Government Buildings

View from the Arsenal Tower, Springfield, Mass (3)

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Looking north from the Arsenal tower at the Springfield Armory, around 1882. Image from Springfield Illustrated (1882).

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The view in 2015, photographed with permission from the Springfield Armory National Historic Site.

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This view from the top of the Main Arsenal tower shows the northwest corner of the Springfield Armory and the Liberty Heights neighborhood in the distance. Both areas have undergone some significant changes, with the most obvious being the large building to the right. Built for Springfield Technical Community College after the Armory closed in 1968, it occupies the ground where several officers’ houses once stood, as seen in the first photo. However, two other historic buildings in this scene survive today. The Long Storehouse, built between 1846 and 1863, is now partially hidden by newer construction, but it still stands along the northern edge of the campus. Just in front of it, in the center of the photo, is the much smaller Master Armorer’s House, a Greek Revival style home that was originally located next to the Main Arsenal before being moved to its current site shortly before the first photo was taken.

It is somewhat hard to tell, but the Liberty Heights neighborhood in the distance has undergone far more drastic changes than the Armory grounds. When the first photo was taken, this area to the northeast of downtown was sparsely populated, with large estates that were owned by wealthy citizens. However, as the city grew, these properties were subdivided and developed with multi-family homes by the early 1900s. The neighborhood changed even further in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Interstate 291 was built through the area, but today at least one of the historic mid-19th century homes has survived. Built in 1853, the Joshua Bliss Vinton House is barely visible on the extreme left of the 1882 photo, and it is still standing at the end of Underwood Street, where it serves as the rectory for Our Lady of the Rosary Church on Franklin Street. Both the church and the house are mostly hidden by trees in the 2015 scene, but the steeple of the church can be seen on the far left, and just beyond it is the cupola of the house.

For other then and now views from the Arsenal tower, see the other posts showing the view facing southwest, west, south, and north.

Custom House Tower, Boston

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The Custom House Tower in Boston, as seen from Quincy Market during its construction, around 1913-1915. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

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The scene in 2015:

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As explained in this earlier post, Boston’s Custom House was built in 1849, with a convenient location near Long Wharf that easily allowed officials to inspect incoming cargoes. Boston’s role as major seaport grew over the years, though, and by the early 1900s it was necessary to expand it. Rather than demolishing the old building, though, they simply added a 32-story skyscraper on top of it. At the time, Boston had a 125 foot limit on skyscrapers in the city, but as a federal building the Custom House Tower was exempt. At 496 feet tall, it was nearly four times the maximum height, and it dominated the Boston skyline for many years, as this early 1930s view of the city shows.

The c.1913-1915 photo above shows the building during its construction, with the original 1849 structure clearly visible at its base. It would remain the tallest building in the city until the completion of the Prudential Tower nearly 50 years later, and it would be used by US Customs until 1986 when they moved into the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Federal Building. After a long period of vacancy, the historic tower is now a Marriott Hotel, and it is part of the Custom House District on the National Register of Historic Places.

Beacon Hill Reservoir, Boston

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The reservoir atop Beacon Hill in Boston, around 1860. Image taken by Josiah Johnson Hawes, courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

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The scene in 2015:

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Long before the Wachusett and Quabbin Reservoirs, Boston’s municipal water supply was Lake Cochituate, a reservoir in Natick, Framingham, and Wayland. The project began in 1845, and it included not only creating the artificial lake, but also building a 14-mile long aqueduct that fed this stone reservoir atop Beacon Hill, just behind the Massachusetts State House. From here, the water was distributed throughout the city, using the hill’s elevation to carry the water downhill through the pipes. It occupied the majority of the block between Hancock, Derne, Temple, and Mt. Vernon Streets, and it had a capacity of over 2.6 million gallons.

The structure’s cornerstone laying ceremony in 1847 included a time capsule, which contained several publications and two silver plates, perhaps in the hope that, like the great Roman aqueducts in Europe, this public water supply structure would last for thousands of years. However, as it turned out, it lasted for less than 40. It closed by about 1880, and around three years later it was demolished to build a large expansion of the Massachusetts State House, which now occupies the site where this reservoir once stood.

Main Street, Lee, Mass

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Looking north on Main Street from near Park Street in Lee, in 1911. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

 

Main Street in 2015:

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The town of Lee is situated in the Berkshires region of Western Massachusetts, and in the 19th century it was a small but prominent industrial town. At its peak, the town had several dozen paper mills and several marble quarries, and the town’s prosperity was reflected in its downtown area here along Main Street. Most of the buildings in this scene date to the mid to late 19th century, including the historic Memorial Town Hall to the right. It was completed in 1874, and has housed the town offices ever since. Through the years, it has also taken on a variety of other uses, including a post office, Grand Army of the Republic hall, barber shop, movie theater, district court, and police station. In 1965, singer Arlo Guthrie faced littering charges in the courtroom here, an incident which later inspired his famous song “Alice’s Restaurant.” Today, in addition to the town offices, it is also the town police station, and although it has undergone renovations in 1912 and in 1990-1991, its exterior has remained well preserved for over 140 years.

