Tag Archives: Great Salem Fire of 1914

A Neighborhood Besieged

A dynamic, healthy city is composed of neighborhoods: this is a time-honored, universal observation, so much so that I believe it is a truism. It follows that municipal leaders should prioritize the protection of neighborhoods, but too many times, far too many times in my opinion, the City of Salem has pitted residents against developmental entities which seek to alter the composition and character of neighboods in overwhelming ways. I’m really worried about a neighborhood located just south of where I live, through which I walk and/or drive pretty much every day, which seems to be facing a development of gargantuan proportions: three multi-storey buildings for shelter and senior housing along with adminstrative and retail facilities, to be built in and on a small area of narrow streets and small houses, the remainder of a storied section of our city. The neighborhood now goes by the name of “Greater Endicott” for the major street that runs through it, but in the past it was: a ship-building district at the head of the South River proximate to Mill Pond, “Roast Meat Hill,” Salem’s first African-American neighborhood, and Little Italy, a tight-knit neighborhood clustered around a community-built church.

A Stereoview of the Boston & Maine Depot, with Mill Pond in back and the Endicott Street neighborhood top right, from the Dionne Collection at Salem State University Archives and Special Collections, 1870s. Jen Ratliff of the Archives has recently published a post on Salem’s “Little Italy,” which you can find here, along with links to more photos and ephemera.

The development at issue has not been proposed formally to a City board yet, but its developers, two regional non-profits, Lifebridge Northshore and Harborlight Community Partners, have met with city councillors and the neighborhood association. Lifebridge operates a homeless shelter on part of the site on which they want to expand, and Harborlight is a community development nonprofit which has built and redeveloped many affordable housing projects on the North Shore. There is no question that both organizations are engaging in laudable and necessary work, but in this particular case I believe that their missions are in conflict with the viability of an historic Salem neighborhood. Their proposal is to demolish the current Lifebridge Shelter, once the parish hall for St. Mary’s Italian Church, as well as the church itself and adjacent buildings, to build two five-storey buildings along Margin Street, and an additional four-storey building for senior housing behind these two structures, on the existing playground along Pratt Street. Very little parking is specified: 12-15 spaces for three huge buildings, several of which will have considerable visitation and staffing needs. And there’s one odd little detail: because one of the buildings which will be demolished is the Christopher Columbus Society, which features a bar, Lifebridge has proposed relocating said bar in its dry shelter building! I believe that none of the new housing facilities are limited to Salem residents; both Lifebridge and Harborlight operate as regional organizations. As there is a state law mandating the replacement of playground facilities, a new playground will be built along Endicott Street. I have seen a rendering of this proposal, but I don’t really know where it came from or if it is accurate so I’m not going to publish it here: suffice it to say that it’s rather horrifying!  The buildings don’t look like anything else in the neighborhood—this could be the beginning of the Hampton Inn-ization of Salem as the project looks like it will mirror the new Hampton Inn across the way (the less stripey part), and I’m no architect or surveyor, but I don’t really see how everything will fit.

As there has been no formal proposal yet, my sources for this proposal are notes from several meetings of the Greater Endicott Neighborhood Association: with the developers and with the two candidates for Mayor in Salem’s recent special election. Sadly, both of these men sound a bit resigned about the development: their answers to the residents’ questions give the impression that resistance is futile! The relationship between Lifebridge and Harborlight and Salem’s municipal government seems very close: both organizations were collaborating “partners” in the creation of the Salem Housing Road Map for FY 2023-2027, and last fall Harborlight hosted a ‘Housing Institute‘ at Old Town Hall for city councillors and staff. Photographs of smiling Salem politicians at Lifebridge and Harborlight fundraisers and legislative breakfasts appear regularly: there doesn’t seem to be the same separation as is the case with private developers, or maybe I’m just being naive about the latter. The proposal is in serious conflict with the zoning for the neighborhood, but there are tools to overide these restrictions in Massachusetts: 40B and 40R statutes, which grant developers free reign if sufficient affordable housing is part of the proposal. Salem has already met (and exceeded) the 40B requirement of 10% affordable housing, but 40R is more of a “carrot” than a stick approach to urban development, aimed at creating “smart growth districts” in proximity to mass transit by “streamlining” the permittal process and incentivizing the host city/town with cash payments. This could happen here, but it would take a majority vote of the City Council. There’s no question that more housing is a drumbeat echoing out from City Hall, but I believe that our councillors care about neighborboods too: I’m not as pessimistic (yet!) as one commentor in the meeting notes who observed that “a group of 100 individuals is being privileged over a neighborhood, and by extension, a city.”

The Harborlight Homes Housing Institute at Old Town Hall, Salem, Sept. 22, 2022.

What came before, and what next? That’s about as much housing policy discussion as I can engage in. It’s more simple for me, really. When I think about this neighborbood faced with this looming development, my mind conjures up one question: hasn’t it suffered enough? Of all Salem’s historic neighborhoods, this one is the least protected and has withstood the most challenges: from economic dislocation in the 18th and 19th centuries, from the Great Salem Fire which singed its borders in the early 20th, to development in the 20th centuries. And now this. People in the nineteenth century were very conscious of its venerability and vulnerability in a way that people in the 21st century are not, because it had already lost so much. Salem’s first two custom houses were located in this neighborhood, the so-called “Port House” and “French House”: the latter survived into the nineteenth century and was verified as Salem’s old house by none other than the Reverend William Bentley, who found “1645” carved into a mantle. In the vicinity of High Street were myriad seventeenth-century houses, including the famous Palmer House drawn by Edwin Whitefield in the 1870s and the Pease and Price Bakery, captured by Frank Cousins in the 1890s. And then of course there is the 1665 Gedney House, certainly not as noted as these structures a century ago but now an illustrative study house owned by Historic New England, which has recently confirmed that it operated as a tavern operated by widow Mary Gedney during the Witch Trials. I think the development of a preservation mentality in Salem in the later nineteenth century was very much focused on this neighborhood, rather than more illustrious ones, because the progressive filling-in of the South River and Mill Pond and the coming of the railroad yards had transformed it into a marginal location over the century: “Knocker’s Hole,” named for the loud knocking of shipwrights’ mallets in the shipyards along the shore, was no more. In an “epitaph” for the recently-demolished Palmer House in the 1880s, a Salem antiquarian noted that the “old homestead” had been named for “the old pioneer ship-builder of Knocker’s Hole, Richard Palmer, who had grants among the first of those who wrought so lustily in the noisy shipyards about Creek Street.”

