An exterior view of Horticultural Hall soon after its 1901 debut. / Photo courtesy of Detroit Publishing Co./Library of Congress

We’ve seen plenty of trend pieces about millennials’ love for plants. But today’s tenders of massive monsteras have nothing on the green-thumbed enthusiasts of centuries past, who preserved plant specimens in herbariums, painted them in painstakingly detailed illustrations, and created sprawling botanical gardens and arboretums. They even designed architecture around flora—not only glass-walled conservatories and orangeries, but sturdy, stately structures such as Back Bay’s Horticultural Hall, the former headquarters of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (and current HQ of the magazine you’re reading right now).

The society didn’t start out with fancy digs. Its first meeting convened at a Congress Street insurance office on a frigid February day in 1829, when 16 attendees braved 6-foot snowdrifts for the occasion. Despite that modest turnout, the society quickly took root, hosting exhibitions of locally grown flora (including buzzy new cultivars like the Concord grape) and helping to create America’s first garden cemetery at Mount Auburn. By century’s end, the society claimed nearly a thousand members and had outgrown two previous Horticultural Halls—the first on School Street, and the second on Tremont—neither of which remains standing today.

The third Horticultural Hall was built to last. After purchasing a lot on the corner of Mass. Ave. and Huntington, the society hired Wheelwright & Haven, the architectural firm behind landmarks such as the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall and the quirky Harvard Lampoon Building. Horticultural Hall would be a more sober structure, one designed to harmonize with the year-old Symphony Hall across the street. The resulting blueprints begot a rectangular Renaissance Revival building of brick bedecked with white trimmings, like a layer cake artfully adorned with icing. Bedford limestone framed the windows and formed Ionic capitals atop the pilasters; marble friezes featured fruits and flowers, hinting at the bounty within. Inside, the ground floor contained a 300-seat lecture hall, a small exhibition hall, and a cavernous main exhibition hall measuring over 52 feet wide and 123 feet long. Vaulted skylit ceilings soared nearly 50 feet high, and a raised loggia at the hall’s eastern end let viewers survey the vast space. The second floor held another stunner: a balconied library boasting ornate woodwork and more than 10,000 volumes on horticultural topics.

More than 150 species starred in this Italian Garden exhibition in the spring of 1912. / Photo courtesy of the State Library of Massachusetts

On June 3, 1901, when 2,000-plus attendees arrived for the opening night of the inaugural 10-day show, they found the new building filled with flowers and foliage loaned by Greater Boston’s finest gardens and greenhouses. White and purple wisteria bloomed in the lecture hall; jasmine perfumed the loggia. The small exhibition hall showcased a thousand orchids, a collection called the “best ever gathered in America” by the Boston Transcript. And in the main hall, a riot of azaleas and rhododendrons offered the illusion of a real garden transported indoors, complete with floors covered in earth and gravel walkways.

This arched entrance was added to the building during the 1980s renovation.

In the decades that followed, Horticultural Hall served as a home not only for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, but for lots of other like-minded groups, including the Wildflower Society, the Garden Club Federation, the Boston Mycological Club, and the Herb Society of America. The building was also rented for an array of other happenings, from dance parties to dog shows, antique fairs to Shakespeare performances. But it began a second life in 1984, undergoing a $4 million renovation that allowed the society to continue to operate the library while commercializing most of the building. The very first tenant: Boston magazine. The staff moved into one of the city’s most beautiful and unusual office spaces, which had been updated with a cantilevered mezzanine level that added square footage but preserved the hall’s grand scale and natural light.

In the ’90s, the society sold the building and transplanted itself to the Gardens at Elm Bank, a 36-acre property in Wellesley and Dover where it remains to this day. But that lavish library hasn’t gone to waste. Today it’s home to the Museum of Fine Arts’ William Morris Hunt Memorial Library, where books on art, not botany, line the shelves. And in the adjoining hall, monthly, quarterly, and biannual magazines continue to be made in that airy, sunlit space where annuals and perennials once bloomed.

The Cyclorama’s Tremont Street façade today. / Photo by Melissa Blackall

If you’ve attended an event at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Cyclorama—one of the South End’s most unusual buildings—you may have been too busy clinking glasses at that gala, or perusing paintings at that art fair, to wonder: What was the original purpose of this huge round room? And what’s with all the arrow slits and turrets?

Turns out, the brick exterior’s fortress-like feel was intentional, because the Cyclorama was built in 1884 for battle—for Paul Dominique Philippoteaux’s panoramic painting The Battle of Gettysburg, that is. After another version was exhibited to paying crowds in Chicago, entrepreneur Charles Willoughby commissioned a cavernous rotunda to house the new canvas in Boston. Architects Charles Amos Cummings and Willard T. Sears—the duo who’d designed Copley Square’s Old South Church a decade before—capped it with one of the largest domes in the country, second only to that of the U.S. Capitol.

