Victorian Boston
1873 - 1901

In 1880, Boston, the Athens of America, was a metropolis built on a monumental scale, a city of elegant spires that reached upward to the heavens, a megalopolis where elephantine buildings sprouted about like giant mushrooms, suddenly emerging full-grown from the earth. The streets were lined with every variety of greenery and covered with silvery pavers from Belgium. Massive public gardens flourished throughout the city creating the famed Emerald Necklace.
By 1880 all evidence of the great conflagration of 1872 that destroyed the central city had been obliterated; instead, everywhere one looked, were behemoths of marble and brick designed in the grand manner, Romanesque, Italianate, French Revival and Boston Gothic, giants that devoured entire city blocks, the architectural marvels of the Gilded Age. While the world remembered the holocaust that almost destroyed Chicago in 1871, few discussed the inferno that turned downtown Boston into a wasteland.

Henry Hobson Richardson

The Boston Gothic look can be attributed to Henry Hobson Richardson, a youthful architectural genius from Louisiana. Hobson gave Victorian Boston a sense of style and elegance that distinguished from every other city in the world and spawned the adjective “Richardsonian”

Henry Hobson Richardson, the great grandson of English scientist, Joseph Priestly, was born at Priestly Plantation, Louisiana in September 29, 1838. He grew up speaking fluent French and attended public and private schools in New Orleans before going to Harvard in 1854. While at Harvard, he excelled in both mathematics and drawing and eventually gave up civil engineering in favor of studying architecture. His talent for math and drawing served him well when he applied to be the second American student to enter the famed Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The Civil War broke out while he was in the Paris and prevented him from returning to Louisiana. The War stripped the Richardson family of their wealth and young Henry supported himself by working in the offices of practicing architects in Paris until the autumn of 1865. It was common for American architects who studied in Europe in the 19th Century to drift either into the English style of architecture or an eclecticism that had no real style. Richardson did neither. The Romanesque that he saw in Europe, especially in the middle and south of France, appealed strongly to his sense for mass and a breadth of composition offset by a richness of ornamentation and shaped his personal esthetic.

H. H. Richardson House

Trinity Church

Richardson returned to the post-war United States and settled briefly in Staten Island, New York, where he soon began practicing as an architect. His neighbor and later collaborator was the famed architect, Frederick Law. The Great Boston Fire of 1872 devastated most of the downtown area of Boston and provided the young architect the opportunity of a lifetime. Fire brigades from as far away as Maine were called in to help out since the local horse population (used to draw the fire apparatus) had recently been decimated by equine influenza. Phillips Brooks' Trinity Church was one of the many buildings destroyed in the conflagration. The congregation bought a parcel of land in the then still developing Back Bay. Richardson won the competition to design and build the new church. In his masterful transitional project for Trinity Church, Boston, Richardson first brought together the forces that would mark the very best of his work: Romanesque masses compacted in a solid composition of weighty volumes and powerful forms; textural variety of colorful materials directly laid up and juxtaposed in an ornamental tapestry of surface enrichment; craftsmanship evidenced in a building which is both the simple construction of a master mason as well as the handiwork of a team of artisans. Richard’s Trinity Church is a total work of art: Augustus St. Gaudens' sculpture adorns the open space outside the north transept and adjacent to Trinity's flanking chapel building; John LaFarge stained glass and mural; William Morris stained glass (three upper north transept windows and baptistery window); and Romanesque capitals and other carvings enrich an added west porch, based on St. Giles du Gard. However, it would be in its restrained pyramidal massing and in its translation of both the Romanesque vocabulary and pictorial surface effects to an almost abstract simplicity that Trinity's impact on subsequent work by the architect would be felt.

When Richardson died prematurely in 1886, William LeBaron Jenney had just complete Chicago's first skyscraper and Frank Lloyd Wright was about to build his first house. Although he would not live to witness the rapid changes in both urban and suburban architectural design, in 20 short years, Richardson had already made his mark. From his monumental masonry blocks of "Richardsonian Romanesque", Richardson established a lasting legacy for American architects of the following generation and left his mark forever on the glorious “hub of the universe, Boston!