As the neighborhood became less central, it became more affordable of course, and so a succession of African-Americans who worked in the city’s many service industries took up residence there, from the 1820s into the 1870s: mariners gave way to cooks and hairdressers, chimney sweeps and cartmen. Clarissa Lawrence opened Salem’s first school for African-American children in the neighborhood as early as 1807, and letter settled at 8 High Street, which she passed down to her children. She founded the Colored Female Religious and Moral Society of Salem, which soon merged with the integrated Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, for which she traveled to the third national convention of the Women’s Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia in 1839 (on a segregated train) to give her rousing speech about meeting the “monster prejudice everywhere.” In the 1840s, there were seventeen African-American households on High Street, and more on adjoining streets, including that of Mercy Morris, the sister of the pioneering Boston lawyer Robert Morris, on Creek Street. A decade later, the Fletcher family was living on nearby Pratt Street (likely the street to be most impacted negatively by this development), including Francis Fletcher, who advocated for the formation of an African-American Regiment during the opening years of the Civil War in correspondence to Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, and then joined the Massachusetts 54th himself.

Clarissa Lawrence’s (of High Street) big speech, and Francis Fletcher of Pratt Street. Pratt Street runs right by the High Street playground, which is a designated site for one of the multi-storey buildings, so everything you see on the left above will be a big building. No more tree-filtered sun for this neighborhood.

Salem’s City Directories reflect a change after the Civil War: not so many of the familar names of African American families in the nighborhood, replaced by a succession of Irish and then Italian names. Between 1880 and the restrictive immigration act of 1824, 4 million Italians came to the US, part of a larger “Great Migration” during which 17 million Italians left their country after unification, most from the still-agriarian South rather than the more urban, and industrializing North. Massachusetts was a major destination, and Salem then offered employment in thriving textile and shoe factories, but all the sources I consulted indicated that Italian-Americans in Salem didn’t break into that more lucrative work in great numbers until World War I and after: there was a lot of ditch-digging for instrastructure projects and employment in various service industries before. It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that a community of Italian-Americans in Salem formed around the foundation of a church: St. Mary’s Italian Church, built on Margin Street by this community in the 1920s and the center of this neighborhood until closed by the Archdiocese of Boston in 2003. Stripped and subjected to iconoclastic destruction between intervening periods of Lifebridge ownership thereafter, it’s almost painful to read about the great reverence that this community held for this Church before, expressed in material ways by everything from an embroidered altar cloth to the tower bell, cast on-site in the Italian tradition. You can see the bell today right next to the Christopher Columbus Society, and I wonder where it will end up if this proposal goes forward.

Salem’s Italian-American Community in the 1920s and the building and embellishment of St. Mary’s Italian Church & the former church today: the Lifebridge/Harborlight plan seems to call for either outright demolition or facadism. One immediate consequence of the foundation of this Italian-American parish/neighborhood was the recognition of Salem’s Italian-Americans as such: before they were Italians, then they were Americans, celebrating July 4th with one of their traditional arts! Postcard of St. Mary’s from the SSU Dionne Collection.

The Great Salem Fire of 1914 was capricious in this area, taking out some streets and leaving (High!) others alone: when you walk around you will see a lot of buildings dating from 1915-1916 as rebuilding and building went together in the neighborhood. More damaging were two major “developments” of the 1930s along its northern boundary: the building of the Salem Post Office on Margin Street and the Holyoke Building resulted in the razing of at least 50 buildings for the Post Office alone. Samuel McIntire’s house on Summer Street was demolished to make way for the Holyoke in 1935, and this decade of depression and rampant destruction was also when venerable Creek Street was eradicated altogether.

X marks the spot of the future Post Office and Holyoke Building, along with curving Creek Street: many of the structures in this photograph would be demolished in the 1930s, including Samuel McIntire’s house on Summer Street (yellow arrow). Another arrow marks St. Mary’s Italian Church, SSU Archives and Special Collections. The Post Office rising, also SSU and charming Creek Street by Frank Cousins, Phillips Library Digital Collections via Digital Commonwealth.

When I look at the aerial photograph above I see the housing density that the leaders of the City of Salem crave now; it was destroyed by those 1930s developments in the name of progress. And while the Lifebridge/Harborlight proposal is driven by a more humane mission, it will inevitably impact the remainder of this still densely-settled and heritage-rich neighborhood in a negative manner just because of its size and scale. And it doesn’t have to be that way: there are other sites in Salem, far more appropriate sites which could accomodate the proposal’s various programming needs much more effectively.  The City should work with the developers to find a suitable site rather than to impose this project on a neighborhood which has stood the test of time.

 

A sunny Memorial Day in the Greater Endicott Street Neighborhood.


