Essex Street Boston

Sheaffe House, Boston

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The Sheaffe House at the corner of Columbia and Essex in Boston, sometime in the 1800s. Photo courtesy of Boston Public Library.

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The scene in 2014:

 

Located in the southern part of downtown Boston, the Sheaffe House was built in 1734 by Thomas Child, who owned a distillery a few block away.  The house was later owned by his son-in-law, William Sheaffe, for whom the house is named.  Sheaffe died in 1771, and his wife opened the house as a boarding house to support the family.  One of the residents was Lord Percy, a British officer who fought at Lexington & Concord and the Battle of Long Island.  Thanks to Lord Percy, one of Sheaffe’s children, Roger Hale Sheaffe, attended military school in London and eventually reached the rank of general in the British army.

The house was demolished sometime before 1887, and the brick building on the left-hand side of the 2014 photo replaced it.  The building, 88 Kingston Street, has been substantially renovated – I’m not sure if anything survives but the facade.  To the right is the One Lincoln Street building, an office building that was built in 2003 and is one of the tallest buildings in the Financial District.

Harrison & Essex Streets, Boston

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The corner of Harrison Avenue and Essex Street in Boston, in 1860. Photo courtesy of Boston Public Library.

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The scene in 2014:

Located in present-day Chinatown, this scene has completely changed in the past 150 years, with none of the 1860 buildings surviving today. Even the streets have changed somewhat, with Harrison Avenue (the street in the lower left foreground) being extended across Essex Street, through where the house on the right-hand side of the 1860 photo once stood.  That house was home of Wendell Phillips, a noted 19th century abolitionist, lawyer, and candidate for governor of Massachusetts.

Incidentally, the first photo was taken by Josiah Johnson Hawes, who worked with Albert Sands Southworth in the famous Southworth & Hawes photographic company.  Together, they were among the early pioneers of quality photography, and some of Hawes’s photographs, including the one above, give a rare glimpse of Boston on the eve of the Civil War.