CultureNOW - The Somerset at Commonwealth Avenue: Arthur H. Bowditch and Peter Vanderwarker

The Somerset at Commonwealth Avenue

Architect
Arthur H. Bowditch

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
The list of plants sounds like a poem: Sea lavender, goldenrod, asters, beach peas, beach plum, sea buckthorn, tamarix, Virginia rose, bayberry, sweet fern, dyer's
greenwood, Oregon holly grape. It is a list of species that were planted in 1884 in a tiny new park called the Beacon Entrance. The park contained only two and a half acres, but it was sown with 100,000 shrubs, vines, flowers, and trees. It was created by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who called the park the Beacon Entrance because he thought of it as a narrow entry into his much larger Back Bay Fens beyond.

The new park was a green, watery strip connecting the Charles River with the Fens. It runs horizontally across the foreground of these two photographs, made in 1924 and 1980. In the background is Commonwealth Avenue, where the tiny, toy-like trees of 1924 have now grown into green giants. Looking at the photographs, one may wonder what the people in ,the cars would think if they were told that someone, once upon a time, thought the little patch of earth beneath the overpass was so important that he put 100,000 plants there. No other part of Olmsted's great Emerald Necklace, the chain of connected green spaces that runs from the Boston Common to Franklin Park, has been so devastated.

Except for the loss of the Beacon Entrance, little has changed from the time of the old photo to that of the new. Most of this block of Commonwealth was built between 1885 and 1901 and has not been altered since. The most prominent building is the old Somerset Hotel on the right, designed by Arthur Bowditch, built in 1897, and recently converted to condominiums. It may be that the Olmsted parks, long neglected, are about to enter a renaissance. Certainly a new interest in them is growing all over the country, most notably in the case of the astonishing renovations in New York's Central Park. This year is the centenary of the design of Franklin Park, considered to be - along with Central -Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Parkone of Olmsted's masterpieces.

The Franklin Park Coalition and other groups are sponsoring exhibitions and celebrations to rouse concern about the Boston Parks, some of which have already undergone renovation over the past few years. But it is too late for the Beacon Entrance. In his "Notes on the Plan of Franklin Park," Olmsted quoted the English historian John Ruskin in words that can serve as a sad caption for these two photographs: "Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for and say, 'See! This our fathers did for us.'''

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Lost Jewel, Boston Globe, 9 June 1985

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Location

416 Commonwealth Ave
Boston, MA 02215
United States

Nearby Items

Leif Eriksson		237 feet
Ayer Mansion		684 feet
Charlesgate (The Beacon Entrance)		686 feet
Fenway Studios		764 feet
Massachussetts Historical Society		0.3 miles
Boston Conservatory		0.3 miles
Church Court		0.3 miles