After the Fire: a New Salem Saltbox

I like to recognize the anniversary of the Great Salem Fire (June 25, 1914) every year, or most years, as it was such a momentous event in so many ways, starting, of course, with sheer destruction and dislocation: 1376 buildings burned to the ground (out of around 5000 structures in Salem proper), 18,000 people lost their homes and 10,000 people lost their jobs. Only three people died, which seems incredible given the magnitude of this conflagration, but 60 people were injured. Like every disaster of this scale, there are so many topics to address about its aftermath: the immense shelter and aid effort, the rapid rebuilding program, the plans for a “new” Salem. New might not be the correct word, as the architects and planners and owners who sought to rebuild on the broad swath of fire-ravaged land along Lafayette streets and the harbor were very interested in fire-resistant building materials but their aesthetic preferences were more traditional. This is a moment when Colonial Revival Salem comes into full flower, after germinating for several decades. You could label the traditional brick, stucco, and wooden buildings which line lower Lafayette and its side streets “conservative” but I prefer the terms referential or contextual: I’m always impressed with the deep appreciation displayed by early twentieth-century architects for Salem’s colonial and federal architecture and their desire to study and emulate heritage buildings. Perhaps post-fire architects, builders and planners were a bit too deferential to the past (architectual author and photographer Frank Cousins seems to view the opportunity before Salem as one of colonial compensation after all those sub-par Greek Revivals and Victorians were swept away) but I’m alway happy to see the past privileged over the present. I thought I’d illustrate this Colonial Revival moment with just one “new” house: a saltbox built on Cedar Street for Mr. and Mrs. George A. Morrill as designed by architect A.G. Richardson.

Two Cedar Street, built 1815: today, in the 1980s, and as newly-built.

A.G. Richardson was a Boston architect who lived in Salem, and thus the recipient of quite a few post-fire commissions. His pre-fire work does not seem to be overwhelmingly reflective of colonial inspiration, but more like a mix of old and new. He did design a “new Colonial house” for a harborview lot on Lafayette which was featured in House and Garden magazine in June of 1907. But the Morrill house at 2 Cedar Street looks much more traditional, and Frank Cousins and his co-author Phil Riley even praised it as “practical” in their Colonial Architecture of Salem (1919): “the resulting house as it stands to-day represents virtually and exact copy of the Maria Goodhue house in Danvers, erected in 1690 and destroyed by fire in 1899. Its long roof-line, formed by the lean-to continuation of the same pitch, contributes a uniquely appropriate character to the modern architecture to the modern architecture of Salem and was found to provide a very practical way of bringing a piazza in the rear and all service appurtenances under one roof, thereby saving expense and avoiding all leadage complications common to roors considerably broken by gables or dormers.” Riley had praised the Morrill house earlier as “in the spirit of old Salem” in his 1916 article in The House Beautiful, but I think I should note that there were not many surviving saltboxes in early twentieth-century urban Salem, so Richardson had to look to nearby Danvers for inspiration! Fortunately Cousins had photographed the Maria Goodhue house (see below, from the Cousins Collection at the Phillips Library via Digital Commonwealth) before it was destroyed by fire. The new door of Two Cedar Street was definitely old Salem, however: Richardson copied the entrance of the Captain John Hodges House on Essex Street.

There was something about the Fire that fueled preservation in Salem and elsewhere, as story after story in national newspapers and periodicals emphasized the fact that the older sections of Salem escaped its path: an early report indicated that the House of the Seven Gables had been swept away, and it seems like there was a collective sigh of relief when it was revealed to be false. Wallace Nutting, that exemplar of the Colonial Revival, featured ethereal ladies draped in timeless white dresses on the steps of Chestnut Street houses spared from the fire in his 1915 “expansable” catalog, and the equally timeless saltbox merged colonial charm, clean lines, and (space for) modern conveniences.


There is Light

A large part of the frustration many in Salem felt at the removal of Salem’s archival heritage contained in the collections of the Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library in 2017 was due to the fact that so little of these materials had been digitized: a tiny fraction, with no guarantees of more to come. I do think it was surprising to many just how far behind comparable institutions the PEM was in the process of increasing access to its collections, and this vulnerability certainly made it easy for nattering nabobs like me to criticize their complete, non-compensated removal. But a few months ago we began to hear of some major digitization initiatives, and yesterday was a truly joyous day, as the PEM uploaded its newly-digitized collection of glass plate negatives by the Salem photographer Frank Cousins (1851-1925) to the Digital Commonwealth site, enabling access to thousands of historic images of streets, houses, objects and people in Salem and other towns and cities from c. 1890-1920, just like that. I’ve been waiting for these images for a decade, browsing the printed catalog of negatives regularly, knowing exactly what was there, and what I could not see, what we all could not see. And then suddenly we could.

Cousins TeamThe Frank Cousins “Team”/ Employees’ carriage in the Columbus Day parade in Salem, 1892, Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum: Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives via Digital Commonwealth.

It was a little overwhelming going through these images, which include several cities (lots of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and quite a few New England towns—Cousins was a publisher of both books and photographs with his own art company as well as his retail store, the Bee-Hive, on Essex Street, and he was also an early preservation consultant), but of course I was only interested in the Salem images. Oddly, I became a bit……anxious, even tearful, going through them, both because it was so amazing to see structures and streets I had only imagined, and then I realized what we had lost: both to the Great Salem Fire of 1914 (on this very day!) and later “redevelopment”. My friend, former student, and fellow blogger Jen Ratliff, a fierce archivist who is just as invested in all of this as I am, was a bit overwhelmed as well, so we decided to conduct a little cross-blogging experiment so that we could focus: we each chose our top ten Cousins images and are linking to each other’s posts: so you (and I!) can see her picks at History by the SeaI’m very curious to see if we have some common choices–or completely divergent ones! [update: they are totally different]

So here are my top ten Frank Cousins images from the Phillips Library Collection of his glass plate negatives, accessed through Digital Commonwealth (I’m not counting the Cousins Team above, that’s a freebie):

One. Lost houses and a lost street, named after a lost creek, with a lost church (the South Church on Chestnut Street, which burned down in 1903) in the background:  Creek Street, c. 1890.

