy held back because he had hoped to renegotiate with his subs to recoup some of the loss. Murphy is so angry that he threatens to write a letter to the Commission that will blow open the selection of Merrill as the City Hall architect but he doesn’t do it. Both jobs are awarded to multiple contracts by trades. Cape Ann hasn’t won all the stone work; Maine and New Hampshire Granite Company of Conway N.H. is the supplier of stone for the Memorial Hall. But to supply the desired reddish granite for City Hall, the Cape Ann Company will need to open its own quarry in Conway, N.H. and thus will begin a new round of controversy and delay.

“…a peculiar protest.”
But even before the extent of the granite problem reveals itself another quarrel breaks out, this time over the cornerstones. By early fall, the foundations have progressed sufficiently to allow the setting of cornerstones an important ritual in the 19th Century building; ceremonies are scheduled for October 11th. Mayor Palmer appoints a sub-committee of Commissioners Welch, Philips and Webster, all good Masons. But when the Catholic community discovers that the Masons have been invited to lay the stone in their typical grand ritual, vigorous protest errupts. Over 4600 individuals sign the petition which is read from the pulpit of every Catholic church in Lowell but one: St. Peter’s. No doubt because Fr. Rowan, the pastor, has his hands full with his plan to replace his current church with a new one;  to fund the new church, he has collaborated in a scheme with leading businessmen from Ward 4 to locate the new post office on the site of his current church at the corner of Gorham and Appleton Streets. The Saint Peter’s conflict is a conundrum for General Butler. The Catholic parishioners of are part of his Democratic constituency, but he has allied with corporate interests to block the scheme and grab the new post office for a site owned by the Massachusetts Corporation on Merrimack Street. (He fails and George Runels will pick up the site for his impressive new block.) Now the cornerstone protest can only further offend his Catholic supporters.
The Catholics ask why is a secret organization granted this honor? Why isn’t this ceremony a purely civic event? The organizers claim to be dumbfounded. No one has ever objected before, but this protest is reported sympathetically around the country despite local efforts to dismiss it. Coincidentally, the Pope will issue an Encyclical on October 15th of that year, “Ab Apostolic Solii Celsitudine” condemning the Masonic influence in the Italian government. The City Council refers the petition to a sub-committee, essentially burying it but a compromise of sorts is in the works. The Masons won’t set the Memorial Hall cornerstone. Instead it will be undertaken by the Grand Army of the Republic an organization that embraces both Catholic and Protestant veterans of the Civil War.
General Butler sends a telegraph to the City that unfortunately he has an engagement in the west and so cannot otherwise accept their kind offer that he make an oration.
“A peculiar protest” says the Vox Populi, but this protest explains the second half of the title of Webster’s memorial book: Webster is a Mason himself and he wants to discredit or diminish the significance of the protest. The “peculiar flurry of opposition…” Vox Populi reports “…had the effect to bring out a much larger number of that fraternity than would otherwise have appeared; and other people who resented this attempt to control the city-authorities made it a point to demonstrate their feelings in unmistakable ways.” “One of the grandest pageants in Lowell’s History” it crows. And it indeed must have been grand with six bands and a grand parade of thirty-eight carriages full of past and present Masonic Grand Masters.

