Franklin Place

Franklin Place, designed by Charles Bulfinch and built in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1793–95, included a row of sixteen three-story brick townhouses that extended in a 480-foot[1] curve, a small garden, and four double houses.

[5] Although this method of financing was in rather wide use in Europe at the time, the Massachusetts General Court refused articles of incorporation and the project ultimately rested on Bulfinch's meager business talent.

On July 6, 1793, the Columbian Centinel carried the following notice: The public are hereby informed that a plan is proposed for building a number of convenient, elegant HOUSES, in a central situation, and a scheme of tontine association.

Bulfinch completed the project, including its complementary file of four double houses facing across the grass plot (17-24 Franklin Place), but in so doing sacrificed both his and his wife's fortunes.

The Crescent no doubt also owed something to the well-known plan Robert Adam devised for two half circles of connecting houses as an extension of London's Portland Place, as well as certain examples Bulfinch had seen in Paris.

In architectural detail, the Crescent recalls the Adelphi Terrace, which Bulfinch knew both as a center of Neoclassical building in London and as the haunt of exiled Tory relatives and family friends.

[11] Thomas Pemberton described the Crescent at the time of completion as "a range of sixteen well built and handsome dwelling houses, extending four hundred and eighty feet in length ...

[24] The earliest reference to the project is in Pemberton's description of the recently completed Crescent: "The opposite side is intended to be built in a straight line, and in a varied style of building.

[27] As the site plan made for the Historic American Buildings Survey shows, the axis of the Crescent and the double houses opposite was along the line of Arch Street with the Franklin Urn serving as a focus.

The end houses were placed obliquely to the middle ones and thus corresponded to the east and west pavilions of the Crescent; the slight angle helped keep the street openings as wide as possible.

No floor plan has been discovered but it is presumed the double houses had the traditional arrangement of two rooms on either side of a transverse hallway divided, as in the Crescent, by main and service staircases.

Between the Crescent and the double houses was a wrought-iron-fenced semi-oval grass plot 40' wide at its center and about 280' long, with shade trees; it was at the heart of the city's first garden square.

[28] In 1795, Bulfinch placed a large Neoclassical urn (similar to one executed by Robert Adam) and pedestal in the square's center; he had purchased these in Bath and brought them home from his Grand Tour of 1785–87.

Also unlike in London, where gated streets allowed entry only to residents, access to the garden was not restricted and it could be enjoyed by visitors to the Library and Historical Societies, as well as by theater- and church-goers.

These additional amenities for residents recalled what St Albans had done for St. James's Square, and were a bold move, considering that Puritan Boston had banned theatrical performances until December 1793 and had displayed religious intolerance throughout its history.

The graceful archway connecting the two rooms in the picture is a Neoclassical architectural detail used by Bulfinch to relate the interior of the house to the Palladian window on the Crescent's central building.

The new residents were less concerned with the neighborhood's overall appearance, as seen from late photographs that show the garden overcrowded with small shrubs planted randomly among the trees, and a wood picket fence replacing the original iron posts and chains.

[35] Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. noted these changes in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, published in 1858 just as demolition was underway: "There were the shrubs and flowers in the Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Commerce is just putting his granite foot upon them.

Financial troubles continued to plague him, such that he spent July 1811 in debtors' prison, but the Crescent and Franklin Place helped transform Boston from an 18th-century town into a 19th-century city.