Cousins_00461 Creek Street

 

Two. Norman Street, a street which has been obliterated by redevelopment and traffic—what is left of it is still being obliterated by the latter now. This is an astonishing image if you are familiar with the present-day Norman Street.

Cousins_00805 Norman Street

 

Three. The amazing Doyle House at 33 Summer Street, right next to Samuel McIntire’s house, both destroyed for the horrible Holyoke Mutual Building that was built in the 1930s and still stands on the block that extends from Norman to Gedney along Summer Streets. Look at how many additions this house had! Love the plank walks and garden layout too.

Cousins_02453 33 Summer Street

 

Four. The Pease and Price Bakery at 13 High Street, which was destroyed by fire on June 25, 1914, along with over 1300 other structures. This marks an important fire boundary—all the structures on the other side of High Street were saved: it’s very apparent when you walk down this street today.

Cousins_00463 13 High Street Pease and Price Bakery

 

Five. Photographs of lower Federal Street are hard to find: love these houses at 13-15, long gone. Their site is a parking lot now, of course.

Cousins 13 Federal

 

Six. A storefront window of Cousins’ own shop, the Bee-Hive, on Essex Street. I zoomed in a bit (this is another freebie, not #7!) so you could see what was for sale: shirtwaists and more, the Great Sale of Ladies Cotton! The Essex House, also long-gone, was right next door.

Cousins_00881 Store

Cousins Close Up

 

Seven. A Jacobean Monk table and chair. (plus unidentified man). Cousins photographed the collections of the Essex Institute and Peabody Museum as well: for the former, furniture was dragged out to the street where I presume there was better light. I love all of these “posing furniture” shots.

Cousins_03011 Jacobean Monk Table and Chair

 

Eight. 51 Boston Street, “The Senate”. The people, the signs, the cobblestone streets……another lost building, this time to the Fire, as it was situated just about at the center of its outbreak.

Cousins_01258 51 Boston Street the Senate

 

Nine. The Clifford Crowninshield House on lower Essex Street (on the left)–my only survivor among these images! This house has been a favorite of mine for quite some time, and it’s a bit run-down, so it’s nice to see it in better condition. I knew there must have been a window in that center entrance gable!

Cousins_00147 Clifford Crowninshield House

 

Ten. Laying the cornerstone for St. James Church on Federal Street, August 31, 1892. Just a great shot: Cousins was more of a documentarian than an artistic photographer but this image has both qualities.

Cousins St. James Church laying cornerstone

 

It was very tough to limit my choices to ten, but I’m sure more photographs from this amazing and now-accessible collection will work their way into my blog in the future: now go over to Jen’s blog for her picks!

Update: Now we also have the top ten Cousins picks of another friend, former student, and fellow Salem blogger, Alyssa Conary.


Dutch Treats

I believe that I am running out of architectural styles manifest in Salem: I’ve featured First Period houses several times, also Georgians, it’s always about Federals in this city, and I have also posted on both Greek and Gothic Revival houses. There are so many variations of Victorians: but certainly I have featured Italianate and Queen Anne houses. Like the Federal style, the Colonial Revival is very predominate in Salem so I could never really “cover” its breadth of expression, but every time I go off on an “Olde Salem” tangent I’m in that realm. I’m not sure I could find enough bungalows in Salem for a post (perhaps) and I’m just not interested in anything built after World War II. One conspicuous omission from this laundry list is Dutch Colonial, one of the most popular residential styles of the era between the wars. Salem certainly has some Dutch Colonials, so I set off on foot to see as many as I could. For the most part, this meant leaving the downtown for North and South Salem, as this was chiefly a “suburban” style in its heyday—when it was featured very prominently in all the architectural periodicals and popular texts like Richardson Little Wright’s Low Cost Suburban Homes. A Book of Suggestions for the Man with the Moderate Purse (1916). I love the caption under a rendering by architect Norman Baird Baker:  “the Dutch Colonial gambrel roof type of house stands preeminent for suburban life. Its roof provides ample room and the general lines are attractive and comfortable”.

Dutch collage

Dutch collage 2

The Dutch Colonials of North Salem do not seem like “starter homes” at all: more like homes which one would aspire to live in throughout one’s life! And one is for sale—or, rather, under contract. I’m also including this charming little house on Walter Street which strikes me as more Dutch than Dutch Colonial: it’s clearly earlier but I just think it belongs in this company.

Dutch North

Dutch North a

Dutch Colonial North Salem

Dutch Treat Walter Street

The Dutch Colonials of South Salem were all built after the Great Salem Fire of 1914: while their counterparts in the northern section of the city were constructed in a pastoral setting, these houses sprung from a wasteland! And that is why we have a more unusual example of a stucco Dutch Colonial: as fire prevention was at least as important as design.

Dutch South

Dutch South Roslyn

Dutch South Stucco

The Fire took out many buildings on the western end of the McIntire District in central Salem as well; a few Dutch Colonials arose in their place, adding to the very diverse streetscapes of the twentieth-century city. Those built-in benches above and below were definitely the must-have feature of 1919, or 1923.