A lighting grid designed by Buckminster Fuller hangs in the interior, which offers a blank canvas for a wide range of events. / Photo by Melissa Blackall

The grand opening of the Cyclorama in 1884. / Courtesy of the Boston Public Library/Flickr

Philippoteaux’s painting was no less impressive. Nearly 400 feet long and 50 feet high, it debuted on December 22, 1884, when Bostonians packed Tremont Street and paid 50 cents apiece to see it. After navigating a narrow passageway and a flight of stairs, they reached the viewing platform—and found themselves transported to the famed Civil War battlefield of 1863. The French artist spent months interviewing survivors and sketching onsite, and his incredibly realistic rendering seemed to extend for miles in every direction. Props—dirt and debris, canteens, and cannons—provided a 3D foreground, completing the illusion.

The word “cyclorama” was coined to describe such spectacular tableaux. The IMAX of the 1800s, cycloramas popped up in many cities, and in the wake of the success of the Civil War scene, Boston’s soon hosted depictions of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, ancient Jerusalem, and a Hawaiian volcano. But the fad soon fizzled. Philippoteaux’s painting—now on view at the Gettysburg National Military Park—languished in an abandoned crate for years.

The Cyclorama building, however, continued to see plenty of action. During the 1890s, it offered a panoply of trendy entertainments, including boxing, roller polo, and bicycle riding. Other wheels rolled in at the turn of the century, when the space housed a series of auto shops and manufacturers such as Albert Champion, who invented the A.C. Spark Plug there in 1907. Then in 1923, the Cyclorama turned over another new leaf as the Boston Flower Exchange moved in, razing the feudal façade and installing a skylight.

When the exchange moved to Albany Street in 1971, the Cyclorama once again became a home for art. The Boston Redevelopment Authority tapped the newly formed Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) to steward the site, which went on to host works such as artist Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Composed of 39 place settings inspired by famous female figures, the installation prompted the creation of one of the Cyclorama’s most distinctive features: a suspended steel lighting grid, designed by Milton-born polymath Buckminster Fuller to illuminate Chicago’s work.

Today, the place welcomes plenty of other parties, from weddings and fundraisers to a skateboarding showdown that filled the Cyclorama with ramps and rails this past summer. “There’s something new and different here every day,” says BCA chief advancement officer Emily Foster Day. Renting out the venue helps the nonprofit operate its neighboring artist studios, gallery, and theaters, but when the Cyclorama isn’t booked for a function, it too becomes a destination for creators—like Masary Studios, the collective that combined light projections, sound, and poetry for 2017’s site-specific commission Know No. Impromptu performances happen there, too. “One of my first memories of working at Boston Center for the Arts is coming in one day at lunchtime…and here was this man sitting and playing cello,” Foster Day recalls. “It was so hypnotic and mesmerizing and indicative of what the BCA is about, which is to support working artists to create, perform, and exhibit. To see that happening in this space is really special.”

A concert circa 1940, the year the Hatch Shell made its debut. / Courtesy of Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection

Every summer, Bostonians tote blankets and beach chairs to the Edward A. Hatch Memorial Shell, the open-air venue on the Esplanade that hosts free concerts, from Wednesday night performances by the Boston Landmarks Orchestra to the annual Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular. Crowned by a 40-foot-high shell inlaid with an intricate sunburst design, the art deco structure is pretty spectacular itself.

But on July 4, 1929, when pioneering Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler led the first of many performances on the Esplanade, musicians accustomed to Symphony Hall’s gilded stage made do with makeshift digs. Fiedler had gotten the idea for a free concert series during a walk along the Charles, and a temporary wooden bandshell was built to accommodate more than a month of near-nightly concerts that first season. Carpenters then disassembled the barnlike shell, which would be hammered back into shape for the next four summers. A new shell replaced the worn-out one in 1934, but it wasn’t built to last either: A hurricane blew out the back in 1938.

Funds for a permanent solution were hard to find during the Depression, though the downturn didn’t dampen enthusiasm for the free concerts. Attendees wrote hundreds of letters of appreciation to Fiedler, who told the Globe in 1934 that the music “appears to have been welcomed by many during the Depression as something quite important to their daily lives.” What Fiedler didn’t realize was that funding for a new structure already existed. In 1926, when Back Bay heiress Maria Hatch died, she left $300,000 for a “park, playground, or memorial” to honor her late brother, Edward, and “minister to the public need for a beauty spot.” But the trustee she’d selected died, too, and the money sat unused until Attorney General Paul Dever discovered the trust in 1935. Court-appointed trustees considered several projects—a planetarium was deemed too pricey—before settling on a shell for the Esplanade, aiming to create a “permanent landmark of architectural beauty.”

A group of musicians, music writers, and concert-goers voted to select which composers’ names would adorn the granite base. / Photo by Finegold Alexander Architects

To that end, they tapped Richard J. Shaw, a Boston architect who specialized in churches, though this secular gathering place would be his greatest design. Licensing a patented German structural system for the concrete shell, he clad the exterior in rustic terrazzo, inlaid the interior with acoustically pleasing teak, and adorned the 72-foot stage with a granite base emblazoned with the bronzed names of famous composers. Behind the scenes, he installed stainless steel and frosted-glass fixtures, bedecking dressing areas in art deco glamour.

