Arnold Arboretum

Exactly 125 years ago this week, Frances Glessner noted in her journal a trip to the Arnold Arboretum in the Forest Hills section of Boston, while traveling from her summer estate in New Hampshire back to Chicago.  Of the visit on October 13, 1890, she wrote:

“Yesterday morning (Isaac) Scott called early and took Lettie and me to see the Arnold Arboretum.  We went by train to Forest Hills and walked over the Arboretum.  It was most interesting and delightful.  The roads are all beautifully laid in this suburb with a nice side walk, beautiful winding roads, great trees and green grass.”

Arnold Arboretum was established in 1872 when the executors of the estate of whaling merchant James Arnold donated a portion of his estate to Harvard College for the establishment and support of an arboretum.  Charles Sprague Sargent (1841-1927) was appointed the first director the following year and served for 54 years, creating an institution that became a model for other cities across the United States and the world.  

Sargent was responsible for the 1,000 year lease whereby Harvard retained ownership of the land, but the arboretum became part of the Boston park system known as the “Emerald Necklace,” a seven-mile-long network of parks and parkways laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted between 1878 and 1892.  The design of the arboretum itself was a result of Sargent working closely with Olmsted, who laid out the general plan of paths and roads, and the groupings of plants. 

The arboretum covers 281 acres and includes nearly 15,000 accessioned plants, as well as an herbarium collection of more than 1.3 million specimens and an important research library containing in excess of 40,000 volumes.   Two years after Frances Glessner’s visit, the administration building was designed by Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Jr. of the firm of Longfellow, Alden and Harlow.  Longfellow was working in the office of H. H. Richardson at the time the Glessner house was designed, and was later a guest of the Glessners in their Prairie Avenue home. 

Forest Hills is a part of the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, noted for its hilly terrain and wooded areas.  The area south of Walk Hill Street in particular is characterized by curving tree-lined streets laid out in irregular patterns, the result of the gradual transformation of the area from country estates to a “streetcar suburb.”  Forest Hills is surrounded by the three final “links” of the Emerald Necklace – Arnold Arboretum, Arborway, and Franklin Park.  In addition, it is home to the sprawling 275 acre Forest Hills Cemetery, considered one of the finest 19^th century rural cemeteries in the country. 

A section of Forest Hills, known as the Woodbourne Historic District, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 and features a plan laid out in part by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., who would have been attending Harvard as a classmate of George Glessner at the time Frances Glessner visited the area in 1890. 

For more information on the arboretum, visit http://www.arboretum.harvard.edu/.  

Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Jr.

Exactly 125 years ago, Frances Glessner made the following entry in her journal:

“October 29, 1889 – Mrs. and Elizabeth Sprague called bringing Mr. Wadsworth Longfellow, a nephew of the poet.”

Although this is the only record of their ever meeting, Frances Glessner would have already been acquainted with Longfellow.  In October, 1885, the Glessners were in Brookline, Massachusetts meeting with H. H. Richardson about the design of their home.   Regarding membership in Richardson’s Country Club, Frances Glessner noted, “Mr. R. wanted to propose Mr. Longfellow, a nephew of the poet, who is in Mr. R’s office.”  She does not indicate whether they actually met Longfellow during their visits to Richardson’s office.

Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Jr. was born in Portland, Maine in 1854, the son of Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Sr., a younger brother of the famed poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  He graduated from Harvard University in 1876, and then studied architecture at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.  He had been a senior draftsman in Richardson’s office for several years when the commission for the Glessner house came into the office.

Shortly after Richardson’s death in 1886, Longfellow formed a partnership with Frank Ellis Alden (1859-1908) and Alfred Branch Harlow (1857-1927).  The firm, known as Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, maintained offices in Boston and Pittsburgh.  Their early buildings continued the tradition of the Romanesque revival style, with which Longfellow would have become proficient during his years with Richardson. 

Some, such as the city hall building in Cambridge, Massachusetts (shown above) could easily be mistaken for Richardson’s own buildings.  In later years, there was less emphasis on the Romanesque and an emerging interest in the Colonial Revival style.

Among the buildings designed by the firm are:

Rev. William J. Holland house

(now the Music Building at the University of Pittsburgh)
Photo by Tim Engleman

West End United Methodist Church, Pittsburgh

Joseph Horne House, Pittsburgh

Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh

Hunnewell Building at Arnold Arboretum, Boston

Longfellow left the firm in 1896, primarily because he was based in Boston, whereas both Alden and Harlow had relocated to Pittsburgh to manage the significant number of commissions in that city.  Longfellow continued his practice in Boston, and designed several buildings around Harvard, until his death in 1934.  For a time he worked in association with a cousin, William Pitt Preble Longfellow. 

Among his later buildings are:

Phillips Brooks House at Harvard, Cambridge

Bertram Hall, Radcliffe College, Cambridge

Theodore Parker Unitarian Universalist Church, West Roxbury, Mass.

Architectural historian Margaret Henderson Floyd wrote the definitive biography of Longfellow’s firm, Architecture after Richardson: Regionalism before Modernism – Longfellow, Alden, and Harlow in Boston and Pittsburgh, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1994.