CultureNOW - First Church in Roxbury: William Blaney and Peter Vanderwarker

First Church in Roxbury

Architect
William Blaney

Dates

1804

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
The First Church in Roxbury looks more like a traditional New England village church than any other in the city. Crisp and austere in form, pure white in color, it stands with a sense of pride and presence atop a knoll overlooking John Eliot Square.

The new photo demonstrates a fact that few Bostonians are aware of: The church is only a short walk from the towers of Boston's Back Bay. So sharply separated are Boston's neighborhoods, by barriers both physical and psychological, that it comes as something of a shock to realize that the distance from First Church to the Prudential tower, about a mile, is no greater than the eight blocks from Arlington Street to Massachusetts Avenue in the Back Bay.

The older photo dates from around 1875. It shows that although the church has changed very little, its surroundings have changed a great deal. In the new photo, the spacious houses visible to the left of the church in 1875 are gone, replaced by vacant land that fails to provide the church's oval green with the firm, defining edge it needs.
First Church is now the oldest wood church in Boston, yet it is the fifth church that has stood on this site. Its congregation, now Unitarian, was originally a Congregationalist group that first gathered around the Reverend John Eliot in 1632. The present building dates from 1804. William Blaney was its architect and a bell cast by Paul Revere
hangs in its tower.

In recent decades, this part of Roxbury has been troubled by low income levels and declining population. Most of its residents are black, as is the minister of First Church, Thomas E. Payne, although the congregation is 85 percent white. Some of the buildings around the church are now being fixed up, an indication, perhaps, of gentrification in Roxbury. Payne believes the neighborhood will slowly become
wealthier and, probably, predominantly white - possibilities that are cause for both hope and concern among residents and city planners.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - A Site to Behold", Boston Globe, 16 February 1986

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Location

Dudley St & Putnam St
Roxbury, MA 02119
United States

Nearby Items

Carved in Stone: William Lloyd Garrison Fountain		0.3 miles
Medallions & Alvah Kittredge Park Fence		0.3 miles
Alvah Kittredge Park Fence		0.3 miles
Faces of Dudley		0.3 miles
Alvah Kittredge House		0.4 miles
Washington Street at Vernon Street		0.4 miles
Dudley Square Police Station		0.4 miles