Prentiss Webster, Mason himself, minimizes his fellow Democrats’ discomfort and give the grandiose ceremony detailed coverage in “The Story of the City Hall Commission: including the Exercises at the Laying of the Cornerstones.” But it falls to former Mayor Jerimiah Crowley in his remarks at the Memorial Hall stone setting to give perspective and find common ground: “…sometimes people, through mistaken zeal for the cause of liberty and religion will fan into life the dying embers of almost forgotten prejudices and for a moment they will burn with all the fierceness of the hated past…”
By early 1891, with the new construction season ahead, there’s a problem at the City Hall site. Memorial Hall construction is humming along, but City Hall is lagging and anyone paying attention can see that the stone is not arriving in sufficient quantity. Each month, less than half of the needed forty cars of stone arrive. Some months, it’s been as few as twelve carloads. In early February, Architect Merrill offers reassurance that the delays of the fall will not be repeated. The Cape Ann quarry in New Hampshire he explains had layers of defective stone that had to be quarried out to reach suitable material and now a second quarry has been opened and no bad stone has been found. But he’s been misinformed.
ON March 20th Colonel French,  himself of the Cape Ann Quarry, of the  is summoned to the City to explain the delay. When French meets with the Commission, members Howe, Runnels and Phillips are absent. Webster, Welch and new Mayor Fifield will need to sort out the mess. French tells the Commission that he cannot supply them with the necessary stone from New Hampshire and that they must finish with Cape Ann stone from Gloucester. But the Cape Ann stone is bluish in color, not red, and the basement level of the Hall has been completed in the redish Conway stone. One wit suggests that the solution is build the first floor in white marble and finish above with Cape Ann. In that way the City will have a patriotic monument in red, white and blue, but nobody’s laughing.
The local granite cutters say that there’s enough stone at North Conway to build ten city halls and that Cape Ann needs to honor the contract terms. A rumor claims that the real problem is that Cape Ann has another contract with a delay penalty of $100 a day – far more than the $25 daily penalty in the city’s contract. But it’s worse; both explanations are true. The quarry stone is inferior and Cape Ann is favoring another contract with higher penalties. Architect Merrill files his own protest with the Commission objecting to the stone substitution and disavowing for the bad effect that will occur. Webster mildly mocks Merrill for this.
The public is briefly distracted by a new controversy over the wording on the lintel stone of the memorial building. The Commission has voted that it will read “City Library.” In the face of protests by the Grand Army of the Republic and others the Commission will quickly backtrack and change the inscription to “Memorial Hall.’ And then on March 31st, James Francis abruptly resigns from the Commission. It’s not because of the Memorial Hall controversy as some suggest; he explains that he has a relative working for the Cape Ann company and he does not want to be appear to be taking actions that might favor the company and impugn his reputation. The relative is his son-in-law, Henry H. Bennett who has recently taken a job with the Cape Ann granite company. Perhaps it’s simply an innocent coincidence but for many years prior, Bennett was the postmaster at the Bay View station in Gloucester and you don’t get a job like postmaster in the General’s front yard without Butler’s support. Francis’s resignation must be the catalyst needed for the Commissioners to reject the substitute stone as Webster tells us they do, but what he omits to write is that the delays will continue for months until August, when Cape Ann is compelled to acquire the necessary stone from the neighboring New Hampshire and Maine company quarries, the suppliers to Memorial Hall. But even before the stone problem is solved, the Commission is faced with another decision but with a happier outcome, under the terms of the contract, if they want the high tower they must commit by June 30th so on May 19th they request and additional $30,000 from the City Council for the taller tower and the attic dormers.
Memorial Hall is completed and dedicated in April 1893, a full six months ahead of City Hall which is dedicated finally in October to general relief and celebration. Even the new Daily Sun can say:
“Grand, gorgeous, massive in proportions, perfect in details; such is our new city Hall.” (with nary a mention of grain elevators.)
There were two more flare-ups first over furniture and then when the Olmsted landscape architecture firm proposed moving the Winged Victory statue to the side of City Hall as part of its overall landscape plan.
It’s no wonder that battle weary Prentiss Webster feels the need to write that criticisms, were “printed on wood pulp,” [which will] “crumble to pieces within one quarter century, … the buildings … stand as the result of the work of the Commission and as an instructor to the children of the critics, when the critics …[are] no more.”

 

In 1878 Lowell’s City Hall, built in 1830, is patched up yet again for another ten years of service, but no one is particularly satisfied and there’s a sense that Lowell is falling behind.  It’s a matter of civic pride.  William Kitteridge the sash and blind maker says of the City Hall that it’s the “meanest on the continent for the number of inhabitants”[i] but there’s still no rush to replace it  as the coal dealer Josiah Peabody pragmatically notes “our pride may have outgrown the present building but our necessities have not.” [ii]

Still, when the opportunity arises in late 1879 to buy the “Burrows Lot,” from the Merrimack Corporation, the City seizes the chance.  This sale is no charitable gesture by the Corporation. Shrewdly they know a new city hall will substantially enhance the value of their neighboring real estate and the city has paid top dollar, $83,400, for the site. By one calculation it’s determined that the cost of the site will be over $146,000 [iii] when the ten-year sinking fund is retired. But there is never a question of any other location.  This is the symbolic heart of the City, made sacred by the Ladd & Whitney monument and ringed by the leading civic, industrial and religious institutions of the city.

But a new city hall will wait ten years until 1888, at the start of a new city government, headed by the reform mayor Charles Dana Palmer. Palmer is a Harvard educated corporation man from a prominent Boston family and married to Rowena Hildreth. [iv] The intervening years have been good ones; wages and capital have doubled[v] and the booming city is full of confidence and no longer afraid of debt.

Ordinarily a new city building would be the responsibility of the City Council’s joint committee for lands and buildings but Mayor Palmer wants a commission, a commission of impartial and civic-minded leaders who will transcend politics and personal gain, a commission dedicated to its noble cause and which will survive the annual changes in city government for what’s expected at most to be a three-year long enterprise.  It will take twice as long to complete it’s tasks.

Reformers love commissions which are presumed to be apolitical, efficient and free from partisan battles. For the likes of Charles Eliot,  President of Harvard, they are the preferred form of government and Palmer is a Harvard man. Democrats despise commissions.  For them they are elitist affronts to democracy.  So while the City Council passes the resolution in April, Palmer won’t announce his City Hall Commission until August 3.  He’s got a lot riding on this board because he wants to replace the Lands and Buildings with a public works commission; the City Hall Commission will be its stalking horse.

When the members are announced , the sententious weekly Vox Populi will effuse “It would have been difficult for Mayor Palmer to improve upon the commission he has appointed.”[vi] Only later will the Vox editorialize for members to resign.

But it does indeed seem to be “a commendable selection of gentlemen”[vii] of age and experience, one for each of the city’s six wards and headed by the mayor who will serve ex-officio.  The irreproachable, James B. Francis, Chief Engineer of the Locks and Canals corporation and world-renowned hydraulics expert, represents Belvidere; and there’s George Runels, the wealthy stone contractor, who returned to Lowell fifty years earlier from a whaling boat shipwreck and the south seas adventures to make his fortune as a stone contractor .  He built the Jail.  Equally experienced an influential is John F. Howe, the contractor and lumber dealer who, with his brother, seems to have built just about everything in town.  John F. Phillips, Agent for the Boston & Maine Railroad, who will tragically die by a fall from his window in the Merrimack House. John Welch the former senator for the Irish neighborhood the Acre and one of the two Democrats is on the Commission who will grouse loudly about his treatment by the Press.

