Second Empire

11-13 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

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The houses at 11 and 13 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, sometime in the 1870s. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

The houses in 2017:

This lot in the Back Bay was purchased in 1860 by Frederick Hall Bradlee, a merchant whose father, Josiah Bradlee, had established the prosperous firm of Josiah Bradlee & Co. In 1846, the firm had been described as “one of the wealthiest commission houses in the city,” and Josiah had an estimated net worth of $500,000, equal to about $13.5 million today. Frederick was similarly wealthy, with a fortune of about $300,000 in 1846, and at the time he lived on Tremont Street with his wife Lucretia. However, in the 1860s they joined the many wealthy Bostonians who were relocating to the fashionable Back Bay neighborhood, which was just starting to be developed.

Frederick Bradlee did not actually start building on this lot until later in the decade, when he hired architect Nathaniel J. Bradlee (no direct relation) to design two homes here. The two houses match, with very similar Second Empire-style architecture, but they do not form a symmetrical pair. The one on the left, at 13 Commonwealth, is slightly wider, while the narrower 11 Commonwealth is one story taller. Both houses were completed around 1868, and Frederick kept the wider one for himself and Lucretia, while selling 11 Commonwealth to his daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Henry Ward Abbott.

Frederick lived here in this house for about 20 years, until his death in 1888, and 13 Commonwealth was sold soon after, to Martha Codman, the widow of artist John Amory Codman. Some of Frederick’s descendants would go on to achieve prominence, though, including his grandson, Frederick J. Bradlee Jr., who was an All-American football player at Harvard in the early 20th century. The younger Frederick’s son, Ben, was born in 1921, and went on to become the longtime editor of the Washington Post, where he played a major role in exposing the Watergate Scandal.

In the meantime, the house at 13 Commonwealth was sold in 1907 to Anna Nowell, the daughter of former governor Oliver Ames and a cousin of another Oliver Ames, who lived in the house on the far left at 15 Commonwealth. She and her husband George had the house demolished, and they hired the architectural firm of Parker, Thomas & Rice to design a replacement, with a Classical Revival style that matched the architectural tastes of the period. As part of this project, the front steps and porch of the neighboring 11 Commonwealth also had to be removed, and a new entrance was added to the ground floor.

Since the early 20th century, both houses have gone through a variety of owners. On the right, 11 Commonwealth has remained a single-family home, and aside from the removal of the old entrance very little has changed in the building’s appearance. The house at 13 Commonwealth was a single-family home until the 1940s, when it was converted into medical offices on the lower floor and apartments on the upper floors. Some of the offices were later converted into additional apartments, but in 2000 the entire building was restored, and it is now a single-family home again.

For more detailed historical information on these houses, see the Back Bay Houses website for 11 and 13 Commonwealth.

17-19 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

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The houses at 17 and 19 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, sometime in the 1870s. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

The houses in 2017:


These houses were built on a lot that had been purchased in 1866 by attorney William H. Gardiner. A member of a prominent Boston family, his father John Sylvester John Gardiner had been the rector of Trinity Church from 1805 to 1830, and William had studied law under Harrison Gray Otis in the early 1800s. He was nearly 70 when he purchased this property in the Back Bay, and he had his house built on the right side, at 17 Commonwealth. The house was completed in 1867, and that same year he sold the remaining two-fifths of the lot to Thomas C. Amory, who built his own house here on the left, at 19 Commonwealth.

Like Gardiner, Amory was an attorney, but he was also a poet, author, and historian who published a number of books in the 1870s and 1880s. His house here was completed in 1868, and it was designed by Henry Van Brunt, a young architect who later went on to become one of Boston’s leading architects of the era. It matches the Second Empire-style design of its neighbors, and although narrower than the surrounding homes, it is one story taller, with a fifth floor under the mansard roof.