On July 2, 1940, a crowd of 20,000 gathered for the big debut, a program that began with Beethoven and ended with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Some called the shell a “concertorium,” coining a new word for the occasion. Fiedler called it a dream come true. He conducted there over the next four decades, drawing a record-breaking audience of 400,000 for the bicentennial celebration in 1976.

Maintaining a venue exposed to the elements is no easy feat. Finegold Alexander Architects led the first major renovation in 1990, when the Hatch Shell marked its 50th anniversary. The project replaced cladding ravaged by freeze-thaw cycles, restored dressing areas long abandoned due to water damage, and, of course, fine-tuned the acoustics. That meant replacing all 20,000 pieces of deteriorated teak inside the shell. Working with hand tools in the dead of winter, local craftsman Howard Brickman re-created the curved panels’ herringbone pattern with black-and-white photos as his guide. The painstaking work paid off. “If you go up there and stand at the podium and speak at a normal speaking voice, you can be heard out in the audience,” Brickman says. “It’s really cool.”

Nearly three decades later, renovations are again under way. The Department of Conservation and Recreation is tackling interior projects over the next few years, and the restoration of the shell’s roof was completed in 2018, when more than 600 new terrazzo panels were pieced together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Three-dimensional laser scans of the shell ensured a more watertight fit between panels, which should help prevent weather damage—and keep a Boston beauty spot looking good for years to come.

Today the Hood Milk Bottle remains a fixture of Fort Point. / Photo by Openroads.com/Flickr

Any list of the city’s most iconic landmarks would have to include the Hood Milk Bottle. A beacon for the Boston Children’s Museum, which stands a few yards away, the 40-foot-tall bottle is instantly recognizable to tourists and locals, tots and grownups. But the bottle’s backstory isn’t quite as well known—and it’s as strange as the structure itself.

The bottle got its start in 1933 as a roadside stand for ice cream maker Arthur Gagner, who used it to beckon drivers on Route 44 in Taunton. The massive bottle—roomy enough to hold 58,620 gallons if it were real—was certainly a novelty, though Gagner wasn’t the only entrepreneur to employ fanciful architecture to catch the eyes of customers. As car ownership became commonplace, giant doughnuts, coffee pots, hot dogs, and other surreal shapes rose up on roadsides across the country, enticing motorists to pull over. Gagner peddled sweet treats from his whimsical wooden stand for a decade before selling the building to the Sankey family, who also used it to sell ice cream. But by 1967, the bottle had been abandoned. In 1974, photographer Walker Evans took a Polaroid of the forlorn building—a snapshot that now belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

After Sankey’s Ice Cream shuttered, the bottle languished for several years in its original location in Taunton. / Photo courtesy of Boston Children’s Museum

After languishing for eight years, the bottle found an unlikely savior: Carol Scofield, a clothing designer and, as it turns out, a fan of roadside Pop architecture. She saw the building while driving by and bought it for $2,500. Then she called John Sloan, director of urban design for the Boston Redevelopment Authority (now known as the Boston Planning & Development Agency), and asked if he had any ideas for repurposing it. Sloan thought the bottle would make a perfect addition to City Hall Plaza; he imagined it selling ice cream in the summer and hot chocolate in the winter, bringing life to the vast brick expanse. One of his colleagues had a friend who worked at Hood, which agreed to fund the bottle’s restoration. But the mayor’s office quashed the plan: Gerhard Kallmann, one of the architects who led the design of City Hall in the 1960s, had made it clear he viewed the idea as an affront to the building’s dignity.

Sloan went back to the drawing board, seeking another underused urban space that needed a little levity. Eventually he reached out to the Children’s Museum, which was preparing to move from Jamaica Plain to a former wool warehouse on Congress Street Wharf. The playful take on a kid-friendly beverage was a hit with the museum’s board. Before long, the bottle was off for refurbishment in Quincy, where workers sanded off 14 coats of old paint. On April 20, 1977, it bobbed across Boston Harbor on a barge escorted by two fireboats, and a crowd cheered as a crane delivered the 15,000-pound bottle to the doorstep of the soon-to-debut museum.

The refurbished bottle made a grand entrance in 1977, floating across Boston harbor before being installed in its new home. / Photo courtesy of Boston Children’s Museum

Over the years, the bottle has hosted various vendors, from Hood to Au Bon Pain to Sullivan’s. It quickly turned into a fixture of Fort Point. “The bottle became such a good symbol for the museum back in the 1980s that many signs around the city were just a graphic of the milk bottle and an arrow—it was so well known,” says architect Peter Kuttner, principal of CambridgeSeven, the firm that helmed a renovation of the museum in 2007. By that time, the bottle was looking battered, having suffered water damage during storms. CambridgeSeven cut the structure in two, rebuilt the bottom half, reinforced the top, and moved the bottle slightly to a higher-elevation spot. “We were pleased to be able to save as much of it as we possibly could,” Kuttner says.