Lastly, representing Centralville and the Secretary of the Commission is the enigmatic Prentiss Webster, the youngest of the group and Welch’s fellow Democrat. Webster is an attorney, the legal partner of the inimitable General Benjamin F. Butler and for good measure he’s also Butler’s nephew; In fact, he’s also Mayor Palmer’s nephew.  Both Palmer and Butler married daughters of  prominent Fisher Hildreth.   His grandfather was  Humphrey Webster, a cousin of Daniel Webster, and the carpenter for Town Hall. After graduating Lowell High School, Prentiss followed his attorney father to Germany where William Prentiss had been appointed a U.S. Consul.  Prentiss attended university in Germany and after his father’s death served for a brief time as an American consul as well.

Consensus among this olio of opinions, experience and interests may not prove easy and the Daily Courier is nearly prophetic when it notes, “There is no immediate pressure for a City Hall and the Commission can afford to ‘go slow.”[viii] The board will be mired in indecision and controversy, competing agendas, hobbled by questionable decisions and poor practices. The last, the decision to repeatedly meet in executive session with no press or public present, will  fuel endless speculation of scheming, conspiracy and  calculating secrecy decried as  “dark-lantern” tactics.  Suspicious types will later assert that the purported reformer Palmer’s intended all along to benefit General Butler’s Cape Ann Granite Quarry, the Boston & Maine Railroad and his friend, the architect Fred W. Stickney[ix].  What will become clearer is that Palmer is Stickney’s sometimes lone patron that Webster is looking after Butler’s interests closely and that the often absent George Runels, friend of architect Otis A. Merrill,  has his own agenda.

Almost as soon as it begins, the Commission’s work is expanded to accommodate a request for a hall to memorialize the City’s Civil War Veterans.  The initiative is a petition to the City Council from city notables headlined by General Butler. More that a petition, the demand includes  detailed specifications for a fine granite memorial that will incorporate the city library as well.

In February of 1889, the Commission announces that it will hold an architectural design competition with cash prizes for the top three winners.  Competitions like this are increasingly popular.  Rival city Cambridge held one the previous year for its City Hall and that contest may have  been Lowell’s inspiration, but competitions come in different formats; the Cambridge competition was a closed one, only five firms were invited to compete.  Lowell’s contest will be open and blind.  Coincidentally, just three months earlier a  similar, controversial State House additional architectural competition drew a letter of protest published in American Architect and Building News, signed by architects from across Massachusetts and beyond and including both of Lowell’s leading architects Frederick W. Stickney and Otis A. Merrill.  Among the architects’ grievances is that it’s not promised that the contest winner will also receive the contract.  Lowell’s contest will lack a similar guarantee.  Otis Merrill’s indignation over the State House contest terms will not carry-over to the Lowell exercise.

Sixty-seven architects express interest and twenty-three make anonymous submissions in a prescribed format to insure anonymity and allow comparison.   Webster’s writes in The Story of the City Hall Commission published the year after the dedications, that the Commission deliberates and narrows down the competitors to five,  eliminates two more and then does something surprising.  They reveal the three finalists for the final ranking, until now known only as “Three Rings,” ”Triangle” and “Utility.”  Astonishingly, the Commission members now know the identities of the three even as they choose the first, second and third place winners.  It takes four votes to select the first-prize winner with a four to two split and a single vote for the second prize winner, again split four to two.

When the winners are announced on April 2^nd to the city’s delight, two of the three winners are Lowell architects.  Fred W. Stickney the popular, young  designer, has taken the first prize of $1200 for the most original design.  He’s also the only one who’s proposed solving the awkward building program with two separate structures: a city hall and a memorial building and library. (He may come to regret this later.)  Lowell’s favorite young architect has also beaten Arthur Vinal, the well-connected former City Architect of Boston who receives the second prize of $800.  Merrill & Cutler, Lowell’s other leading firm by default is third with a $500 prize for a competent design modeled after a well-known H.H. Richardson work.

 

In fact all three prize-winning designs are some variation of the currently popular Romanesque, a style of architecture which will abruptly fall from fashion in just three years in the wake of the Chicago Exposition of 1892 which ushers in a new classically inspired style.  Webster acknowledges as much when he states of the winners, “originality of design was not apparent…”

Vinal’s design is the same as much of his other work to date.  He readily appropriates fashionable architectural details and materials from Richardson, like just about everyone else. Stickney’s plan is  more original in composition. Merrill & Cutler’s design “Utility”, a motto particularly appropriate to his work,  is an obvious scaled down interpretation of Richardson’s masterpiece, the Allegheny County Courthouse.  For good or bad, Richardson’s work, has created models and fashions that the public expects for all types of structures particularly railroad stations, libraries court houses or city halls.