Dutch Treat

Dutch Treat Warren


Tea & Sympathy

This weekend, I gave a talk on Salem author Mary Harrod Northend, the Martha Stewart of her day (1904-26), at the House of the Seven Gables and my favorite part (not sure about my audience’s) was her commentary on tea rooms, accompanied by her always-illuminating photographs. In a 1915 article in American Cookery, Miss Northend hails “The Coming of the Tea-House” as a sign of both women on the move and an indication of increasing interest in her beloved Colonial style: even though she admits that tea houses are of Japanese origin those “that are dotted along the automobile routes of New England never fail to give to the tourist the savor of the time when the old coaches drove along the turnpikes, the travelers stopping at ‘ye ordinary’ or inn for crisp waffles, maple syrup and fragrant, steaming coffee” (I really did not know that waffles were colonial fare).  She highlights those that possess such ambiance, and also the social roles of tea houses and rooms, particularly for women: who opened them for respectable “livelihoods” and frequented them at all stages of life: as college students, young mothers, and empty nesters (although she of course does not use that term). Miss Northend seldom indulges in social history so this is interesting in general, and particularly so is her story of the Puritan Tea-House in Beverly, whose owner, “losing her home in the Salem fire, took refuge in a small, homely little house, just a minute’s walk from the station and cornering two roads. It is at the center of a group of all-year-round houses founded by people who had tired of the bustle and confusion of the city. It was an ideal spot for a tea-house and an easy matter to remodel the little old farmhouse to present-day use”. And so this Salem refugee thrived in Puritan-style.

Mary Harrod Northend’s Tea-Houses, c. 1915-1925, courtesy of Historic New England: The Tea House at the Gables, the Fernery and Martha Ann Tea Shop on Essex Street in Salem, and the sign for the Tea Kettle and Tabby Cat in Wenham.

Mary Gables Tea House 2

Mary Gables Tea 3

Mary Gables Tea House

Mary Fernery Tea Room 1913 Essex Street

Mary Martha Ann Tea House 2

Mary Martha Ann Tea House

Mary Tabby Cat Tea Room Wenham


Scorched Earth/A Lost Salem Garden

Since I went in deep for the centennial anniversary of Great Salem Fire of 1914 a few years ago I have this date imprinted in my mind: I woke up this morning and my first thought was oh no. So much was lost that day—houses, factories, civic buildings, churches–as the fire devoured several wards of Salem. The recovery effort, which seems remarkably swift and efficient to me, focused primarily and rightfully on rebuilding, but there was an implicit concern for the loss of landscape as well, and so parks were planned and trees replanted. There was one notable Lafayette Street landscape that was lost on forever on that day, however: the garden of George B. Chase. There was no effort to reconstitute this creation; instead the large lot became the site of the new Saltonstall School, which rose from the ashes of the fire pretty quickly. The Chase Garden was indeed fleeting, but fortunately we have two great sources to remember it by: the wonderful 1947 guide book Old Salem Gardens, published by the Salem Garden Club, and several photographs in the American Garden Club’s Archives of American Gardens at the Smithsonian.

Chase Old Salem Gardens

Chase Old Salem Gardens 2

Chase Garden collageJust one of my many copies of the invaluable Old Salem Gardens (1947) with the Chase garden entry; the location of the Chase garden on the 1874 and 1891 Salem Atlases.

The Salem Garden Club ladies who produced Old Salem Gardens, chief among them Club President Mable Pollock, took great care to include historical information and personal reminiscences whenever possible, greatly enhancing the research value of their compilation:  this is no little pamphlet! We hear all about the Chase Garden from the “discussive and chatty” Miss Chase, who grew up on the property, as her memories are transcribed onto the page. She tells us about the beds of ostrich ferns and rhododendrons in the immediate proximity of her family house, above which swayed purple beech and weeping birch trees, and a “large bed containing 72 plants of Azalea mollis bought from Lewis Van Houtte of Belgium”. In the spring there was white narcissus poeticus, followed by red salvia. Laburnum and althaea screened the large vegetable garden, which included salsify, rhubarb, asparagus, peas, beans, carrots, summer squash, tomatoes, onions and corn: the seed of the latter [came from] a cousin, Benjamin Fabens, and was called “Darling’s Early”. It was most satisfactory in every way, for the ears were not too long, and they had deep kernels and a small cob; the husk was quite red, as were the blades….it was the sweetest corn ever eaten at that time. Continuing along towards Salem Harbor along a box-bordered path, we “see” fruit trees and more exotic trees and shrubs, including a very notable varieties of magnolia and viburnum which particularly impressed repeat visitors from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Near the back of the garden were beds of roses, and a cutting garden of annuals and perennials, encircled by yet another row of shrubs and trees, including the oldest growth on the property, a locust grove, which nature had planted. All swept away on one day: June 25, 1914.

Chase Garden

Chase Garden AAG 1904 Smithsonian

Chase Garden After

Chase Garden After 2Views of the front and back of the Chase Garden (including Mr. Chase himself on the bench), 1904, Archives of American Gardens, Smithsonian Institution; Ten years later on Lafayette Street: postcard views of the Fire’s immediate aftermath from the (commemorative???) Views of Salem after the Great Fire of June 25, 1914 brochure issued by the New England Stationery Company.


An Urban Village in Salem

In preparation for the little talk I’m going to be giving about a post-fire neighborhood in Salem next weekend, I’ve been reading up on turn-of-the-century urban planning, design and construction trends. I’m much more comfortable in the Tudor realm than that of the Tudor Revival, but through my amateurish yet persistent pursuit of information about Salem’s rebuilding after 1914 fire, role in the Colonial Revival movement, and the early preservation movement I have been able to develop a fair amount of familiarity with the primary and secondary sources. Plus, I have several friends who are real architectural historians who are also happy to help–as well as very helpful commentators here.  I’ve written about this particular neighborhood, Orne Square, before, but I approached it again with an open mind, so I could glean a few more details about its origins, and a lot more context.

Orne Square Ruins

orne-square-1916

Orne Square in the summers of 1914 and 2014.

