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    Boston's Financial District
    Boston's Financial District
    Boston's Financial District
    Ebook283 pages1 hour

    Boston's Financial District

    By Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

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    About this ebook

    Boston's financial district is considered the heart of New England's banking and finance. It is a veritable overlay of sleek modern office buildings and elegant high-rise structures of the early twentieth century. In the center of this contemporary skyline is evidence of the financial district's long history. Boston's first skyscraper, the Boston Custom House tower, stands high from where it was built in 1915 on top of the original 1849 custom house building.

    Boston's Financial District chronicles the steady change from a romantic neighborhood to numerous banking and business houses. It was originally known as Old South End and was a residential site of elegant mansions designed by Charles Bulfinch and located on tree-lined squares and streets that emulated the aristocratic boroughs of London. The photographs in Boston's Financial District show evidence of the destruction wreaked by the Great Boston Fire of 1872 and the rebuilding of Boston's center of commerce. With its well-known banks and businesses, the financial district has witnessed some of the most monumental and influential historical changes in the city of Boston.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateNov 1, 2002
    ISBN9781439611753
    Boston's Financial District
    Author

    Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

    Anthony Mitchell Sammarco is a noted historian and author of over sixty books on Boston, its neighborhoods and surrounding cities and towns. He lectures widely on the history and development of his native city.

    Read more from Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

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      Boston's Financial District - Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

      city.

      INTRODUCTION

      Greatness in cities in America is too often associated with prodigious commercial activity, miles of business blocks, fine new sixteen-story buildings, the ceaseless strife of toiling thousands, and other features of a boom.

      —An astute anonymous observer in 1892

      Boston’s financial district is roughly bounded by Tremont, Essex, Court, and State Streets and the waterfront. Today, it is home to many leading banking and investment houses that transact business throughout the world. However, in the first two centuries after Boston was settled in 1630 by English Puritans seeking to create a new Zion in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, this area was a combination of residential land and small shops that would remain as such until the mid-19th century. By the time of the Civil War, Boston was deeply involved in the vast infilling project of the Back Bay, which took place after 1858. Thanks to the ingenious engineer John Souther and his Souther steam shovel, one of the country’s quintessential Victorian neighborhoods was ultimately created. As the residents of such streets as Summer, Kingston, Otis, Pearl, and High Streets in the old South End left their enclaves for the newly developed South End, the downtown area would become decidedly commercial with new business blocks of four- and five-story structures rapidly built to replace the former mansions.

      Following the Civil War, Boston saw a dramatic decrease in all aspects of maritime commerce as the economy shifted toward the more lucrative manufacturing centers of Lowell and Lawrence, which produced cotton textiles that served the consumer base of the United States. The towns founded by Francis C. Lowell and Abbott Lawrence, two prominent Bostonians, used the waterpower afforded by the Merrimac River. Their extensive mills were staffed with both native Americans and an ever increasing flow of immigrants, most of whom were from western Europe. However, downtown Boston was to eventually become a beacon that attracted businessmen who sought to succeed in business, finance, insurance, and trading concerns. Thereby, a center of finance in New England was created.

      It was said in 1892 that in its commercial, as distinguished from its aesthetic, aspect, Boston still occupies relatively as prominent a position among the cities as she ever did. While it is true that other cities in certain directions are growing more rapidly, yet, in many instances, it is Boston brains and Boston capital and Boston methods which are reasonable for their advancement. In the 1875–1900 period, Boston’s banking and investment houses expanded to provide services for the up-and-coming middle class investor who stands in the forefront in developing property and otherwise affording opportunities for commercial prosperity. It was in Boston that life insurance began, as well as superior carriers of fire insurance. Following the Great Boston Fire of 1872, the number of manufacturing industries located in the city numbered in the hundreds and included the boot and shoe industry, the leather, cotton, and wool exchanges, publishing houses, and impressive retail houses, most of which were located in the financial district. One newspaper wag said it was the east wind, a codfish diet, and other innocent fictions that accounted for the causes of intellectual Boston people, but only to those of the manor born! Boston was referred to as the Athens of America, and even more boldly, as the Hub of the Universe by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who portrayed Boston as an intellectual hotbed of thinkers, movers, and shakers who, with the new business lords in Boston’s financial district, made Boston home not just to the bean and the cod but to a wide spectrum of people who originally hailed from every corner of the earth.