There’s no guarantee that Stickney will get the actual commission, but he’s the first prize winner and isn’t that how these things work?  The local press carefully describes both Stickney and Merrill’s designs in minute detail. Vinal’s design is barely mentioned and not even illustrated.  Curiously though, at Stickney’s insistence, Mayor Palmer forbids Stickney’s perspective to be photographed for an engraving so an image of Merrill’s design is published first.[x] An image if Stickney’s winning design is published days after it’s description.  But with the praise, comes the first criticism of Stickney’s design and the competition.  An anonymous letter to the Daily Mail, signed only  “Artist” acidly comments that ‘if this is the best of the 23 submitted, the other 22 must indeed have been an inferior lot.”  “schoolboy work, ” [xi] the writer calls it and provocatively asks  why haven’t the actual designs been made public?  It’s a good question. The losing entries have been returned to their authors with no public viewing.  We don’t even know who competed but for one entry from the firm of Wait and Cutter, later  published in American Architect and Building News.

Prior to the competition it was expected that the building would be built of granite.  Quincy Granite as Councilman Sullivan suggested.[xii]  Butler’s Memorial Hall petition imagined a granite building as well. Several of the Commissioners want granite as well but likely for different reasons. But Stickney’s plan calls for brick buildings with red granite trim.  Merrill’s building  design is Ohio Sandstone with red granite from North Conway. They both have designed cautiously for the budget of $300,000. The cost difference between a brick or even sandstone structure and a granite one is substantial principally because granite is hard to quarry and to work with. Merrill has even told the Vox Populi that the budget didn’t allow granite.

Webster writes that “…none of the architects…could demonstrate the possibility of the erection of the buildings for $100,000 and $200,000.”  Surely this can’t be true because both Lowell architects have economized in their designs and how then could the Commission select winners at all if “possibility of erection of the buildings for the sums named…” was the first criterion of the competition? The budget question must be a red herring because the cost will grow to $450,000 under the Commission’s direction.  Something is missing in the winning design and it’s granite. When it becomes clear that Stickney is not the automatic winner, American Architect and Building News editorializes that this is “humiliating treatment”[xiii] to an architect of his standing.  He’ll need thick skin because a lot more is on the way.

Stickney will have a chance to fight for the bigger prize when he is invited to develop a revised plan under the supervision a sub-committee of Mayor Palmer and Commissioner Howe.   In another strange turn, the Commission also invites the Boston architect George A. Clough to also revise his plan but Clough hadn’t even entered a complete submission to the competition just a hurried floor plan.[xiv]  The historian Walter Muir Whitehill describes Clough as “a competent but not very talented practitioner.”[xv]  Clough is credited for adopting the German system of building large public buildings around interior courtyards for light and air.  He was also Boston’s first city architect in the 1870s. At the time of the City Hall competition, he’s the architect for the new Suffolk County Superior Courthouse in Pemberton Square which, coincidentally, is being built with Cape Ann granite. Clough is invited because Commissioner Howe, the old builder, it’s suspected, doesn’t think Stickney is experienced enough. “What will we do when all the old architects have died?”[xvi] another Commissioner mocks.

But unexpectedly, when the Commission meets to review Stickney and Clough’s new plans, there’s a third set. Someone has tipped off Otis Merrill who’s pushed his way to the table with his own revised plans. That someone is undoubtedly Merrill’s friend, George Runels.   Now with three architects in contention, the Commission will stalemate for two more months through seven meetings and forty-seven votes. Clough, it’s rumored, had three votes initially which included Welch and Howe and possibly Webster, but at some point he’s out of contention, voluntarily or  dropped perhaps because he was too stubborn for a board with strong opinion .  He’s paid $700 for his efforts and the next year he will be in a heated conflict with the Court House Commissioners and will announce, “I disown the building and will not be responsible for it.”[xvii] He will also sue the City of Boston for $20,000 in unpaid fees.[xviii]

The Commission may be meeting in executive sessions but rumors are spreading and in early July, the Republican-leaning Daily Mail claims that the “mouse in the meal”[xix] is partisan politics.  Commissioners Welch and Webster, both Democrats the  Mail claims, are delaying by voting doggedly for  Arthur Vinal, undoubtedly, a fellow Democrat and it’s allegedly their plan to continue to delay until there’s a new city administration, a Democratic one so they can give the job to a Democrat.  There are a few problems with this claim.  Vinal is a Republican and substitution of a Democratic Mayor for Palmer alone won’t provide a Democratic majority on the Commission.  Welch is incensed and demands that the Commission respond; he claims he supported Clough as long as Commissioner Howe supported him and then with Clough gone, switched to Vinal as the best man.  Mayor Palmer tells him to let it go, and the Commission votes down Welch’s proposal to open meetings to the press and public. Only Webster votes with him. The Commission is deadlocked: Welch and Webster supporting Vinal, Howe, Runels and Phillips voting for Merrill and only Palmer, and possibly Francis backing Stickney.  With growing public exasperation at the inaction, this can’t go on and a solution is finally brokered among the Republican members.  The contract will be split in two with Palmer joining the others to award the City Hall to Merrill and the Memorial building to Stickney.  Welch and Webster abstain.