Today, with seas rising due to climate change, the waterfront plaza the bottle calls home is again in the spotlight. The Children’s Museum recently tapped local design firm Sasaki to devise a resilience plan to address flood risk and reimagine its stretch of the Harborwalk as an even better place to play. Here’s hoping it helps a quirky icon stand tall for generations to come.

Photo courtesy of Nick Curry

A new ad for the Freedom Trail is attracting an awful lot of attention this week—and not, it’s safe to assume, the kind the family-friendly Boston institution was after.

The advertisements, spotted at several bus shelters around the city in recent days, offer what is intended to be a quick turn of phrase aimed at tourists flocking here for sight-seeing: “As Boston as a cream pie.”

The message sits atop a white background, next to what appear to be the layers of a freshly sliced pie, of the sort made famous by the city’s historic Parker House hotel.

I’ll be honest, when I first spotted an image of the ad making the rounds online, my first thought was that salty locals were poking fun at the dated dessert reference. After all, how Boston is a Boston cream pie these days? The treat is up there with baked beans and the term “Beantown” among old tropes whose link to the city is significant only to visitors from far away.

But then it hit me. The internet was not simply being snooty about chocolate pie. No, the hundreds of smart-asses chiming in about the phrase had drawn a much different, and decidedly not-safe-for-work, conclusion from the ad copy. (Please don’t make me explain it to you. Google it if you must.)

Feel like the copywriters could’ve thought a little more about this one pic.twitter.com/8i8IU82qtq

— Nick Curry (@ncurr) September 2, 2021

As expected, a lot of racy, pun-laced, and often pretty gross jokes have emerged online the past few days, as have references to an iconic misunderstanding in an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. “Well, someone in this decision making chain can have the content filter removed from their computer,” one commenter on a wildly popular Reddit thread poking fun at the ad wrote. “That’s a big oof right there,” wrote another.

The Freedom Trail itself seems to have taken notice. Under one tweet, reading, “Feel like the copywriters could’ve thought a little more about this one,” the institution wrote this reply: “Don’t do this to us… Please…,” coupling it with an emoji of a face with a bead of sweat forming on its brow, and a “math lady” GIF.

It did not respond to a request for comment, and deleted the tweet after we reached out.

Now, look. Clearly our friends at the Freedom Trail were going for a more wholesome message here, and you can’t help but feel bad for them now that they’ve triggered this kind of response from people whose minds are perennially in the gutter.

It does, however, come with the territory around here. Boston’s internet community has a knack for sniffing out innuendos in places they don’t belong. Another ad, this one for a cannabis delivery company, has also caught the attention of some local perverts in recent days. As has this billboard for a local Catholic school.

This city has also seen controversies spurred by worse advertising sins than this, like when TD Bank had to apologize for an ad about losing your debit card in Dorchester that critics instantly slammed as racist. Or, also in Dorchester, when the neighborhood historical society pulled a holiday promo that declared it was “Dreaming of a White Dorchester.” For years, Legal Sea Foods made what appeared to be a concerted effort to ruffle feathers with its cheeky ads, and more than once took things a little too far.

In this case, here’s hoping all the unintended attention generated by the Freedom Trail ad leads more people to make use of the city’s famous route, and maybe pay a visit to historic sites like the Paul Revere House and USS Constitution. Especially given the hit the local tourism industry has taken in the pandemic, they can use all the foot traffic they can get, however they get it. Additional logos on the poster suggest it is supported by the governor’s newly launched “My Local MA” initiative, alongside the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau, and the city’s B-Local app, all of which are working to get small businesses back on steady footing.

But in the meantime, let this be a lesson to all of the city’s marketers: Check your ad copy again and again. Run every word through Urban Dictionary if you have to. And before you unveil your latest designs, consider hiring consultants with the sense of humor of a horny teen.

South Station circa 1902, when carriages were allowed to pass through the arched entrance. / Photo courtesy of Historic New England, archival photograph by Nathaniel L. Stebbins

South Station is New England’s largest train station, but today’s riders may not realize that it used to be much bigger. In fact, when its first train departed at 4:38 a.m. on January 1, 1899, bound for Newport and lugging 12 tons of Boston newspapers, the headlines billed it as the biggest station in the world.

Work had started in 1896, when five railroads—Boston and Albany, Boston and Providence, Old Colony, New England, and New Haven—teamed up to build a union station for trains chugging into the city from the south and the west. Forming the Boston Terminal Company, they hired the firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, protégés of famed architect Henry Hobson Richardson, who designed Copley Square’s Trinity Church. But for this project, they didn’t hew to his namesake Richardsonian Romanesque style. Instead, they drew inspiration from the Neoclassical Revival style favored by the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s, which aimed to bring grandeur to urban architecture.