When I last considered Orne Square, I assumed that it was a very scaled-down, Americanized, and urban (or suburban) example of the Garden City Movement initiated by Ebenezer Howard’s To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) and Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902) and conceived and implemented by the Boston architectural firm of Kilham & Hopkins, who were very connected and very involved in Salem’s rebuilding according to progressive principles that were both aesthetic and economic. By 1914, Kilham & Hopkins had completed the majority of their work on the new Boston neighborhood of Woodbourne in Jamaica Plain, clearly inspired by one of the most conspicuous English Garden City “company towns”, Bournville in Birmingham, which Walter Kilham had visited himself, finding it “architecturally charming, but fearfully paternalistic as only the English can be”. They would go on to build the Atlantic Heights neighborhood in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and workers’ housing in Lowell for the Massachusetts Homestead Commission. In between, they designed and constructed a variety of buildings for the devastated Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company in Salem, including housing for its workers, and a neighborhood of affordable single-family and duplex brick cottages in North Salem. They were the likely architects of Orne Square, so everyone said, but I could never find confirming evidence, and somehow the style, the material, the client, and the overall commission just didn’t seem to point to the extremely busy Kilham & Hopkins firm. Salem was awash with architects in 1914-1918 (I have a working list of 63, and I’m sure there were more), many equipped with the MIT-credentials and social connections of Walter Kilham and James Hopkins. The owner of the Orne Square property, the private Phillips Trust, didn’t seem quite as taken with the Kilham & Hopkins as the public Salem Rebuilding Trust: the former had already hired the renown local architect William G. Rantoul to rebuild a three-family structure on the site of its Warren Street “tontine” block. The Orne Square commission went to an architect who was not local (yet), but who had several strong Salem ties: Ambrose Walker, then of Brookline, who had previously shared a Boston office and practice with his MIT classmate Ernest Machado (who died tragically young in 1907) and presently did so with A.G. Richardson, another Salem architect who was then occupied with rebuilding wasted Fairfield Street with brick Colonial Revival structures.

Bournville Village Trust

Bourneville Model Village

Kilham & Hopkins

Urban village Rantoul Architectural Forum 1917 vol. 26

Michael Reilly’s Bournville Village poster ( MS 1536 Box 59, reproduced with kind permission of the Bournville Village Trust, Library of Birmingham), and the Village itself, built by Cadbury as a model village for its factory and workers in Birmingham; Kilham & Hopkins plans for the Massachusetts Homestead Commission and a “low-rent” brick two-family house commissioned by the Salem Rebuilding Commission, 1915, Architectural Forum, Volume 28 and Phillip Library, Peabody Essex Museum; William G. Rantoul’s newly-completed Warren Street buildings, Architectural Forum, Volume 26.

I was going to save Walker for my talk next week but his identity seems to have leaked out so I might as well make the big reveal here! I have no idea why it was such a big secret for so long anyway: I found the building permit as well as notices in several trade journals pretty easily. I’ve chased down a few of his other commissions as well and while there does seem to be considerable variation in the styles of architects of this era, they do tend to favor certain materials, and Walker nearly always built in the distinctive Portland cement you see so perfectly illustrated by Orne Square. No brick for him, and wood was not a recommended building material in fire-anxious Salem at the time. I’m not entirely sure why Orne Square did not become an acclaimed development at the time of its completion–or after–when the two great propagandists of Salem architecture, Mary Harrod Northend and Frank Cousins, wrote about the resurgence of the Colonial in Salem after the great fire. I suspect it was not Colonial enough for these revivalists! Northend at least references Walker’s work (but does not name him) in her influential article for the September 1920 issue of The House Beautiful, Worthwhile Homes built in Salem since the Conflagration of 1914″: There is a grouping of some twenty stucco houses designed for moderate rentals in Orne Square which should not be omitted. The houses are artistic and comfortable, and the development worthy of being copied in any small city. Indeed, about a decade after the completion of Orne Square we do see the distinct design of one of its “2 1/2 story stucco duplexes” appearing in several (I’ve found seven–from Hamilton, Ohio to Santa Cruz, California) regional newspapers across the country, generally accompanying Walker’s text about the affordability and durability of duplex living and masonry construction. As the Portland Cement Company proclaimed in its contemporary advertising, “This is the age of cement”. There very well may be more Orne Squares out there.

Orne Square 1926

The word that pops out the most for me in Mary Harrod Northend’s description of Orne Square above is “artistic”: I’m very familiar with her work, and she uses that word rarely. I think she recognized the craftsmanship of these houses, but their more streamlined style was a bit beyond her comfort zone. Rantoul’s and Richardson’s brick houses with their colonial trim looked familiar, while Walker’s artistic houses appeared a bit different, even foreign. So that brings me to back to the Garden City movement, and Walker’s inspiration. I’m not going to go into great detail here, because I want to save something for my talk, but he was of a generation of architects that was definitely influenced by the goals of the Garden City, but was also exposed to its limitations, especially in America, which was never going to see wholly-planned cities, only neighborhoods within existing ones: urban villages like Woodbourne in Boston, the Connecticut Mills Village in Danielson, CT designed by Alfred Bossom, the Westinghouse Village in South Philadelphia, and John Nolen’s Urban Park Gardens in Wilmington, Delaware, all constructed contemporaneously with Orne Square.

Urban Village Danielson CT CT Mills Alfred Bossom architect AABN 1919

Urban VillageWestinghouse Village Philadelphia 1919 Clarence Wilson Brazer arch

Urban Village Union Park Gardens Wilmington Nolen Cornell

Urban Village Shakespeare Frank Chouteau Brown Architectural Year Book

Connecticut Mills Village, Danielson, CT, Westinghouse Village, Philadelphia, The American Architect, 1919; Union Park Gardens, Wilmington, Delaware, John Nolen papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. And one that didn’t get built:  Frank Chouteau Brown’s plans for a “Shakespeare Village in the Fens” of Boston, from the Boston Architectural College’s Current architecture: published in connection with a joint exhibition held in Boston, November 1916.