A “log-rolling scheme”[i] says unapologetically Democratic  Daily News  cynically asking: “Is the City Hall to be built on the “good fellow plan?  Is it to be erected merely to fatten the pockets of a few pet architects?”[ii]  And in yet another surprise, the Commission, stung by criticism that the design competition was a folly, announces that the two architects have agreed to return their prize money.   Stickney refuses saying he knows nothing about any arrangement but Merrill acknowledges that he had agreed, suggesting  that he was deep in the deal.[iii]  The Daily News satirically sums it up: “The City Hall Commissioners believe that the first shall be last and the last first.  This is why the man who won the last prize was placed in the first and the man who received the first prize was pushed to the rear.”[iv] If selecting the architects was an ordeal, building City Hall will be a similar trial.

The Lowell Architects

Stickney and Merrill could not be more different in education, background, style or temperament.  They compete for public work,  but for their commercial and residential design work will come from very different sources.  They are both ambitious and competitive and both are descended from old Yankee families that trace their lineage back to the 1630s.  Merrill takes particular pride in his descent from a line of ministers and deacons and finds common ground with the newly affluent, self-made Yankee businessmen and small manufacturers of the Lowell Highlands, men like himself from the New Hampshire countryside. Stickney is the favored architect of Belvidere, the worldly community of inherited and corporate wealth.

Merrill comes to architecture self-taught from carpentry.  It’s a traditional path declining with the introduction of organized professional training. Stickney is among the first generation educated at MIT and he has trained in leading Boston firms before striking out on his own.   Practicality will define Merrill’s work throughout his career.  Stickney’s work will mirror popular architectural fashion but with originality and skill.

Merrill is a sober man, a decorated Civil War veteran nine years Stickney’s senior and a Deacon in the First Congregational Church. In many ways he’s more typical of Stickney’s father’s generation.  Fred is the Lowell-born son of a successful businessman.   Merrill  is acknowledged for his public piety. The Deacon, as he is often called, will design meeting houses not only for his own First Congregational Church but also the Highland Congregational Church and the Central Congregational in Chelmsford. Fred Stickney’s  family belongs to First Universalist Church a liberal denomination; they believe in universal salvation not predestination. It’s is also one of the most prestigious and perhaps wealthiest congregations counting Freeman Shedd among its members; Shedd will be an important patron for Stickney.

Deacon Merrill

Otis Merrill is born in Hudson N.H in 1844 the son of a carpenter and Deacon and the eldest of at least nine children but as a teenager he lives and works on the  farm of a neighboring widow.  Just before his 18^th birthday in 1863, he enlists in the 7^th New Hampshire Regiment, serves in multiple battles in the Carolinas, and is promoted first to a corporal and later sergeant; In one battle he  is injured but not too seriously and is decorated for bravery.  Like his religion, his military service will be a defining feature of his life and  career providing valuable business contacts and commissions.

He arrives in Lowell in 1868 to practice carpentry and study architecture after a three year apprenticeship in Haverhill.  In 1870 he and his first wife Jennie Moore move into their new home of Wannalancit Street where he will live for over thirty years. He’s doing well; it’s an enviable location. Wannalancit Street is a not wealthy Pawtucket Street, but close by.  After Jennie’s death in 1882, he marries Annie Smith, ten years his junior. When Annie dies prematurely in 1886, he marries in 1889 for a third time  to Annie Boynton.  He will have six children with his three wives.

By 1874 Merrill is confident enough to call himself an architect and he sets up shop in Stott’s Block on the Depot end of Middlesex Street. Important work is still going to Boston architects but he will learn from their examples.  George Meacham the designer of the Ladd & Whitney Monument, and best known as the architect of the Boston Public Garden, is the architect of the 1868 Green School. a building whichMerrill will cite the school some  twenty years later as still  the best public building in Lowell.[i]  Charles B. Atwood fresh from the Boston firm of Ware and Van Brunt, designs the 1873 Five Cent Savings Bank Block on Merrimack Street, a Venetian Palace in High Victorian Gothic done up in white marble. Years later, Atwood is called one of the “three or four best designers in the country” known not just for the Vanderbilt Cottage in Newport but also his work as Charles Burnham’s partner at the Chicago World’s Fair.

In 1878 Merrill is selected as  architect for  the  important Appleton National Bank Block and he  moves his offices to the better located Fisk Block on Central Street.  He now has a popular practice designing houses for Lowell’s business elite such as an 1879 house on Wilder Street for Asa C. Russell, the head of the Thorndike Manufacturing Company.  His work is safe and conservative.  Merrill is not an original designer and the best work from his office will be by his junior partners and other young architects.  But draftsmen and architects don’t stay for long and he will have four professional partnerships over his active career.

In 1878 Merrill enters into his first partnership with Charles C. Eaton; Eaton is an odd choice for a partner.  He’s just graduated from MIT, not the special architectural program but  with a full degree, but has no obvious experience, but he is the son of Samuel C. Eaton the beloved local popcorn dealer, a temperance leader and a fellow Deacon of the First Congregational Church.

It’s hard to imagine what contribution the young Eaton makes to the firm because he spends much of 1879 travelling in Europe with his new wife. His real interest is engineering and after patenting a switching device in 1880 that he sells to Bell, he leaves the firm and moves to Boston, settling in the fashionable Hotel Cluny. With his brother-in-law, he establishes a ‘temperance spa” serving medicinal waters such as Vichy and soft drinks, which becomes the  Boston institution, Thompson’s Spa. In his later years, he’ll be entangled in a scandalous, cross-continental divorce to the delight of the Boston and Los Angeles press.