The end result was grand indeed: a stately five-story headhouse of pink granite and tan brick, flanked by two brick wings that stretched down Atlantic Avenue and Summer Street, plus a massive metal shed that sheltered 28 tracks. “This great terminal station, laid out upon such a comprehensive scale, so liberal in its accommodations and so complete in all its equipment, will hereafter rank as one of the great public buildings of this city,” Mayor Josiah Quincy III told the crowds gathered for the dedication. They oohed and ahhed as 1,200 electric lights turned on at once, illuminating a vast waiting room with coffered ceilings, arched windows, and marble mosaic floors. Outside, the headhouse’s curved façade had been lined with Ionic columns and topped by an ornate clock with a 12-foot face. Built by Roxbury’s Edward Howard Clock Company and modeled after Big Ben, it provides a perch for an 8-ton granite eagle and is still wound by hand.

Salt air eventually corroded the train shed, which was demolished in 1930. / Photo courtesy of Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones collection

The station’s amenities were impressive, too. Staffed by white-aproned attendants, a nursery by the ladies’ lavatories was equipped with cradles and rocking chairs. The gents, meanwhile, had a smoking lounge, a shoeshine emporium, and a barbershop. Kiosks sold sundries and snacks, but travelers looking for heartier fare could claim one of 200 stools at marble-and-mahogany lunch counters. In 1931, a former carriage concourse became the home of a 600-seat movie theater. It screened newsreels, cartoons, and short films until the mid 1950s, when the theater was transformed into a chapel. Dubbed Our Lady of the Railways, it offered 18 masses on Sundays—with speedy sermons for worshippers with a train to catch. There was even an employee bowling alley, located in a subterranean “ghost terminal” intended for an electric rail project that never materialized.

For years, South Station was the country’s busiest terminal; it served 38 million passengers in 1913, when Grand Central Terminal saw a mere 22 million. But the rise of highways and airlines ended the golden age of rail travel. As ridership declined, South Station deteriorated, and the Boston Redevelopment Authority (now known as the Boston Planning & Development Agency) bought the property in 1965. Hoping to redevelop the site, the BRA removed tracks and demolished the wings; the wrecking ball might have claimed the entire headhouse, but a campaign succeeded in adding Boston’s only remaining Neoclassical Revival structure of note to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. Three years later, the BRA sold South Station to the MBTA, which embarked on major renovations in the ’80s and ’90s, restoring tracks, rebuilding with materials from the original quarry and brickmaker, and adding direct Red Line access and a bus terminal.

Today, visitors can explore the station via free walking tours. / Photo by Warren Patterson

Big changes may be coming once again. Houston developer Hines hopes to build a 51-story commercial and residential tower in the airspace over the tracks. And as Boston battles the country’s worst rush-hour traffic, officials are considering proposals to ease congestion by either expanding South Station or linking it with North Station—a move that would create an uninterrupted route from the nation’s capital all the way to Maine. One hundred twenty years after its debut, the storied station is still making headlines.

The family’s original furnishings, including the Sori Yanagi stools by the fireplace, still fill the house. / Photo by Toan Trinh

This year marks the centennial of the Bauhaus, the design school founded by modernist pioneer Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, in 1919. But the building that best embodies his philosophy isn’t in Germany; it’s in Boston’s backyard, perched on a hill in bucolic Lincoln, where Gropius House looks much as it did when the architect and his family moved in back in 1938.

Lured by a post at Harvard, Gropius had relocated to Massachusetts in 1937 with his wife, Ise, and daughter, Ati, renting a house in Lincoln while they planned for a home of their own. At the request of a mutual friend, philanthropist Helen Osborne Storrow provided land for and financed the construction of the new abode—a boon for a family that had been forced to abandon assets when they fled Nazi Germany for London in 1934. While Gropius and his partner Marcel Breuer were the official architects, the design was discussed nightly around the dinner table. Ise was the chief landscaper, and 12-year-old Ati offered input, too, requesting her own private entrance. Dad obliged with an outdoor spiral staircase, a curvy counterpoint to the clean-lined exterior that, he later wrote, “proved to be very practical because children could enter there directly without carrying dirt through the house.”

You’ll find that modernist marriage of form and function everywhere. “The vision of Walter Gropius included an almost utopian sense that simple, affordable, aesthetically pleasing, and functional architecture should be the way forward,” says Wendy Hubbard of Historic New England, which now operates Gropius House as a museum. “The materials, in fact, are the aesthetic.” Those materials included novel industrial ones such as sound-absorbent acoustic plaster, glass blocks that helped draw in daylight, and sleek pieces from companies such as Kliegl Bros., whose commercial light fixture showcased the dining room table.

Despite the home’s modern look, traditional New England design inspired the architect, who wrote, “The old white-painted Colonial houses, unpretentious and genuine in plan and appearance, won my affection.” / Photo courtesy of Historic New England

But the Gropiuses didn’t just want to bring the Bauhaus to Boston; they wanted to synthesize its principles with what they found in New England. To that end, the home’s modern rectilinear structure rises from a familiar fieldstone foundation, and in the entryway, you’re greeted by clapboard—a staple of the classic Colonials Gropius admired. But he used the material in a new way, arranging it vertically in the interior, not horizontally outside. “This mix of tradition and nontradition, of commercially available materials used in a domestic setting—all of that feels contemporary,” Hubbard says.