It is also important to note that Walker did not come from Salem or the North Shore, so he wouldn’t have been so subject to the dictates of its weighty architectural tradition. He became a Salem architect after his marriage to Machado’s younger sister Juanita in 1923, moving into the family home on Carpenter Street, becoming a trustee of the House of the Seven Gables, becoming the fire-proofing expert for several local organizations, and writing a scholarly paper on Samuel McIntire. But before that he was living in Brookline, not far from what I think of as one of the earliest urban villages, the Cottage Farm neighborhood, practicing in Boston, and immersed in a community made up of his very accomplished and worldly family, his fellow MIT graduates, and his colleagues–an artistic village of sorts.(Though no doubt he was also catching the train to Salem regularly, as by several accounts his courtship of Juanita occurred over two decades).

Appendices: Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose Walker in the 1930s; Walker’s drawings from the MIT Summer School, 1895, “The Georgian Period”, ed. William Roch Ware.

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walker-drawings


Trees for Lafayette

This is not to complain–I know lots of good Salem people are working on this–but rather to offer some perspective: Salem’s grand boulevard Lafayette Street needs some trees (and some love). This is the route on which I walk to work nearly every day, and I crave the protective canopy it once had. I’m also tired of picking up trash, and hoping that the commitment to the future that tree plantings represent would also instill a bit more stewardship for this once-grand street. Lafayette Street was laid out a bit later than the rest of Salem: over the course of the nineteenth century following the erection of a bridge to Marblehead and the partition of the vast farm of Ezekiel Hersey Derby. The earliest photographs I have seen are from the 1870s: they show a boulevard of mansions, and trees: elms of course, but also other varieties. We have very precise dating for the planting of the elms of upper Lafayette Street from a wonderful book, John Robinson’s Our Trees. A Popular Account of the Trees in the Streets and Gardens of Salem, and of the Native Trees of Essex County, Massachusetts, with the Locations of Trees, and Historical and Botanical Notes (1891):  It has been said that the trees on the upper portion of Lafayette Street were planted within the line of the Derby estate, on account of some opposition to placing them in the street itself. The street was laid out in its present magnificent width at the suggestion of Mr. E. Hersey Derby in 1808. Mr. David Waters informs me that his father, but a short time before his death, while passing these trees, said that when a boy he was called by Mr. Derby to assist at planting them, holding the samplings while the workers filled the earth in about them. Mr. Waters, Senior, was born in 1796 and would have been twelve years of age when the street was laid out. The date of the planting of these elms, thus corroborated, may, therefore, safely be placed at 1808. In addition to a few images of the entire tree-lined street, we also have several photographs of the “wooded estates and pleasure gardens” (a phrase from an 1873 guidebook to greater Boston) of Lafayette Street before the Great Salem Fire of 1914. When you compare these lush images with those taken in the days after the Fire, it’s painful.

Lafayette_Street,_Salem,_MA 1910

Lafayette Street Cousins cropped 1891

Lafayette Street Cousins Derby Mansion 1891

Lafayette Houses Collage

Lafayette Church 1880s

Shades of pre-fire Lafayette Street: a very popular postcard c. 1910; Frank Cousins’ photographs of the very verdant street (1876) and the Old Derby Mansion (1891), demolished in 1898, Duke University Library; Gothic Revival and Victorian houses on upper Lafayette, still standing, while the McIntire-designed Josiah Dow House (built 1809) in the lower-right hand corner is gone (Smithsonian Institution collections and Cornell University Library); rendering for the Lafayette Street Methodist Church, American Architecture and Building News, 1884.

The Fire laid waste to half of the street (from Derby to Holly and Leach Streets), and later on many of the surviving mansions of the other half–rather massive Victorians, Queen Annes, and Italianates–became subdivided and commercialized. After the replacement of some of these structures by some truly terrible mid-century apartment buildings, the Lafayette Street Historic District was created in 1985. Trees will really help Lafayette Street, but other challenges remain: chiefly the constant traffic which seems to grow worse and worse with every passing year and the incremental though persistent expansion of Salem State University (my employer) at its upper end. Students and staff have turned this end of Lafayette into one big parking lot, a trend that has not been mediated by the construction of a large campus parking lot in my estimation. I think a new South Salem train stop would help with the parking, but I’m not sure about the traffic: I watch it every day on my way to and from work and the majority of it does not seem to be university-related: this is also the only route to Marblehead, after all.

Traffic is tough, but more trees will shield and shade Lafayette Streets residents…and walkers. And as I said at the top, there are plans for more trees, and better maintenance of existing trees, throughout Salem. Just last week the City Council formed the Leaf-oriented Resiliency and Arboricultural Expansion Taskforce with its associated acronym, LORAX, for just that purpose (yes, you read that correctly: LORAX). The plans for the major new development at the corner of Lafayette and Loring Streets also have lots of provisions for trees. I’m not really a fan of the new building (which will totally dominate the view from my office) but I’m really happy to see plans for all these new trees, including some disease-resistant elms (there is one Elm still alive on Lafayette–I think? See below!)

Lafayette Street 1908 Final

Lafayette today

Lafayette after the Fire pc

Lafayette 1917 SRCR Final

Lafayette Tree

Upper Lafayette in 1908 and today; the 1914 fire was so devastating, in so many ways, and all of the reports reference the lost trees almost as much as the lost buildings: the Rebuilding Commission Report specified many trees–some of which are visible in the 1917 photograph above: if trees were a priority then, they should be a priority now! Lafayette’s surviving Elm, near the corner of Fairfield Street.