Merrill forms a new partnership in 1882 with Arthur S. Cutler.  Cutler is a native of Andover and a talented draftsman who has been with Merrill since 1875.  He too is an active member of First Congregational Church and will serve as the superintendent of the Sunday School for years.  Some important works from this time include an 1882 laboratory building at Phillips Academy and The Old Ladies Home of 1882.  Not all their work is accomplished but the awkward Wilton Town Hall of 1884 may be the result of its difficult site.  Cutler’s own house on Niccolet Street showcases his talent and his 1894 Odd Fellows Hall is one of the finest works from the office.

The firm’s work is greatly enhanced  when the young Scottish architect, Alexander Hay joins the office in 1888 and his influence can be seen in the Armory and the Palmer Street firehouse and particularly the City Hall design. With its powerful, simple geometry, stripped of superfluous ornament it looks towards the modernism of the early 20^th century.  This new confident design is evident in  the 1889 addition to the Central Block with it’s bold, modern gesture of a wide curving glass wall that faces up to Merrimack Street.. Hay is a young architect with ambitions; he submits his own entry to the 1889 competition for the Cathedral of Saint John the Devine in New York. He remains with Merrill and Cutler until 1893 when he relocates to New Orleans to become one of that city’s premiere architects.

“…an architect of taste and ability.”

Fred Stickney’s father Daniel arrives in Lowell in 1849 from Pelham, New Hampshire. First a clerk but in 1853 he joins Albert Wheeler as the junior partner in a West Indies goods and grocery firm on the corner of Merrimack and Tilden Streets. In 1862 he starts a new partnership in Centralville with his brother-in-law Frederick Spofford. Fred is the younger of two children; bright and talented, he passes the rigorous entrance exam and graduates Lowell High School in 1871.  In the fall of 1873 he enters MIT as a Special Student in Architecture, a five old program at the eight year old school and the first professional architectural training in the country.

Fred may have found his way to MIT thanks to a new 1870 state law that requires communities of over 10,000 inhabitants to offer courses in drawing for free to anyone over the age of fifteen.  Lowell offers the requires drawing in its evening school beginning in 1872.  The instructor is Channing Whittaker, a Civil War veteran and recent MIT engineering graduate.  It’s easy to imagine an ambitious Stickney in this class encouraged by Channing to study further.  The links between the Lowell classroom and MIT are strong; William E. Ware, an MIT instructor himself and partner in the firm of Van Brunt and Ware teaches the advanced architectural class in 1875 and Whittaker will later teach at MIT himself. Stickney will take over the Lowell evening program in 1880.

MIT in 1873 is the center of American architecture. Richardson’s Trinity Church is rising, fitfully across Boylston Street.  Fred distinguishes himself by winning one of the two class prizes awarded by the Boston Society of Architects and in 1875 he begins working in the Pemberton Square offices of Hartwell & Swasey. Some accounts say he studied with H.H. Richardson.  Richardson regularly brought young MIT draftsmen and students to his Brookline studio so it’s conceivable that a prize-winning student like Stickney was invited to work for a period  with Richardson.

Fred may be training with Hartwell’s Pemberton Square office but his focus is on Lowell.  The architectural historian James O’Gorman says that Richardson moved his practice from New York City to Boston to be closer to his Harvard college classmates who were the source of many of his commissions. Stickney has made a similar strategic choice to build his practice among his friends and acquaintances in Lowell.  With the  Vesper Boat Cllub and later with the founding of the Yorick Club the grocer’s son for Centralville and his Belvidere friends are  trying to create in Lowell a facsimile of the metropolitan world of the “club men” and  for Stickney this will be  a social network that will nurture his practice. His association with Freeman Shedd will provide important local work and his friendship with Julian Talbot also will result in numerous projects. Young and athletic, Fred is a regular champion in races and  Vesper regattas. He’s something of a hero himself when he and two fellow boaters rescue a boater who’d gone over the Pawtucket Falls.  He’s chummy with the Butler boys, Ben Israel and Paul and the Nesmith sons; more so  it seems there’s not a ball or party or society wedding that doesn’t include him.  In fact he designs an admired Tea housefor a Japanese themed ball in 1878.  The first known completed design by Stickney is, in fact, the 1879 Vesper Boat House a beautiful, compact Stick Style structure that  still ranks among his finest and most original works.  In 1879 he also designed  an exuberant Stick Style house for Elizabeth Burrows, the widow of Henry Burrows, former agent of the Merrimack Print Works.