Above all, the couple thought a modern New England house should exist in harmony with its natural surroundings. They selected Concord grapevines and other indigenous plants for the grounds and scaled the structure at a modest 2,300 square feet. It feels larger thanks to the outsize windows. “There is nothing,” Gropius wrote, “like watching a blizzard through twelve-foot-long glass panes while sitting at the dinner table.” These, too, were practical, positioned for passive heating; on bright winter days, the home’s temperature could hit 70 degrees even if the family turned off the heat. In summer, the cantilevered roof functioned as a brise-soleil, blocking high-angle sun, while the screened-in porch became a breezy second living room.

Ise and Walter Gropius worked side by side at their Bauhaus-designed double desk in the study. / Photo courtesy of Historic New England

Of course, every room feels like one designed for living, an effect heightened by the fact that the home’s contents have been largely left intact. Art by famous friends Joan Miró and Josef Albers hangs on the walls. Books line the shelves; coats wait in the closet. And the décor includes the biggest collection of Bauhaus furniture outside Germany, plus later additions that became modernist icons, such as an Eero Saarinen “Womb” chair—a 1953 birthday gift to Gropius that’s still produced today.

Gropius’s ideas have stood the test of time, too. “How they treated their landscape, how they heated and cooled their house, how he designed a modest dwelling—all of that resonates today,” Hubbard says. Indeed, one testament to his legacy is how much we take his insights for granted. A century after the Bauhaus was founded—eight decades after the blueprints for Gropius House were drawn—we don’t think of his ideas as belonging to a particular period; we think of them as good design.

Photo by Robert David Linsdell/Flickr

The coast of Cape Ann is dotted with impressive estates, but none quite like that of John Hays Hammond Jr., who took the adage “A man’s home is his castle” literally. Drawbridge? Check. Flying buttresses? You bet. A bell tower? Its chimes rang on the hour, much to the chagrin of his neighbors. A protégé of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, Hammond was an inventor who amassed more than 800 patents, dreaming up everything from radio-control technology to electronic musical instruments. But the man behind those new-fangled innovations had a penchant for the past, and his Gloucester home and laboratory would be his wildest design.

Constructed between 1926 and 1929, Hammond’s Abbadia Mare—his “abbey by the sea,” as he called it—was ostensibly a wedding present for his wife, Irene. But she couldn’t have cared less about medieval architecture; that was Hammond’s passion, sparked by encounters with castles during his tween years studying in England. It would be a lifelong fascination. “In a few years after I am gone, all my scientific creations will be old-fashioned and forgotten,” he wrote in 1924. “I want to build something in hard stone and engrave on it for posterity a name of which I am justly proud.”

The castle’s exterior mixes architectural styles, including 13th-century French Gothic. / Photo by Michele Snow

Hammond hired Allen & Collens—a Boston architectural firm that specialized in Gothic Revival projects—to oversee construction, but the vision was very much his own. He scoured Europe for architectural salvage, buying up archways, façades, windows, and wall panels from the rubble of World War I. These centuries-old artifacts were incorporated alongside new construction materials (including wood intentionally weathered with seawater for an old-timey look). The result so impressed John D. Rockefeller, an avid art collector, that the tycoon used it as a model for the Cloisters in New York—the only museum in the United States to exclusively showcase art from the Middle Ages.

Hammond’s home is full of surprises. Take the 100-foot-long Great Hall, adorned with a rose window, a fireplace from 15th-century France, and an alcove where he liked to read late into the night. But this wasn’t just a grandiose living room; it was also a concert hall and a recording studio. The rippled stone walls were designed with acoustics in mind and surround what was once the hemisphere’s largest organ—complete with 8,400 pipes—installed in a private residence. Top musicians of the day were invited to play the grand instrument.

Tropical plants grow in the courtyard, which features an archway made from Mount Vesuvius lava rock. / Photo courtesy of Hammond Castle Museum

A few steps away is the home’s second centerpiece, the courtyard, another space with secrets. Hammond was inspired by his friend Isabella Stewart Gardner’s lush oasis at Fenway Court, but he wanted his version to have a couple of additional features. The most obvious is the 30,000-gallon pool, dyed bright green to disguise its nearly 9-foot depths. (Hammond would tell guests it was only a few feet deep—and then startle them by diving in.) The courtyard’s most unusual feature, though, was its weather system of lights and pipes, which allowed Hammond to summon sunlight, moonlight, fog, or a heavy downpour on demand. Guests lingering too long in the courtyard at dinnertime might find themselves suddenly drenched.

