CultureNOW - 57 Mt. Vernon Street: Peter Vanderwarker

57 Mt. Vernon Street

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
If Boston has an epicenter, a mythic heart, it is a short stretch of upper Mt. Vernon Street on Beacon Hill, shown here in photos from 1860 and 1992. The walk down Mt. Vernon to Louisburg Square, past these historic brick mansions, is the most beautiful and urbane that Boston has to offer. Little has changed on Beacon Hill since young Henry Adams grew up in No. 57 in the 1840s and '50s, with "a large and overpowering set of brothers and sisters," as he put it later in his classic The Education of Henry Adams. No. 57 is the house set back at the left of each photo. Adams came to believe he had been betrayed by his wealthy and untroubled Beacon Hill upbringing, one that ignored the changes occurring in the world: "Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as simple as it was classic ....

The moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good .... Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy." To the right is No. 55, now the Nichols House Museum, the only house on the hill open to the public, with guided tours three afternoons a week. It is named for Rose Standish Nichols, the first American woman landscape architect. Her will established the house as a museum in 1960. It is preserved as it existed during the 75 years she lived there and contains such treasures as two sculptures by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, her uncle. An earlier resident, between 1817 and 1819, was
Daniel Webster.

Both Nos. 55 and 57 were designed by Charles Bulfinch and were built in 1804 by Jonathan Mason, a shipping merchant and real estate developer who became a US senator. They are two of a row of four houses Mason gave to his daughters as wedding presents. Mason belonged to a group called the Mt. Vernon Proprietors, speculators who, in 1798, purchased 18 acres of pasture from an agent of the painter John Singleton Copley. Copley protested in vain over the bargain price of $1,000 an acre. Mt. Vernon was an actual hill in those days. The Mt. Vernon Proprietors sliced 50 or 60 feet off the top and dumped the earth in the river at the foot of the hill, creating Charles Street.

They then laid out today's Mt. Vernon, Pinckney, Chestnut, and Walnut streets, gradually filling them in with houses. There has never been a time when Beacon Hill was not home to civic and cultural leaders; it has never gone out of fashion. Now a historic district, in which you need permission to alter the exterior of any house. even to the extent of a doorknob, the Hill is the changeless center of an ever-changing city.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Hill Culture, Boston Globe, 26 July 1992

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Location

57 Mt Vernon Street
Boston, MA 02108
United States

Nearby Items

Nichols House Museum		99 feet
Beacon Hill		454 feet
Massachusetts State House Annex (Beacon Hill Reservoir)		780 feet
Anne Hutchinson		825 feet
John Fitzgerald Kennedy		910 feet
Third Harrison Gray Otis House (American Meteorological Society)		982 feet
Henry Cabot Lodge		1000 feet