When the firm of Hartwell & Swasey is dissolved in 1881, Hartwell forms a new partnership with George C. Richardson.  We don’t know whether Stickney was invited to join the new firm, but Richardson was from Lawrence and was Fred’s MIT classmate and the other BSA prize winner of 1875; this may not have sat well with  the competitive 28-year-old Stickney who boldly opens his own Boston office on Devonshire Street. He shares space another distinguished former Hartwell & Swasey employee, Ludvig Ipsen, a Danish-born architect who will gain greater fame as a book illustrator for Mark Twain.  Ipsen’s son Ernest is a renowned portrait artist and the painter of the portrait of Stickney that hangs in the Memorial Hall.   By 1883 Stickney is confident enough open a Lowell office and of course he opens it in the newly built Hildreth Building, designed by Van Brunt and Howe and the most prestigious address in the city.  A local newspaper account assures readers that it will be “the best looking office in the building.” [i]

The 1880s, will be a productive and creative decade for Stickney and his work will be far reaching, incluidng houses for three of the most prominent men of Topeka, Kansas, Rosemary Hall in Water Mill New York and local commercial work including in 1884 a business block for Taylor and Cook and a new building for the Hoyt and Shedd firm. During this time he  develops a reputation for school design with the Butler School in 1881 and the Pawtucketville School in 1884. But he’s also working further afield  as seen in the 1887 Alice Keyes House in Cincinnati the grand resort hotel, the 1887 Senter House in Centre Harbor, New Hampshire, an  1889 a country house in Manchester, Vermont for Edward Isham, the Chicago law partner of Robert Lincoln.  The 1890 Eliot Hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire and the 1892 Woodstock Inn in Vermont.  Two of his best works from this period are the 1890 Kennebunk River Club and the 1891 Talbot Hall in North Billerica. In 1887 he designs his only known church, the First Baptist Church in North Tewksbury which faces James Rand’s school house of 1858. In1892 he beats out two competitors for the design of the Highland Club. When envious Belviderites across town propose a club of their own, they know where they want it. Stickney’s 1890 Lamson House on Nesmith Street.

Stickney’s office in these days always had at least four or five draftsmen, among them is George Mansur, a Lowell native, also the son of a grocer who significantly had worked for several years as a draftsman for George Clough on the Boston Courthouse.  In 1892 Stickney also enters into a partnership with his MIT classmate, William D. Austin. In that same year, Henry Greene, of the future California firm of Greene and Greene, will apprentice in Stickney’s office after completing the MIT program much as Stickney may have apprenticed in Richardson’s studio.

Law Enforcement Association

Meanwhile, Otis Merrill’s public life takes a consequential turn 1892 when the notorious Reverend Hugh Montgomery, of the Anti-Saloon League, takes the pulpit of the Central Methodist Episcopal Church and brings his war on whiskey to Lowell.

Abetting Montgomery is the Reverend George Kengott, another ardent reformer, newly installed at the First Congregational Church.  This war will have no more determined foot-soldier than Deacon Merrill.  If they can’t prohibit alcohol then by damned they will see the licensing law rigorously enforced and so the Law Enforcement Association begins its crusade to save Lowell from itself. These self-appointed guardians of the public welfare and morality will inspect, spy on and file complaints on license violators and will in turn become subjects of scorn and ridicule.

“I might almost say that some of these places,” thunders Merrill at a hearing, “ are just as much licensed by the authorities of our cities as though they had licenses of prostitution,” [ii]The increasingly blue-nosed Deacon will  complain about theater as well. When n 1893 the City investigates extending Dummer Street, Merrill wants to make sure that they take the neighboring Bijou Theater in the process to eliminate the “plays dangerous to our people … . the quiet of the Sabbath is disturbed.” Although with coy reticence he’d rather “say nothing about the character of the plays…”[iii] he will eventually be sued in 1894 for false imprisonment.

Montgomery’s ally as Merrill’s church, the Reverend George Kengott, proves too disruptive for a good number of the members of the First Congregational Church and a substantial number, including Arthur Cutler, Merrill’s partner,  will call for his dismissal but Otis Merrill will lead Kengott’s defense and a bitter battle over control of the church and property.  With two partners on opposing sides their professional partnership is shattered.

Merrill will form a new firm with another young draftsman from Andover. The new firm of Merrill and Clark will last for only three years and Merrill will join with Perley F. Gilbert to form a yet another new firm, Merrill and Gilbert. After only a few years he retires from architecture to his third wife’s family farm in Pepperell, where they will raise their four children until his death in 1931.  Arthur Cutler will finally find stable work as a building inspector for the city but will die tragically of a stroke or heart attack while vacationing with his family in the summer of 1903

Fred Stickney will continue to practice architecture in Lowell until his death in 1918.  His cause of death will be listed as Bright’s Disease, the same as with H. H. Richardson. But in a burst of frankness on the eve of Prohibition, the secondary cause will be listed as “alcoholism.”  Merrill’s firm will continue-on as Gilbert Associates and Stickney’s legacy will be carried on in part by the work of his partner William Austin and in Lowell by Henry Rourke a former employee, competitor and partner.

[i] Lowell Morning Courier 5-23-1883

[ii] Lowell Morning Courier 4-29-1892

[iii] ibid

[i] Lowell Vox Populi 2-4-1888

[i] Lowell Daily News 7-11-1889

[ii] ibid

[iii] Lowell Daily News 7-19-1889

[iv] Lowell Daily News 7-24-1889

[i] Lowell Daily Citizen 10-27-1879

[ii] ibid

[iii] ibid

[iv] Eliot Samuel Atkins; “Biographical History of Massachusetts:1916

[v] Lowell Morning Courier 10-19-1892

[vi] Lowell Vox Populi 8-4-1888

[vii] Lowell Morning Courier 8-17-1888

[viii] ibid

[ix] Lowell Daily News 3-7-1890

[x] Lowell Vox Populi 4-6-1889

[xi] Lowell Daily Mail 4-8-1889

[xii] Lowell Morning Courier 2-14-1888

[xiii] American Architect and Building News 4-20-1889

[xiv] Lowell Vox Populi 6-29-1889

[xv] Walter Muir Whitehill. The Making of an Architectural Masterpiece: The Boston Public Library. American Art Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Autumn, 1970)