Both Gardiner and Amory died in the 1880s, and these two houses went on to have a number of subsequent owners in the next few decades. Probably the most notable of these was William Phillips, who owned 17 Commonwealth from 1930 to 1942. Phillips was a diplomat whose career included serving as Assistant Secretary of State and Under Secretary of State, as well as ambassador to Belgium, Canada, and Italy. Because of the nature of his diplomatic work, though, he and his wife Caroline did not live here very much, and instead rented it out to other tenants.

Both of these houses are still standing today, although they have been modified over the years. In the early 1920s, the front entrance of 19 Commonwealth was lowered to the ground floor, the steps were removed, and the old doorway became a window. About a decade later, similar work was done to 17 Commonwealth, shortly after William Phillips purchased the property. Later in the 20th century, both houses were converted into condominiums, and today each house is divided into three individual units.

For more detailed historical information on these houses, see the Back Bay Houses website for 17 and 19 Commonwealth.

21-23 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

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The houses at 21 and 23 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, sometime in the 1870s. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

The houses in 2017:


The easternmost block of Commonwealth Avenue, between Arlington and Berkeley Streets, was among the first to be developed in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. Shortly after the land was filled, much of the block on the north side of the street was purchased in 1860 by merchant and Congressman Samuel Hooper, who built his own house at 25-27 Commonwealth, which is partially visible on the far left. Hooper sold the rest of the lots, including these ones, and in 1868 a pair of symmetrical Second Empire-style townhouses were built here. The homes match the architectural style of the rest of the street, and they are nearly identical to two other sets of houses at 41-47 Commonwealth.

The house on the left, number 23, was owned by Daniel Spooner, a former shipping merchant who later entered the textile industry, becoming treasurer of the Great Falls Manufacturing Company in New Hampshire. He only lived in this house for about a year, until his death in 1869, but his wife Elizabeth continued to live here until later in the 1870s. The house on the right, 21 Commonwealth, was owned by John A. Burnham, a manufacturer whose positions included serving as president of the Nashua Iron and Steel Company. He lived here until his death in 1884, and the house remained in his family until 1913.

Since then, both houses have seen a number of subsequent owners, but essentially nothing has changed in this scene. Both houses are still standing, as are the houses on either side of the photos, and Commonwealth Avenue continues to be one of the most desirable streets in Boston. Today, many of the historic townhouses have been converted into apartments or condominiums, including the house on the left at 23 Commonwealth, which is now a four-unit condominium building. The building on the right was converted into classrooms in the 1940s, and was used by several different school over the years before eventually being restored to a single-family home in the early 2000s.

For more detailed historical information on these houses, see the Back Bay Houses website for 21 and 23 Commonwealth.

41-47 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

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The four houses at 41, 43, 45, and 47 Commonwealth Avenue, sometime in the 1870s. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

The houses in 2017:


In the mid-19th century, Boston was geographically small and very crowded, with very little undeveloped land. The population was continuing to grow, however, leading the city to embark on an ambitious civil engineering plan to fill in the Back Bay, a badly polluted tidal marsh along the Charles River. The project began in the late 1850s, and within a decade the neighborhood was already well on its way to becoming one of the city’s most exclusive residential areas.

Commonwealth Avenue, with its broad, tree-lined mall, was intended to be a centerpiece of the development, and house lots on the sunny north side were considered particularly desirable. This spot here, partway between Berkeley and Clarendon Streets, was purchased in 1869 by Elijah C. Drew, a merchant and president of the Eleventh Ward National Bank. Here, he built two identical pairs of symmetrical houses, with a Second Empire-style design that matched most of the other homes in the area.

Upon completion around 1869, Drew moved into the house at 41 Commonwealth Avenue, on the far right side, but he sold the other three homes. House number 43, second from the right, was sold to William T. Andrews, who purchased it for his daughter Elizabeth and her husband, John T. Clark. John was a partner in the crockery firm of Clark, Adams, and Clark, and he also served as chairman of the city’s Board of Aldermen. The house to the left, number 45, was sold to Elmer Townsend, a businessman who owned the New England Wax Thread Sewing Machine Company, and last house on the left, number 47, was also sold to a businessman, dry goods merchant Henry Blaney and his wife Mary.