Just beyond the Memorial Town Hall is the Baird and Benton Block, a three story commercial building that was built in 1875 by paper manufacturers Prentiss Baird and Charles and James Benton. It originally had a mansard roof like the neighboring Town Hall, but the roof was destroyed in a fire in the late 1800s. Aside from renovations to the first floor storefronts, the building’s appearance is similar to what it looked like in 1911, but the upper two floors were vacant from the 1950s until a renovation in 2012 that converted it into classroom and office space.

Most of the other commercial building in the scene date from the second half of the 19th century, but the oldest is the Morgan House, the wood-frame building with the two story porch on the left side of Main Street. It was built in 1817 by William Porter as a house, and in 1867 it was purchased by Edward Morgan, who enlarged the original building and turned it into the Morgan House inn. Over the years, its guests have included Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, John F. Kennedy, and George Bernard Shaw, and today it is still operated as an inn and restaurant.

Overall, the only significant change to this scene is the Park Building, located on the far left where the Lee Savings Bank building stood in the 1911 photo. It was built just a few years later in 1914, and it is one of the newest buildings along this section of Main Street. The entire area is now part of the Lower Main Street Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places, and it is an excellent surviving example of a historic 19th century New England town center.

Post Office, Monson, Mass

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The post office at the corner of Main and State Streets in Monson, around 1893. Image courtesy of the Monson Free Library.

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The scene in 2015:

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The building in the first photo was built in 1855 for the recently-established Monson National Bank.  In 1872, Monson Savings Bank was also created, and the two companies shared the same counter, tellers, and vault within this small building until 1893, when a larger one was completed just a short walk down Main Street from here.  That same year, the nearby Central Block, which housed the post office, was destroyed in a fire, so the post office was moved to the recently-vacated bank building.  It later moved back to the Central Block location when a new building was completed on the site.

I don’t know exactly when it was demolished, but it would have been sometime before 1925, when the original Monson High School was built here.  The school building was converted into the town offices in the early 1990s, but it sustained heavy damage in the une 1, 2011 tornado, and it was demolished in 2013.  A new town office building, seen to the right in the 015 photo, was completed earlier in the year.

John Brown’s Fort, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia

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The fire engine house at the Harpers Ferry Armory, more commonly referred to as “John Brown’s Fort,” as seen around 1860. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Civil War Collection.

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The same view in May 1939. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Collection.

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The scene in 2015:

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This small, seemingly nondescript building was built in 1848 at the entrance to the Harpers Ferry Armory, and was used as a guard house and fire engine house.  Normally, such a building would not be the subject of an 1860s stereocard, but it gained widespread fame just a few years earlier, due to its role in John Brown’s raid on the armory.

On October 16, 1859, northern abolitionist John Brown led a group of 22 men who attempted to take the armory and start a slave rebellion. They succeeded in taking the armory, and took a number of Harpers Ferry citizens hostage, but the plan quickly unraveled and they ended up barricading themselves in this building, surrounded by local militiamen and other armed townspeople.  Eventually, Colonel Robert E. Lee, still fighting in the US Army at the time, led a detachment of Marines, who succeeded in taking the building and capturing John Brown and most of his men.

To many northern abolitionists, John Brown was a hero, but to southern slaveowners he was a dangerous radical and a criminal. He was executed on December 2 in nearby Charles Town, but the failed raid helped to set the Civil War in motion a little over a year later.  The first photo was probably taken within three years of the raid, and in it the building still bears some of the scars from the fight.

Unlike most of the armory buildings, this one actually survived the war, and over time it became a tourist attraction and a symbol of the abolitionist movement. However, many residents feared that it would become a major draw for African-Americans to visit the town, so they were looking for ways to get rid of it.  Finally, in 1891 the owners decided to dismantle the fort and reassemble it at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  It was a colossal failure at the exposition, though; the move cost $60,000, and just 11 people paid the 50 cent admission fee to view the fort.

The fort underwent further dismantlings and reconstructions, before eventually moving to its present-day site about 150 feet to the right of here.  However, it doesn’t have much real historic value, because of the number of times it has been reconstructed and the amount of original materials that has been lost over time.

After the fort was moved from here, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad built new railroad embankments through the site of the fort, so today it is at a substantially higher elevation than it was in the first photo.  The monument, seen in the last two photos, was added by the railroad and marks the original location.