[xvi] Lowell Daily Mail 7-10-1889

[xvii] Boston Globe 9-22-1890

[xviii] Boston Globe 1-12-1894

[xix] Lowell Daily Mail 7-10-1889

[xx] Lowell Daily News 7-11-1889

The impetus for this blog was a talk I gave over forty years ago, or more specifically, I talk I redid in 2017. Way back in 1977, I gave a talk to the Lowell Historical Society on the 1889 architectural design competition for the new Lowell City Hall. Chatting one day over lunch with my old friend Lewis Karabatsos, I tossed out the idea of revisiting it forty years later and before I knew it I was chin deep in research. The story I’d found interesting years earlier turned out to be a great one aided by the the benefit of years of hindsight, better researching skills and improved access to historical materials.
After I’d given the talk I wondered what I would do with this great story and that’s how the blog came about.

The City Hall saga was the subject of my first two posts. I’d toyed with the idea of a blog on architecture, planning and design before but wasn’t sure the world wanted or needed opinion pieces from me. But great stories about forgotten or overlooked architects, builders, planners and others might just be something that others could enjoy. I called the blog “Building Blocks” because while these posts might seem random, I think that they build on one another to tell the story of the how and why things in the built environment came to be and the connections between remarkable people who made them happen.

The initial Lowell research got me looking at architects in Lowell and made me want to clear up a few vexing mysteries (at least to me.) Little did I know when I started looking at the early 19th Century architect James H. Rand, that it would cause me to reconsider much of what John Coolidge wrote in “Mill & Mansion,” his pioneering work on Lowell and its development and architecture. It has also brought me new insights into the development of architecture as a profession and the difficulty of building a career and a practice that has interest far beyond Lowell.
The Worcester Turnpike piece is a reconsideration of a talk I gave at the Historic Roads Conference a number of years ago. The roadway has always intrigued me and I had a sense that it had a greater historical significance that’s largely forgotten now and I hope I conveyed that. I’m also deeply interested in the history of public works and the extraordinary efforts required to see them to completion. This is something I know well from my own career but again something not fully appreciated. As former MDC Commission Bill Geary (my favorite all-time boss) would often comment, “People look at the Charles River and imagine that it’s just as God made it,” not knowing, of course that what they see today is an artifice of human imagination and an engineering puzzle that requires constant tending. The post on Bill Callahan and his fight to build the Turnpike Extension through the Charles River Basin is an exploration of that puzzle and an exposition of the power of a single individual from the era of so-called “Great Men” and how one person can shape policy and action in the face of official policy and presumed institutional consensus through keen political maneuvering and apparently sheer will. Elisabeth Herlihy, a contemporary of Callahan, is a deliberate contrast in style and achievement. The two stenographers, Herlihy and Callahan, through their intellect, curiosity and drive, both enjoyed great achievements, but where Callahan’s power was raw and obvious, Herlihy’s power was referential authority but no less effective. It was a pleasure to “rediscover” Herlihy, a remarkable planning pioneer who helped define a profession for generations and in a time when women’s public roles were considerably constrained.

if I strayed back to Lowell with my post on the 1877 Boston & Maine Railroad Depot it was in the same character of explaining the why of a thing and the repeated difficult efforts to see its realization. It helped that the architects had a quirky edge to give some life and fun to the story. But the many decades-long story of the fight to create this railroad illuminates a theme that I think distinguishes Lowell from all the other industrial cities that followed. Lowell offered abundant opportunities for local entrepreneurs who competed with the Boston-based capitalists for the control of the fortune and future of the city. The latter were focused single-mindedly on the well-being on their industrial investments. The former however had a more immediate and personal investment in the city and strived to diversify and raise the place to build their idea of a community.

The story of Frederic Faulkner’s white elephant of a house in some ways is a continuation of that theme. His house though represents his aspirations and those of his peers for the City when others, notably the capitalist Frederick Ayer decamped from Lowell for an equally ostentatious Tiffany-designed mansion in Boston’s Back Bay. Faulkner’s House is a great Gilded Age story of ill-conceived excess melded with strong personalities for an unfortunate over-reach that couldn’t be sustained.

The Faulkner story is an adaptation of a talk I gave this past June to the Lowell Historical Society which continues to indulge me. Lew Karabatsos is a great sounding board and Walter Hickey is an incredible researcher who generously surprises me with his treasures. That talk included more about the architect James Rand and his extraordinary houses and Samuel Lawrence, the youngest and most scandalous of the storied Lawrence brothers whose now forgotten deeds had a near-devastating impact on the City. Ben Butler perhaps appropriately gained possession of Lawrence’s grand country home overlooking Hunts Falls on the Merrimack after Lawrence departed Lowell. Fittingly, it would be Butler who would rescue Lowell several years later from Samuel Lawrence’s great fraud.

I’ve got a few other stories that I’d like to explore that I hope will prove as interesting to others as they are intriguing to me.