Indeed, visitors soon realized that the home was designed to abet Hammond’s prankish personality. Guests lounging in the library learned that the round room’s domed ceiling catches and amplifies sound, helping their host eavesdrop (and comment) on whispered conversations. First-time overnight visitors had to brave the Early American bedroom, named for its many antiques, though they were hardly its distinguishing detail. There were no door handles inside the room, so occupants would find themselves trapped by seemingly seamless wallpaper—and have to shout for help to be directed to a hidden button that opens the doors.

Guests included boldface names such as Walt Disney, Cole Porter, and Ethel Barrymore, but the general public got to see Hammond’s treasures, too, as much of the home operated as a museum during his lifetime. Hammond Castle remains one today, offering tours from May through September—and transforming into a haunted house every October. Hammond, who loved a good scare, would surely approve.

A general view of the Emancipation Statue in Park Square with Abraham Lincoln on May 21, 2013. Photo by Paul Marotta/Getty Images

Seven score and one year ago (that is, in 1879), a statue depicting Abraham Lincoln standing over an enslaved man was installed in downtown Boston’s Park Square—and yesterday, the Boston Art Commission voted unanimously to take it down.

“After engaging in a public process, it’s clear that residents and visitors to Boston have been uncomfortable with this statue, and its reductive representation of the Black man’s role in the abolitionist movement,” Mayor Walsh said in a press release about the BAC’s vote. “I fully support the Boston Art Commission’s decision for removal and thank them for their work.”

The statue, called The Emancipation Group or The Emancipation Memorial, was a gift to the city by Moses Kimball, a local politician. It is a copy of a statue, created by Boston artist Thomas Ball, that still stands in Washington D.C.’s Lincoln Park. The Boston sculpture has been criticized for years due to its racist depiction of Lincoln looming over a crouching Archer Alexander. The statue depicts the 16th president with his right hand resting on the Emancipation Proclamation and his left hand raised benevolently over a kneeling, half-naked Alexander, a Black man who assisted the Union Army, escaped slavery, and was recaptured under the Fugitive Slave Act. The inscription on the monument reads, “A race set free/ and the country at peace / Lincoln / Rests from his labors.”

Local artist Tory Bullock has been at the forefront of the current movement to remove the statue. Three weeks ago, Bullock posted a video to his Facebook page, that has since been viewed over 48,000 times, in which he explains the issues with the way the statue depicts the pair of men—if the statue is supposed to be about emancipation and equality, Bullock posits, why does the statue depict a white man standing over a Black man?  “Now for all my Black people out there,” Bullock says in the video, “Is that image of a Black dude on his knees…Does that make you feel powerful? Does that make you feel respected? Does that make you feel good?”

Bullock also launched a petition calling for the removal of the statue that garnered over 12,000 signatures. Shortly thereafter, the City of Boston launched an online survey encouraging the public to share their input on The Emancipation Group, which received 645 responses. The BAC then held two special meetings to hear public testimony. Tuesday, the commissioners voted unanimously to remove the statue’s “bronze figurative elements.”

In a message to Boston, Bullock said he is “beyond happy” with the BAC’s decision. “This road was not easy,” Bullock said. “I applaud the Commission for not just agreeing to remove the statue, but for creating a space for the city to share how they feel about it. Process is important, and Boston created a process for the rest of the country to use as a blueprint. I’m proud of my city today.”

The date for the removal has not yet been set, but the BAC plans to resume conversation about the statue at its July 14 meeting. When the statue is taken down, an art conservator will oversee the removal process and its placement into temporary storage, and detailed documentation of the work, its history, and the process the BAC took to reach this decision will be placed into the group’s archives. The Commission also intends to create a public event that acknowledges the statue’s history and informs the public, create temporary signage to interpret the statue before its removal and permanent signage after its removal, and and begin a process to determine “how to re-contextualize the existing statue in a new publicly accessible setting.”

“Public art is storytelling at the street level. As such, the imagery should strike the heart and engage the mind,” Ekua Holmes, Vice-Chair of the BAC, said in a statement. “What I heard today is that it hurts to look at this piece, and in the Boston landscape, we should not have works that bring shame to any groups of people.”

Rendering by Neoscape

When it was built in 1902, the Ayer Mansion at 395 Commonwealth Avenue broke with Back Bay tradition. Rather than using the red brick favored by neighboring townhouses, it was faced with light-colored granite. The structure’s windows were devoid of surrounds, which presented an austere form, while the façade’s smooth, flat surfaces were ornamented by bands of brilliantly colored mosaic panels set in limestone.

The mosaics were the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, who conceived the residence’s interiors. The son of the iconic jewelry store founder, Tiffany was a prolific glassmaker, leader of the art nouveau movement, and interior design industry pioneer. While he designed many interiors during his Gilded Age heyday, the Ayer Mansion stands today as the sole example of a house designed from inception by him.

Tiffany’s impressions shaped elements from the furniture to the wallcoverings and included several stained-glass features and light fixtures he designed himself. Through the home’s front double bronze doors, one encounters a majestic marble entrance hall from which a semi-circular staircase with intricate mosaic–stair risers leads to a stage intended for the theatricals of Mrs. Ayer, the once-aspiring actress and much younger second wife of Mr. Ayer, who’d made his fortune in pharmaceuticals and textiles in Ayer, Massachusetts.