Salem 1912

I stumbled across the “first annual” Report of the Salem Plans Commission the other day, and read it with rapt attention. This was issued at the end of 1912, a time when the city’s population had experienced rapid growth and housing was in short supply, the waterfront was “decayed”, and downtown (trolley) traffic was at a standstill. There were startling parallels to Salem 2016 in the Report, starting with its opening assertion that Salem is known quite literally with a single tolerable entrance or exit and (possibly excepting Loring Avenue) we must admit that this is quite literally true, whether we travel by foot, carriage, automobile, trolley, train or boat. While the Commission asserts that Salem’s entrance corridors, called “gateways” in the report (a timely term now) all needed work, they are clearly advocating for more immediate attention to the city’s key transportation network: the combination of trains and trolleys that drove external and internal traffic. Salem’s main gateway was identified as the Boston & Maine Depot, and the arteries that commenced from there were apparently in dire need of widening and expansion in the forms of a”ring road”, a “shore drive”, and a street system. The entire report calls for a more systematic Salem in every conceivable way: roads, parks, housing, zoning.

Salem Train Depot 1912Salem’s Gateway, 1912

The commissioners write with a very strong voice, one voice, and express stark opinions throughout their report: the congested wooden housing in The Point is a “fire menace” (a prescient observation, given it would be leveled by the Great Salem Fire in two years) which evolved through “selfish gain driven by public indifference”, the waterfront must be “redeemed”, the North River is a “stinking open sewer”. They are so assertive that what one would think would be a rather dry text makes for riveting reading!

Salem 1912 North River

Salem 1912 Billboards on Bridge Street The “Stinking” North River and “Billboard Adornment” on Bridge Street.

In order to achieve their vision for Salem, the Commissioners include lots of detailed recommendations which are both utilitarian and aesthetic. They are aware of the significance of Salem’s material heritage but I would not call them preservationists: if an old building is interfering with trolley traffic on a narrow street it’s got to go! They seem particularly focused on Central and Lynde streets as problematic for traffic flow, and their recommendations seem to be the inspiration for the consolidation of the former Elm and Walnut Streets into a widened Hawthorne Boulevard.

Salem 1912 Central Street to Essex St

Salem 1912 Washington and Lynde Streets

Salem 1912 North and Lynde Streets

Salem 1912 Lynde Street from North St

Salem 1912 North and Federal Streets

Salem 1912 Elm and Walnut From above: Central Street looking towards Essex; the intersection of Washington and Lynde Streets; two views of the intersection of North and Lynde Streets; a trolley turning onto Federal Street; Elm and Walnut Streets.

I think Commissioner Harlan P. Kelsey was the author of the report, but I can’t confirm this as it was simply published by the “Plans Commission”. Kelsey was a really prolific landscape architect who lived in Salem (at One Pickering Street–this was the house that distracted me from Kelsey’s story to that of its architect, Ernest Machado) and, in addition to his landscape and planning practices, also maintained two profitable nurseries in his native North Carolina and adopted city. I’ve read his writing on plans and parks elsewhere, and it sounds familiar, and the last part of the Report is devoted to the shoddy condition of Salem’s shade trees—another timely topic!

Salem 1912 Broad ST

Salem 1912 Lafayette Two Salem streets which the Commissioners actually LIKED for both their width and their trees: Broad and Lafayette. Both would be half-leveled by the Great Salem Fire in 1914.

All photographs from:  City Plans Commission, First Annual Report to the Mayor and City Council, December 26, 1912.  Salem: Newcomb & Gauss, 1913.


Greek Revival Salem

I think I’ve covered just about every architectural style represented in Salem over the past few years: lots of variant Colonial houses, the very dominant Federal style, and many of the nineteenth-century styles, including Gothic Revival, Italianate, Queen Anne and Second Empire. But I haven’t featured many houses built in the so-called “National Style”:  Greek Revival, which dominated public and domestic architecture across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The very first house I lived in in Salem was assertively Greek Revival (built in the 1840s, the peak of the style) and my present house (built in 1827) should probably be classified as such too but it’s such a miss-mash it doesn’t really feel classical.  That’s a bit early for the Greek Revival in Salem, which held onto its Colonial and Federal styles longer, I think. For that reason, as well as the Great Salem Fire of 1914, it always seems like Salem has fewer Greek Revival structures than it should have: many of the public buildings, including the “new” City Hall, are Greek Revival, but you don’t find too many domestic structures as they would have been built in the “newer” neighborhoods along Lafayette Street, the center of the conflagration. Some of the most poignant “postcards from the Fire” show Greek Revival houses being devoured. Yet there are Greek Revival houses on nearly every street in the older sections of Salem too, signs of success in the mid-19th century city, no long a center of a global commerce, but still bustling. Two such houses, located on Winter Street, are now for sale, which prompted my long-overdue Greek Revival post.

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Walker Evans’ photograph of Salem City Hall, taken in the early 1930s when he visited Salem and shot only Greek and Gothic Revival structures–no Federal! (Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, more here) These were clearly his architectural preferences, and he captured similar structures wherever he went. Quite contrarily, Salem’s own Frank Cousins was quite condescending about the Greek Revival, probably because such structures replaced his beloved Colonial houses in downtown Salem. The now-mothballed Greek Revival courthouse on Federal Street.

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Bertram House Salem

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Winter Street Greek Revivals presently for sale:  The Captain John Bertram House at number 24, built in 1842-43 by Salem’s greatest philanthropist. The black & white MACRIS photo is from 1998 (An absolutely stunning house: check it out), and the Payson-Fettyplace House at number 16, built in 1845, which has been operating as an inn for some time. Below: more Salem Greek Revivals, by no means an exhaustive collection! A Greek Revival “cottage” on Northey Street, a recently-revived Greek Revival on Bridge, a row of Greek Revivals on Federal, a Greek Revival with many additions on Essex, and the stately Lee-Benson Mansion on Chestnut, all built in the 1840s.

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