      In the period between World War II and the present, Boston’s financial district has gone from the Boston Custom House—the only high-rise office building in this area of Boston—to a multitude of skyscrapers that now blanket the district. Beginning in the 1930s with the Batterymarch Building (60 Batterymarch Street) and the United Shoe Machinery Building (138–164 Federal Street), the massive rebuilding of the financial district continued in the 1960s with the New England Merchants National Bank (28 State Street), the Boston Company Building (1 Boston Place), the First National Bank of Boston Building (99 High Street), State Street Bank Building (225 Franklin Street), and the Shawmut Bank (1 Federal Street). The rebuilding seemingly continues unabated to this day. In the last decade, the area that once had elegant Federal mansions and verdant gardens with views of the sea has given way to a densely built-up commercial area with a multitude of buildings and commercial concerns, creating a thriving nexus of businesses. The last two centuries in the history and development of Boston’s financial district have seen tremendous changes and usages, which will probably continue in the next two centuries.

      Still, this vibrant and energetic area of the city of Boston draws businesspeople, clients, tourists, and native Bostonians alike to the financial center of the Hub of the Universe.

      The city of Boston was incorporated in 1822. After that time, it began to see tremendous topographical changes with the cutting down of the three hills known as the Trimount—Mount Vernon and Beacon and Pemberton Hills—and the infilling of the waterfront around Dock Square. Here, in an 1850 print, the Boston Custom House has been built on India Street at the head of Long Wharf, where the bowsprits of packet ships practically came up to the granite steps and where they discharged their cargo for distribution to vendors in the city. Today, the area is hemmed in on all sides by development. The impressive custom house was designed by Ammi Burnham Young, who was assisted by J.H. Hammatt Billings. It was built between 1837 and 1849 of Quincy granite, and a tower designed by Peabody & Stearns was built in 1915.

      One

      THE OLD SOUTH END

      In the early 19th century, the South End of Boston was a fashionable residential district with impressive mansions, tree-lined streets, and lavish gardens. The streets such as Summer, Franklin, Otis, High, and Pearl Streets were lined with imposing brick mansions, many of which were designed by Boston’s gentleman architect and native-born son Charles Bulfinch (1763–1848). Beginning in the 1790s, the Harvard College–educated Bulfinch, following a grand tour of Europe, began transforming the town of Boston from a small, provincial seaport to an urbane and sophisticated city of brick and granite buildings. Starting in 1793 with the design and construction of the Tontine Crescent on Franklin Street, Boston’s architectural outlook was to be vastly broadened by Bulfinch’s astute perspective and obviously perceptive neoclassical designs. He was to serve as chairman of the selectmen of Boston and oversee the implementation of new architectural perspectives and how they ultimately changed the face of the old town. Between 1793 and 1820, he would lay the underpinnings of what would become the city of Boston in 1822 and the gateway to 19th-century architectural, topographical, and ethnic changes that would radically transform Boston into the Athens of America and, as it was later coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Hub of the Universe. In the first two decades of the 19th century, the Old South End had become the most fashionable residential area in town with close proximity to the waterfront and breathtaking views of the harbor from Fort Hill, a one-time fortified eminence.

      The Vassall-Gardner House once stood on Summer Street between Chauncey and Washington Streets. Built in 1727, it was typical of early-18th-century wood houses in Boston that were set in a fenced, well-kept garden. The house is seen here just prior to its demolition in 1854 to make way for a commercial block built by the Gardner family. The still well-tended Colonial house had a large carriage house set at the end of a cobblestone drive. The crenellated tower seen in the distance is that of the Church of Our Savior (organized in 1845 ), which was designed by J.H. Hammatt Billings and built on Bedford Street. The house was a poignant reminder of the once common pre-Revolutionary streetscapes in town, and it would remain a remarkably long time into the 19th century. Today, Macy’s

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