In the evening, Tiffany’s glasswork glows on the exterior from the lamplight within. / Photo by Greg Premru

A Tiffany “glass jewel” lamp stretches up through the home’s five stories; an eight-pronged fixture illuminates the second-, third-, and fourth-floor landings, while a complex jewel lamp is a crowning element on the top level. / Photo by Greg Premru

The five-story home was the tallest on the block when it was built, and the one with the most progressive design for many years after. The Ayers wanted to make a statement with their new house, says David Hacin, principal and creative director of Hacin + Associates. “When they moved into Back Bay, they were outsiders. They wanted to make a splash with their bold design choices….the Tiffany tilework around the front door was radical for a time when things were very conformist in Back Bay.”

After the Ayers passed away, the mansion was converted into office space and was eventually acquired by a nonprofit religious group and used as part cultural center and part women’s college dormitory. Deemed a National Historic Landmark in 2005, the mansion was purchased in December 2021 by Jean Abouhamad, president of Sea-Dar Construction, who initially considered transforming the more than 15,000-square-foot structure into condominiums. However, his plan quickly shifted: “I realized it would be a crime to break up the building into different units,” Abouhamad recalls. “When I saw the beautiful foyer, the circulation spaces with the curved stairway going through the center of the house, I said, ‘wow—this place is so unique. It needs to be a single-family home.’”

Now discreetly being offered for sale for $17 million, Abouhamad knew that attracting the right buyer would be tricky. “The person who purchases this home is someone who appreciates art and can understand the significance of the structure,” says Abouhamad, who turned to Hacin and his team to visually reimagine the interiors of the residence for modern family living. The project involved crafting architectural plans and virtual renderings—with the help of creative agency, Neoscape—depicting interior schemes that can be further enhanced and implemented for the new buyer.

“Louis Comfort Tiffany was a futurist, and we were inspired by that. As we came up with the interior design, we were imagining the home would be for people that are similarly bold today as the Ayers were to their time,” says Hacin, noting that they’d also possess a global sensibility akin to the Ayers family, who’d lived abroad in Europe and on a houseboat floating on the Nile.

The kitchen concept references the plaster ceiling and molding from the home’s original parlor and has a bright and open feel with light floors, dark wood cabinetry, and white walls. / Room rendering by Neoscape

The dining room rendering enhances the original fireplace with modern sconces and a Louis XVI mirror, along with a hand-painted wallcovering and a custom bronze-and-wood table. / Room rendering by Neoscape

For the interiors, Hacin’s team seamlessly integrated modern furnishings and a modified floor plan with the home’s existing form and character. The muted palette takes cues from the original glasswork, says Matthew Woodward, one of the project’s interior designers, “infused with gray tones to make it feel more contemporary.” A 1903 inventory of the mansion was acquired, which revealed an extensive collection of exotic souvenirs from the family’s travels. It also noted Louis XVI furniture, pieces upholstered in silk moiré, and gold Japanese cloth wallcoverings. The new scheme incorporates design details that nod to these elements along with organic and global motifs, which were often found in Tiffany’s designs.

Among the home’s original details are the library’s intricate glass-mosaic fireplace surround and an 11-inch-deep carved wood frieze featuring the bookplates of famous men embellishing the perimeter of the space. The drawing room’s floral-patterned ceiling and three-foot-high wainscoting are also intact. Such details, paired with period references, are juxtaposed with sleek and curvilinear contemporary pieces and dramatic statement chandeliers by well-known present-day designers in the renderings, reflecting balanced, compelling, and inviting interiors.

The library’s carved wood detailing and intricately detailed Tiffany-designed fireplace surround are paired with sleek sofas and black marble consoles. Windows are left unadorned to highlight the stained glass embellishments and woodwork. / Room rendering by Neoscape

The family-focused design of the house accommodates a fourth-floor “kids’ lounge enclosed by glass doors,” says Woodward, noting the space exists as a jewel box of sorts, framing the elliptical stairwell and Tiffany-designed fixture that hangs from the top of the house and branches out on each stair landing.

The stairway rises from the second-floor hall and terminates at the top-floor sky parlor, where a crowning stained-glass skylight once filtered light into an exotic space filled with bric-a-brac from the Ayers’ travels. Considered lost for decades, Woodward says it was recently discovered that the original leaded glass skylight had been covered up and was still there. The rendering of the room depicts contemporary seating and an antique pool table underneath the skylight, making it easy to envision new life taking shape amid Tiffany’s creative ingenuity.

Miraculously, much of the marble entrance hall, including the glass-mosaic trompe l’oeil of a Greek temple, remains intact. / Photo by Greg Premru

Other intact elements include multi-hued stained-glass panels. / Photo by Greg Premru

The top-floor sky parlor features the original fireplace with a modern surround. Tiffany sconces are positioned between the windows, with arched plaster crown molding around the windows. / Room rendering by Neoscape