CultureNOW - 90 Westland Ave: Peter Vanderwarker

90 Westland Ave

There are no podcasts available.

Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Ghosts from the past linger in unexpected ways. At 90 Westland Avenue in Boston, at the corner of Hemenway Street across from the Fenway, the architecture of a new building evokes the memory of a mansion that once occupied the site.

We see the mansion in the older photo, not long after it was built in 1888. It was the home of a real estate developer named Charles Page and his wife, Kate. The architect was H. Langford Warren, who was soon to become the first head of the school of architecture at Harvard.

As a young man, Warren was a draftsman in the office of the great Boston architect H. H Richardson. In the Page house, he employed many Richardsonian motifs, including the great arched entryway. But Warren was also a fan of the Arts and Crafts Movement, with its love of fine handicraft. You can see that in the elaborate diaper-patterned brick and in the stepped gables. The gables were a revival of a motif from old Flemish, Dutch, and Scottish architecture, sometimes called corbie-step gables, because corbies (crows) liked to stand on the steps.

Those steps are what you notice in the new photo. "I tried to replicate the step-up roof to emphasize the main entrance," says Lucio Trabucco of Needham, the architect of the new building. "There was a great love expressed by the neighbors for that house. I tried to pay some homage by bringing some of the details back. I also tried to replicate the treatment of the windows with the arches." Influential, too, was the Boston Landmarks Commission, which asked that the new building take cues from the exuberance of the old.

Like many American houses that were intended for the ages, the Page mansion lived a short, undignified life. It was published in the magazine The Brickbuilder in 1905, which called it "charming and scholarly." But by 1912, the building was an art gallery, and in 1917 the whole house was lifted up one story and a strip of retail stores, in glass and buff-colored brick, was inserted beneath it. The original arched entryway then became a second-floor window. The building was falling apart by the time the current owner, Nick Pseudoikonomou, who operates Cappy's Pizza on the ground floor, decided to replace it. He offered the old house to anyone who would take it, but no one did.

A few of the original Arts and Crafts windows, made of bottle glass set in lead, were salvaged by a Boston city planner. Maybe someday they will be incorporated in a new building and will then become second-generation ghosts of the old Page mansion.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Turning a Page", Boston Globe, 12 December 2004

map not available at this time.

Location

Westland Avenue & Hemenway Street
Boston, MA 02115
United States

Nearby Items

Tent Bay		0.2 miles
Boston Conservatory		0.2 miles
Massachussetts Historical Society		0.3 miles
The Mapparium		0.3 miles
Edgerly Road Playground		0.3 miles
Fountain		0.3 miles
Convergence: Boston Sculptors Gallery Exhibits at the Christian Science Plaza		0.3 miles