None of the original families in these homes lived here for very long, and by the end of the 1870s all four had been sold. Over the next few decades, the houses has a variety of other residents, and in 1902 the house at 43 Commonwealth was demolished and replaced with a new house, designed by architect Julius A. Schweinfurth for Ashton R. Willard. This broke up the symmetry of the original set of four houses, and it also created an interesting contrast between the dark brownstones of the Victorian era and the much lighter building materials of the Classical Revival era.

When the first photo was taken, the surrounding lots had not been developed yet. These homes would be built later in the 1870s, and very little has changed since then. Aside from the replacement of the house at 43 Commonwealth, the only other significant change in this scene is the fifth floor atop 45-47 Commonwealth. These two houses had been purchased in 1963 and combined into a single apartment building, and a fifth-floor penthouse was added, replacing the original mansard roof. However, the building was renovated again in 2008, restoring the roof and making the fifth floor almost unnoticeable from the street.

For more detailed historical information on these houses, see the Back Bay Houses website for 41, 43, and 45-47 Commonwealth.

John P. Wilcox House, Springfield, Mass

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The house at 17 Ingraham Terrace in Springfield, around 1938-1939. Image courtesy of the Springfield Preservation Trust.

The scene in 2017:


Born in Springfield in 1836, John P. Wilcox was the son of Philip Wilcox, a tinware and stove merchant. Likewise, John became a stove merchant, and in 1861 he married his first wife, Harriet Russell. She died of tuberculosis in 1866, though, and two years later he remarried to Henrietta Willis. By 1870, they were living in this elegant Second Empire-style house at the corner of Ingraham Terrace and Union Street. The location of this house would have afforded them with excellent views of downtown Springfield and the Connecticut River valley, and the value of the property was listed as $40,000 in the 1870 census, equal to over $770,000 today.

John died 1897, and his widow Henrietta lived here until her death in 1912. His only child was Hattie, the daughter of his first wife. She never married, and lived here her entire life, until she died in 1930. By the time the first photo was taken, the house was being rented by Bernard F. Gilchriest, a physician who lived here with his wife Odette and their two children, who were also named Bernard and Odette. They lived here until at least the early 1940s, and the house itself was still standing over a decade later. However, the property last appears in the Springfield Republican, and the house was probably demolished sometime in the 1950s or 1960s. Today, the site of the house is a parking lot for the former Wesson Memorial Hospital, which is visible in the distant left of both photos.

238-240 Union Street, Springfield, Mass

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The house at 238-240 Union Street in Springfield, around 1938-1939. Image courtesy of the Springfield Preservation Trust.

The building in 2017:

This building is one of several Second Empire-style duplexes on this section of Union Street, including the similar-looking one directly across the street at 247-249 Union. It was built in 1869, and was owned by Colonel James M. Thompson, a prominent city resident who lived in a nearby mansion a little further up Union Street. Originally, the building had a third unit, which was located on the left side, but this was demolished around the 1930s.

After Colonel Thompson’s death in 1884, his family continued to own this building into the early 20th century. Census records from both 1900 and 1910 show that the units on the left were boarding houses, with tenants that included a bookkeeper, bank clerk, and a clergyman. The unit on the right, though, was rented to a single family, with real estate agent William Dewey living here from at least 1900 to 1910, along with his wife Ella and their three children, Alonzo, Eudocia, and Dorothy.

In subsequent censuses, the building continued to be used as a boarding house for several more decades. The third unit, number 236, was removed sometime before the first photo was taken, and the interior of the building is now divided into six different units. However, very little has changed with the building’s exterior in the past 80 years, and it stands as a good example of the type of elegant townhouses that were built during the city’s post-Civil War housing boom.