Sanna Hines
Beacon Hill
Beacon Hill is Boston’s first neighborhood.
One of the earliest writers about Boston, William Wood, described Beacon Hill as “a high mountain, with three little rising hills on top of it; wherefore it is called Tramount.”
This hill, as it appeared toward the close of the eighteenth century, was described by President Timothy Dwight, of Yale College, as almost a waste tract. In the year 1796 it was bought by three citizens of Boston; its irregularities and roughnesses were removed at great expense, its western declivity cut down, and a field of about thirty acres was transformed into a smooth tract, affording ideal building sites. Soon after this field was partly covered with pretentious houses. And in splendor of building and nobleness of situation, the summit of Beacon Hill, in the opinion of the above-named writer, was unrivalled on this side of the Atlantic.
The removal of the original three peaks of Beacon Hill reduced it to about one half of its former height. But, as has been well said, the Common remains a distinctive feature of the topography of Boston; and the fact that it has been preserved with comparatively little change from almost the beginning of the settlement renders it the more precious.—The State House
Beacon Hill Beacon
Originally called Sentry Hill, the area was renamed for a tower capped by a firepot. In 1635, “It is ordered that there shall be a Beacon sett on Centry Hill at Boston, to give notice to the country of any danger…”—The Memorial History of Boston
The warning beacon was never lit. A windstorm took down the sixty-foot tower. A monument replaced it, but this was demolished in 1811. The current monument in front of the Massachusetts State House went up in 1898.
The Back Bay
The Back Bay was used for little more than milling operations until the mid-19th century, when the bay’s tidal flats were filled in a process that lasted until the late 1880s and resulted in the creation of more than 450 acres of usable land.
The Back Bay was planned as a fashionable residential district, and was laid out as such by the architect Arthur Gilman in 1856. Having travelled to Paris, Gilman was familiar with Baron Haussmann’s plan for the new layout of that city and this inspiration reflected a growing American interest in French architecture and city planning.
As the tidal flats were slowly filled in, beginning at edge of the Public Garden and extending westward, residential construction followed. Because the land filling efforts proceeded slowly, construction advanced concurrently on filled-in lots as they became available. As a result, most blocks in the Back Bay date from approximately the same era and, when viewed in sequence, illustrate the changing tastes in and stylistic evolution of American architecture over the course of the mid- to late 19th and early 20th centuries.