Streetcars and Farmland Help to Form Historic Mission Hill
Did you know Mission Hill was once rural farmland? Did you know the area was also a German brewery breeding ground?
This is the seventh in a nine-part series on Boston.com about historic districts in the city of Boston.
It is hard to imagine any area around Boston as rural farmland, but parts of Roxbury and other areas around Boston, were just that.
Mission Hill was once called Parker Hill and was originally was part of the town of Roxbury before Roxbury was annexed by Boston.
The neighborhood was made up of farms and large country estates for the wealthy prior to the Revolutionary War, according to the Boston Landmarks Commission.
After the war, some industry began to come to Mission Hill and by the mid-1800s, farmland was being turned into property for suburban homes.
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According to the Landmarks Commission, development of the Mission Hill Triangle really took off in second half of the 19th century, after streetcars and more transportation became available for people who worked in the city. It is called a “triangle,’’ because the small district is in the shape of a triangle due to Huntington Ave.’s diagonal direction.
“This really is an example of a streetcar suburb,’’ Meghan Hanrahan Richard, the preservation planner for the Boston Landmarks Commission’s Mission Hill Triangle Architectural Conservation District, said. “It was made on streetcar lines that went in in 1856.’’
Streetcar suburbs were neighborhoods “where immigrants and middle-low to middle class were able to afford to buy their own single family house outside of the city and commute in,’’ Richard said. “There was fresher air and cleaner living conditions.’’
A Mission Hill District Landmarks Commission Study Report published in 1985 quoted historian Sam Bass Warner on the spread of housing in the area:
“In the postwar building boom which lasted through 1873 cheap row houses filled the vacant lots on the streets off lower Tremont Street and up the side of Mission Hill. In the next two decades, especially in the 1885-1895 boom, inexpensive housing of one kind or another covered most of the outer section from Mission Hill to the West Roxbury line.’’
Development in the area consisted of 190 house lots, which were mainly single-family homes in the form of two-story brick row houses. Eventually, three- and four-story row houses and a few apartment buildings popped up. Most of the homes had sizeable front yards.
“In the Mission Hill Triangle, you really see they have deep gardens, which gave them a more suburban feel,’’ Richard said.
“Architecturally, the buildings here provide good examples of the way in which the fashionable residential styles and building types favored by the upper classes were adapted on a more modest scale for the use of the middle and lower middle class,’’ the Landmarks Commission wrote in its report.
Because the Mission Hill Triangle itself is very small (the smallest historic district in Boston, according to Richard) and mostly residential, the area surrounding it had a large impact on people who lived in the Triangle.
“There were industrial uses going on nearby,’’ Richard said, referring to nearby breweries and warehouses, as well as the Harvard Medical campus. “It gave people a place to work.’’
The first brewery came to the Mission Hill area in the 1820s, according to the Landmarks Commission, but by the 1870s beer had become a main source of income for the area.
The breweries tended to be owned by German immigrants and a very small number of the buildings (none of which are still breweries) still exist today. One of the former breweries has been turned into an apartment building on Heath St., according to Lois Regestein, Mission Hill Triangle district commissioner and resident of the area since 1971.
The German immigrants of Mission Hill also influenced the building of a mission in the area, which was built from 1876 to 1878. The church is now called Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and is still functioning today as a Catholic church.
The church’s congregation was primarily German for the first 30 years and then became primarily Irish, changing with the demographics of the neighborhood, said Regestein.
Regestein said the neighborhood took steps to protect its past even before it became an officially protected district. An agreement in the 1970s ensured the growing Harvard medical campus would not swallow up Mission Hill.
“The Mission Hill Planning Commission made an agreement with Harvard that they would not cross Huntington Ave. to expand the medical school,’’ Regestein said. “That was a big deal.’’
Regestein and others looked into zoning laws for the district and realized that some of the residential homes were actually zoned to be commercial.
To keep people from losing their homes to commercial businesses, the planning commission had the zoning laws in Mission Hill changed, according to Regestein.
After the South End became a historic district in 1983, people in the Mission Hill Triangle desired similar status.
“The residents of the neighborhood realized they had an intact area,’’ Richard said. “They wanted to make sure that it remained within the institutions that surrounded the neighborhood.’’
The Mission Hill Triangle Architectural Conservation District was formed in 1985.
Architectural Styles
According to the Landmarks Commission, though almost all of the homes are row houses, they all have varying styles, which take elements of the Queen Anne, Romanesque Revival, Georgian Revival, and Second Empire styles.
The report said that many of the buildings in this district were influenced stylistically by architecture in the Back Bay and the South End.
“The row houses that face Tremont Street have a marble façade,’’ Richard said. “It’s really unusual, as there aren’t too many other buildings in Boston with those features.’’
One detail that makes this district interesting is that it is so intact from its original development and that nearly all structures built after 1872 are still standing.
The houses found in Mission Hill are often in series of six that look similar.
“All the different styles makes it rather unique in a tiny neighborhood,’’ Regestein said. “We have a tremendous amount of variation, but a lot of unity.’’
Famous Sites in Mission Hill
– The Helvetia (706 Huntington Ave.): One of the last buildings to go up in the district, this structure is in the Queen Anne Revival style and is the largest building in the district. It is still an apartment building today.
– Ester Building (682 Huntington Ave.): A Georgian Revival apartment building, which has a bottom floor that, was used for commercial use. It is still an apartment building today.
– Mission Hill Church Complex (1525 Tremont St.): This complex consists of six buildings, two annexes, a boiler house, and a courtyard. The church is named Basilica and Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Richard said that this church, though it is not actually in the district and has its own landmark status, is the reason Mission Hill has its name. Ted Kennedy’s funeral was held here in 2009.
Regulations
Unlike a “historic district,’’ according to Richard, an Architectural Conservation District is less strict and is “of local significant and looked at as a district as a whole, preserving the overall character.’’
For the Mission Hill Triangle Architectural Conservation District, the guidelines put out by the Landmarks Commission say that the most important part of these buildings are the facades and roofs that face the street – including the sidewalls visible within the district.
Original features must be retained if possible, and if not they should be constructed as much as possible to look like they originally did, according to the guidelines.
Because may of the houses in this district have a front yard, there is a section of the regulations specifically related to this that states, “Much of the character of the district depends on the scale and appearance of the open spaces along streets. These features, the front yards and walkways, are generally bordered by masonry curbing, which should be retained as originally intended. Compatibility with adjacent yards is encouraged.’’
The guidelines state that fences should remain as close to original as possible and that if a front yard already exists it shouldn’t be paved.
This district does not have a protection area surrounding it, therefore there are not set guidelines for what can be built on its edges.
Regestein mentioned that there is currently a debate going on regarding a high-rise building that would be built on Worthington Street. She said Equity Residential wants to build a 35-story apartment tower on the edge of the district, which some residents worry would ruin the aesthetic and intimate feel.
“It’s the biggest threat to the neighborhood,’’ Regestein said.
Any questions, concerns, or proposals for exterior change should be brought up with the Boston Landmarks Commission.
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